Culture as Nature The Shock of the New

HORNS BEEP AND ENGINES ROAR

Unlike our grandparents, we live in a world that we made.

Until about 50 years ago,

images of nature were the keys to feeling in art.

Today, for most people, nature has been replaced

by the culture of congestion, cities and mass media.

We are crammed like battery hens with stimuli

and overload has changed our art.

Capitalism plus electronics gave us a new habitat, our forest of media.

The problem for art was how to survive there, how to adapt to it

because otherwise, it was feared, art would go under.

# Well it's Saturday night and I just got paid

# Fool about money Don't try to save

# My heart says "Go, go, have a time"

# Cos it's Saturday night and baby I'm feelin' fine

# Going to rip it up

# Going to rock it up

# Going to shake it up

# Gonna ball it up

# Going to rock it up

# And ball tonight

# Got me a date Now don't be late

# Pick her up in my 88

# Shag it on down to the Union Hall

# When the juke starts jumping I'll have a ball

# Going to rip it up

# Going to rock it up

# Going to shake it up

# Going to ball it up

# Going to rock it up

# And ball tonight

# Ready, set go, man, go

# I've got a girl that I love so

# And I'm ready

# Ready to rip it up, I'm ready

# Ready to rip it up, I'm ready... #

The present has more distraction than the past.

Works of art once had less competition from their surroundings.

GREGORIAN CHANT

The background to the organised sound of Gregorian chant

wasn't random noise.

Silence was one of the dominant facts of medieval life.

You listened to one thing at a time.

GREGORIAN CHANT CONTINUES

In a pre-technological world, you also looked at one thing at a time.

Things could not be reproduced -

no print, no film, no cathode ray tubes.

Each object, singular.

Each act of singing, transitive.

Not today.

Today, the object splits into a swarm of images of itself,

clones, copies.

The more famous an object is,

the more cultural meaning it has and the more unique people say it is,

but the more it breeds.

Mass production strips the image of its complexity

so that it resembles a sign.

A sign is a command.

It's something you take in all at once.

It means one thing only. It isn't any better for being handmade.

Pictures are different. They are more complicated.

They mean a lot of things.

You scan them and their meaning adds up and unfolds.

You don't get it all at once.

Pictures educate.

Signs discipline.

Mass language always tends to speak in the imperative voice.

The idea of sitting down and painting this landscape like an Impressionist

was obviously absurd.

But how could art defend itself against a torrent of signs

which were more vivid than its own images?

By assimilating.

By grafting the vitality of media

onto what had become a wilting language.

That, at any rate, was the hope.

In the 19th century, the world of the Industrial Revolution

appeared in landscape painting slowly pushing its way

into a fixed aesthetic category like an intruder in paradise.

Manufacture invading nature.

The sign found its way into art a little bit later.

The gap between the formal speech of painting and the lingo of signs

began somewhere after 1900 when a few artists and poets

realised that print was all around them and that it made up a visual language

which art, up till then, had barely even scratched.

The prophet of this was the Polish-French writer,

Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet of Cubism.

You read handbills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud -

here's this morning's poetry and for prose you've got the newspapers.

Six-penny detective novels full of cop stories,

biographies of big shots, a thousand different titles.

Lettering on billboards and walls,

door plates and posters squawk like parrots.

But the home of the quick message was America, especially New York.

Its shapes were already a subject for American artists by 1920.

To Joseph Stella, an Italian migrant artist,

the Brooklyn Bridge was a cathedral of the new.

It was the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilisation -

America.

The eloquent meeting point of all the forces arising

in a superb assertion of their powers, an apotheosis.

The vision of the new city as sublime, as a temple of progress,

almost a new Jerusalem, was felt by other artists.

Here by Georgia O'Keeffe.

But in the late '20s and early '30s,

none of them were interested in the street lingo,

the flashing ads in lights

which astounded every out-of-towner in New York.

That was too vulgar.

It stood for the commercialism that American painters wanted to repudiate.

The heroism of work - that was an acceptable subject,

but the signs that sold the products of work, no.

There was one exception, an American painter

who loved what he called the New York visual dialect - Stuart Davis.

Davis belonged to the same generation as Hemingway,

and like him, he went to Paris and was deeply changed by contact with the French avant-garde.

Cubism formed his style.

Before he got to France in the early 1920s, Davis was doing Cubist-type paintings

but the brand names and words and signs

dominated them as they had never been allowed to dominate a Picasso.

This painting was the precursor of all American pop art.

The brand name itself was a kind of icon to Davis.

It was fast, it delivered its meaning in quick bursts,

and in painting it was a found object, a visitor from another medium.

The word gave Davis's painting its rhythm,

the choppy rhythm of American life as he felt it.

The clue to that rhythm was jazz.

Davis believed jazz was the first real American modernism.

The brilliant colours on gasoline stations, chain store fronts, and taxicabs,

synthetic chemistry, fast travel by train, auto, and aeroplane,

which brought new and multiple prospectives.

Electric signs, five and ten-cent kitchen utensils, movies and radio.

Earl Hines' hot piano and Negro jazz music in general.

In one way or another, the quality of these things

plays a role in determining the character of my paintings.

Paris school, abstraction, escapism...nope.

Just colour-space composition celebrating the revolution of stresses

set up by some aspects of the American scene.

But in their time, the '40s and '50s,

Davis's images of mass culture were on their own.

No major American painters were ready to go so far into the badlands of other media

or to do it with that mixture of cool and brashness.

Then, around 1955, some others did enter them,

but from another direction.

If you buy a half pound of bacon in a supermarket,

you end up with an ounce and a half of plastic and cardboard wrapping around it.

If your electric iron goes on the fritz, you simply chuck it away.

One of the peculiarities of a place like the city dump

is that it makes you realise that New York throws away in the course of a week

probably more manufactured goods than were produced in 18th-century France in the course of a year.

The motto was replacement, not maintenance, disposability and not durability,

and there was a subject in this landscape of waste and the secret language of junk

because during the '50s, some American artists realised

what the Dadaists in Europe had known about 30 years before,

namely that societies reveal themselves in what they threw away.

Street junk was to these men what the flea market had been to the Surrealists,

and among them there was one budding master,

a man in his 20s from Texas named Robert Rauschenberg.

I actually had a kind of a house rule.

If I walked completely around the block

and I didn't find enough to work with,

I could pick one other block in any direction to walk around, but that was it.

The works had to, whatever I did,

had to look at least as interesting as anything that was going on outside in the window.

The result was his combines, large collages of refuse - things found and resurrected.

He got to New York in the early 1950s

and since then, Rauschenberg has opened up more room for anti-formalist art

than anyone else in America.

Every artist after 1960 who believed that all of life ought to be open to art

was in his debt one way or another.

We now take it for granted that art can be anything.

It can be for any purpose from pleasure to threat to systematic boredom.

Some is meant for museums, some to be thrown away,

and some to be performed as in this piece

danced by Rauschenberg in 1966 - Pelican.

This plurality at the end of the '70s is largely due

to what Rauschenberg did in the '50s and '60s.

Its roots are in Dada

and especially in the collages that Kurt Schwitters made in Germany in the '20s and '30s.

Merz pictures he called them,

modern city life describing itself in its own waste.

Junk, torn posters, old photos, tickets.

Rauschenberg applied this to the even brasher life of the American city.

The New York streets gave him his palette of objects.

In the studio he sorted them out and glued them down.

I tended to work in things that were either so abstract...

..that er, no one knew what this object was or it had been so mangled

that you couldn't recognise it any more,

or something so obvious that you didn't think about it.

He punctuated them with slathers of paint.

These painted links are what Rauschenberg got from abstract expressionism

and they remind us that the things in his combines

are meant to hang together as paintings and not just sit there as objects.

But the combines were meant to look a bit random.

Each one was a rendezvous where the common objects of the day could gather.

Monogram was the most notorious of all the combines.

Why the goat?

Partly I guess because he had one as a pet when he was a kid in Texas.

He was bereaved by its death and he wanted to resurrect it.

Animals have one main use in Rauschenberg's art.

They're innocent witnesses,

survivors of nature in a flood of culture.

Why the title?

Because monograms lace through one another as the goat does through the tyre.

But if you ask why it has lasted,

why monogram keeps its shock value despite 20 years of reproduction in the history books,

the reason is probably sexual.

The goat and the tyre is one of the wittiest images of sexual penetration ever made by an artist.

Jasper Johns was always bracketed with Rauschenberg in the 1950s.

Actually the two of them were utterly unlike one another.

Where Rauschenberg's work was garrulous, Johns' was terse.

Rauschenberg breathed out, but Johns breathed in.

His work was about difficulty.

It was extremely subtle and didactic, and like Marcel Duchamp, his mentor,

Johns was interested in the ready-made image.

He wanted to use things that were so simple, so familiar,

that, as he put it, they left him free to work on other levels.

New York painting had been full of inventions of displays of character.

Johns would show what could be done with things that were not invented,

things that were so well-known that they weren't well seen.

Very early on, Johns gave a clear outline of his theme,

which was the difference between science and art,

which helps you understand the way in which art operates.

He did this at first by painting targets.

Now everybody knows what you do with a target.

You pick up a gun and you shoot at it.

But this means that you're looking at the target in a particular way

because all your attention is fixed on the bull.

You're not concentrating on the outer circles.

In official language, one would call this

an extreme example of hierarchical perception and selective looking.

The target is a test, and Johns took it with a sort of deadpan irony

to test what you would expect a work of art to do.

The painting denies the use of a real target.

The fact that it is painted with all those dense touches of encaustic

so lovingly like the skin of one of Cezanne's apples

means that you're not meant to look at it the way a marksman does.

The centre is not more important than the rings.

Every bit of the surface is equally important.

You look at the whole of the picture.

And so a sign, a target, has been turned into a painting

fit for the museum stair which must be scanned.

Two contradictory ways of looking. A paradox.

On top of his painted target he adds plaster casts

and there's another paradox with them.

One wants to see them as images, perhaps elements of a portrait,

but they're more like fossils, specimens,

visual words that stand for classes of things.

Ear, hand, penis.

The image turns into a sign

and thus inside one painting, you have two ways of seeing.

The sign becoming a painting and sculpture becoming a sign.

No country has a more elaborate cult of its flag than America.

It's the best-known sign in the whole culture.

The eye recognises it in a flash and passes on.

But the art of painting is to delay the eye. This is not a flag.

Its motto comes from Magritte - this is not a pipe. Why?

Because it's a painting.

This is a painting too.

It has stars and stripes and it's made of cloth but it's not a flag.

Paint can make almost anything abstract,

even a subject as highly charged as the American flag.

We see the painting first, that pale perfect skin,

but the flag beneath it, the sign, has lost its power to command.

It's real but it's also completely abstract.

Flags are only as flat as this in the ideal space of art.

He did the same thing with numbers. He wasn't a great colourist,

but as a tonal painter Johns had no American rivals.

So one ends up thinking of pictures like this, so beautifully made,

not in the context of sums or computer displays,

but as the end of a tradition of still life that begins with Chardin.

These aren't beer cans. They're made out of bronze and then painted.

So they are sculpture pretending to be junk, pretending to be art.

The brushes aren't real either, neither is the coffee can.

They are bronze too, and painted.

Johns' work was seldom what it seemed to be.

It was always about something else, about irony, manipulation,

tradition, and the defensive painting in the face of a mass culture environment.

You'd suppose the stage was set for pop in the '50s in America,

and certainly the materials were there.

But the culture from which pop sprang wasn't at all respectable

as far as American artists in the '50s were concerned.

Giant plaster doughnuts were what they had to defend their art against.

After all, they had to live with this, and there was nothing remotely exotic or pleasing about it.

To them it was the nightmare from which they couldn't wake,

the erosive splurge of mass cult, of vulgarity.

But the English didn't have to live with it

and so in the '50s there were some English artists who saw the gross sign language of American cities

with the kind of distant longing that Gogin felt for Tahiti.

They'd grown up with austerity and rationing and national health teeth, but Hollywood?

Hollywood had shaped their dreams.

Forever young, forever sexy and forever swollen with abundance.

MUSIC: "Be-Bop-A-Lula" by John Lennon

# Well... Be-bop-a-lula she's my baby

# Be-bop-a-lula, don't mean maybe

# Be-bop-a-lula she's my baby

# Be-bop-a-lula don't mean maybe

# Be-bop-a-lula she's...

# My baby love, my baby love My baby love

# Well she's the girl in the red blue jeans

# She's the queen of all the teens

# She's the one that I know

# She's the one that loves me so

# Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby

# Be-bop-a-lula, don't mean maybe

# Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love My baby love, my baby love... #

One of the inventors of pop back in the early '50s

was an Englishman, Richard Hamilton.

Everybody seemed to go to the same kind of sources.

Everybody that was doing interesting work at that time and wanted to be figurative

tended to go to second-hand material.

They went to the mass media,

something that had already been converted from real-life

into processed pulp, processed television,

processed cinema or newspapers or whatever.

And the visual world became a new landscape

of secondary filtered material.

# The cleanest clean under the sun

# Is Tide Clean, new Tide Clean. #

Clean and bright as the sun on the sand.

The kind of clean you like best next to those you love.

That's because new Tide has extra cleaning power.

With Tide, things always come out clean and fresh as a sea breeze.

More than white, more than bright, really clean.

Clean! The cleanest clean under the sun.

In one of Hamilton's collages from 1956,

the word "pop" appears in art for the first time, linked to a sort of Beverly Hills dream world.

My own interests were certainly very specialised

in that it seemed to me that the advertisers were manipulating the public

in a very skilful and interesting and amusing way.

The difference between pop art and popular art is the fact that pop art is sophisticated.

It's not done by the masses

but it's done by highly professionally trained experts for a mass audience.

For the connoisseur who has everything.

At last, a work of art to match the style of modern life.

The Critic Laughs.

A perfect marriage of form and function, design and delight,

created for you and yours by Europe's most caring craftsmen

in an exclusive edition of only 60 examples.

The Critic Laughs, thrill to the sensation of emotion.

Hamilton is proud to present its new multiple.

The Critic Laughs, by Hamilton.

It's the other possibility, the other extreme of the hotdog.

But it's still to some extent a pop object.

We had to tool up for the whole venture,

using the same materials in the same factories even,

that Brown used for the production of their case.

Made an instruction book and a guarantee card

and tried to repeat the whole process of consumer product presentation.

Of course, it sold not in supermarkets or in chemist shops or department stores,

but in rather smart galleries throughout the world,

or presented in exhibitions in elegant museums.

I've also made posters of this kind of subject and all the other ephemeral material

and the idea of making a commercial seems to me to be the realisation of a dream

when you can go through the whole analogy of producing the object

and making all the literature and then come to the great finale,

which is to make the film and present it on TV in the form of a commercial.

And that whole process is the work of art, to my mind.

That is the work rather than the single object.

The analogy is what's to propose to the industrial and advertising process

is much more important than the object as a sculptural form.

More than 40 years ago, a great Marxist critic, Walter Benjamin, said that it was going to be hard

and maybe impossible for any child raised in the howling blizzard of signals

to find his way back into the exacting silence of a book.

Benjamin died in 1940, but what he feared from radio and cinema and advertising

came a thousand times truer with mass television.

The box you're watching has done more to alter the direct discursive relationship

of images to the real world, on which painting used to depend,

than any other invention this century.

This isn't really a matter of good or bad programming,

everybody knows the box is a cornucopia of dung most of the time,

but the effects I mean don't depend on the quality of programmes,

they flow from the nature of television itself.

You only have two choices when watching a movie in a cinema -

you can go, or you can stay.

With television there's a third - you can change the channel.

SNATCHES OF SOUND

And so, in a chaotic way,

the dream of the Russian Constructivist film-makers

and of the German Dadaists

has come true with television, because whole societies

have learned to see in terms of montage and juxtaposition.

Ours is the cult of the electronic fragment.

Because it's so intimate and casual,

the box worked on us in other ways too.

Its images had a weird contradictory tone.

They were real. Present in the room.

But at the same time they were artificial, illus...

wouldn't hold, they kept creeping up the screen,

or breaking off into dots and lines and jabber.

Not like film in a cinema.

Their reality was provisional.

Their reality was provisional, but the colour was ultra-vivid.

Electron colour.

Not the colour of ink, or nature, or paint.

Television messages get to you in small packets.

You don't scan a screen as you scan a painting,

and you don't inspect it the way you might inspect a Chinese vase.

The fate of these messages, these images, is to get equalised.

Catastrophe, love, war, soap -

they all pour forth in an overwhelming glut.

And like radiation, which in fact they are, they are everywhere.

And they have affected art.

One of the artists they most affected in the '60s was Rauschenberg.

He lives a long way from New York now,

on an island off the Florida coast.

No junk here,

but his work is still saturated with images from the media.

One's 'bombasted' by magazines, TV sets -

I didn't have a TV then, but... TV sets, the refusal,

the excess of the rest of the world,

even though you don't know them.

We can't move again until... If I forget...

..where anything is.

If I could paint or make an honest work,

it somehow should incorporate all of these elements.

Which were and are a reality.

Collage is a way of getting an additional piece of information,

that's impersonal.

I've always tried to work impersonal.

In the early '60s,

printed images began to replace objects in Rauschenberg's work.

The bank of images included everything from 15th century

reproductions to diagrams from the Scientific American,

to yesterday's front page.

As the images in his work in the '60s piled up,

the paintings took on a heightened documentary flavour.

He wanted to give canvas

the accumulative flicker of a colour television set.

The subject was glut.

SNATCHES OF TV SOUND

His view of the media was both affectionate and ironic.

He liked excavating whole histories within an image.

Histories of the media themselves.

Consider this red patch.

It's a silk screen enlargement of a photo that he found in Life magazine.

Which was in turn a parody of this famous painting -

Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.

The painting was based on an early sequential photo by Marey.

So the image bridges 70 years of technological time, right there.

It goes from photography to painting to photography,

back to painting.

But the irony is that it ends up looking like

the figures of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden

in Masaccio's fresco in Florence.

Which turns the image of Kennedy, who was dead by then,

into a sort of vengeful god with a pointing finger,

thus fulfilling the prophecy of the 19th century French diarist Edmond de Goncourt.

"The day will come when all the modern nations will adore

"a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written

"in the popular press,

"and images of this god will be set up in the churches,

"not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him,

"but established, fixed, once and for all, by photography.

"On that day, civilisation will have reached its peak,

"and there will be steam-propelled gondolas in Venice."

From television, film and photography

we receive a stream of images every day.

There is no way of paying equal attention to all that surplus,

so we skim.

The image we remember is the one that most resembles a sign.

Simple, clear, repetitious.

We absorb, rather than inspect.

Indifference becomes our second skin.

Everything the camera gives us is slightly interesting.

Not for long, just for now.

The human extension of the glut of images is celebrity.

Which replaces the Renaissance idea of fame.

The artist who understood this best,

and became best-known for understanding it, was Andy Warhol.

Warhol is nearly as famous as Picasso,

at least on the level of chit-chat and gossip.

But Picasso was famous for his energy and masculinity,

Warhol for his passivity and sexlessness.

He became a famous artist by silently proclaiming

that art can't change life,

whereas others once did by loudly giving the impression that it could.

And...no, I don't think I am a revolutionary artist.

He got started in the '50s as Andy Warhola,

a Polish kid from Pittsburgh

who made it to New York as a commercial artist.

By the end of the '70s, he'd relapsed into being another

kind of commercial artist - doing Nescafe society portraits.

A painter without a subject.

His career as a man with something to say, lies in-between.

'Art is short for artist.

'I thought words are just always made shorter,

'so art was just cut from the word artist, and made shorter.'

What he extracted from mass culture was repetition.

"I want to be a machine", he announced.

Warhol loved the sameness.

An infinite series of perfectly standardised products.

When Monet painted in series, he did it to glorify the eye.

To show how it could discern tiny differences.

Discrimination within abundance was the essence of such painting.

Today we have sameness within glut. And that was what Warhol painted.

His work in the early '60s was a baleful mimicry of advertising

without the gloss.

It was about the way that advertising promises

that the same pap with different labels

will give you special unrepeatable experiences.

Advertising flatters people that they're a bit like artists -

the consumer is rare, discriminating.

A connoisseur of experience.

If Warhol was once subversive -

and in the early '60s he was - it's because he turned that round.

A famous artist who loved nothing but banality and sameness.

I want to be a machine, to print, to repeat

which was the most cunning sort of dandyism.

He began by doing straight advertisements,

than he ran ironic commentary on them.

But by the '70s, advertisers were copying him.

Like this.

Warhol's autistic stare was the same for heroes and heroines.

All you learn is that celebrity breeds clones,

thousands of signs for itself, a series without a limit.

The image is less painted than registered.

No nuances, just slips in the silk screen.

It looked coarse, grainy, quick.

It wants you to glance at it, like a television screen,

rather than scan it like a painting.

And, like American TV in the '60s, it's also haunted by death.

And, as with TV, the violence Warhol enjoyed

got filtered through a cool, indifferent medium -

photography and silk screen.

These Disaster paintings have one subject in common.

Not just death, rather the state of being an uninvolved spectator.

The eye passes them,

like that man passing in the background.

What this added up to was one piercing insight

about the nature of media.

But that was it.

It could be done over and over again but not developed further as art.

The idea had a half-life, like a radioactive isotope.

It sent out a lot of radiation in the '60s,

and then it became feeble.

And then dead.

Boredom finally became boring.

But the nature of mass imagery fascinated other artists in the '60s as well.

If Warhol and Rauschenberg were into television,

Roy Lichtenstein was about print.

His best-known source was American comic strips of the '40s and '50s.

The stuff that artists of his generation,

who made the Pop Movement, grew up on.

To its detractors it looked about as challenging as bubblegum.

Take a comic and blow it up. But there was more to it than that.

MUSIC: "Venus in Blue Jeans"

# She's Venus in blue jeans

# Mona Lisa with a ponytail

# She's a walkin' talkin' work of art

# She's the girl who stole my heart

# My Venus in blue jeans

# Is the Cinderella I adore

# She's my very special angel too

# A fairy tale come true... #

I don't think that's...

It's dealing with the images

that have come about in the commercial world, and using that.

Because there are certain things about it which are impressive, or...

bold, or something.

And it's that quality of the images

that I am interested in.

The texture that the dots make

and various things

that are usable to me, in my art,

for expressing...um...

..that feeling.

But it's not saying that commercial art is terrible,

or, "Look what we've come to."

That may be a sociological fact, but that's not what this art is about.

Printers' dots were the basis of Lichtenstein's style.

A code that ended up looking very cool and abstract.

It was a way of distancing the image, making it both big

and remote.

And, like Johns, Lichtenstein was intrigued by the difference

between scanning and looking.

You scan a frame in a comic strip, then flick on,

because comics exist to tell a story.

But a painting is meant to detain you.

Make a museum-scale comic and you have another paradox about the way that we see art.

Probably Lichtenstein's work has been around too long for its shock value to last,

but in the '60s when it was new, its ironies really worked.

Another source for art in mass culture was the American billboard.

James Rosenquist used to paint them for a living.

In my billboard painting experience,

I've painted...hundreds of square feet of Franco-American spaghetti.

And I painted a... large beer glass 60 feet long.

And some...huge pieces of bacon.

And salesmen would come along and they'd say,

"That beer hasn't got enough hops in it. You have to make it a little bit lighter."

Or, "The bacon is dirty." Or, "That Franco-American spaghetti orange is dirty."

So I'd go home at night saying, "Oh, no!"

There's a kid of buck-eyed surrealism in big American advertisements

with their weird meetings of image and their overlaps and sudden cut-offs and giant size.

And that went into Rosenquist's paintings.

They had a casual narrative style, but were enormous, the scale of 19th-century history painting.

Like billboards, they were about paradise,

but a paradise of consumers fatally compromised.

Rosenquist summed up his ambition to be a painter of American history

in the one major painting that the Vietnam war provoked, the F-111.

The title comes for a bomber the Americans were using against the Vietnamese.

Rosenquist distilled a sour irony

from the contrast between that killing machine and those emblems of the good life,

the life that so many Americans believed was being defended outside Saigon in 1965.

Pop was big and brash, it had learnt that from other media.

But there was no chance it could survive outside the museum.

On the street, real mass culture would have simply crushed it.

This gap between art and life was not closed.

Now and again an artist would try putting a big picture among the billboards.

This one is by Alex Katz.

A set of pretty upper-bourgeois American profiles with one black face thrown in

can do nothing against 42nd Street.

In a culture of mass communications,

art has to survive either by stealth or by living in those game parks we call museums.

And no country in the world makes that clearer than America,

the home of the most enlightened patronage

and the most profound indifference to the visual environment that our century has known.

The city that put up the stiffest resistance

to the idea of culture with a capital C was this one, Las Vegas.

You can't imagine an art museum in a place like this

and, in fact, the idea of art simply evaporates because there's nothing to do,

it flies off in the face of the illusions of which this place is composed,

sudden wealth, endless orgasm, Dean Martin.

This is the Disney World of terminal greed.

And no wonder it had such an enormous appeal to the pop sensibility,

because here you have an infinite variety of signs

which are all plugging exactly the same product, luck.

Now the product's abstract and only the signs are real.

And so Vegas sums up American giganticism, not because it's big but because it pretends to be.

Its monuments, the city lights are conceived on a scale

much beyond anything that most artists ever get to work on.

And so, really, the town is a work of art, lousy art, but art all the same.

And no wonder that this festive junk food for the eyes had such an appeal to artists and critics.

MUSIC: "The Sound of Silence" by The Bachelors

# I've come to talk with you again

# Because a vision softly creeping

# Left its seeds while I was sleeping

# And the vision that was planted in my brain still remains

# Within the sound of silence

# In restless dreams I walked alone

# Narrow streets of cobbled stone

# Beneath the halo of a street lamp

# I turned my collar to the cold and damp

# When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light

# That split the night

# And touched the sound of silence

# And in the naked light I saw

# Ten thousand people maybe more

# People talking without speaking

# People hearing without listening... #

There is no way that museum art can rival the commercial extravaganzas of the real world.

The artists who worked with neon and lights in the 1960s certainly couldn't.

Their efforts were as pointless as building a souvenir that rivalled the Eiffel Tower.

# Fools, said I, you do not know Silence like a cancer grows

# Hear my words that I might teach you

# Take my arms that I might reach you

# But my words like silent raindrops fell

# And echoed in the wells of silence

# And the people bowed and prayed

# To the neon god they made... #

In fact, there was only one artist who took on the full weight of the American commonplace,

its giganticism, its power of spectacle.

But he did it by irony and his work went far beyond any limits one could assign to the pop sensibility.

He was Claes Oldenburg, the thinking person's Walt Disney.

CHEERING

DRUMMING

I always try to attend the Thanksgiving Day parade, which is held in New York.

Sometimes if I'm in Europe I make a special point of coming back so I can attend it.

I guess it all started when I was small.

I was always taken to the parade and it's figured in my imagination,

the excitement of seeing those huge balloons in the air moving about.

But my interest in the parade is not so much an interest in the circus aspect of it,

in the clowns or the floats, I'm really specifically interested in these balloons on that scale

and what they do in the air.

And the whole engineering aspect of getting these balloons down through these streets

and the whole process of filling the balloons with gas which goes on a whole 12 hours before the parade.

All these parts of the parade are very interesting to me.

And it's the balloons that I come to see

rather than anything else.

Born in Sweden, raised in Chicago, Oldenburg grew up fascinated by the size of things American.

From the beginning his art was literally about appetite,

the desire to touch, squash, stroke,

absorb, digest and become what he saw.

Probably I do two things that are contrary,

I try to make the art look like it's part of the world around it,

at the same time I take great pains to show that it doesn't function as part of the world around it.

He took ordinary things, small ones got huge, soft ones hard, hard ones went soft.

This is a ladder. This is a saw.

The logic of use has gone. Things take on multiple meanings

and they keep alluding back to the human body.

A Chicago fireplug becomes a torso with breast and nipples, a monumental nude.

This is the original fireplug.

Because this fireplug was directly outside of my house

and this was the fireplug I saw every day.

And it's more or less the one that my fireplug fantasies are based on.

This is the one that was done in 1968 as a souvenir of the Democratic convention.

This way it's breasts, and if you turn it upside-down it becomes the bottom half of the torso.

These being legs.

I like to take an object and deprive it of its function completely.

Take an ordinary object, change its scale, its material, and suddenly it is a stranger to the world,

weird and complicated.

I have a condition I want to express about form,

and then an object sort of fits into that condition.

And then I take the object without thinking too much about the object.

That is this could just as well been a bank vault,

except that I like the lights that are very simple

and very straightforward, and symmetrical form,

which is what I was looking for.

Something geometric and uncomplicated.

I suppose the best examples of this recomplication of an ordinary thing back into an image

lie in Oldenburg's sculptural projects, his big ones, the monuments.

Not very many of them have actually been built,

but in Philadelphia this one was, and what could be more ordinary than a clothes pin?

But on the other hand, you'd have to go some way

to find anything more dreamlike and grotesque than a clothes pin 40 feet high.

Like a monster in a movie,

it suggests that the real world has somehow contrived to rise against its owners.

But it's also partly human, a fact which underscores its monstrosity.

The clothes pin has two legs and one is encouraged therefore to read it as a man.

The spring clip on the thing's torso suggests compression, force, inhibition.

The angles are all sharp and there's nothing flabby.

The thing is in fact a giant authority figure,

a sort of parody of the hero in sculpture,

a modern Colossus of Rhodes.

BIRDSONG

Oldenburg's range goes all the way from that to the pastoral...

like this giant trowel.

In his power of invention and his drive to impose his whole self on the world, fears and all,

he is the nearest equivalent to Picasso that America has yet produced.

But for every artist of Oldenburg's seriousness, there were a hundred bandwaggoners.

By the end of the '60s, the pop sensibility was like a mechanised carnival.

The avant-garde takes over the electronic village

and the prophet of this idea, a Canadian professor named Marshall McLuhan,

was one of the last thinkers in the world to believe that artists were still ahead of the game.

The artist is the enemy, but in our time

the artist has become the very basis of any scientific power of perception

or making contact with reality.

It now seems that McLuhan was wrong,

the game had finally got ahead of the artist.

One of the catch words of the late '60s in art as in gossip was "information".

And since the medium was the message, the quality of information was not held to matter very much,

the sheer amount of it was so glamorous.

When you surround people with electric information,

the overload of information becomes fantastic.

The amount of information in the environment under electric conditions

is many times greater than that of the normal human environment pre-electric.

And there's only one natural response to such overload and that is pattern recognition.

American educators are so serious that they exude parody all the time.

And this place is a parody of the McLuhanist state of mind.

It's called The Living History Center and it's in Philadelphia.

'We like this country very much.'

Here the kiddies can have what is called

a "non-elitist, multi-dimensional, environmental learning experience."

Translation - compulsory fun.

They can listen to bits of The Declaration of Independence on the phone.

They can look at period photos and bus tickets on the big index wheels.

And they learn nothing.

The medium is the message here and it turns the brain to cornflakes.

'We hold these truths to be self-evident.

'That all men are created equal.'

OVERLAPPING ELECTRONIC VOICES

The good side of the Pop sensibility was its openness to life,

its readiness to let art react to mass culture.

The bad side was the manipulation and promotional garbage that flooded the art world in the '60s.

Instant this, instant that.

Probably you couldn't have one without the other.

We were told over and over again

that art based on mass media was more democratic than art that wasn't.

It could survive in the big, wide world, but generally that turned out not to be true.

Whether it was difficult, exacting stuff like Jasper Johns

or just entertainment like most pop art, it needed the museum more than ever.

That way or the other way?

We can turn it round if we don't like it.

HE LAUGHS

For all the talk, art based on the media turned out to be just as fragile as any other kind.

The trouble is that in any showdown between painting and the big media, painting cannot possibly win.

People believe what they see on the screen, in photos or even on the box,

but nobody extracts the essential information for the conduct of their lives

from looking at paintings any more.

The thing is that compared to the media, art's a small thing,

it's just a vibration in a museum, really.

And it deals with what hasn't already been said.

It isn't even a very good religion, but once it gives up its claims to seriousness, it's shot.

The Pop sensibility and its ironies nearly took these claims away,

dissolved them in the doctrine that the medium is the message,

but then it became apparent

that all this doctrine boiled down to was the idea that it doesn't matter what art says.

Now, perhaps Andy Warhol was right for his moment when he said that Pop Art was about liking things.

But even so it's not enough, man is an animal who judges,

and even in a culture which has split as disastrously and in as many ways as ours has,

the problems of choice and taste and moral responsibility for images still remain.

In fact, they get harder, but the rock upon which the avant-garde sank

was that art could no longer control that responsibility.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd