0:00:55 > 0:00:59One myth of modern art is that it began like a prophet in the desert,
0:00:59 > 0:01:03the avant-garde, the rejected outsider armed with truth.
0:01:03 > 0:01:05Today, that myth is lost.
0:01:05 > 0:01:11At the start of the '70s, the idea of an avant-garde in painting and sculpture was winding down.
0:01:11 > 0:01:14It's now over, part of a period style.
0:01:14 > 0:01:19In the meantime, modernism itself has become our official culture.
0:01:49 > 0:01:52This is not a building. It's a sculpture.
0:01:52 > 0:01:55Not finished yet, but one of the largest of the 20th century
0:01:55 > 0:01:57and a long way from the art world.
0:01:57 > 0:02:00This valley is in the Nevada Desert, 5,500 feet up
0:02:00 > 0:02:04and four hours' hard drive over bared roads from Las Vegas.
0:02:04 > 0:02:07It's also on the edge of the Nuclear Proving Grounds.
0:02:07 > 0:02:10The artist, Michael Heizer, is an American.
0:02:10 > 0:02:15The piece is called Complex One. He started it in 1972.
0:02:34 > 0:02:3840 metres long, 33 wide and seven high.
0:02:38 > 0:02:40A colossal task.
0:02:42 > 0:02:45At the most, a couple of dozen strangers see it in a year,
0:02:45 > 0:02:49so it has a smaller audience than Cubism did 70 years ago.
0:02:49 > 0:02:52It can never be moved, no museum will ever take it in
0:02:52 > 0:02:56and reproduction gives no real idea of it.
0:02:57 > 0:03:01We are at the end of modernity, and modern art has found its mass audience.
0:03:01 > 0:03:05So one of the last acts of modernism was, so to speak, to return to the desert
0:03:05 > 0:03:09and to retreat from those who wanted to smother it with love,
0:03:09 > 0:03:13and discover in physical isolation the kind of parallel and equivalent
0:03:13 > 0:03:18to the cultural isolation that was the fate of the original avant-garde.
0:03:18 > 0:03:21- Sure. I invented that idea... - 'Michael Heizer.'
0:03:21 > 0:03:26The idea that there are no values attached to something like this
0:03:26 > 0:03:31because it's not portable and not a malleable barter exchange object.
0:03:31 > 0:03:34And that says it. You can't trade this thing.
0:03:34 > 0:03:36You can't put it in your pocket.
0:03:36 > 0:03:42If you have a war, you can't move it around. It's not worth anything. In fact, it's an obligation.
0:03:42 > 0:03:44The theory is that art and land
0:03:44 > 0:03:47are the things that have the greatest value.
0:03:47 > 0:03:51Here you have both art and land, if either is usable,
0:03:51 > 0:03:54and neither are worth very much.
0:03:54 > 0:03:57I think all large sculptures have been technically difficult
0:03:57 > 0:04:00for all people who ever built them.
0:04:02 > 0:04:06I think that I haven't tried to surpass that scale.
0:04:06 > 0:04:10I simply tried to keep pace with it, and it's a historical scale.
0:04:11 > 0:04:13I think that it's normal and natural
0:04:13 > 0:04:17to build a sculpture of this measurement at this time.
0:04:20 > 0:04:22Why make such things?
0:04:22 > 0:04:26Why spend so long constructing something so big and hard to get to?
0:04:26 > 0:04:30Partly to change a work's relation to the art world as a system,
0:04:30 > 0:04:32to get it out of the stream of opinion about art
0:04:32 > 0:04:36and the stream of official culture and money exchange.
0:04:36 > 0:04:39Isolation is the essence of land art.
0:04:39 > 0:04:43Remoteness gives all efforts to see it the character of a pilgrimage.
0:04:43 > 0:04:48Going to it, you have in a sense said yes to it before you see it,
0:04:48 > 0:04:54and given more time to it than most would give to looking at a sculpture in a museum.
0:04:54 > 0:04:59But the idea that a museum would even bother with advanced art is a fairly new one.
0:04:59 > 0:05:01The notion that it could become the place
0:05:01 > 0:05:05where modernist credentials would be sealed and stamped is even newer.
0:05:05 > 0:05:08This was largely an American invention.
0:05:08 > 0:05:13One of the illusions of the 19th century at the start of the museum age in America
0:05:13 > 0:05:16was the idea that art morally improved you.
0:05:16 > 0:05:18I think that I can testify that it does not.
0:05:18 > 0:05:21Nevertheless, the idea of social improvement through art
0:05:21 > 0:05:25struck a responsive chord in the American rich who now began to spend
0:05:25 > 0:05:30hundreds of millions of dollars on the setting up, the building and endowment of museums.
0:05:30 > 0:05:35It may be that some of them felt, on a quite deep level, that this was tantamount to a religious act.
0:05:35 > 0:05:38And they all knew it was tax deductible.
0:05:38 > 0:05:40God loveth the cheerful giver,
0:05:40 > 0:05:44and the donors had every reason to feel cheerful.
0:05:48 > 0:05:52The earlier American robber barons - Morgan,
0:05:52 > 0:05:56Frick, Carnegie - could amass monuments to themselves,
0:05:56 > 0:06:01monuments of past art housed in neo-renaissance palaces.
0:06:02 > 0:06:05But the great change came in 1929,
0:06:05 > 0:06:09when the Museum of Modern Art was founded in New York.
0:06:09 > 0:06:11Today, it seems such a natural title.
0:06:11 > 0:06:14Then, it seemed very odd indeed.
0:06:14 > 0:06:17Wasn't the avant-garde against museums on principle?
0:06:17 > 0:06:21Hadn't the futurists wanted to burn them down?
0:06:21 > 0:06:25No European museum was trying to collect modern art in a systematic way.
0:06:25 > 0:06:29The idea of doing so was largely the work of Alfred Barr,
0:06:29 > 0:06:32who persuaded a growing circle of millionaires,
0:06:32 > 0:06:34seated on the Rockefeller family,
0:06:34 > 0:06:40to underwrite a museum that would treat modernism as a historical fact, the culture of their time.
0:06:40 > 0:06:45Its present senior curator, William Reuben, recalls the policy.
0:06:45 > 0:06:51I think Alfred Barr's aims were first to make a synoptic collection of modern art.
0:06:51 > 0:06:55That is to say, to show all schools from all nations,
0:06:55 > 0:07:00as opposed, let us say, to the groups of modern art that one found in European museums,
0:07:00 > 0:07:05which were heavily weighed towards the nation in which the museums were located.
0:07:05 > 0:07:10To try to balance these according to what he saw as their quality and importance,
0:07:10 > 0:07:12rather than their provenance.
0:07:12 > 0:07:17This meant, also, not following any particular line -
0:07:17 > 0:07:21that is, toward abstraction or not abstraction or whatever.
0:07:21 > 0:07:24Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say
0:07:24 > 0:07:28that there was a sense of avant-gardism that lay behind this,
0:07:28 > 0:07:34a force that led to radical painting
0:07:34 > 0:07:39being more prized than, let us say, conservative realistic paintings
0:07:39 > 0:07:42of a type that the public was more familiar with.
0:07:45 > 0:07:49By 1950, the MoMA, as New Yorkers call it with a sort of Oedipal affection,
0:07:49 > 0:07:54had put together a collection of 20th-century art that no European museum could rival.
0:07:54 > 0:07:56It didn't take sides.
0:07:56 > 0:08:02All rivalries and differences of ideological splits were recorded on the museum walls
0:08:02 > 0:08:05not in a partisan spirit, but as cultural facts.
0:08:05 > 0:08:09The museum wanted everything and its opposite.
0:08:09 > 0:08:12It defused the tensions of all moments
0:08:12 > 0:08:14by rendering them historical.
0:08:14 > 0:08:18From now on, modernism would tend to seem noble and exemplary,
0:08:18 > 0:08:21rather than tense and controversial.
0:08:21 > 0:08:24So now the metaphors of temple and treasure house,
0:08:24 > 0:08:27once the property of museums of traditional art,
0:08:27 > 0:08:29could apply to modernity, too.
0:08:29 > 0:08:33Scores of new museums were built in America in the '60s.
0:08:33 > 0:08:35Most of them looked like fortresses, culture bunkers
0:08:35 > 0:08:38radiating an image of vast security.
0:08:40 > 0:08:43This one, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington is, in effect,
0:08:43 > 0:08:48the set for The Guns Of Navarone without the guns.
0:08:48 > 0:08:52But the climax of the trend happened just across the street.
0:08:55 > 0:08:58The National Gallery in Washington had been built and paid for
0:08:58 > 0:09:03by one of America's older mercantile princes, Andrew Mellon, in 1941.
0:09:03 > 0:09:07Several decades later, his descendants and their foundation,
0:09:07 > 0:09:12laid out close to 100 million to construct this new East Building.
0:09:20 > 0:09:24Its main feature was this enormous nave.
0:09:24 > 0:09:28People could enjoy the sensation of being in the church of art
0:09:28 > 0:09:30without actually being obliged to pray.
0:09:30 > 0:09:34If ever a museum set up a building whose main function
0:09:34 > 0:09:38was to praise its own stature as an institution, this was it.
0:09:39 > 0:09:43The galleries themselves were relegated to the corners.
0:09:44 > 0:09:47The cost of this remarkable essay in museological splendour
0:09:47 > 0:09:50was a third of the price of a nuclear submarine,
0:09:50 > 0:09:53which puts it in one perspective.
0:09:53 > 0:09:58On the other hand, it was about twice the Gross National Product of some African states,
0:09:58 > 0:10:00which may put it in another.
0:10:01 > 0:10:03This may be pondered by anyone
0:10:03 > 0:10:07who does not think modernism is our official culture.
0:10:07 > 0:10:11The result of such expansions is to turn the museum
0:10:11 > 0:10:15from a sort of articulated tomb into a low-rating mass medium.
0:10:15 > 0:10:17BRASS BAND PLAYS
0:10:29 > 0:10:31APPLAUSE
0:10:35 > 0:10:37We have before us here,
0:10:37 > 0:10:40in concrete, marble and glass,
0:10:40 > 0:10:43a tangible demonstration that excellence
0:10:43 > 0:10:46and access to a wide public
0:10:46 > 0:10:48are far from being contradictory.
0:10:48 > 0:10:51They are complementary.
0:10:51 > 0:10:56This building stands as a metaphor for what, at its best,
0:10:56 > 0:11:00the relationship between Government and the arts can be.
0:11:00 > 0:11:04Meanwhile, the interlock between new art, capital, real estate,
0:11:04 > 0:11:09education, displaced piety and show biz has gathered enough power
0:11:09 > 0:11:13to transform whole neighbourhoods outside the museum.
0:11:13 > 0:11:15# I'm in with the "In" crowd
0:11:17 > 0:11:19# I go where the "In" crowd goes
0:11:20 > 0:11:23# I'm in with the "In" crowd
0:11:24 > 0:11:27# And I know what the "In" crowd knows
0:11:29 > 0:11:35# Any time of the year, don't you hear how to have fun... #
0:11:35 > 0:11:38When I came to New York to live in 1970,
0:11:38 > 0:11:41I moved into a downtown industrial district
0:11:41 > 0:11:45which, because it was south of Houston Street, was christened SoHo.
0:11:45 > 0:11:48In those days, there were two art galleries in SoHo.
0:11:48 > 0:11:51There were two Italian bars, no restaurants,
0:11:51 > 0:11:55no tourists and quite a lot of peace and quiet.
0:11:55 > 0:11:59Today, nine years later, there are 75 galleries, at last count,
0:11:59 > 0:12:03dozens of restaurants and bars, and on weekends,
0:12:03 > 0:12:06when the peering hordes of dentists from New Jersey
0:12:06 > 0:12:11come down here to take their Gucci loafers for a walk among the bubble top buses,
0:12:11 > 0:12:15there is very little peace and quiet indeed.
0:12:16 > 0:12:18# ..We've got our own way of walkin'
0:12:23 > 0:12:26# We've got our own way of talkin'
0:12:30 > 0:12:33# Any time of the year, don't you hear
0:12:33 > 0:12:35# Gotta have fun
0:12:35 > 0:12:37# Spendin' cash, talkin' trash
0:12:38 > 0:12:42# Girl, I'll show you a real good time
0:12:42 > 0:12:45# Come on with me and leave your troubles behind
0:12:46 > 0:12:49# I don't care where you've been
0:12:49 > 0:12:55# You ain't been nowhere till you've been "In"... #
0:12:55 > 0:12:59Such are the healing and transforming powers of art.
0:12:59 > 0:13:03In the 19th century, artists used to live in "bohemias",
0:13:03 > 0:13:05which were interesting but not chic.
0:13:05 > 0:13:09Today, they make places chic by moving in, at least for a short time,
0:13:09 > 0:13:14until the landlords raise the rent and boot them out so they have to go somewhere else.
0:13:14 > 0:13:17This process is known as urban renewal.
0:13:18 > 0:13:21The SoHo recipe of the art colony as a huge boutique,
0:13:21 > 0:13:25post-modernism and designer jeans, happened to other places,
0:13:25 > 0:13:29like this part of Paris around Les Halles.
0:13:29 > 0:13:33It was bulldozed flat in the 1970s to make room for a development
0:13:33 > 0:13:36whose core was the Pompidou Centre.
0:13:39 > 0:13:41The Centre opened in 1977.
0:13:41 > 0:13:45If the monument of the start of modernism was the Eiffel Tower,
0:13:45 > 0:13:48this is the one at its end.
0:13:48 > 0:13:50A palace of French centralisation,
0:13:50 > 0:13:54a cross between a prison and a construction toy.
0:13:55 > 0:13:57It's a very metaphorical building.
0:13:57 > 0:14:02Although the pipes and ventilators stop practically all natural light from getting in -
0:14:02 > 0:14:05quite a trick in a metal and glass structure -
0:14:05 > 0:14:08they suggest industrial process, like an oil refinery.
0:14:11 > 0:14:14In the 1920s, Russian constructivist architects
0:14:14 > 0:14:18designed palaces of culture which were never built.
0:14:18 > 0:14:21This Marxist ideal of the museum as a social condenser
0:14:21 > 0:14:26was only translated into fact in capitalist Paris 60 years later.
0:14:28 > 0:14:31For blocks around, the quarter has been gutted and remade
0:14:31 > 0:14:34in the French version of the SoHo mix, full of little galleries
0:14:34 > 0:14:39selling little art and neat studio apartments for young trendies.
0:14:39 > 0:14:44Where the belly of Paris used to be, culture gulch now stands.
0:14:50 > 0:14:52APPLAUSE
0:14:55 > 0:14:59If anyone had suggested 30 years ago that the fallout from modern art
0:14:59 > 0:15:03would produce such mutations, nobody would have believed it.
0:15:03 > 0:15:06This is what happens when big concentrations of social interests
0:15:06 > 0:15:10decide to use modern art as their aiming point.
0:15:10 > 0:15:13The irony is that the institutional triumph of the new
0:15:13 > 0:15:17happens just when the old social uses of art,
0:15:17 > 0:15:20whose residue gave the idea of the avant-garde its meaning,
0:15:20 > 0:15:22have almost withered away.
0:15:25 > 0:15:28PERFORMER ANNOUNCES IN FRENCH
0:15:30 > 0:15:35In the 15th century, one of these uses was to inform and to explain.
0:15:35 > 0:15:39Where did you get information about the world and how to live in it?
0:15:39 > 0:15:44Well, not from magazines or newspapers. They didn't exist.
0:15:44 > 0:15:47Not from books, either, because in the 15th century
0:15:47 > 0:15:51the idea of mass printing was hardly even an idea.
0:15:51 > 0:15:55500 years ago, you and I probably would have been illiterate.
0:15:55 > 0:15:58This left two other channels of information.
0:15:58 > 0:16:00One was the spoken word.
0:16:00 > 0:16:06That included everything from village gossip to the high rhetoric of the altar and pulpit.
0:16:06 > 0:16:11The other one was visual images - painting and sculpture.
0:16:11 > 0:16:13Of these, painting was the more eloquent,
0:16:13 > 0:16:17with its much greater power of visual illusion
0:16:17 > 0:16:22and its adaptability to almost any given surface.
0:16:22 > 0:16:25This chapel in the church of San Clemente in Rome
0:16:25 > 0:16:28was painted by an artist named Masolino da Panicale.
0:16:28 > 0:16:33500 years later, we can look at his work with a tourist's eye or with an art historian's.
0:16:33 > 0:16:38The one thing we cannot do is see it with the eye of his own audience.
0:16:38 > 0:16:42Because that eye supposed, as our culture no longer does,
0:16:42 > 0:16:47that painting was one of the primary dominant forms of public speech.
0:16:47 > 0:16:53Painting explains and describes - and here it describes a legend.
0:16:54 > 0:16:58The task of painting was to make it vivid and tangible and credible,
0:16:58 > 0:17:02to insert the legend into the life of people who gathered here
0:17:02 > 0:17:06so that it would strengthen their faith and alter their beliefs,
0:17:06 > 0:17:08and so compel behaviour.
0:17:08 > 0:17:12That, as I understand it, is what public art fundamentally
0:17:12 > 0:17:14has always been about.
0:17:14 > 0:17:17But today we have no credible public art
0:17:17 > 0:17:21because other media have taken its old power away.
0:17:21 > 0:17:25Throughout its history, up to the end of the 19th century,
0:17:25 > 0:17:27art kept this didactic purpose.
0:17:27 > 0:17:31It showed people what to worship, what to pray to,
0:17:31 > 0:17:34whom to believe, what values to adopt.
0:17:34 > 0:17:38It was the main generator of social symbols.
0:17:38 > 0:17:42Today, the whole issue of the use of public art is in question.
0:17:42 > 0:17:47Most of the time, our ancestors assumed it was the main purpose of painting.
0:17:47 > 0:17:51The object could be tiny and precious, like a religious icon.
0:17:51 > 0:17:54Or it could be as big as David's Oath of the Horatii,
0:17:54 > 0:17:56which was a political item
0:17:56 > 0:18:00made to teach republican virtue to the French.
0:18:00 > 0:18:03We know that art is about pleasure, too.
0:18:03 > 0:18:05And fear.
0:18:07 > 0:18:10And tranquil meditation beyond politics.
0:18:10 > 0:18:15And a host of things as wide as the range of human feeling itself.
0:18:18 > 0:18:22But up to the end of the 19th century, the importance of art
0:18:22 > 0:18:27was usually bound up with its role as public discourse.
0:18:27 > 0:18:30Without that role, there would have been no avant-garde,
0:18:30 > 0:18:33because if art doesn't embody values,
0:18:33 > 0:18:35it can't act as a conscience.
0:18:35 > 0:18:38That was what the avant-garde set out to be
0:18:38 > 0:18:41when it made its debut in the mid 19th-century -
0:18:41 > 0:18:43the conscience of a class,
0:18:43 > 0:18:47its traditional enemy and chief patron, the bourgeoisie.
0:18:47 > 0:18:51What made the avant-garde possible in France, where it was born,
0:18:51 > 0:18:53was the salon system.
0:18:58 > 0:19:03Instead of a circle of artists trying to get work from one prince or bishop,
0:19:03 > 0:19:06you had hundreds, even thousands, of easel paintings
0:19:06 > 0:19:10competing for the attention of thousands of middle-class people.
0:19:10 > 0:19:12It was more like a bazaar than a court,
0:19:12 > 0:19:17and it gave more room for invention and scandal and liberty.
0:19:17 > 0:19:19Anyone could send a picture in,
0:19:19 > 0:19:22though there was no guarantee that it would be hung.
0:19:22 > 0:19:24The salon was the theatre
0:19:24 > 0:19:28in which the drama of offending the bourgeois was played out.
0:19:28 > 0:19:32Hilton Kramer, art critic of the New York Times.
0:19:32 > 0:19:37The relationship of the avant-garde to the middle class is enormously complicated
0:19:37 > 0:19:45because it, like everything else in modern culture, was so changeable.
0:19:45 > 0:19:50Er... The initial collision, the initial challenge,
0:19:50 > 0:19:55always, within a single generation, was resolved into an embrace.
0:19:55 > 0:20:01What was established taste for the bourgeoisie in one generation
0:20:01 > 0:20:04was abandoned in the subsequent generation
0:20:04 > 0:20:08for the taste of what had been conceived to be avant-garde.
0:20:08 > 0:20:13It's a great misunderstanding of the history book of 19th-century culture
0:20:13 > 0:20:16and of our own in the 20th century
0:20:16 > 0:20:19to hold on to the notion of the avant-garde
0:20:19 > 0:20:22as sort of permanent cultural guerillas
0:20:22 > 0:20:29making their forays into, er... middle-class wealth.
0:20:29 > 0:20:34They actually were more like family,
0:20:34 > 0:20:38in which there were conflicts of generations.
0:20:38 > 0:20:43And in the end, as often happens in families,
0:20:43 > 0:20:45when the wills were read,
0:20:45 > 0:20:49the avant-garde turned out to be the beneficiary after all.
0:20:49 > 0:20:53The first great painter to embody the ideal of the avant-garde
0:20:53 > 0:20:57was Gustave Courbet in the 1850s and '60s.
0:20:57 > 0:21:00In politics, a radical. In art, a realist.
0:21:00 > 0:21:03In person, an invincible and solid egotist
0:21:03 > 0:21:08who could show himself greeting even the sea on equal terms.
0:21:10 > 0:21:13He called himself "the most arrogant man in France".
0:21:13 > 0:21:16When asked which school he belonged to, he replied,
0:21:16 > 0:21:21"I'm a Courbetist, that's all. My painting is the only true one.
0:21:21 > 0:21:24"I am the first and unique artist of this century.
0:21:24 > 0:21:27"The others are students or drivellers."
0:21:28 > 0:21:31Courbet's work can only be understood
0:21:31 > 0:21:34in relation to the public that he was struggling to create.
0:21:34 > 0:21:37This public, he hoped, would crystallise
0:21:37 > 0:21:41out of the mass audience of the salons around the idea of realism,
0:21:41 > 0:21:46a public which accepted that art should be challenging and problematic.
0:21:46 > 0:21:49In short, the public for modern art itself.
0:21:49 > 0:21:53He set himself firmly against the reigning taste of his day,
0:21:53 > 0:21:55and the penalty was insult.
0:21:55 > 0:21:58"From what fabulous mating of a slug with a peacock,
0:21:58 > 0:22:03"from what genital antithesis, from what fatty oozings
0:22:03 > 0:22:07"can have been generated this thing called Monsieur Gustave Courbet?
0:22:07 > 0:22:11"Under what gardener's cloche with the help of what manure,
0:22:11 > 0:22:17"as a result of what mixture of wine, beer, corrosive mucous and flatulent swellings
0:22:17 > 0:22:20"can have grown this sonorous and hairy pumpkin,
0:22:20 > 0:22:22"this aesthetic belly,
0:22:22 > 0:22:27"this imbecilic and impotent incarnation of the self?"
0:22:27 > 0:22:30They don't write art criticism like that any more.
0:22:30 > 0:22:33Not because of editorial timidity or the law of libel,
0:22:33 > 0:22:38but because nobody feels threatened by works of art the way that Dumas felt threatened by Courbet.
0:22:38 > 0:22:43He used the kind of language that societies use to protect themselves and to punish offenders.
0:22:43 > 0:22:47Its frenzied insult was, in a way, a back-handed compliment
0:22:47 > 0:22:51because it sprang from an intense belief that it mattered what art said
0:22:51 > 0:22:56and that works of art had real consequences in the real world.
0:22:56 > 0:23:00To change the language of art, the official visual speech of France,
0:23:00 > 0:23:04was like seizing the radio station and changing the programmes.
0:23:04 > 0:23:09The new could only shock as long as it was constantly underwritten by the old.
0:23:09 > 0:23:13Otherwise, why get excited by bits of paint on canvas?
0:23:13 > 0:23:16From Courbet onwards, the idea of the avant-garde artist
0:23:16 > 0:23:20as a Bolshevist or anarchist was fixed in the public mind.
0:23:20 > 0:23:25It contributed to the idea that modern art owed nothing to the past
0:23:25 > 0:23:28and was opposed to all traditions.
0:23:28 > 0:23:31This was nonsense, but it was durable nonsense.
0:23:31 > 0:23:36I think that the principal radical effect
0:23:36 > 0:23:41that the avant-garde has on society, and has had on society,
0:23:41 > 0:23:48doesn't take place directly in the realm of politics, but takes place in the realm of style and feeling.
0:23:48 > 0:23:53That is, it prepares the educated segment of the society
0:23:53 > 0:23:58to question the values that have been handed down.
0:23:58 > 0:24:01It...creates a kind of ferment...
0:24:01 > 0:24:07which prepares the way for vast political change.
0:24:07 > 0:24:09Its role is to create a model of dissent.
0:24:11 > 0:24:13Today, painting and sculpture
0:24:13 > 0:24:16scarcely have the power left to create such a model.
0:24:16 > 0:24:20All that happens is, now and again, usually in England or Australia,
0:24:20 > 0:24:22people get worked up about some object
0:24:22 > 0:24:26because it's seemed not worth the money a museum paid for it.
0:24:26 > 0:24:29So it was with Carl Andre's 120 Bricks.
0:24:29 > 0:24:33The essential difference between this kind of sculpture
0:24:33 > 0:24:35and any that existed in the past,
0:24:35 > 0:24:40is that this depends, not just a bit, but totally on the museum.
0:24:40 > 0:24:44A Rodin in a parking lot is still a misplaced Rodin.
0:24:44 > 0:24:47But this in a parking lot is just bricks.
0:24:47 > 0:24:51In this way, a museum becomes a nearly equal partner with the artist.
0:24:51 > 0:24:54It helps create the work by providing the only place
0:24:54 > 0:24:56where an array of bricks can be seen as art
0:24:56 > 0:24:59and fitted into the context
0:24:59 > 0:25:02of a minor modern art movement called minimalism.
0:25:02 > 0:25:05On the street, minimalism doesn't exist.
0:25:05 > 0:25:07There are only things.
0:25:09 > 0:25:12This piece by the American sculptor Donald Judd,
0:25:12 > 0:25:17if you saw it outside the gallery, is just a row of plywood boxes.
0:25:17 > 0:25:21The museum gives it a slot in a debate about the nature and limits of art,
0:25:21 > 0:25:24and that was the content of the work.
0:25:24 > 0:25:27The Nirvana of boredom that minimalism promised
0:25:27 > 0:25:31was the exact opposite of the fantasies of action and involvement
0:25:31 > 0:25:33that political art held out.
0:25:33 > 0:25:35CROWD CHEERING
0:25:35 > 0:25:37But the real field of modernist experience
0:25:37 > 0:25:41lies somewhere between dumb mass propaganda on one hand
0:25:41 > 0:25:45and the silences of a dying avant-garde on the other.
0:25:45 > 0:25:47That experience is not collective.
0:25:47 > 0:25:51In front of a Matisse, you do not hear the chant of surging millions.
0:25:51 > 0:25:56You hear one voice carefully explaining itself to one person -
0:25:56 > 0:25:59the interested stranger, yourself.
0:26:04 > 0:26:06Most of the great voices of modernity
0:26:06 > 0:26:09come from neither the left nor the right of society,
0:26:09 > 0:26:11but from just outside it.
0:26:11 > 0:26:16The basic reason why the avant-garde had so little influence on action
0:26:16 > 0:26:20and such a lot on sensibility is that it was solitary.
0:26:20 > 0:26:21William Reuben.
0:26:21 > 0:26:23Religious painting ceases.
0:26:23 > 0:26:27The painting of the political leader disappears.
0:26:27 > 0:26:30The painting of history, as such, disappears.
0:26:30 > 0:26:35All the themes that belong to the collectivity, so to say, disappear.
0:26:35 > 0:26:38One of the ways we can define modern art, if we want to,
0:26:38 > 0:26:43is that it has been an art that did not engage itself in the old collectivities,
0:26:43 > 0:26:48but rather in the much more limited world of the experience of the artist himself
0:26:48 > 0:26:53and of the people who loved and were interested in that world.
0:26:53 > 0:26:59This world of the artist has since been commercialised and various other things have happened to it,
0:26:59 > 0:27:02but in its essence, it was a private world
0:27:02 > 0:27:06as opposed to the public world which characterised pre-modern art.
0:27:06 > 0:27:11This recoil from the public stance didn't only happen in abstract art.
0:27:11 > 0:27:14It came in depictive art as well.
0:27:14 > 0:27:17There is an immense gap between the ambitions of a Courbet
0:27:17 > 0:27:21and those of an American realist sculptor like George Segal.
0:27:21 > 0:27:23His subject is not so much human sociability
0:27:23 > 0:27:28as the difficulty of any kind of communication at all.
0:27:31 > 0:27:34In fact, over the last 25 years,
0:27:34 > 0:27:39the art of social commentary has been the exception and not the rule.
0:27:39 > 0:27:43One of these exceptions is Ed Kienholz, who makes big tableaus
0:27:43 > 0:27:45charged with irony and grotesqueness
0:27:45 > 0:27:48very much in the tradition of Berlin Dada,
0:27:48 > 0:27:51but starting with the American scene.
0:27:51 > 0:27:53CHATTER AND MUSIC
0:28:18 > 0:28:22A bar and eaterie in Los Angeles called Barney's Beanery
0:28:22 > 0:28:27formed one of these pieces, and Kienholz reconstructed it and its clientele.
0:28:32 > 0:28:35HUM OF CONVERSATION
0:28:35 > 0:28:38SENTIMENTAL MUSIC PLAYS IN BACKGROUND
0:28:45 > 0:28:49Most of the avant-garde style since Cubism were meant as a criticism of life.
0:28:49 > 0:28:53But the dominant museum style of the '60s certainly was not.
0:28:53 > 0:28:56This was the kind of color field painting
0:28:56 > 0:28:58that developed out of Jackson Pollock's work,
0:28:58 > 0:29:01that atmospheric web of dripped paint,
0:29:01 > 0:29:04all free gesture and light touch.
0:29:04 > 0:29:09The artist who seized a duplicit delicacy was Helen Frankenthaler.
0:29:09 > 0:29:12In 1952, she painted Mountains and Sea,
0:29:12 > 0:29:15the progenitor of a whole school of stain painting.
0:29:15 > 0:29:19Her work held a constant thread of landscape images,
0:29:19 > 0:29:21but other painters who picked up
0:29:21 > 0:29:25on her way of dying and staining the canvas dispensed with that.
0:29:25 > 0:29:28Morris Louis wanted to produce a decorative impersonal surface
0:29:28 > 0:29:30from which everything that smacked of character,
0:29:30 > 0:29:35like a directional brushstroke or a change of texture, was excluded.
0:29:35 > 0:29:38Kenneth Noland reduced the elements even further.
0:29:38 > 0:29:42Colour, not shape, is the origin of each painting.
0:29:42 > 0:29:44Noland could give it an airy energy
0:29:44 > 0:29:48that offered a pure forceful hedonism to the eye.
0:29:48 > 0:29:50But that was all they did offer,
0:29:50 > 0:29:54and although more museum time and space was devoted to propagating it
0:29:54 > 0:29:57in America than any other style or movement,
0:29:57 > 0:29:59the resources of color field painting
0:29:59 > 0:30:02were looking pretty thin by the end of the '60s.
0:30:02 > 0:30:05It maintained itself as a mandarin style,
0:30:05 > 0:30:08but the Matissian heart was no longer in it.
0:30:10 > 0:30:12At the opposite pole of feeling,
0:30:12 > 0:30:15there were Frank Stella's paintings from the '70s,
0:30:15 > 0:30:18fuelled with a sort of maniacal decorative punch -
0:30:18 > 0:30:20glitter, scribbling, congestion,
0:30:20 > 0:30:23big French curves swinging out of the design
0:30:23 > 0:30:26like the feathers of some tropical bird.
0:30:26 > 0:30:29The sheer energy of this kind of work belies the idea,
0:30:29 > 0:30:31much talked about recently,
0:30:31 > 0:30:35that abstract painting, as such, is a dying form.
0:30:35 > 0:30:39As in a different way the paintings of Bridget Riley do.
0:30:41 > 0:30:45For abstract art can serve as a model for clear feeling.
0:30:45 > 0:30:46Here, it does.
0:30:46 > 0:30:51It is very exact, showing what slips can happen in the process of seeing,
0:30:51 > 0:30:55and how insecure the pleasures of the eye may be.
0:30:55 > 0:30:58I don't think it's a small matter to be shown this.
0:30:58 > 0:31:01Although some people think such art has no content,
0:31:01 > 0:31:04one can take it that this process of seeing and feeling
0:31:04 > 0:31:09set forth on the canvas IS the content - not a simple one, either.
0:31:09 > 0:31:13Riley's kind of sharp, self-doubting talent, so finely tuned,
0:31:13 > 0:31:16was particularly vulnerable to attack.
0:31:16 > 0:31:18It wasn't merely decorative,
0:31:18 > 0:31:22but the commercial world made it seem so in the 1960s,
0:31:22 > 0:31:27by chewing her work up and spitting it out as Op art fashion.
0:31:27 > 0:31:31MUSIC: "Devil In Her Heart" by the Beatles
0:31:34 > 0:31:36# She's got the devil in her heart... #
0:31:36 > 0:31:40By the end of the '60s, the word "avant-garde" had been done in
0:31:40 > 0:31:42by fashion on one side and, on the other,
0:31:42 > 0:31:46the market pressure for a new art movement every six months.
0:31:46 > 0:31:49# ..her lips they really thrill me
0:31:51 > 0:31:55# I'll take my chances For romance is
0:31:55 > 0:31:58# So important to me
0:31:59 > 0:32:03# She'll never hurt me She won't desert me
0:32:03 > 0:32:07# She's an angel sent to me
0:32:07 > 0:32:11# She's got the devil in her heart No, no, no
0:32:11 > 0:32:15# No, this I can't believe
0:32:15 > 0:32:18# She's gonna tear your heart apart
0:32:18 > 0:32:23# No, no nay will she deceive
0:32:23 > 0:32:27# She's got the devil in her heart
0:32:27 > 0:32:31# But she's an angel sent to me... #
0:32:31 > 0:32:36The problem wasn't entirely defined by the fact that fashion had been taking ideas from artists.
0:32:36 > 0:32:40It had been doing that for 50 years.
0:32:40 > 0:32:43Art Deco was decorator Cubism,
0:32:43 > 0:32:47and a lot of linoleum owes its patterns to Mondrian.
0:32:47 > 0:32:50But now, the promotional world as a system
0:32:50 > 0:32:55had fused with the art world as a system, and that was new.
0:32:55 > 0:32:59In a very insidious way, the idea of cultural confrontation
0:32:59 > 0:33:02had been replaced by the idea of styling.
0:33:02 > 0:33:04And that was new, too.
0:33:04 > 0:33:07We were heading into a stage of meaningless tolerance
0:33:07 > 0:33:11where nothing an artist could do would be thought really offensive
0:33:11 > 0:33:15because there was always a chance that it might convert into capital.
0:33:15 > 0:33:19There was a flood of instant art for instant people.
0:33:19 > 0:33:21Vasarely to Warhole,
0:33:21 > 0:33:25all of it getting its 15 minutes of undivided attention
0:33:25 > 0:33:28from a new class of collectors who saw its up-to-datedness
0:33:28 > 0:33:31as a way of underwriting their social careers
0:33:31 > 0:33:35or buying an up-to-date public relations image for their companies.
0:33:35 > 0:33:38The great emblem of the culture of quick results
0:33:38 > 0:33:40was not any given work of art,
0:33:40 > 0:33:43it was the art market itself which began to boom
0:33:43 > 0:33:47and has been going up ever since, as money goes down.
0:33:50 > 0:33:53I started writing about art 20 years ago.
0:33:53 > 0:33:56In those far-off days, you could spend time in a museum
0:33:56 > 0:34:00without ever thinking about what the art might cost.
0:34:00 > 0:34:02The price was not relevant.
0:34:02 > 0:34:06Besides, price and value were completely distinct questions.
0:34:06 > 0:34:09But then, in the early '60s, something began to happen.
0:34:09 > 0:34:11First, there was a trickle and then a stream,
0:34:11 > 0:34:15and finally a great brown roaring flood of propaganda
0:34:15 > 0:34:17about "art investment".
0:34:17 > 0:34:20The price of a work of art now became part of its function.
0:34:20 > 0:34:26It redefined the art, whose new job was to sit on the wall and get more expensive.
0:34:26 > 0:34:32The result was that, whereas before, works of art had been like strangers with whom one could converse
0:34:32 > 0:34:35and whom one could gradually get to know,
0:34:35 > 0:34:39they now assumed, more and more, the character of film stars,
0:34:39 > 0:34:42with the museum as their limousine.
0:34:42 > 0:34:46I doubt if anybody, nowadays, can look at a Cubist Braque or a Rothko
0:34:46 > 0:34:48or a Russian constructivist sculpture
0:34:48 > 0:34:53without being deeply affected by the fact that the prices of these things
0:34:53 > 0:34:55has become absurdly high.
0:34:55 > 0:34:57And that in some crucial sense,
0:34:57 > 0:35:01this has removed them from the run of ordinary experience.
0:35:01 > 0:35:04I think high price strikes people blind.
0:35:04 > 0:35:06I think it displaces the content of the work.
0:35:06 > 0:35:09You can't spend very much time writing about art
0:35:09 > 0:35:14without realising how much criticism and scholarship, whether they want to or not,
0:35:14 > 0:35:19end up serving that system whereby a bunch of brokers with faces like silver teapots
0:35:19 > 0:35:22make fortunes flogging modern masterpieces
0:35:22 > 0:35:26to another bunch of investors in Manhattan and Zurich.
0:35:26 > 0:35:29You may or may not find this depressing,
0:35:29 > 0:35:31but it certainly depresses me.
0:35:31 > 0:35:34David Bathurst of Christie's, New York.
0:35:34 > 0:35:37Well, it scares the hell out of me, frankly,
0:35:37 > 0:35:42because tulip mania, which is the most dramatic and historical
0:35:42 > 0:35:46possible parallel with the situation at present,
0:35:46 > 0:35:50was rather like the South Sea Bubble.
0:35:50 > 0:35:54You get a perfectly straightforward market, a good strong market,
0:35:54 > 0:35:57an international market like the art market,
0:35:57 > 0:36:01and suddenly, for whatever reason, it becomes the flavour of the month.
0:36:01 > 0:36:04Art is the thing to put your money into.
0:36:04 > 0:36:07All sorts of people who have no interest in art,
0:36:07 > 0:36:12just AS art, as something which you should love and like and be interested in.
0:36:12 > 0:36:15Suddenly, you're told you ought to be investing in art.
0:36:15 > 0:36:19Millions of people pour their money into works of art
0:36:19 > 0:36:24and they expect it to perform in some way, like some magic stock.
0:36:24 > 0:36:26I have £3,000 bid for it.
0:36:26 > 0:36:28For £3,000...
0:36:29 > 0:36:32£3,000. 200.
0:36:32 > 0:36:34500. 800. 4,000.
0:36:34 > 0:36:36At £4,000...
0:36:37 > 0:36:394,000.
0:36:39 > 0:36:41£4,000. Any more?
0:36:41 > 0:36:45£4,000. 4,000.
0:36:45 > 0:36:46Any more?
0:36:48 > 0:36:53The basic law of the art market is that art has no intrinsic value,
0:36:53 > 0:36:55no value as material.
0:36:55 > 0:37:00Its price reflects only two things - desire and scarcity.
0:37:00 > 0:37:03Its scarcity can be controlled, to some extent,
0:37:03 > 0:37:07and nothing is more manipulable than desire.
0:37:07 > 0:37:10High price isolates the star painting.
0:37:10 > 0:37:13It makes it a curiosity, a celebrity.
0:37:13 > 0:37:17And like other celebrities, both famous and only partly visible.
0:37:17 > 0:37:21You can't walk into a museum and look at a picture
0:37:21 > 0:37:26which has been rammed down your throat in the newspapers only a month or year ago,
0:37:26 > 0:37:28that this picture fetched two, three
0:37:28 > 0:37:32and, in the case of the Valasquez in the Metropolitan Museum, 5.5 million,
0:37:32 > 0:37:35you can't look at it and totally put it out of your mind.
0:37:35 > 0:37:40You must be wondering, "Is that really worth 5.5 million?"
0:37:40 > 0:37:42However marvellous the work of art is,
0:37:42 > 0:37:45this element must cloud your thinking quite heavily.
0:37:45 > 0:37:48It must dominate your thinking.
0:37:48 > 0:37:51Um... It's rather like... a pretty girl.
0:37:51 > 0:37:54You look at a pretty girl. That's lovely.
0:37:54 > 0:37:57Then you're told she's a gillionairess.
0:37:57 > 0:38:02This can - I'm sure it shouldn't - but there's no question, it affects your thinking.
0:38:02 > 0:38:05It may affect it advantageously or disadvantageously.
0:38:05 > 0:38:12I'm sure, if you're a gentleman... you should totally ignore it, but it's impossible.
0:38:12 > 0:38:14And, um... It's the same sort of thing.
0:38:14 > 0:38:18It does cloud your thinking, for better or for worse,
0:38:18 > 0:38:22and I'm sure in many cases, practically all cases, for worse.
0:38:22 > 0:38:25Works of art, now, have become rather like gold ingots.
0:38:25 > 0:38:28People look at them and say, "Gosh!"
0:38:33 > 0:38:37One reaction among artists in the '70s was to stop making objects altogether,
0:38:37 > 0:38:40to make art which, in theory, couldn't be sold,
0:38:40 > 0:38:45art that was an event, leaving just its traces on film or tape.
0:38:45 > 0:38:47Performance art,
0:38:47 > 0:38:51which most people still have trouble seeing as art at all.
0:38:51 > 0:38:56It's a kind of high-intensity theatre and because its basic material is the artist's body
0:38:56 > 0:39:00some performance pieces carry risk and pressure to an extreme.
0:39:00 > 0:39:02Like this by the Englishman Stuart Brisley,
0:39:02 > 0:39:06where he pushes himself almost to drowning in a tank.
0:39:08 > 0:39:13I am interested in placing the body in certain circumstances
0:39:13 > 0:39:19whereby a certain strain occurs, where a certain tension occurs.
0:39:19 > 0:39:21For example, being underwater.
0:39:21 > 0:39:26In this case, I was dealing with the problem of people
0:39:26 > 0:39:30who almost drop out of the bottom of the social system
0:39:30 > 0:39:33and become tramps or down and outs, or what have you.
0:39:33 > 0:39:38So that one has this kind of mute character.
0:39:38 > 0:39:41That was one of the major elements in the piece
0:39:41 > 0:39:44that I wanted to express.
0:39:55 > 0:39:58You can see what tradition such work belongs to.
0:39:58 > 0:40:00It's expressionism.
0:40:00 > 0:40:03But today, expressionism has collapsed inwards,
0:40:03 > 0:40:07leaving only one theme, the portrait, the artist himself,
0:40:07 > 0:40:11his own body seen both as subject and as object.
0:40:13 > 0:40:18If you wanted to find the crossing points between the early romanticism of American art
0:40:18 > 0:40:21and the narcissism of the '70s, this would be one of them.
0:40:21 > 0:40:27This is The Mirrored Room designed by the artist Lucas Samaras in 1966.
0:40:27 > 0:40:31Despite photography and all the ways we have of capturing an image,
0:40:31 > 0:40:36the mirror is still the main way we have of inspecting our own bodies.
0:40:36 > 0:40:40For Samaras, the image in the mirror was both himself
0:40:40 > 0:40:45and somebody else, an audience reacting to what he did.
0:40:45 > 0:40:50So the mirror's a kind of magical split in the world of human relationships.
0:40:50 > 0:40:54To see yourself multiplied forever inside a glass cube,
0:40:54 > 0:40:57that is a tremendous feat of narcissism.
0:40:59 > 0:41:03Even the table and the chair throw back little facets of oneself.
0:41:03 > 0:41:07Their own shape gets quite lost in this maze of reflections.
0:41:09 > 0:41:12Meanwhile, the reflections are infinite.
0:41:12 > 0:41:17They make up this huge crystalline panorama, like the night sky.
0:41:17 > 0:41:20Like outer space, something very much bigger than the self,
0:41:20 > 0:41:23but artificial at the same time.
0:41:23 > 0:41:26When camera or videotape replace the mirror,
0:41:26 > 0:41:28you have body art.
0:41:28 > 0:41:31Its ancestry lies 50 years back,
0:41:31 > 0:41:35when Marcel Duchamp had a star shaved on the back of his head
0:41:35 > 0:41:39and pretended to be Old Nick, the devil, with shaving cream.
0:41:39 > 0:41:43Probably its most interesting practitioner today lives in Vienna,
0:41:43 > 0:41:47appropriately, since Vienna was the city of Freud,
0:41:47 > 0:41:49the cradle of psychoanalysis,
0:41:49 > 0:41:55and its culture was permeated by the expressionist desire to inspect and question the neurotic self.
0:41:55 > 0:41:59ORGAN PLAYS "THE BLUE DANUBE"
0:42:05 > 0:42:09ORCHESTRA PLAYS "THE BLUE DANUBE"
0:42:56 > 0:43:00ORGAN CONCLUDES "THE BLUE DANUBE"
0:43:02 > 0:43:05Today, the artist Arnulf Rainer draws inspiration
0:43:05 > 0:43:09from photos of catatonic posers and grimaces in the mad house,
0:43:09 > 0:43:12and acts out his own developments of them before a camera.
0:43:12 > 0:43:15Then, he alters them by drawing.
0:43:15 > 0:43:18SPEAKS IN GERMAN
0:43:22 > 0:43:27INTERPRETER: Like all artists, I'm in a tradition of self-portraiture.
0:43:27 > 0:43:32There is probably a special relationship to Van Gogh's and Schiele's self-portraits,
0:43:32 > 0:43:38insofar as they're done in a very manneristic, heightened and exalted form...
0:43:38 > 0:43:41CONTINUES SPEAKING IN GERMAN
0:43:47 > 0:43:50..Perhaps it is important in general,
0:43:50 > 0:43:56that I experience a strong identity between the expression of my body,
0:43:56 > 0:43:59my pose and my psychological state.
0:44:00 > 0:44:03And then, it's important that I'm coordinated,
0:44:03 > 0:44:07that my whole body amalgamates into a unity.
0:44:07 > 0:44:11For instance, between the toe and the pupil,
0:44:11 > 0:44:13there becomes a strong connection.
0:44:19 > 0:44:22And then, there are special criteria,
0:44:22 > 0:44:25but that depends on my state of mind.
0:44:25 > 0:44:28Excitement or aggressiveness
0:44:28 > 0:44:31or gliding or the will to exaggerate
0:44:31 > 0:44:34or presumptuous lying.
0:44:34 > 0:44:39Then very soft tones, then threatening ones.
0:44:40 > 0:44:42Although, in general,
0:44:42 > 0:44:45an inner uneasiness prevails.
0:44:49 > 0:44:52But there is a general feeling today
0:44:52 > 0:44:55that the traditions of modernist imagery are closing.
0:44:55 > 0:44:58Thus, the domain of ideal sociable pleasure
0:44:58 > 0:45:01of the world's delights unimpeded by irony,
0:45:01 > 0:45:05whose representatives were Bonnard and Matisse and Picasso,
0:45:05 > 0:45:07scarcely appears in painting any more.
0:45:07 > 0:45:11It survives in the context of gay imagery in David Hockney's work.
0:45:11 > 0:45:15If it no longer has its Mozarts, at least Hockney is its Cole Porter,
0:45:15 > 0:45:18which is no mean thing to be.
0:45:42 > 0:45:46Meanwhile, the hope of the Dadas, surrealists and constructivists,
0:45:46 > 0:45:49that art could influence politics, is gone.
0:45:49 > 0:45:53Perhaps the last artist to think otherwise is a German, Joseph Beuys,
0:45:53 > 0:45:57a former Luftwaffe pilot whose happenings and manifestos
0:45:57 > 0:46:00and celebrity as a Pied Piper of youth politics
0:46:00 > 0:46:03have turned him into a strangely anomalous figure,
0:46:03 > 0:46:06a protestor against the German establishment
0:46:06 > 0:46:10whose work is invested in by half the bankers in West Germany.
0:46:10 > 0:46:16But with the end of modern art, art starts, for me, you know?
0:46:16 > 0:46:20With the end of modern art, art is not dying,
0:46:20 > 0:46:23art comes to birth, that is my idea.
0:46:23 > 0:46:26But then it is a real understanding of art.
0:46:26 > 0:46:31It is an anthropological understanding of art. Everybody is an artist then.
0:46:31 > 0:46:35Beuys' answer to the political decline of the aesthetic avant-garde
0:46:35 > 0:46:39was to define art as "any kind of being or doing",
0:46:39 > 0:46:41rather than specifically making,
0:46:41 > 0:46:45and then to designate the whole social fabric, politics included,
0:46:45 > 0:46:48as what he called "a social sculpture".
0:46:48 > 0:46:54I think it is a basic metaphor for all social freedoms.
0:46:54 > 0:46:57But it shouldn't be only a metaphor.
0:46:57 > 0:47:02It should be in the daily life, a real means
0:47:02 > 0:47:07to go in and to transform the power fields of the society.
0:47:07 > 0:47:11Of course, it's one thing to wish that art had influence over events,
0:47:11 > 0:47:14and quite another to show that it actually does.
0:47:14 > 0:47:18Beuys' own work did not escape the machinery of the '70s,
0:47:18 > 0:47:20in which the meaning of all avant-gardes,
0:47:20 > 0:47:24socially directed or not, was effectively gutted by the market.
0:47:27 > 0:47:30But the work is often amazingly powerful.
0:47:30 > 0:47:32Beuys took glass cases
0:47:32 > 0:47:35and filled them with grimy mementos of the German past.
0:47:35 > 0:47:38A dried rat in a pail of straw,
0:47:38 > 0:47:41a hotplate with two blocks of fat sitting on the burners,
0:47:41 > 0:47:44chipped crockery, mummified sausages,
0:47:44 > 0:47:46sinister bits of metal and wire,
0:47:46 > 0:47:49and an old picture of a concentration camp.
0:47:49 > 0:47:52This piece is known as the Auschwitz Box.
0:47:52 > 0:47:57Its intensity is such that one can hardly imagine a school of Beuys.
0:47:57 > 0:48:01The work is too personal for that, too haunted by memory.
0:48:05 > 0:48:07CLAP OF THUNDER
0:48:12 > 0:48:16This may be the most expensive sculpture ever made,
0:48:16 > 0:48:19costing over 1 million to build.
0:48:19 > 0:48:23This is the tip of a work of art, or rather of 1/400th of a work of art
0:48:23 > 0:48:25which stands in the New Mexico desert
0:48:25 > 0:48:28a couple of hundred miles from Albuquerque.
0:48:28 > 0:48:33400 stainless steel rods, their tips forming a level plain of spikes
0:48:33 > 0:48:36one kilometre wide and a mile long,
0:48:36 > 0:48:40the whole thing laid out correct to one-sixteenth of an inch.
0:48:41 > 0:48:44Installation began on it in 1977
0:48:44 > 0:48:48and it's substantially finished now, or rather, insubstantially finished.
0:48:48 > 0:48:50Despite its enormous spread,
0:48:50 > 0:48:53The Lightning Field isn't really a mass at all.
0:48:53 > 0:48:59You don't think of it in terms of body and substance, but rather delicacy and transparency,
0:48:59 > 0:49:04landscape, time and, above all, weather and light.
0:49:22 > 0:49:25THUNDER RUMBLES
0:49:39 > 0:49:43The artist who conceived this work is Walter De Maria.
0:49:45 > 0:49:49The place, this specific site, the fact that it's in New Mexico
0:49:49 > 0:49:52and not in California or in another place
0:49:52 > 0:49:55takes on a tremendous importance.
0:49:55 > 0:50:01And one feels a particular spirit of this place.
0:50:04 > 0:50:10This site was chosen because it was remote and isolated,
0:50:10 > 0:50:12more so than other places.
0:50:12 > 0:50:18There's a heavy incidence of lightning here during the summer months.
0:50:20 > 0:50:26The pointed tip serves as the direction,
0:50:26 > 0:50:32which sends the invisible electric charge into the atmosphere
0:50:32 > 0:50:38to complete the circuit between nature itself and the work.
0:50:42 > 0:50:47Part of the content of the work is the ratio of people to space.
0:50:47 > 0:50:53If we think of four to six people in one day walking through the field,
0:50:53 > 0:50:56they have a very private experience.
0:51:03 > 0:51:09Unfortunately, one can't often get a private enough experience in a museum.
0:51:10 > 0:51:13Though the museum has its function.
0:51:13 > 0:51:17The museum has its own architecture, its own traditions,
0:51:17 > 0:51:19which don't fit here.
0:51:31 > 0:51:34Clearly, the museum can't handle ALL art.
0:51:34 > 0:51:38You can't fit a whole landscape with 400 tax deductible spikes into it,
0:51:38 > 0:51:41and it's not a good place for small, fleeting gestures
0:51:41 > 0:51:44because gestures don't sit well in a permanent collection.
0:51:44 > 0:51:48Nor is it a good place for getting shot at in or half drowned in
0:51:48 > 0:51:50or getting covered in goat guts
0:51:50 > 0:51:56or experiencing any one of the other various things that body artists have chosen to do to their bodies.
0:51:56 > 0:52:00Every institution has its limits, though it may try not to observe them.
0:52:00 > 0:52:05You have to think of a museum as broadcasting on a given frequency.
0:52:05 > 0:52:09Not all the signals coming out of the culture can get on that one wavelength.
0:52:09 > 0:52:11This is not the museum's fault.
0:52:11 > 0:52:16A museum can no more contain all culture than a zoo hold all nature.
0:52:17 > 0:52:21MUSIC: "Messa da Requiem" by Verdi
0:53:27 > 0:53:30If the avant-garde has lost its functions,
0:53:30 > 0:53:33is modern art just a historical issue?
0:53:33 > 0:53:36Thomas Messer, Director of the Guggenheim Museum.
0:53:36 > 0:53:40I don't think that art owes us anything.
0:53:40 > 0:53:46I think that art is its own motor, its own result.
0:53:46 > 0:53:52We exaggerate what art can do, at least in a direct way.
0:53:52 > 0:53:56I think that we are having expectancies about this
0:53:56 > 0:54:01which, when they are not fulfilled, or not fulfilled in that way,
0:54:01 > 0:54:03we turn around and blame it.
0:54:03 > 0:54:08So I am perfectly content to leave art go its own way
0:54:08 > 0:54:13and, furthermore, I have absolutely no fears about the fate of art.
0:54:13 > 0:54:17I do worry about art institutions, which is a different matter.
0:54:17 > 0:54:21As long as there is life on this planet, there will be art -
0:54:21 > 0:54:25whether we recognise it as such, whether we see it for what it is,
0:54:25 > 0:54:27or whether we look in wrong directions
0:54:27 > 0:54:31and presume that something is art, that isn't is another matter.
0:54:31 > 0:54:33But art is safe.
0:54:33 > 0:54:39As to whether modernism is over, I think it's probably a little too early to say.
0:54:39 > 0:54:43I don't think that it's out of the realm of possibility
0:54:43 > 0:54:47that a handful of great geniuses, great painters,
0:54:47 > 0:54:52could emerge within the next ten years and revitalise this tradition.
0:54:52 > 0:54:55That's all it takes - two or three men.
0:54:55 > 0:54:59At the same time, they will revitalise it, I think,
0:54:59 > 0:55:01in a way that will...
0:55:01 > 0:55:05make it not certainly resemble very closely what existed before.
0:55:05 > 0:55:10I would have to admit, in the face of those who argue that modernism is over,
0:55:10 > 0:55:14that there is a lot of evidence to suggest that a period is ending.
0:55:14 > 0:55:16ROAR OF TRAFFIC
0:55:21 > 0:55:25We finish where modernism began, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.
0:55:25 > 0:55:31Perhaps the etiquette now demands that I should try and prognosticate about what is coming next.
0:55:31 > 0:55:34Well, I won't, because I don't know.
0:55:34 > 0:55:37History teaches us a certain thing, that critics,
0:55:37 > 0:55:41when they fish out the crystal ball and guess what the future will be,
0:55:41 > 0:55:43are almost invariably wrong.
0:55:43 > 0:55:46I don't think there's been such a rush towards insignificance
0:55:46 > 0:55:50in the name of the historic or future as we've seen in the last 15 years.
0:55:50 > 0:55:55The famous radicalism of '60s and '70s art turns out to have been a kind of dumb show,
0:55:55 > 0:55:59a charade of toughness, a way of avoiding feeling.
0:55:59 > 0:56:04I don't think we are ever again obliged to look at a plywood box or a row of bricks
0:56:04 > 0:56:10or a videotape of some twit from the University of Central Paranoia sticking pins in himself
0:56:10 > 0:56:12and think, "This is the real thing.
0:56:12 > 0:56:16"This is the necessary art of our time. This needs respect."
0:56:16 > 0:56:19Because it isn't, and it doesn't.
0:56:19 > 0:56:21And nobody cares.
0:56:21 > 0:56:25The fact is that anyone EXCEPT a child can make such things,
0:56:25 > 0:56:28because children have the kind of direct, sensuous
0:56:28 > 0:56:31and complex relationship with the world around them
0:56:31 > 0:56:35that modernism in its declining years was trying to deny.
0:56:35 > 0:56:40That relationship is the lost paradise that art wants to give back to us.
0:56:40 > 0:56:42Not as children, but as adults.
0:56:42 > 0:56:44It's what the modern and the old have in common -
0:56:44 > 0:56:48Pollock with Turner, Matisse with Rubens or Braque with Poussin.
0:56:48 > 0:56:53The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible,
0:56:53 > 0:56:57to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness
0:56:57 > 0:57:01not through argument, but through feeling.
0:57:01 > 0:57:05And then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you,
0:57:05 > 0:57:09and in this way, to pass from feeling to meaning.
0:57:09 > 0:57:12It's not something that committees can do.
0:57:12 > 0:57:16It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements.
0:57:16 > 0:57:21It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way
0:57:21 > 0:57:26between a sense of history and an experience of the world.
0:57:26 > 0:57:29This task is, literally, endless.
0:57:29 > 0:57:34So although we don't have an avant-garde any more, we're always going to have art.
0:57:49 > 0:57:52Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
0:57:52 > 0:57:55E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk