The Future That Was The Shock of the New

One myth of modern art is that it began like a prophet in the desert,

the avant-garde, the rejected outsider armed with truth.

Today, that myth is lost.

At the start of the '70s, the idea of an avant-garde in painting and sculpture was winding down.

It's now over, part of a period style.

In the meantime, modernism itself has become our official culture.

This is not a building. It's a sculpture.

Not finished yet, but one of the largest of the 20th century

and a long way from the art world.

This valley is in the Nevada Desert, 5,500 feet up

and four hours' hard drive over bared roads from Las Vegas.

It's also on the edge of the Nuclear Proving Grounds.

The artist, Michael Heizer, is an American.

The piece is called Complex One. He started it in 1972.

40 metres long, 33 wide and seven high.

A colossal task.

At the most, a couple of dozen strangers see it in a year,

so it has a smaller audience than Cubism did 70 years ago.

It can never be moved, no museum will ever take it in

and reproduction gives no real idea of it.

We are at the end of modernity, and modern art has found its mass audience.

So one of the last acts of modernism was, so to speak, to return to the desert

and to retreat from those who wanted to smother it with love,

and discover in physical isolation the kind of parallel and equivalent

to the cultural isolation that was the fate of the original avant-garde.

-Sure. I invented that idea...

-'Michael Heizer.'

The idea that there are no values attached to something like this

because it's not portable and not a malleable barter exchange object.

And that says it. You can't trade this thing.

You can't put it in your pocket.

If you have a war, you can't move it around. It's not worth anything. In fact, it's an obligation.

The theory is that art and land

are the things that have the greatest value.

Here you have both art and land, if either is usable,

and neither are worth very much.

I think all large sculptures have been technically difficult

for all people who ever built them.

I think that I haven't tried to surpass that scale.

I simply tried to keep pace with it, and it's a historical scale.

I think that it's normal and natural

to build a sculpture of this measurement at this time.

Why make such things?

Why spend so long constructing something so big and hard to get to?

Partly to change a work's relation to the art world as a system,

to get it out of the stream of opinion about art

and the stream of official culture and money exchange.

Isolation is the essence of land art.

Remoteness gives all efforts to see it the character of a pilgrimage.

Going to it, you have in a sense said yes to it before you see it,

and given more time to it than most would give to looking at a sculpture in a museum.

But the idea that a museum would even bother with advanced art is a fairly new one.

The notion that it could become the place

where modernist credentials would be sealed and stamped is even newer.

This was largely an American invention.

One of the illusions of the 19th century at the start of the museum age in America

was the idea that art morally improved you.

I think that I can testify that it does not.

Nevertheless, the idea of social improvement through art

struck a responsive chord in the American rich who now began to spend

hundreds of millions of dollars on the setting up, the building and endowment of museums.

It may be that some of them felt, on a quite deep level, that this was tantamount to a religious act.

And they all knew it was tax deductible.

God loveth the cheerful giver,

and the donors had every reason to feel cheerful.

The earlier American robber barons - Morgan,

Frick, Carnegie - could amass monuments to themselves,

monuments of past art housed in neo-renaissance palaces.

But the great change came in 1929,

when the Museum of Modern Art was founded in New York.

Today, it seems such a natural title.

Then, it seemed very odd indeed.

Wasn't the avant-garde against museums on principle?

Hadn't the futurists wanted to burn them down?

No European museum was trying to collect modern art in a systematic way.

The idea of doing so was largely the work of Alfred Barr,

who persuaded a growing circle of millionaires,

seated on the Rockefeller family,

to underwrite a museum that would treat modernism as a historical fact, the culture of their time.

Its present senior curator, William Reuben, recalls the policy.

I think Alfred Barr's aims were first to make a synoptic collection of modern art.

That is to say, to show all schools from all nations,

as opposed, let us say, to the groups of modern art that one found in European museums,

which were heavily weighed towards the nation in which the museums were located.

To try to balance these according to what he saw as their quality and importance,

rather than their provenance.

This meant, also, not following any particular line -

that is, toward abstraction or not abstraction or whatever.

Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say

that there was a sense of avant-gardism that lay behind this,

a force that led to radical painting

being more prized than, let us say, conservative realistic paintings

of a type that the public was more familiar with.

By 1950, the MoMA, as New Yorkers call it with a sort of Oedipal affection,

had put together a collection of 20th-century art that no European museum could rival.

It didn't take sides.

All rivalries and differences of ideological splits were recorded on the museum walls

not in a partisan spirit, but as cultural facts.

The museum wanted everything and its opposite.

It defused the tensions of all moments

by rendering them historical.

From now on, modernism would tend to seem noble and exemplary,

rather than tense and controversial.

So now the metaphors of temple and treasure house,

once the property of museums of traditional art,

could apply to modernity, too.

Scores of new museums were built in America in the '60s.

Most of them looked like fortresses, culture bunkers

radiating an image of vast security.

This one, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington is, in effect,

the set for The Guns Of Navarone without the guns.

But the climax of the trend happened just across the street.

The National Gallery in Washington had been built and paid for

by one of America's older mercantile princes, Andrew Mellon, in 1941.

Several decades later, his descendants and their foundation,

laid out close to 100 million to construct this new East Building.

Its main feature was this enormous nave.

People could enjoy the sensation of being in the church of art

without actually being obliged to pray.

If ever a museum set up a building whose main function

was to praise its own stature as an institution, this was it.

The galleries themselves were relegated to the corners.

The cost of this remarkable essay in museological splendour

was a third of the price of a nuclear submarine,

which puts it in one perspective.

On the other hand, it was about twice the Gross National Product of some African states,

which may put it in another.

This may be pondered by anyone

who does not think modernism is our official culture.

The result of such expansions is to turn the museum

from a sort of articulated tomb into a low-rating mass medium.

BRASS BAND PLAYS

APPLAUSE

We have before us here,

in concrete, marble and glass,

a tangible demonstration that excellence

and access to a wide public

are far from being contradictory.

They are complementary.

This building stands as a metaphor for what, at its best,

the relationship between Government and the arts can be.

Meanwhile, the interlock between new art, capital, real estate,

education, displaced piety and show biz has gathered enough power

to transform whole neighbourhoods outside the museum.

# I'm in with the "In" crowd

# I go where the "In" crowd goes

# I'm in with the "In" crowd

# And I know what the "In" crowd knows

# Any time of the year, don't you hear how to have fun... #

When I came to New York to live in 1970,

I moved into a downtown industrial district

which, because it was south of Houston Street, was christened SoHo.

In those days, there were two art galleries in SoHo.

There were two Italian bars, no restaurants,

no tourists and quite a lot of peace and quiet.

Today, nine years later, there are 75 galleries, at last count,

dozens of restaurants and bars, and on weekends,

when the peering hordes of dentists from New Jersey

come down here to take their Gucci loafers for a walk among the bubble top buses,

there is very little peace and quiet indeed.

# ..We've got our own way of walkin'

# We've got our own way of talkin'

# Any time of the year, don't you hear

# Gotta have fun

# Spendin' cash, talkin' trash

# Girl, I'll show you a real good time

# Come on with me and leave your troubles behind

# I don't care where you've been

# You ain't been nowhere till you've been "In"... #

Such are the healing and transforming powers of art.

In the 19th century, artists used to live in "bohemias",

which were interesting but not chic.

Today, they make places chic by moving in, at least for a short time,

until the landlords raise the rent and boot them out so they have to go somewhere else.

This process is known as urban renewal.

The SoHo recipe of the art colony as a huge boutique,

post-modernism and designer jeans, happened to other places,

like this part of Paris around Les Halles.

It was bulldozed flat in the 1970s to make room for a development

whose core was the Pompidou Centre.

The Centre opened in 1977.

If the monument of the start of modernism was the Eiffel Tower,

this is the one at its end.

A palace of French centralisation,

a cross between a prison and a construction toy.

It's a very metaphorical building.

Although the pipes and ventilators stop practically all natural light from getting in -

quite a trick in a metal and glass structure -

they suggest industrial process, like an oil refinery.

In the 1920s, Russian constructivist architects

designed palaces of culture which were never built.

This Marxist ideal of the museum as a social condenser

was only translated into fact in capitalist Paris 60 years later.

For blocks around, the quarter has been gutted and remade

in the French version of the SoHo mix, full of little galleries

selling little art and neat studio apartments for young trendies.

Where the belly of Paris used to be, culture gulch now stands.

APPLAUSE

If anyone had suggested 30 years ago that the fallout from modern art

would produce such mutations, nobody would have believed it.

This is what happens when big concentrations of social interests

decide to use modern art as their aiming point.

The irony is that the institutional triumph of the new

happens just when the old social uses of art,

whose residue gave the idea of the avant-garde its meaning,

have almost withered away.

PERFORMER ANNOUNCES IN FRENCH

In the 15th century, one of these uses was to inform and to explain.

Where did you get information about the world and how to live in it?

Well, not from magazines or newspapers. They didn't exist.

Not from books, either, because in the 15th century

the idea of mass printing was hardly even an idea.

500 years ago, you and I probably would have been illiterate.

This left two other channels of information.

One was the spoken word.

That included everything from village gossip to the high rhetoric of the altar and pulpit.

The other one was visual images - painting and sculpture.

Of these, painting was the more eloquent,

with its much greater power of visual illusion

and its adaptability to almost any given surface.

This chapel in the church of San Clemente in Rome

was painted by an artist named Masolino da Panicale.

500 years later, we can look at his work with a tourist's eye or with an art historian's.

The one thing we cannot do is see it with the eye of his own audience.

Because that eye supposed, as our culture no longer does,

that painting was one of the primary dominant forms of public speech.

Painting explains and describes - and here it describes a legend.

The task of painting was to make it vivid and tangible and credible,

to insert the legend into the life of people who gathered here

so that it would strengthen their faith and alter their beliefs,

and so compel behaviour.

That, as I understand it, is what public art fundamentally

has always been about.

But today we have no credible public art

because other media have taken its old power away.

Throughout its history, up to the end of the 19th century,

art kept this didactic purpose.

It showed people what to worship, what to pray to,

whom to believe, what values to adopt.

It was the main generator of social symbols.

Today, the whole issue of the use of public art is in question.

Most of the time, our ancestors assumed it was the main purpose of painting.

The object could be tiny and precious, like a religious icon.

Or it could be as big as David's Oath of the Horatii,

which was a political item

made to teach republican virtue to the French.

We know that art is about pleasure, too.

And fear.

And tranquil meditation beyond politics.

And a host of things as wide as the range of human feeling itself.

But up to the end of the 19th century, the importance of art

was usually bound up with its role as public discourse.

Without that role, there would have been no avant-garde,

because if art doesn't embody values,

it can't act as a conscience.

That was what the avant-garde set out to be

when it made its debut in the mid 19th-century -

the conscience of a class,

its traditional enemy and chief patron, the bourgeoisie.

What made the avant-garde possible in France, where it was born,

was the salon system.

Instead of a circle of artists trying to get work from one prince or bishop,

you had hundreds, even thousands, of easel paintings

competing for the attention of thousands of middle-class people.

It was more like a bazaar than a court,

and it gave more room for invention and scandal and liberty.

Anyone could send a picture in,

though there was no guarantee that it would be hung.

The salon was the theatre

in which the drama of offending the bourgeois was played out.

Hilton Kramer, art critic of the New York Times.

The relationship of the avant-garde to the middle class is enormously complicated

because it, like everything else in modern culture, was so changeable.

Er... The initial collision, the initial challenge,

always, within a single generation, was resolved into an embrace.

What was established taste for the bourgeoisie in one generation

was abandoned in the subsequent generation

for the taste of what had been conceived to be avant-garde.

It's a great misunderstanding of the history book of 19th-century culture

and of our own in the 20th century

to hold on to the notion of the avant-garde

as sort of permanent cultural guerillas

making their forays into, er... middle-class wealth.

They actually were more like family,

in which there were conflicts of generations.

And in the end, as often happens in families,

when the wills were read,

the avant-garde turned out to be the beneficiary after all.

The first great painter to embody the ideal of the avant-garde

was Gustave Courbet in the 1850s and '60s.

In politics, a radical. In art, a realist.

In person, an invincible and solid egotist

who could show himself greeting even the sea on equal terms.

He called himself "the most arrogant man in France".

When asked which school he belonged to, he replied,

"I'm a Courbetist, that's all. My painting is the only true one.

"I am the first and unique artist of this century.

"The others are students or drivellers."

Courbet's work can only be understood

in relation to the public that he was struggling to create.

This public, he hoped, would crystallise

out of the mass audience of the salons around the idea of realism,

a public which accepted that art should be challenging and problematic.

In short, the public for modern art itself.

He set himself firmly against the reigning taste of his day,

and the penalty was insult.

"From what fabulous mating of a slug with a peacock,

"from what genital antithesis, from what fatty oozings

"can have been generated this thing called Monsieur Gustave Courbet?

"Under what gardener's cloche with the help of what manure,

"as a result of what mixture of wine, beer, corrosive mucous and flatulent swellings

"can have grown this sonorous and hairy pumpkin,

"this aesthetic belly,

"this imbecilic and impotent incarnation of the self?"

They don't write art criticism like that any more.

Not because of editorial timidity or the law of libel,

but because nobody feels threatened by works of art the way that Dumas felt threatened by Courbet.

He used the kind of language that societies use to protect themselves and to punish offenders.

Its frenzied insult was, in a way, a back-handed compliment

because it sprang from an intense belief that it mattered what art said

and that works of art had real consequences in the real world.

To change the language of art, the official visual speech of France,

was like seizing the radio station and changing the programmes.

The new could only shock as long as it was constantly underwritten by the old.

Otherwise, why get excited by bits of paint on canvas?

From Courbet onwards, the idea of the avant-garde artist

as a Bolshevist or anarchist was fixed in the public mind.

It contributed to the idea that modern art owed nothing to the past

and was opposed to all traditions.

This was nonsense, but it was durable nonsense.

I think that the principal radical effect

that the avant-garde has on society, and has had on society,

doesn't take place directly in the realm of politics, but takes place in the realm of style and feeling.

That is, it prepares the educated segment of the society

to question the values that have been handed down.

It...creates a kind of ferment...

which prepares the way for vast political change.

Its role is to create a model of dissent.

Today, painting and sculpture

scarcely have the power left to create such a model.

All that happens is, now and again, usually in England or Australia,

people get worked up about some object

because it's seemed not worth the money a museum paid for it.

So it was with Carl Andre's 120 Bricks.

The essential difference between this kind of sculpture

and any that existed in the past,

is that this depends, not just a bit, but totally on the museum.

A Rodin in a parking lot is still a misplaced Rodin.

But this in a parking lot is just bricks.

In this way, a museum becomes a nearly equal partner with the artist.

It helps create the work by providing the only place

where an array of bricks can be seen as art

and fitted into the context

of a minor modern art movement called minimalism.

On the street, minimalism doesn't exist.

There are only things.

This piece by the American sculptor Donald Judd,

if you saw it outside the gallery, is just a row of plywood boxes.

The museum gives it a slot in a debate about the nature and limits of art,

and that was the content of the work.

The Nirvana of boredom that minimalism promised

was the exact opposite of the fantasies of action and involvement

that political art held out.

CROWD CHEERING

But the real field of modernist experience

lies somewhere between dumb mass propaganda on one hand

and the silences of a dying avant-garde on the other.

That experience is not collective.

In front of a Matisse, you do not hear the chant of surging millions.

You hear one voice carefully explaining itself to one person -

the interested stranger, yourself.

Most of the great voices of modernity

come from neither the left nor the right of society,

but from just outside it.

The basic reason why the avant-garde had so little influence on action

and such a lot on sensibility is that it was solitary.

William Reuben.

Religious painting ceases.

The painting of the political leader disappears.

The painting of history, as such, disappears.

All the themes that belong to the collectivity, so to say, disappear.

One of the ways we can define modern art, if we want to,

is that it has been an art that did not engage itself in the old collectivities,

but rather in the much more limited world of the experience of the artist himself

and of the people who loved and were interested in that world.

This world of the artist has since been commercialised and various other things have happened to it,

but in its essence, it was a private world

as opposed to the public world which characterised pre-modern art.

This recoil from the public stance didn't only happen in abstract art.

It came in depictive art as well.

There is an immense gap between the ambitions of a Courbet

and those of an American realist sculptor like George Segal.

His subject is not so much human sociability

as the difficulty of any kind of communication at all.

In fact, over the last 25 years,

the art of social commentary has been the exception and not the rule.

One of these exceptions is Ed Kienholz, who makes big tableaus

charged with irony and grotesqueness

very much in the tradition of Berlin Dada,

but starting with the American scene.

CHATTER AND MUSIC

A bar and eaterie in Los Angeles called Barney's Beanery

formed one of these pieces, and Kienholz reconstructed it and its clientele.

HUM OF CONVERSATION

SENTIMENTAL MUSIC PLAYS IN BACKGROUND

Most of the avant-garde style since Cubism were meant as a criticism of life.

But the dominant museum style of the '60s certainly was not.

This was the kind of color field painting

that developed out of Jackson Pollock's work,

that atmospheric web of dripped paint,

all free gesture and light touch.

The artist who seized a duplicit delicacy was Helen Frankenthaler.

In 1952, she painted Mountains and Sea,

the progenitor of a whole school of stain painting.

Her work held a constant thread of landscape images,

but other painters who picked up

on her way of dying and staining the canvas dispensed with that.

Morris Louis wanted to produce a decorative impersonal surface

from which everything that smacked of character,

like a directional brushstroke or a change of texture, was excluded.

Kenneth Noland reduced the elements even further.

Colour, not shape, is the origin of each painting.

Noland could give it an airy energy

that offered a pure forceful hedonism to the eye.

But that was all they did offer,

and although more museum time and space was devoted to propagating it

in America than any other style or movement,

the resources of color field painting

were looking pretty thin by the end of the '60s.

It maintained itself as a mandarin style,

but the Matissian heart was no longer in it.

At the opposite pole of feeling,

there were Frank Stella's paintings from the '70s,

fuelled with a sort of maniacal decorative punch -

glitter, scribbling, congestion,

big French curves swinging out of the design

like the feathers of some tropical bird.

The sheer energy of this kind of work belies the idea,

much talked about recently,

that abstract painting, as such, is a dying form.

As in a different way the paintings of Bridget Riley do.

For abstract art can serve as a model for clear feeling.

Here, it does.

It is very exact, showing what slips can happen in the process of seeing,

and how insecure the pleasures of the eye may be.

I don't think it's a small matter to be shown this.

Although some people think such art has no content,

one can take it that this process of seeing and feeling

set forth on the canvas IS the content - not a simple one, either.

Riley's kind of sharp, self-doubting talent, so finely tuned,

was particularly vulnerable to attack.

It wasn't merely decorative,

but the commercial world made it seem so in the 1960s,

by chewing her work up and spitting it out as Op art fashion.

MUSIC: "Devil In Her Heart" by the Beatles

# She's got the devil in her heart... #

By the end of the '60s, the word "avant-garde" had been done in

by fashion on one side and, on the other,

the market pressure for a new art movement every six months.

# ..her lips they really thrill me

# I'll take my chances For romance is

# So important to me

# She'll never hurt me She won't desert me

# She's an angel sent to me

# She's got the devil in her heart No, no, no

# No, this I can't believe

# She's gonna tear your heart apart

# No, no nay will she deceive

# She's got the devil in her heart

# But she's an angel sent to me... #

The problem wasn't entirely defined by the fact that fashion had been taking ideas from artists.

It had been doing that for 50 years.

Art Deco was decorator Cubism,

and a lot of linoleum owes its patterns to Mondrian.

But now, the promotional world as a system

had fused with the art world as a system, and that was new.

In a very insidious way, the idea of cultural confrontation

had been replaced by the idea of styling.

And that was new, too.

We were heading into a stage of meaningless tolerance

where nothing an artist could do would be thought really offensive

because there was always a chance that it might convert into capital.

There was a flood of instant art for instant people.

Vasarely to Warhole,

all of it getting its 15 minutes of undivided attention

from a new class of collectors who saw its up-to-datedness

as a way of underwriting their social careers

or buying an up-to-date public relations image for their companies.

The great emblem of the culture of quick results

was not any given work of art,

it was the art market itself which began to boom

and has been going up ever since, as money goes down.

I started writing about art 20 years ago.

In those far-off days, you could spend time in a museum

without ever thinking about what the art might cost.

The price was not relevant.

Besides, price and value were completely distinct questions.

But then, in the early '60s, something began to happen.

First, there was a trickle and then a stream,

and finally a great brown roaring flood of propaganda

about "art investment".

The price of a work of art now became part of its function.

It redefined the art, whose new job was to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

The result was that, whereas before, works of art had been like strangers with whom one could converse

and whom one could gradually get to know,

they now assumed, more and more, the character of film stars,

with the museum as their limousine.

I doubt if anybody, nowadays, can look at a Cubist Braque or a Rothko

or a Russian constructivist sculpture

without being deeply affected by the fact that the prices of these things

has become absurdly high.

And that in some crucial sense,

this has removed them from the run of ordinary experience.

I think high price strikes people blind.

I think it displaces the content of the work.

You can't spend very much time writing about art

without realising how much criticism and scholarship, whether they want to or not,

end up serving that system whereby a bunch of brokers with faces like silver teapots

make fortunes flogging modern masterpieces

to another bunch of investors in Manhattan and Zurich.

You may or may not find this depressing,

but it certainly depresses me.

David Bathurst of Christie's, New York.

Well, it scares the hell out of me, frankly,

because tulip mania, which is the most dramatic and historical

possible parallel with the situation at present,

was rather like the South Sea Bubble.

You get a perfectly straightforward market, a good strong market,

an international market like the art market,

and suddenly, for whatever reason, it becomes the flavour of the month.

Art is the thing to put your money into.

All sorts of people who have no interest in art,

just AS art, as something which you should love and like and be interested in.

Suddenly, you're told you ought to be investing in art.

Millions of people pour their money into works of art

and they expect it to perform in some way, like some magic stock.

I have £3,000 bid for it.

For £3,000...

£3,000. 200.

500. 800. 4,000.

At £4,000...

4,000.

£4,000. Any more?

£4,000. 4,000.

Any more?

The basic law of the art market is that art has no intrinsic value,

no value as material.

Its price reflects only two things - desire and scarcity.

Its scarcity can be controlled, to some extent,

and nothing is more manipulable than desire.

High price isolates the star painting.

It makes it a curiosity, a celebrity.

And like other celebrities, both famous and only partly visible.

You can't walk into a museum and look at a picture

which has been rammed down your throat in the newspapers only a month or year ago,

that this picture fetched two, three

and, in the case of the Valasquez in the Metropolitan Museum, 5.5 million,

you can't look at it and totally put it out of your mind.

You must be wondering, "Is that really worth 5.5 million?"

However marvellous the work of art is,

this element must cloud your thinking quite heavily.

It must dominate your thinking.

Um... It's rather like... a pretty girl.

You look at a pretty girl. That's lovely.

Then you're told she's a gillionairess.

This can - I'm sure it shouldn't - but there's no question, it affects your thinking.

It may affect it advantageously or disadvantageously.

I'm sure, if you're a gentleman... you should totally ignore it, but it's impossible.

And, um... It's the same sort of thing.

It does cloud your thinking, for better or for worse,

and I'm sure in many cases, practically all cases, for worse.

Works of art, now, have become rather like gold ingots.

People look at them and say, "Gosh!"

One reaction among artists in the '70s was to stop making objects altogether,

to make art which, in theory, couldn't be sold,

art that was an event, leaving just its traces on film or tape.

Performance art,

which most people still have trouble seeing as art at all.

It's a kind of high-intensity theatre and because its basic material is the artist's body

some performance pieces carry risk and pressure to an extreme.

Like this by the Englishman Stuart Brisley,

where he pushes himself almost to drowning in a tank.

I am interested in placing the body in certain circumstances

whereby a certain strain occurs, where a certain tension occurs.

For example, being underwater.

In this case, I was dealing with the problem of people

who almost drop out of the bottom of the social system

and become tramps or down and outs, or what have you.

So that one has this kind of mute character.

That was one of the major elements in the piece

that I wanted to express.

You can see what tradition such work belongs to.

It's expressionism.

But today, expressionism has collapsed inwards,

leaving only one theme, the portrait, the artist himself,

his own body seen both as subject and as object.

If you wanted to find the crossing points between the early romanticism of American art

and the narcissism of the '70s, this would be one of them.

This is The Mirrored Room designed by the artist Lucas Samaras in 1966.

Despite photography and all the ways we have of capturing an image,

the mirror is still the main way we have of inspecting our own bodies.

For Samaras, the image in the mirror was both himself

and somebody else, an audience reacting to what he did.

So the mirror's a kind of magical split in the world of human relationships.

To see yourself multiplied forever inside a glass cube,

that is a tremendous feat of narcissism.

Even the table and the chair throw back little facets of oneself.

Their own shape gets quite lost in this maze of reflections.

Meanwhile, the reflections are infinite.

They make up this huge crystalline panorama, like the night sky.

Like outer space, something very much bigger than the self,

but artificial at the same time.

When camera or videotape replace the mirror,

you have body art.

Its ancestry lies 50 years back,

when Marcel Duchamp had a star shaved on the back of his head

and pretended to be Old Nick, the devil, with shaving cream.

Probably its most interesting practitioner today lives in Vienna,

appropriately, since Vienna was the city of Freud,

the cradle of psychoanalysis,

and its culture was permeated by the expressionist desire to inspect and question the neurotic self.

ORGAN PLAYS "THE BLUE DANUBE"

ORCHESTRA PLAYS "THE BLUE DANUBE"

ORGAN CONCLUDES "THE BLUE DANUBE"

Today, the artist Arnulf Rainer draws inspiration

from photos of catatonic posers and grimaces in the mad house,

and acts out his own developments of them before a camera.

Then, he alters them by drawing.

SPEAKS IN GERMAN

INTERPRETER: Like all artists, I'm in a tradition of self-portraiture.

There is probably a special relationship to Van Gogh's and Schiele's self-portraits,

insofar as they're done in a very manneristic, heightened and exalted form...

CONTINUES SPEAKING IN GERMAN

..Perhaps it is important in general,

that I experience a strong identity between the expression of my body,

my pose and my psychological state.

And then, it's important that I'm coordinated,

that my whole body amalgamates into a unity.

For instance, between the toe and the pupil,

there becomes a strong connection.

And then, there are special criteria,

but that depends on my state of mind.

Excitement or aggressiveness

or gliding or the will to exaggerate

or presumptuous lying.

Then very soft tones, then threatening ones.

Although, in general,

an inner uneasiness prevails.

But there is a general feeling today

that the traditions of modernist imagery are closing.

Thus, the domain of ideal sociable pleasure

of the world's delights unimpeded by irony,

whose representatives were Bonnard and Matisse and Picasso,

scarcely appears in painting any more.

It survives in the context of gay imagery in David Hockney's work.

If it no longer has its Mozarts, at least Hockney is its Cole Porter,

which is no mean thing to be.

Meanwhile, the hope of the Dadas, surrealists and constructivists,

that art could influence politics, is gone.

Perhaps the last artist to think otherwise is a German, Joseph Beuys,

a former Luftwaffe pilot whose happenings and manifestos

and celebrity as a Pied Piper of youth politics

have turned him into a strangely anomalous figure,

a protestor against the German establishment

whose work is invested in by half the bankers in West Germany.

But with the end of modern art, art starts, for me, you know?

With the end of modern art, art is not dying,

art comes to birth, that is my idea.

But then it is a real understanding of art.

It is an anthropological understanding of art. Everybody is an artist then.

Beuys' answer to the political decline of the aesthetic avant-garde

was to define art as "any kind of being or doing",

rather than specifically making,

and then to designate the whole social fabric, politics included,

as what he called "a social sculpture".

I think it is a basic metaphor for all social freedoms.

But it shouldn't be only a metaphor.

It should be in the daily life, a real means

to go in and to transform the power fields of the society.

Of course, it's one thing to wish that art had influence over events,

and quite another to show that it actually does.

Beuys' own work did not escape the machinery of the '70s,

in which the meaning of all avant-gardes,

socially directed or not, was effectively gutted by the market.

But the work is often amazingly powerful.

Beuys took glass cases

and filled them with grimy mementos of the German past.

A dried rat in a pail of straw,

a hotplate with two blocks of fat sitting on the burners,

chipped crockery, mummified sausages,

sinister bits of metal and wire,

and an old picture of a concentration camp.

This piece is known as the Auschwitz Box.

Its intensity is such that one can hardly imagine a school of Beuys.

The work is too personal for that, too haunted by memory.

CLAP OF THUNDER

This may be the most expensive sculpture ever made,

costing over 1 million to build.

This is the tip of a work of art, or rather of 1/400th of a work of art

which stands in the New Mexico desert

a couple of hundred miles from Albuquerque.

400 stainless steel rods, their tips forming a level plain of spikes

one kilometre wide and a mile long,

the whole thing laid out correct to one-sixteenth of an inch.

Installation began on it in 1977

and it's substantially finished now, or rather, insubstantially finished.

Despite its enormous spread,

The Lightning Field isn't really a mass at all.

You don't think of it in terms of body and substance, but rather delicacy and transparency,

landscape, time and, above all, weather and light.

THUNDER RUMBLES

The artist who conceived this work is Walter De Maria.

The place, this specific site, the fact that it's in New Mexico

and not in California or in another place

takes on a tremendous importance.

And one feels a particular spirit of this place.

This site was chosen because it was remote and isolated,

more so than other places.

There's a heavy incidence of lightning here during the summer months.

The pointed tip serves as the direction,

which sends the invisible electric charge into the atmosphere

to complete the circuit between nature itself and the work.

Part of the content of the work is the ratio of people to space.

If we think of four to six people in one day walking through the field,

they have a very private experience.

Unfortunately, one can't often get a private enough experience in a museum.

Though the museum has its function.

The museum has its own architecture, its own traditions,

which don't fit here.

Clearly, the museum can't handle ALL art.

You can't fit a whole landscape with 400 tax deductible spikes into it,

and it's not a good place for small, fleeting gestures

because gestures don't sit well in a permanent collection.

Nor is it a good place for getting shot at in or half drowned in

or getting covered in goat guts

or experiencing any one of the other various things that body artists have chosen to do to their bodies.

Every institution has its limits, though it may try not to observe them.

You have to think of a museum as broadcasting on a given frequency.

Not all the signals coming out of the culture can get on that one wavelength.

This is not the museum's fault.

A museum can no more contain all culture than a zoo hold all nature.

MUSIC: "Messa da Requiem" by Verdi

If the avant-garde has lost its functions,

is modern art just a historical issue?

Thomas Messer, Director of the Guggenheim Museum.

I don't think that art owes us anything.

I think that art is its own motor, its own result.

We exaggerate what art can do, at least in a direct way.

I think that we are having expectancies about this

which, when they are not fulfilled, or not fulfilled in that way,

we turn around and blame it.

So I am perfectly content to leave art go its own way

and, furthermore, I have absolutely no fears about the fate of art.

I do worry about art institutions, which is a different matter.

As long as there is life on this planet, there will be art -

whether we recognise it as such, whether we see it for what it is,

or whether we look in wrong directions

and presume that something is art, that isn't is another matter.

But art is safe.

As to whether modernism is over, I think it's probably a little too early to say.

I don't think that it's out of the realm of possibility

that a handful of great geniuses, great painters,

could emerge within the next ten years and revitalise this tradition.

That's all it takes - two or three men.

At the same time, they will revitalise it, I think,

in a way that will...

make it not certainly resemble very closely what existed before.

I would have to admit, in the face of those who argue that modernism is over,

that there is a lot of evidence to suggest that a period is ending.

ROAR OF TRAFFIC

We finish where modernism began, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

Perhaps the etiquette now demands that I should try and prognosticate about what is coming next.

Well, I won't, because I don't know.

History teaches us a certain thing, that critics,

when they fish out the crystal ball and guess what the future will be,

are almost invariably wrong.

I don't think there's been such a rush towards insignificance

in the name of the historic or future as we've seen in the last 15 years.

The famous radicalism of '60s and '70s art turns out to have been a kind of dumb show,

a charade of toughness, a way of avoiding feeling.

I don't think we are ever again obliged to look at a plywood box or a row of bricks

or a videotape of some twit from the University of Central Paranoia sticking pins in himself

and think, "This is the real thing.

"This is the necessary art of our time. This needs respect."

Because it isn't, and it doesn't.

And nobody cares.

The fact is that anyone EXCEPT a child can make such things,

because children have the kind of direct, sensuous

and complex relationship with the world around them

that modernism in its declining years was trying to deny.

That relationship is the lost paradise that art wants to give back to us.

Not as children, but as adults.

It's what the modern and the old have in common -

Pollock with Turner, Matisse with Rubens or Braque with Poussin.

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible,

to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness

not through argument, but through feeling.

And then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you,

and in this way, to pass from feeling to meaning.

It's not something that committees can do.

It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements.

It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way

between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

This task is, literally, endless.

So although we don't have an avant-garde any more, we're always going to have art.

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