Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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the world into which modern art was born had begun to vanish.
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The joyful sense of possibility
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that was born of the machine was now cut down by other machines.
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GUNFIRE
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EXPLOSIONS
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This hill is called the Butte de Warlencourt.
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During the Battle of the Somme, tens of thousands of men died for it.
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The place became a symbol of obsession,
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first held by German machine gunners,
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then captured by British and Australian troops,
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then taken again by the Germans and finally stormed again
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by the Allies and this went on from the autumn of 1916 for two years.
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By the end of World War I, every yard of ground here
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had been dug up by high explosive, mixed with human flesh and bone
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and pulverised and buried again down to a depth of six feet.
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In such places as this,
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our grandfathers tasted the first terrors of the 20th century.
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The life of words and images in art was changed radically and for ever
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because our culture had now entered the age of mass produced industrialised death.
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And at first, there were no words to describe it.
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# We don't want to lose you
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# But we think you ought to go. #
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In 1914, not one man or woman in Europe had any real idea
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what total mechanised warfare would mean.
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Europe had been at peace for 44 years
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and nobody of draft age remembered a war.
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Their authorities sold the war to them
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in a language of rhetorical cliches that descended from chivalry,
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the language of the public school and the officers' mess.
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# Kiss you when you come back again. #
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"Those long uneven lines standing as patiently
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"as though they were stretched outside the Oval or Villa Park.
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"The crowns of hats, the sun on moustached archaic faces,
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"grinning as if it were all an August bank holiday lark.
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"Never such innocence. Never before or since.
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"As changed itself to past without a word.
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"The men leaving the garden tidy.
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"The thousands of marriages lasting a little while longer.
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"Never such innocence again."
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GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS
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In the trenches, millions of young Englishmen, Frenchmen and Germans
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found the idea that war was something between a joust
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and a cricket match had been wrecked by inventions which industrialised death,
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as they had industrialised life.
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This was what they found and what they became.
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By 1916
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and the summer catastrophes of the Somme battlefield,
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a whole generation on both sides of the trenches was becoming aware that it had
been lied to.
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Its generals had lied about the nature and the length of the war.
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Its politicians had lied about its causes.
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Its journalists and propagandists
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had lied about what it was like for the troops.
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The flood of lies
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was so great that it seemed to contaminate all official language.
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And so a chasm opened between official language
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and what the young knew to be reality.
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The speech of the elders could not contain their experiences.
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America would repeat this trauma in the '60s with Vietnam.
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But Europe had it 50 years earlier
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and the antennae of the crisis were the ones whose business
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was language, the writers and artists mostly born between 1890
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and 1900, who had been sucked into the vast statistics of the war.
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"I knew a man, he was my chum, but he grew blacker every day,
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"And would not brush the flies away,
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"Nor blanch,
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"However fierce the hum of passing shells
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"I used to read to rouse him random things from Donne
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"But you could tell he was far gone for he lay gaping, mackerel-eyed
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"And stiff and senseless as a post
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"Even when that old poet cried,
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"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost
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"He stank so badly, though we were great chums, I had to leave him
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"Then rats ate his thumbs."
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World War I destroyed an entire generation.
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We don't know and we can't even guess what might have been painted
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or written if the war had never happened.
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Its imagery of waste, repetition, irony, loss and pain are so built
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into our whole idea of modernity that we simply take it for granted.
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We can't see its alternative.
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As for the waste of minds,
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we know the names of some who were killed too soon. Among the painters
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Umberto Boccioni and Franz Marc, the sculptor Gaudier-Brescha,
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the architect, Sant'Elia, the poets, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.
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But for every one of those whose name survives,
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there must have been scores
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and possibly hundreds of those who never simply got a chance to develop
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and so, if you were to ask where is the Picasso of England,
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or the Ezra Pound of France,
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the probable answer is that they are here.
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Above all, what the war produced in its survivors and onlookers
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was a longing for a clean slate,
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a sense of spiritual apocalypse.
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In return, they would be pacifists, internationalists.
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They would get out of the war if possible, but to where?
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The closest neutral country was Switzerland.
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Zurich attracted every sort of intellectual refugee from northern Europe.
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Great ones like Lenin and James Joyce, but a host of others.
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They had fled their natural homelands
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but they had a cultural one, the cafe.
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Today, the phrase "cafe intellectual"
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is a mild obsolete insult, but then it was not.
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Places like this one, the Odeon in Zurich, were cultural institutions.
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They were, in an almost literal sense,
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mediums of discourse, like magazines.
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People that were separated from the patterns of their society,
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whether by choice or not, still need a forum,
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they need a place where they can go to meet and drink and talk,
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preen themselves, or simply sit alone with a book.
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They say that sex is the poor man's opera,
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but the cafe was the opera of the dissenters.
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It was also the marketplace of ideas for exiles.
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And Modernism was very much the creation of exiles,
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whether you're talking about Picasso the Spaniard,
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or Joyce and Beckett, the Irishmen.
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In the cafes of Europe,
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the intellectuals got their sense of being a class.
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The mandarins of change.
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When Stalin declared war against what he called ruthless cosmopolitans in the '30s,
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he was in effect attacking the Odeons and those who sat in them.
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But even so, the revolution that brought him to power
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was partly hatched in this very room by Lenin,
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who was a regular at the Odeon in 1916.
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Among the other denizens of the Odeon were a Romanian poet
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named Tristan Tzara, a painter named Marcel Janco,
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a sculptor from Alsace, Jean Arp,
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and a German writer named Hugo Ball.
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It was Ball who decided to start a cultural cabaret,
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a club where they could all perform
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and read their work and show their paintings.
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He rented the ground floor of the building in the Spiegelgasse
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and called it the Cafe Voltaire, and here a movement was born.
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Its name was Dada.
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A nonsense name.
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Dada meant "yes yes" in Russian, it meant a rocking horse in Romanian.
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In any language, it was one of the child's first utterances.
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The word Dada signified the desire to go back to scratch,
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the impossible project of starting culture all over again
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from the beginning, uncontaminated by the language of the elders.
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Marcel Janco made theatre masks for the evenings at the Cafe Voltaire,
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gaudy primitive things, run up with cardboard and poster paint.
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Hugo Ball conducted mock rituals on the cafe stage in costume
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and gibberish.
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SPEAKS GIBBERISH
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The strongest influence on the Dadaists in Zurich was Futurism.
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In Italy before the war, Marinetti had already shown
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how to grab an audience with manifestos and stunts.
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His idea of a gratuitous art at the end of history whose full stop
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had been written by the machine and the Great War was what Dada adopted,
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along with the full range of publicity tricks.
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Provocation was the essential business of Dada,
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its claim to modernity. It was art's parody of revolution.
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But Futurism wanted to abolish the past in the name of the machine
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whereas the Dadaists wanted to produce
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an innocence whose metaphor was childhood.
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"We searched for an elementary art that would,
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"we thought, save mankind from the furious madness of these times.
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"We wanted an anonymous and collective art."
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Arp offended all the conventions of sculpture by making simple jigsaw
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reliefs of brightly painted wood, almost toy-like.
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And he used chance by tearing out scraps of paper and dropping them at random onto
a sheet,
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glueing them down in the pattern that they fell in.
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These simple experiments gave the lingering impression
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that the Dadas were against art itself.
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Now it's true that in the years before 1920, not only in Zurich
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but also in Paris and New York, there were some very pointed jabs
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at the cult of art and its priests, the dealers and critics.
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Especially, they came from Marcel Duchamp,
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and the best-known of them was his moustache on the Mona Lisa,
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not only a jab at the middlebrow worship of the artist
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as divine creator, but also a pun on Leonardo's own homosexuality.
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Gioconda was another thing that I made in Paris in 1919
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before going back to America.
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And, well, it was one of these gestures
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because I added a moustache and a little goatee.
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And also wrote underneath something very risque.
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The letters pronounced as the French pronounce them
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mean "she's got a hot ass".
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Then there was Duchamp's Urinal,
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which he exhibited as a fountain and signed R Mutt.
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When I sent that urinal to be shown, is one incident,
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the jury, there was no jury,
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but the people who were organising it
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decided that it couldn't be shown.
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That urinal. So instead of...
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They didn't know I was concerned with it
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because I didn't sign my name,
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as you know.
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R Mutt, the name instead.
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So they just took the thing and threw it away.
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Above the partition.
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Like his bottle rack and bicycle wheel and other ready-mades,
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it said, in effect, that the world was so full of interesting objects
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that the artist need not add to them, instead he could just pick one
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and this ironic act of choice was equivalent to creation.
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When Dada moved to Berlin after the end of the war,
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it took a very different form.
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In Switzerland, it had been jokey and lyrical.
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It exulted innocence and chance. It was an alternative to conflict.
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But not in post-war Berlin.
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To be modern here meant to be engaged in a theatre of politics
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in a city torn by shortages and every other kind of post-war misery,
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as the left battled the centre
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and the right for possession of the streets.
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And it was generally felt that an artist who spent his time
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pulling words out of a hat at random or dropping little pieces
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of torn paper on a table in accordance with the laws of chance
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while other people were storming the Reichstag was not altogether
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living up to the historical possibilities of his age.
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In order for art to assert itself as radical,
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it needed to take political sides in this atmosphere.
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1918 brought the end of the German monarchy and a republic was proclaimed in the
city of Weimar.
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Between the assaults of the left and the right,
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the Weimar Republic lasted 15 years until Hitler finally snuffed it out.
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The first of its crises was a general socialist rising
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in November 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution.
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The left hoped to demolish
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the Prussian war machine for good, but it rolled over them.
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Strikes were answered by martial law
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and there were many young and radical artists
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who went with the rebels to the left of the Republic.
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Now there already was a strong thread of protest against war
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and authority in German art.
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It came from Expressionism, one of whose tenets was
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that there were no political solutions,
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only spiritual ones which must be made by artists.
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But to younger painters,
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the Expressionists didn't seem objective enough.
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To place one's sensitive ego above the whole of the world struck them
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as arrogant self pity and that was what Expressionism tended to do.
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When Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was in the army, he painted himself
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with his painting hand cut off,
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like a mutilated saint.
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A man symbolically castrated by war.
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In fact, he had never been wounded.
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And so the Berlin Dadaists laughed at the inwardness of Expressionism.
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It was becoming official culture.
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They wanted a more realistic and sardonic tone of voice.
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They wanted an art of the billboards and the streets,
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not one of confession and self-searching.
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And they said so in their manifesto of 1918.
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"The highest art will be the part which has been visibly
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"shattered by the explosions of last week,
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"which is for ever trying to collect his limbs after yesterday's crash.
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"Has Expressionism fulfilled our expectations of such an art?
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"No, no, no."
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"Under the guise of turning inward, the Expressionists have banded together into a
generation
248
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"which is already looking forward to an honourable mention in the histories of
literature and art."
249
00:17:21,600 --> 00:17:25,920
"Hatred of the press, hatred of advertising, hatred of sensations are typical of
people
250
00:17:25,920 --> 00:17:29,080
"who prefer their armchair to the noise of the street."
251
00:17:29,080 --> 00:17:31,000
GUNFIRE
252
00:17:31,000 --> 00:17:33,160
"The signatories of this manifesto have,
253
00:17:33,160 --> 00:17:38,760
"under the battle cry Dada, gathered together to put forward a new art."
254
00:17:38,760 --> 00:17:41,600
"What then is Dadaism?
255
00:17:41,600 --> 00:17:46,040
"The word Dada symbolises the most primitive relation to the reality of the
environment.
256
00:17:46,040 --> 00:17:50,880
"Life appears as a simultaneous muddle. Noises, colours, and spiritual rhythm..."
257
00:17:50,880 --> 00:17:54,760
"Which is taken unmodified with all the sensational screams and fevers
258
00:17:54,760 --> 00:17:58,760
"of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality."
259
00:18:14,400 --> 00:18:17,320
The man who made this collage had been in the trenches.
260
00:18:17,320 --> 00:18:19,520
His name was Max Ernst.
261
00:18:19,520 --> 00:18:22,400
The image is called The Murdering Aeroplane,
262
00:18:22,400 --> 00:18:24,880
half machine, half angel.
263
00:18:24,880 --> 00:18:27,560
Half aggression, and half...
264
00:18:27,560 --> 00:18:29,720
What would you say those arms suggest?
265
00:18:29,720 --> 00:18:32,240
Coquetry, modesty?
266
00:18:32,240 --> 00:18:34,000
I don't know of another work of art
267
00:18:34,000 --> 00:18:37,320
that speaks powerfully to me of the strangeness of the machine,
268
00:18:37,320 --> 00:18:39,040
its alien character...
269
00:18:39,040 --> 00:18:41,080
It's a world and a war away
270
00:18:41,080 --> 00:18:45,400
from Delaunay and his joyfully spinning propellers.
271
00:18:45,400 --> 00:18:49,400
Collage for Ernst was a way of rupturing one's grasp of the world.
272
00:18:49,400 --> 00:18:52,000
He didn't make any overtly political statements,
273
00:18:52,000 --> 00:18:54,200
but his work pointed to a way of making them
274
00:18:54,200 --> 00:18:56,760
by cutting out immediate pieces of reality
275
00:18:56,760 --> 00:18:59,480
and sticking them on a page.
276
00:18:59,480 --> 00:19:02,040
The best political collagist among the Dadaists
277
00:19:02,040 --> 00:19:03,960
was a woman named Hanne Hoch.
278
00:19:03,960 --> 00:19:08,040
whose acrid little images from the '20s ARE Weimar.
279
00:19:08,040 --> 00:19:11,240
She was never sentimental, never a party tub-thumper
280
00:19:11,240 --> 00:19:15,120
and being a woman she has regularly been written off as a minor artist.
281
00:19:15,120 --> 00:19:16,920
That she was not
282
00:19:16,920 --> 00:19:19,840
and for a vision of a world that was at the same time clear,
283
00:19:19,840 --> 00:19:22,000
estranged, bleakly funny
284
00:19:22,000 --> 00:19:25,520
and poisoned at the root, nobody could touch her.
285
00:19:25,520 --> 00:19:30,720
MUSIC FROM: "Threepenny Opera" by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
286
00:20:15,320 --> 00:20:18,000
Certain images haunted German Dadaism
287
00:20:18,000 --> 00:20:20,280
and were its obsessive emblems.
288
00:20:20,280 --> 00:20:23,320
One was the war cripples that were on every street corner.
289
00:20:23,320 --> 00:20:26,160
this was the body reformed by politics,
290
00:20:26,160 --> 00:20:28,120
half human half machine,
291
00:20:28,120 --> 00:20:31,400
prosthetic men, painted here by Otto Dix
292
00:20:31,400 --> 00:20:33,960
who had been through the trenches and never forgot it.
293
00:20:33,960 --> 00:20:36,800
This to him was the very essence of the Weimar Republic.
294
00:20:38,480 --> 00:20:39,880
With his mechanical parts,
295
00:20:39,880 --> 00:20:42,360
the cripple was brother to the tailor's dummies
296
00:20:42,360 --> 00:20:44,640
that the Dadaists had seen in the Italian artist
297
00:20:44,640 --> 00:20:46,760
who also inspired surrealism,
298
00:20:46,760 --> 00:20:48,760
Georgio de Chirico.
299
00:20:48,760 --> 00:20:51,800
Raoul Hausmann took a wooden dummy head
300
00:20:51,800 --> 00:20:54,920
and turned it into one of the great images of modern alienation,
301
00:20:54,920 --> 00:20:57,040
The Spirit Of Our Time he called it,
302
00:20:57,040 --> 00:21:00,760
mechanical man complete with a tape measure for making judgements,
303
00:21:00,760 --> 00:21:03,200
a simpering industrial statistic.
304
00:21:05,920 --> 00:21:10,040
But the master of radical sourness in Berlin was George Grosz.
305
00:21:10,040 --> 00:21:13,080
One of his friends called him a Bolshevik in painting,
306
00:21:13,080 --> 00:21:14,760
nauseated by painting.
307
00:21:14,760 --> 00:21:18,600
Actually, it was not painting, but Germany that made him sick.
308
00:21:18,600 --> 00:21:19,840
This one is called
309
00:21:19,840 --> 00:21:21,640
Republican Automatons.
310
00:21:21,640 --> 00:21:24,240
One cripple waves a German flag,
311
00:21:24,240 --> 00:21:26,400
and the other responds with a cheer
312
00:21:26,400 --> 00:21:27,720
from his empty head.
313
00:21:27,720 --> 00:21:30,640
As with politics, so with love,
314
00:21:30,640 --> 00:21:32,400
Weimar man, in Grosz's view,
315
00:21:32,400 --> 00:21:33,760
has no real passions,
316
00:21:33,760 --> 00:21:35,360
but the system has programmed him
317
00:21:35,360 --> 00:21:36,440
with certain desires
318
00:21:36,440 --> 00:21:39,240
so that he will consume well.
319
00:21:39,240 --> 00:21:40,920
Thus, the dummy's mechanical bride
320
00:21:40,920 --> 00:21:42,480
was the whore.
321
00:21:42,480 --> 00:21:43,800
Grosz drew prostitutes
322
00:21:43,800 --> 00:21:46,680
with a degree of moral vindictiveness
323
00:21:46,680 --> 00:21:49,880
that hadn't been seen in art since the late Middle Ages.
324
00:21:49,880 --> 00:21:52,080
To him, the whore was the giftmadchen,
325
00:21:52,080 --> 00:21:54,880
the poison maiden of German folklore,
326
00:21:54,880 --> 00:21:58,280
the bringer of syphilis and ruin.
327
00:21:58,280 --> 00:22:04,640
MUSIC FROM: "The Threepenny Opera"
328
00:22:22,320 --> 00:22:24,720
His theatre of capitalism was as clear and memorable
329
00:22:24,720 --> 00:22:26,680
as an old morality play.
330
00:22:26,680 --> 00:22:30,720
In it, everybody and everything is for sale.
331
00:22:30,720 --> 00:22:33,640
All human transactions, except the solidarity of workers
332
00:22:33,640 --> 00:22:36,120
as a class are poisoned.
333
00:22:36,120 --> 00:22:39,040
The world is owned by four breeds of pig...
334
00:22:39,040 --> 00:22:41,120
the capitalist, the officer,
335
00:22:41,120 --> 00:22:42,920
the priest and the hooker,
336
00:22:42,920 --> 00:22:45,040
whose other form is the society wife,
337
00:22:45,040 --> 00:22:49,160
since, in the end, Grosz didn't see much difference between the two.
338
00:22:49,160 --> 00:22:52,480
It's no use objecting that there were some kindly officers
339
00:22:52,480 --> 00:22:55,200
cultivated bankers and decent women in Berlin,
340
00:22:55,200 --> 00:22:57,440
as pointless as telling Daumier
341
00:22:57,440 --> 00:23:00,240
that there were honest lawyers in France.
342
00:23:00,240 --> 00:23:02,040
The rage and the pain of the images
343
00:23:02,040 --> 00:23:04,880
simply ignores that.
344
00:23:04,880 --> 00:23:07,120
Grosz was one of the hanging judges of art
345
00:23:07,120 --> 00:23:09,800
and his verdicts echo, whether you like them or not,
346
00:23:09,800 --> 00:23:12,520
in every German street and cafe
347
00:23:12,520 --> 00:23:16,480
and beer hall, now as then.
348
00:23:16,480 --> 00:23:21,960
MUSIC FROM: "The Threepenny Opera"
349
00:23:51,000 --> 00:23:53,960
Even though the '20s have gone and with them
350
00:23:53,960 --> 00:23:56,080
the shared idea that the art of opposition
351
00:23:56,080 --> 00:23:59,040
could have a real influence upon political events,
352
00:23:59,040 --> 00:24:03,880
German Dada still remains one of the moral examples of our century.
353
00:24:03,880 --> 00:24:06,800
For the last 30 years, the Brandenburg gate in Berlin
354
00:24:06,800 --> 00:24:10,920
has stood as one of the main symbols of ideological division in Europe.
355
00:24:10,920 --> 00:24:13,760
On this side, they generally don't put you in jail
356
00:24:13,760 --> 00:24:15,400
for uttering the wrong opinions,
357
00:24:15,400 --> 00:24:18,960
on that side, they generally do.
358
00:24:18,960 --> 00:24:21,760
Over there, for the last 50 years, not one artist
359
00:24:21,760 --> 00:24:24,880
has been able to claim the minimum freedom which the Dadaists
360
00:24:24,880 --> 00:24:26,720
and the Expressionists took for granted,
361
00:24:26,720 --> 00:24:29,280
which is the freedom to interpose one's art
362
00:24:29,280 --> 00:24:32,120
between the official message and its audience.
363
00:24:32,120 --> 00:24:35,960
Over there, Stalin is still rolling in his sleep...
364
00:24:37,400 --> 00:24:40,000
But before Stalin, there was one moment in Russia
365
00:24:40,000 --> 00:24:42,440
when advanced art served the power of the left,
366
00:24:42,440 --> 00:24:45,400
not only freely, but with brilliant results.
367
00:24:45,400 --> 00:24:48,880
It happened between 1917 and 1925
368
00:24:48,880 --> 00:24:50,800
when the promise of Communism was new
369
00:24:50,800 --> 00:24:53,520
and the newness of art fused with it.
370
00:24:53,520 --> 00:24:56,920
This hope that the revolutions in art and politics would join
371
00:24:56,920 --> 00:24:59,160
was a modern idea, but was also grounded
372
00:24:59,160 --> 00:25:02,280
in the Russia that existed before the revolution.
373
00:25:02,280 --> 00:25:04,080
Unchanged, frozen,
374
00:25:04,080 --> 00:25:07,920
with a tiny elite of aristocrats and a cultivated middle-class
375
00:25:07,920 --> 00:25:11,320
sitting on top of a vast pyramid of illiteracy.
376
00:25:11,320 --> 00:25:18,760
MUSIC: RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH CHOIR
377
00:25:24,560 --> 00:25:27,440
One of the few ways of reaching the mass of the Russian people
378
00:25:27,440 --> 00:25:29,720
was through visual images.
379
00:25:29,720 --> 00:25:34,520
The Orthodox church had been doing this for 1,000 years with icons.
380
00:25:38,920 --> 00:25:40,760
Without the European avant-garde,
381
00:25:40,760 --> 00:25:43,080
Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism,
382
00:25:43,080 --> 00:25:45,200
there could have been no modern art in Russia,
383
00:25:45,200 --> 00:25:47,800
but before the revolution, both Moscow
384
00:25:47,800 --> 00:25:50,440
and St Petersburg were truly cosmopolitan.
385
00:25:50,440 --> 00:25:53,400
And some of the greatest collectors in modern history,
386
00:25:53,400 --> 00:25:55,920
like Schukine with his Gaugins and Matisses,
387
00:25:55,920 --> 00:25:57,840
lived in Russia.
388
00:25:57,840 --> 00:26:00,360
When Russian artists reacted to Marinetti
389
00:26:00,360 --> 00:26:02,840
and the Futurist gospel of absolute modernity,
390
00:26:02,840 --> 00:26:05,440
they were not responding as provincials.
391
00:26:05,440 --> 00:26:08,160
But, the Russian economy was mainly rural,
392
00:26:08,160 --> 00:26:10,320
the life of its masses primitive
393
00:26:10,320 --> 00:26:12,480
and machine production was so new there,
394
00:26:12,480 --> 00:26:16,040
that the Futurist myths seemed doubly wonderful to Russian painters
395
00:26:16,040 --> 00:26:19,560
and to poets like Alexander Shevchenko in 1913.
396
00:26:19,560 --> 00:26:23,880
"The world has been transformed into a single monstrous, fantastic,
397
00:26:23,880 --> 00:26:27,000
"perpetually moving machine and a sense of rhythm
398
00:26:27,000 --> 00:26:30,000
"and mechanical harmony reflected in the whole of our life
399
00:26:30,000 --> 00:26:33,040
"cannot but be echoed in our thought and in our spiritual life,
400
00:26:33,040 --> 00:26:34,280
"in Art."
401
00:26:34,280 --> 00:26:36,600
EXPLOSION
402
00:26:36,600 --> 00:26:37,960
But it was the revolution
403
00:26:37,960 --> 00:26:39,360
that gave the Russian avant-garde
404
00:26:39,360 --> 00:26:40,760
its real vision of dynamism.
405
00:26:40,760 --> 00:26:43,120
Here, was process and transformation,
406
00:26:43,120 --> 00:26:45,320
the literal renewal of history,
407
00:26:45,320 --> 00:26:47,200
sweeping everything before it.
408
00:26:47,200 --> 00:26:51,880
MUSIC: LE DRAPEAU ROUGE
409
00:27:09,440 --> 00:27:12,880
Artists and poets saw in it the image of the future,
410
00:27:12,880 --> 00:27:15,680
not the real future of purges and terror
411
00:27:15,680 --> 00:27:19,320
in which so many of them would end, but a future that never came,
412
00:27:19,320 --> 00:27:21,800
one of equality, of collective energy,
413
00:27:21,800 --> 00:27:24,480
in which the arts would act like a transformer
414
00:27:24,480 --> 00:27:26,520
and this hope reached artists everywhere,
415
00:27:26,520 --> 00:27:29,040
including some Russians who were working in Paris.
416
00:27:29,040 --> 00:27:32,280
One of them was the sculptor Naum Gabo.
417
00:27:32,280 --> 00:27:35,560
Like the rest of the population,
418
00:27:35,560 --> 00:27:38,640
from the very beginning of this century,
419
00:27:38,640 --> 00:27:41,320
we all were convinced
420
00:27:41,320 --> 00:27:44,960
that only a total revolution
421
00:27:44,960 --> 00:27:49,480
can change the situation, in which we lived,
422
00:27:49,480 --> 00:27:55,000
during the absolute monarchy of the Czar.
423
00:27:57,760 --> 00:28:00,280
The revolution had swept away the middle-class,
424
00:28:00,280 --> 00:28:04,160
and from now on the only patron would be the state.
425
00:28:04,160 --> 00:28:05,200
The new state artists
426
00:28:05,200 --> 00:28:07,880
were encouraged to see themselves as social engineers.
427
00:28:07,880 --> 00:28:10,480
They believed that art could act as directly on politics
428
00:28:10,480 --> 00:28:12,920
as icons had on religion.
429
00:28:12,920 --> 00:28:16,000
Material was short, but at least they got ration cards
430
00:28:16,000 --> 00:28:18,600
and were employed on propaganda jobs.
431
00:28:18,600 --> 00:28:21,320
They did street theatre with parades and masks.
432
00:28:21,320 --> 00:28:23,480
They made propaganda trucks.
433
00:28:23,480 --> 00:28:25,360
They even devised an agitprop train
434
00:28:25,360 --> 00:28:28,160
that could travel the country, distributing leaflets,
435
00:28:28,160 --> 00:28:33,200
screening films and bringing posters and drawings to the proletariat.
436
00:28:34,680 --> 00:28:36,080
There was a man,
437
00:28:36,080 --> 00:28:41,400
Lunacharsky, who was at that time, the people's commissar,
438
00:28:41,400 --> 00:28:45,400
for people's education and enlightenment.
439
00:28:45,400 --> 00:28:47,960
He said, "You must all know
440
00:28:47,960 --> 00:28:51,600
"that what we need really, what the government need
441
00:28:51,600 --> 00:28:55,960
"and think ought to be, is an art of five kopeks".
442
00:28:55,960 --> 00:28:59,760
What he meant by that, not that the art should be cheap,
443
00:28:59,760 --> 00:29:03,360
but he means the art, which every man and workman
444
00:29:03,360 --> 00:29:05,720
and peasant could have bought.
445
00:29:05,720 --> 00:29:08,280
Of all the tendencies in Russian art,
446
00:29:08,280 --> 00:29:11,320
Constructivism seemed closest, at least as a metaphor
447
00:29:11,320 --> 00:29:14,160
to the ideals of the October Revolution.
448
00:29:14,160 --> 00:29:16,320
Naum Gabo explained it.
449
00:29:16,320 --> 00:29:19,600
It is made of nothing and then,
450
00:29:19,600 --> 00:29:21,240
the structure was built up.
451
00:29:21,240 --> 00:29:23,960
So, it is a construction.
452
00:29:23,960 --> 00:29:27,240
It has also an additional sense in the world,
453
00:29:27,240 --> 00:29:29,800
a philosophic sense, you know.
454
00:29:29,800 --> 00:29:32,480
We also demand
455
00:29:32,480 --> 00:29:36,840
that we should not make images
456
00:29:36,840 --> 00:29:40,920
which would increase the destructive spirit in man.
457
00:29:40,920 --> 00:29:43,320
It should give the man
458
00:29:43,320 --> 00:29:45,920
a sense of reason to live.
459
00:29:45,920 --> 00:29:48,240
It should be mentally constructive,
460
00:29:48,240 --> 00:29:49,400
not destructive.
461
00:29:50,600 --> 00:29:54,960
Vladimir Tatlin was one of the Constructivists.
462
00:29:54,960 --> 00:29:58,480
The collagist Raul Hausmann made a sort of icon of the man
463
00:29:58,480 --> 00:30:02,480
called Tatlin At Home with his head filled with thoughts of machinery
464
00:30:02,480 --> 00:30:05,960
and emblems of travel and industrial design.
465
00:30:05,960 --> 00:30:07,720
He wanted, he said...
466
00:30:07,720 --> 00:30:11,200
"To combine materials like iron and glass,
467
00:30:11,200 --> 00:30:13,560
"the materials of modern classicism,
468
00:30:13,560 --> 00:30:17,640
"comparable in their severity with the marble of antiquity."
469
00:30:17,640 --> 00:30:20,960
In 1919, two years after the revolution,
470
00:30:20,960 --> 00:30:23,320
the People's Commissariat for Education
471
00:30:23,320 --> 00:30:26,480
asked him to design a monument to the Third International.
472
00:30:26,480 --> 00:30:29,440
It was going to be 1,300 feet high,
473
00:30:29,440 --> 00:30:32,560
about 300 feet taller than the Eiffel Tower.
474
00:30:32,560 --> 00:30:34,240
And unlike the one in Paris,
475
00:30:34,240 --> 00:30:36,480
this would actually move.
476
00:30:36,480 --> 00:30:39,400
Inside it, three huge mobile units.
477
00:30:39,400 --> 00:30:41,160
The lowest, a cylinder,
478
00:30:41,160 --> 00:30:43,840
was the hall for the Soviet legislative council.
479
00:30:43,840 --> 00:30:46,120
It turned round once a year.
480
00:30:46,120 --> 00:30:47,720
Above it, a pyramid,
481
00:30:47,720 --> 00:30:51,160
the executive block, turning once a month.
482
00:30:51,160 --> 00:30:52,960
And next, another chamber,
483
00:30:52,960 --> 00:30:56,080
an information block which spun once a day.
484
00:30:56,080 --> 00:30:58,600
And finally, a half dome.
485
00:30:58,600 --> 00:31:00,920
All encased in the great spiral,
486
00:31:00,920 --> 00:31:03,280
an ancient Middle Eastern form,
487
00:31:03,280 --> 00:31:07,400
but in steel, on its heroic diagonal, the symbol of dynamism,
488
00:31:07,400 --> 00:31:09,720
of conversion of energy and of evolution
489
00:31:09,720 --> 00:31:11,520
from lower states to higher,
490
00:31:11,520 --> 00:31:14,360
dialectics in three dimensions.
491
00:31:14,360 --> 00:31:15,840
It couldn't be built.
492
00:31:15,840 --> 00:31:18,560
There wasn't enough steel in all Russia for that.
493
00:31:18,560 --> 00:31:21,920
So, it remains one of the great hypotheses of modernism,
494
00:31:21,920 --> 00:31:24,960
and Tatlin was the Leonardo of the Russian Revolution.
495
00:31:24,960 --> 00:31:28,160
In his quest for a perfect wedding of art and technology,
496
00:31:28,160 --> 00:31:30,960
he repeated some of Leonardo's own projects
497
00:31:30,960 --> 00:31:34,280
from 400 years earlier, like the design for a flying machine,
498
00:31:34,280 --> 00:31:37,440
a glider, a sort of cheap airborne bicycle
499
00:31:37,440 --> 00:31:39,400
that every proletarian could have,
500
00:31:39,400 --> 00:31:41,400
which he named the Letatlin
501
00:31:41,400 --> 00:31:44,320
from the Russian word "letat", to fly.
502
00:31:44,320 --> 00:31:46,360
"I have selected the flying machine
503
00:31:46,360 --> 00:31:48,440
"as an object for artistic composition,
504
00:31:48,440 --> 00:31:51,480
"since it is the most complicated, dynamic form
505
00:31:51,480 --> 00:31:54,520
"that can become an everyday object for the Soviet masses.
506
00:31:54,520 --> 00:31:56,520
"An ordinary item of use."
507
00:31:56,520 --> 00:31:59,880
Which it wasn't and could not have been.
508
00:31:59,880 --> 00:32:02,480
Without a highly abstract way of thinking creatively
509
00:32:02,480 --> 00:32:04,960
about matter, there is no technology.
510
00:32:04,960 --> 00:32:07,280
Likewise, there can be no science.
511
00:32:07,280 --> 00:32:09,960
If this power to abstract was the common denominator
512
00:32:09,960 --> 00:32:14,480
of a coming society whose modernity would depend on scientific progress,
513
00:32:14,480 --> 00:32:17,400
then its proper art must be abstract, too.
514
00:32:17,400 --> 00:32:20,960
Abstraction, for the Russians, was reality.
515
00:32:20,960 --> 00:32:23,920
The whole century, the 20th century
516
00:32:23,920 --> 00:32:26,080
and the end of the last century,
517
00:32:26,080 --> 00:32:30,680
even the science has taken and become abstract.
518
00:32:30,680 --> 00:32:34,400
Abstraction in science is the main foundation
519
00:32:34,400 --> 00:32:38,280
of contemporary thinking, of scientific thinking.
520
00:32:38,280 --> 00:32:40,320
And yet, in science,
521
00:32:40,320 --> 00:32:45,680
it has never been a separation from life.
522
00:32:45,680 --> 00:32:49,880
And that is what art must always remember.
523
00:32:49,880 --> 00:32:54,280
That our abstraction, just as in science, is natural
524
00:32:54,280 --> 00:32:58,880
and belonging to the development of the spirit of human beings.
525
00:32:58,880 --> 00:33:00,760
This is our spirit.
526
00:33:00,760 --> 00:33:02,160
It is abstract.
527
00:33:02,160 --> 00:33:06,960
But it does not mean it should totally alienate,
528
00:33:06,960 --> 00:33:10,200
separate itself from life. On the contrary,
529
00:33:10,200 --> 00:33:12,680
it must go deeper in life,
530
00:33:12,680 --> 00:33:16,480
and regard the laws of life and the laws of nature.
531
00:33:18,600 --> 00:33:21,720
Gabo took part in the Constructivist International.
532
00:33:21,720 --> 00:33:24,800
It extended from Holland to Moscow and as one of its members,
533
00:33:24,800 --> 00:33:27,800
the Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-Nagy remarked,
534
00:33:27,800 --> 00:33:29,640
"Constructivism is pure substance,
535
00:33:29,640 --> 00:33:32,720
"it is the socialism of vision".
536
00:33:38,840 --> 00:33:41,280
In this spirit, Moholy-Nagy made what he called
537
00:33:41,280 --> 00:33:43,920
his light space modulators.
538
00:33:46,160 --> 00:33:49,040
Another Russian artist, El Lissitsky,
539
00:33:49,040 --> 00:33:52,440
also tried to marry abstract art with social use.
540
00:33:52,440 --> 00:33:56,560
Through the '20s, he produced a flow of what he named Proun artworks,
541
00:33:56,560 --> 00:34:00,440
the word "proun", pro unovis, meaning "for a new art".
542
00:34:02,640 --> 00:34:04,720
They look like imaginary architecture
543
00:34:04,720 --> 00:34:06,320
and so in a sense they were,
544
00:34:06,320 --> 00:34:08,200
because he thought of them as way stations
545
00:34:08,200 --> 00:34:10,440
between once rigid categories,
546
00:34:10,440 --> 00:34:13,320
the building blocks of a new Socialist Jerusalem
547
00:34:13,320 --> 00:34:16,800
in which all the differences between the older artistic professions
548
00:34:16,800 --> 00:34:20,960
would be merged in one evolved creature, the artist engineer.
549
00:34:24,560 --> 00:34:29,440
Is this Proun room sculpture or painting or architecture?
550
00:34:29,440 --> 00:34:31,000
Impossible to say.
551
00:34:32,720 --> 00:34:35,200
The artist engineer must also be able to work at anything
552
00:34:35,200 --> 00:34:38,640
and here, Lissitsky redesigned a maths textbook
553
00:34:38,640 --> 00:34:40,440
for Russian elementary schools.
554
00:34:41,960 --> 00:34:44,680
He did posters which were meant to communicate with the masses
555
00:34:44,680 --> 00:34:48,200
in a purely abstract way.
556
00:34:48,200 --> 00:34:49,480
How do you incite people
557
00:34:49,480 --> 00:34:51,280
against the White Russian army?
558
00:34:51,280 --> 00:34:52,960
The message is, beat the Whites
559
00:34:52,960 --> 00:34:54,040
with the Red Wedge.
560
00:34:54,040 --> 00:34:56,280
One may doubt if this classic poster
561
00:34:56,280 --> 00:34:58,360
was ever much use as propaganda,
562
00:34:58,360 --> 00:35:01,240
but the work of Lissitsky's colleague Alexander Rodchenko
563
00:35:01,240 --> 00:35:03,800
was more practical in its effect.
564
00:35:05,680 --> 00:35:08,840
Painter, sculptor, poster maker, designer, photographer.
565
00:35:08,840 --> 00:35:12,720
He even designed a leather reinforced workers' suit in 1925
566
00:35:12,720 --> 00:35:14,440
and wore it himself.
567
00:35:14,440 --> 00:35:16,560
And his emblem was the camera.
568
00:35:16,560 --> 00:35:19,400
For the camera was objective, unsentimental.
569
00:35:19,400 --> 00:35:21,040
Instead of symbolist dreams,
570
00:35:21,040 --> 00:35:22,920
it gave the cheap, reproducible,
571
00:35:22,920 --> 00:35:25,280
accessible poetry of fact,
572
00:35:25,280 --> 00:35:26,840
of photomontage.
573
00:35:26,840 --> 00:35:28,840
In his posters and book covers,
574
00:35:28,840 --> 00:35:30,520
Rodchenko combined that
575
00:35:30,520 --> 00:35:33,560
with a brilliant, punchy sense of design.
576
00:35:33,560 --> 00:35:37,000
His montages are not so much still images
577
00:35:37,000 --> 00:35:39,880
as frozen cinema, like documentary film.
578
00:35:41,800 --> 00:35:45,320
Constructivism demanded that every work should speak plainly
579
00:35:45,320 --> 00:35:49,080
and not mystify anyone. This was true of architecture too.
580
00:35:49,080 --> 00:35:51,240
The building as declaration.
581
00:35:51,240 --> 00:35:55,160
This is a design for the offices of the party newspaper, Pravda.
582
00:35:56,720 --> 00:36:00,480
The trouble was that Lenin wasn't much interested in the avant-garde.
583
00:36:00,480 --> 00:36:01,920
He wanted a mass art.
584
00:36:01,920 --> 00:36:04,920
And after him, Stalin, the terrible simplifier,
585
00:36:04,920 --> 00:36:08,640
made anything that wasn't mass art a political crime.
586
00:36:08,640 --> 00:36:12,760
The Constructivists were, from his point of view, bourgeois formalists,
587
00:36:12,760 --> 00:36:15,480
little specks of useless, free imagination
588
00:36:15,480 --> 00:36:18,920
in the great ocean of his new Russia.
589
00:36:18,920 --> 00:36:23,120
Some he killed, some he starved and all of them he degraded
590
00:36:23,120 --> 00:36:26,000
and state art went back to its traditional job
591
00:36:26,000 --> 00:36:28,560
of reinforcing the narcissism of power.
592
00:36:30,160 --> 00:36:32,240
And so, you might think, the one brave effort
593
00:36:32,240 --> 00:36:33,640
to connect revolutionary art
594
00:36:33,640 --> 00:36:35,000
to revolutionary politics
595
00:36:35,000 --> 00:36:36,560
was crushed.
596
00:36:39,040 --> 00:36:42,120
But not quite. Because although we like to think
597
00:36:42,120 --> 00:36:45,360
that modern art is left wing, or at any rate, liberal by nature,
598
00:36:45,360 --> 00:36:47,000
it certainly wasn't in Italy
599
00:36:47,000 --> 00:36:50,640
where Futurism provided the first official style for Fascism.
600
00:36:51,840 --> 00:36:54,240
Mussolini was enraptured by the rhetoric
601
00:36:54,240 --> 00:36:58,160
of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the leader of the Futurists.
602
00:36:58,160 --> 00:37:01,720
His watchword, as it was Marinetti's, was modernity.
603
00:37:03,120 --> 00:37:06,200
And he too loved what Marinetti loved...
604
00:37:06,200 --> 00:37:10,200
Speed, dynamism, mechanical force, war,
605
00:37:10,200 --> 00:37:13,200
contempt for women, the cult of masculinity,
606
00:37:13,200 --> 00:37:15,040
the cult of youth.
607
00:37:16,920 --> 00:37:19,480
MUSIC: "Giovinezza" by Giuseppe Blanc
608
00:37:45,720 --> 00:37:49,320
In 1933, to mark his 10th year in absolute power,
609
00:37:49,320 --> 00:37:52,560
Mussolini held an exhibition of the fascist revolution.
610
00:37:52,560 --> 00:37:55,600
The catalogue proclaimed that it wanted to recall...
611
00:37:55,600 --> 00:37:58,720
"The atmosphere of the times, all fire and fever.
612
00:37:58,720 --> 00:38:02,200
"Tumultuous, lyrical, glittering.
613
00:38:02,200 --> 00:38:04,040
"It could only take place in a style
614
00:38:04,040 --> 00:38:06,520
"matching the artistic adventures of our time
615
00:38:06,520 --> 00:38:08,400
"in a strictly contemporary mode.
616
00:38:08,400 --> 00:38:11,360
"The artist had from Il Duce a clear and precise order
617
00:38:11,360 --> 00:38:14,560
"to make something modern, full of daring.
618
00:38:14,560 --> 00:38:17,280
"And they have faithfully obeyed his command."
619
00:38:18,520 --> 00:38:21,480
Montage, collage, blow ups, Cubist figures,
620
00:38:21,480 --> 00:38:25,480
constructivist devices, references to cinema and photography...
621
00:38:25,480 --> 00:38:27,280
It was all there.
622
00:38:27,280 --> 00:38:30,960
And very like the work of the early Russian revolutionaries.
623
00:38:32,280 --> 00:38:34,280
Enrico Prampolini, one of the fathers
624
00:38:34,280 --> 00:38:35,920
of abstract painting in Italy,
625
00:38:35,920 --> 00:38:37,080
did this mural
626
00:38:37,080 --> 00:38:39,000
of Mussolini's Blackshirts trampling
627
00:38:39,000 --> 00:38:40,640
the red flags of Communism
628
00:38:40,640 --> 00:38:42,880
during the Fascist rising of 1919.
629
00:38:42,880 --> 00:38:45,800
If you switched the colour of the flags and the shirts, of course,
630
00:38:45,800 --> 00:38:49,240
it would celebrate a Communist victory over Fascism.
631
00:38:50,960 --> 00:38:53,880
By the mid-1930s, there was little real difference
632
00:38:53,880 --> 00:38:56,960
between the official style of the Russian Proletarian Revolution,
633
00:38:56,960 --> 00:38:58,440
as approved by Stalin,
634
00:38:58,440 --> 00:39:03,560
and the official style of National Socialism as approved by Hitler.
635
00:39:03,560 --> 00:39:07,080
Both sides thought there was and Hitler's architect, Albert Speer,
636
00:39:07,080 --> 00:39:09,520
thought that his version was the best,
637
00:39:09,520 --> 00:39:12,440
even though they all look much the same today.
638
00:39:12,440 --> 00:39:14,640
It looks like nowadays, you know...
639
00:39:14,640 --> 00:39:17,600
In this time, we thought there are worlds between it
640
00:39:17,600 --> 00:39:22,240
because the Russians, in my opinion,
641
00:39:22,240 --> 00:39:24,680
they were crude in their architecture.
642
00:39:24,680 --> 00:39:27,520
I had a fine architecture, of course, but this was crude.
643
00:39:27,520 --> 00:39:31,280
What Speer designed for Hitler over the years had little or nothing
644
00:39:31,280 --> 00:39:34,920
to do with modernism, except for the crucial fact that he did it
645
00:39:34,920 --> 00:39:38,760
in the 20th century and made it the most grandiose state architecture,
646
00:39:38,760 --> 00:39:42,160
at least in theory, since the time of the pyramids.
647
00:39:42,160 --> 00:39:45,120
Some of the ideas were actually Hitler's.
648
00:39:45,120 --> 00:39:48,120
In 1925, as a penniless nobody,
649
00:39:48,120 --> 00:39:52,120
Hitler was already making these sketches of giant domes and arches
650
00:39:52,120 --> 00:39:55,640
for a remade Berlin to be the capital of the world.
651
00:39:55,640 --> 00:39:59,720
Speer's job was to build these megalomaniac objects.
652
00:39:59,720 --> 00:40:02,400
This dome would have been seven times the diameter
653
00:40:02,400 --> 00:40:04,880
of Michelangelo's dome in St Peter's.
654
00:40:04,880 --> 00:40:06,720
It would have held meetings
655
00:40:06,720 --> 00:40:08,520
of 130,000 party members.
656
00:40:08,520 --> 00:40:10,640
In such a huge building,
657
00:40:10,640 --> 00:40:12,640
the man who is most important
658
00:40:12,640 --> 00:40:14,040
of the whole thing,
659
00:40:14,040 --> 00:40:17,080
for which the building is really done,
660
00:40:17,080 --> 00:40:19,240
shrinks together to nothing.
661
00:40:19,240 --> 00:40:20,600
One can't see him.
662
00:40:22,040 --> 00:40:25,400
I haven't had any way to solve it.
663
00:40:25,400 --> 00:40:30,160
I put a huge eagle with a swastika
664
00:40:30,160 --> 00:40:34,000
behind him to say, "Here he is."
665
00:40:34,000 --> 00:40:38,120
But he wouldn't have been really visible in the grandeur
666
00:40:38,120 --> 00:40:42,120
he would have deserved with his position in the world.
667
00:40:42,120 --> 00:40:44,120
Speer knew that authority
668
00:40:44,120 --> 00:40:45,880
demanded not only size
669
00:40:45,880 --> 00:40:50,040
but absolute regularity, like the rhythm of jackboots on concrete.
670
00:40:50,040 --> 00:40:53,840
What was the average man meant to feel in the Nuremberg stadium?
671
00:40:53,840 --> 00:40:55,320
Nothing.
672
00:40:55,320 --> 00:41:00,360
It was not my aim that he feels anything.
673
00:41:00,360 --> 00:41:04,360
I had only the aim to...
674
00:41:04,360 --> 00:41:08,200
impose the grandeur of this building
675
00:41:08,200 --> 00:41:11,040
to the people who are in this building.
676
00:41:11,040 --> 00:41:16,080
And one can already read in Goethe's Voyage To Italy
677
00:41:16,080 --> 00:41:20,680
when he saw the Roman arena in Verona,
678
00:41:20,680 --> 00:41:23,320
he said, "If people who have different minds
679
00:41:23,320 --> 00:41:24,840
"are in such a surrounding
680
00:41:24,840 --> 00:41:28,520
"pressed together, they all get unified to one mind".
681
00:41:28,520 --> 00:41:32,600
And I think this was the aim of those buildings
682
00:41:32,600 --> 00:41:38,320
and not what the small man will feel personally.
683
00:41:38,320 --> 00:41:39,840
CROWD ROARS
684
00:41:39,840 --> 00:41:41,720
Sieg Heil!
685
00:41:41,720 --> 00:41:44,040
Sieg Heil!
686
00:42:02,880 --> 00:42:06,960
Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil!
687
00:42:09,920 --> 00:42:12,640
Of all the projects that he designed for Hitler,
688
00:42:12,640 --> 00:42:16,880
the domes and the arches, the palaces, the stadiums and the tombs,
689
00:42:16,880 --> 00:42:20,080
only one is left and this is it.
690
00:42:20,080 --> 00:42:24,480
This was Hitler's reviewing stand at the Zeppelin field in Nuremberg.
691
00:42:24,480 --> 00:42:27,640
Speer made a drawing of it to show what it would look like
692
00:42:27,640 --> 00:42:30,480
as a ruin in the year 3,000.
693
00:42:30,480 --> 00:42:32,800
Bigger than the Coliseum,
694
00:42:32,800 --> 00:42:35,560
twice as long as the Baths of Caracalla in Rome,
695
00:42:35,560 --> 00:42:39,280
the stone witness to the beginnings of the Third Reich
696
00:42:39,280 --> 00:42:41,800
and to the end of history.
697
00:42:41,800 --> 00:42:44,080
And so it is,
698
00:42:44,080 --> 00:42:47,960
but not quite as they intended it.
699
00:42:55,520 --> 00:42:59,040
I am a little bit sad that there's not much left,
700
00:42:59,040 --> 00:43:02,040
the whole columns have gone.
701
00:43:02,040 --> 00:43:04,520
And to my astonishment,
702
00:43:04,520 --> 00:43:09,120
the stone we used was of a bad quality.
703
00:43:09,120 --> 00:43:15,600
So I only can say thank goodness that I am no more together with Hitler.
704
00:43:15,600 --> 00:43:19,680
He would have a very mad with me about this bad stone quality.
705
00:43:19,680 --> 00:43:23,280
MUSIC: "An Alpine Symphony" by Richard Strauss
706
00:43:30,040 --> 00:43:32,360
Today, only the ruins are left.
707
00:43:34,960 --> 00:43:38,600
The epitaph for their builder and his client was written
708
00:43:38,600 --> 00:43:40,200
by WH Auden 40 years ago.
709
00:43:40,200 --> 00:43:44,400
"Perfection of a kind was what he was after
710
00:43:44,400 --> 00:43:48,360
"and the poetry he invented was easy to understand
711
00:43:48,360 --> 00:43:51,640
"He knew human folly like the back of his hand
712
00:43:51,640 --> 00:43:55,240
"and was greatly interested in armies and fleets
713
00:43:56,320 --> 00:44:01,720
"When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter
714
00:44:01,720 --> 00:44:06,160
"And when he cried, the little children died in the streets."
715
00:44:30,360 --> 00:44:34,160
Under Speer's influence, Mussolini too switched away from modernism
716
00:44:34,160 --> 00:44:36,720
to a classical style of state architecture.
717
00:44:36,720 --> 00:44:39,560
This was his Italian forum outside Rome
718
00:44:39,560 --> 00:44:42,200
and its metaphor is continuity.
719
00:44:42,200 --> 00:44:48,040
The past underwriting the present, the new Rome reborn from the old.
720
00:44:48,040 --> 00:44:51,680
MUSIC: "Giovinezza" by Giuseppe Blanc
721
00:45:19,840 --> 00:45:22,800
If Hitler had been impressed by the ruins of Rome,
722
00:45:22,800 --> 00:45:26,920
Mussolini actually owned them and he got his architects to exploit them.
723
00:45:29,280 --> 00:45:32,600
He wanted to build "La Terza Roma", a third Rome.
724
00:45:32,600 --> 00:45:36,160
There had been the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the Popes
725
00:45:36,160 --> 00:45:38,440
and now there would be the Rome of Fascism
726
00:45:38,440 --> 00:45:40,800
halfway between Saint Peter's and the sea.
727
00:45:40,800 --> 00:45:43,480
It's head architect was called Piacentini.
728
00:45:43,480 --> 00:45:46,040
It was going to be finished in 1942.
729
00:45:46,040 --> 00:45:49,680
It wasn't, but a good deal of it is still there.
730
00:45:51,160 --> 00:45:55,040
This is the only piece of fascist town planning that still works.
731
00:45:55,040 --> 00:45:57,840
They didn't need to tear it down after the war because it was
732
00:45:57,840 --> 00:46:02,000
far enough outside Rome not to become a troublesome symbol.
733
00:46:02,000 --> 00:46:03,800
The result is a set of buildings
734
00:46:03,800 --> 00:46:08,040
that are the architectural equivalent of Mussolini's famous feat
735
00:46:08,040 --> 00:46:10,920
of getting the Italian trains to run on time.
736
00:46:10,920 --> 00:46:13,320
They're efficient, they're easy to clean -
737
00:46:13,320 --> 00:46:15,400
you just run a damp rag over them -
738
00:46:15,400 --> 00:46:20,320
but unfortunately, they're quite dead.
739
00:46:20,320 --> 00:46:23,160
When Hitler made his first state visit to Rome in the '30s,
740
00:46:23,160 --> 00:46:26,960
Mussolini lined the last couple of miles of railroad track
741
00:46:26,960 --> 00:46:30,000
coming into the Stazione Termini with stage sets -
742
00:46:30,000 --> 00:46:32,240
fake apartment blocks, just the front -
743
00:46:32,240 --> 00:46:34,920
with hundreds of Italians leaning out of the windows
744
00:46:34,920 --> 00:46:36,760
and cheering the Fuhrer.
745
00:46:36,760 --> 00:46:40,000
And this provoked one anonymous wag to write the lines
746
00:46:40,000 --> 00:46:45,080
which in translation run, "Rome of marble remade of cardboard.
747
00:46:45,080 --> 00:46:48,320
"Salute the house painter who will be your next master."
748
00:46:48,320 --> 00:46:50,400
Well, this is cardboard Rome.
749
00:46:50,400 --> 00:46:53,320
MUSIC: "Il Canto Degli Italiani" by Michele Novaro
750
00:47:24,520 --> 00:47:27,000
Classicism with a pastry cutter.
751
00:47:27,000 --> 00:47:30,440
25 years later, a lot of southern Californian universities
752
00:47:30,440 --> 00:47:34,440
were going to look just like this. Mussolini didn't like the style
753
00:47:34,440 --> 00:47:36,880
just because he was a bully and a braggart -
754
00:47:36,880 --> 00:47:40,640
he liked it because he had a jackboot in either camp,
755
00:47:40,640 --> 00:47:42,920
one in the myth of ancient Rome
756
00:47:42,920 --> 00:47:46,040
and the other one in the vision of a technocratic future.
757
00:47:47,280 --> 00:47:50,160
So this kind of architecture seemed just right to him,
758
00:47:50,160 --> 00:47:52,680
as it did to many an American corporate president
759
00:47:52,680 --> 00:47:55,360
and University regent after the war,
760
00:47:55,360 --> 00:47:58,000
like the Lincoln Centre in New York.
761
00:47:58,000 --> 00:48:00,840
All the ingredients of an architecture of state power
762
00:48:00,840 --> 00:48:04,320
as imagined by the totalitarian planners of our century
763
00:48:04,320 --> 00:48:07,760
are also present in what used in the '50s to be called
764
00:48:07,760 --> 00:48:09,840
"the architecture of democracy".
765
00:48:10,840 --> 00:48:15,120
What grandeur came down to was history without the trim.
766
00:48:15,120 --> 00:48:19,680
Not direct revival, certainly not ironic parody,
767
00:48:19,680 --> 00:48:23,240
but solemn parody, high-minded kitsch,
768
00:48:23,240 --> 00:48:26,760
the architectural equivalent of the world's hundred greatest books
769
00:48:26,760 --> 00:48:29,400
bound in hand-tooled Naugahyde.
770
00:48:29,400 --> 00:48:32,240
1950s television-set Renaissance.
771
00:48:34,680 --> 00:48:38,600
Or like the Kennedy Centre for the performing arts in Washington.
772
00:48:38,600 --> 00:48:42,080
This was the international power style of the '50s and '60s
773
00:48:42,080 --> 00:48:44,520
as Art Deco had been to the '30s.
774
00:48:44,520 --> 00:48:50,120
Scale-less, opaque and its metaphors running slightly out of control.
775
00:49:30,240 --> 00:49:32,800
This is the scariest new monument that I know -
776
00:49:32,800 --> 00:49:35,160
Albany Mall, the seat of government
777
00:49:35,160 --> 00:49:36,400
of New York State.
778
00:49:36,400 --> 00:49:37,880
It was designed for one purpose
779
00:49:37,880 --> 00:49:39,080
and it does it very well -
780
00:49:39,080 --> 00:49:42,320
it expresses the centralisation of power
781
00:49:42,320 --> 00:49:44,560
and I don't imagine there's a single citizen
782
00:49:44,560 --> 00:49:48,000
who's ever wandered on this plaza and felt the slightest connection
783
00:49:48,000 --> 00:49:50,760
with the bureaucrats who live in their towers up there.
784
00:49:50,760 --> 00:49:54,920
The place would make Albert Speer seem delicate.
785
00:49:54,920 --> 00:49:58,400
Utter simplicity of meaning, no ambiguities.
786
00:49:58,400 --> 00:50:02,320
And what comes out is not the difference between America and Russia,
787
00:50:02,320 --> 00:50:04,760
but the similarities between the corporate
788
00:50:04,760 --> 00:50:06,720
and the bureaucratic states of mind.
789
00:50:06,720 --> 00:50:09,360
Any one of those buildings there you can imagine
790
00:50:09,360 --> 00:50:11,720
with an eagle on top or a swastika,
791
00:50:11,720 --> 00:50:13,400
or a hammer and sickle.
792
00:50:13,400 --> 00:50:15,280
It makes very little difference
793
00:50:15,280 --> 00:50:16,400
to the buildings.
794
00:50:16,400 --> 00:50:19,680
If you forget about the projects and the manifestoes
795
00:50:19,680 --> 00:50:21,960
and think about what it actually built,
796
00:50:21,960 --> 00:50:26,080
there's no doubt that our culture has its language of political power.
797
00:50:26,080 --> 00:50:28,400
It's not linked to any particular ideology -
798
00:50:28,400 --> 00:50:31,480
it's value-free. It can mean anything.
799
00:51:09,880 --> 00:51:13,240
The architecture of power and coercion is always with us,
800
00:51:13,240 --> 00:51:17,040
but in the area of public building our century has not yet managed
801
00:51:17,040 --> 00:51:20,840
to come up with an architecture of free will.
802
00:51:20,840 --> 00:51:24,960
But on the other hand, what is left of the art of dissent?
803
00:51:24,960 --> 00:51:26,400
Not a great deal.
804
00:51:26,400 --> 00:51:29,800
Only one humane political work of art in the last 100 years
805
00:51:29,800 --> 00:51:33,120
has achieved something like permanent fame and wide affect.
806
00:51:33,120 --> 00:51:37,360
It was Guernica, painted by Pablo Picasso in 1937.
807
00:51:39,120 --> 00:51:42,080
Its imagery was set off by an act of war -
808
00:51:42,080 --> 00:51:45,800
the German bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish civil war.
809
00:51:47,320 --> 00:51:51,160
I say "set-off" because although Guernica has certainly been taken
810
00:51:51,160 --> 00:51:54,240
as the most powerful invective against violence in modern art,
811
00:51:54,240 --> 00:51:57,440
it was not entirely inspired by the war.
812
00:51:57,440 --> 00:52:00,320
These motifs of the weeping woman, the horse and the bull
813
00:52:00,320 --> 00:52:02,920
had been running through Picasso's work for years
814
00:52:02,920 --> 00:52:05,440
before Guernica brought them together.
815
00:52:05,440 --> 00:52:09,360
Nor can you call this a very specific statement about politics.
816
00:52:09,360 --> 00:52:12,000
It's more a general meditation on suffering
817
00:52:12,000 --> 00:52:15,480
and its symbols are deliberately archaic, not historical.
818
00:52:15,480 --> 00:52:20,880
The horse, the bull, the fallen warrior, the sword.
819
00:52:20,880 --> 00:52:24,440
The only modern elements - apart from the late Cubist style -
820
00:52:24,440 --> 00:52:27,680
are the electric light and the suggestion that the horse's body
821
00:52:27,680 --> 00:52:31,080
is made of parallel lines of newsprint, like the newspaper
822
00:52:31,080 --> 00:52:34,240
in Picasso's collages a quarter of a century earlier.
823
00:52:34,240 --> 00:52:38,040
Otherwise, its heroic abstraction and monumentalised pain
824
00:52:38,040 --> 00:52:40,960
belong as much to the world of the Greek pediment
825
00:52:40,960 --> 00:52:44,440
as they do to the time of dive bombers and photography.
826
00:52:44,440 --> 00:52:46,480
STUKAS WAIL
827
00:53:03,560 --> 00:53:06,840
Since then, full dress-revivals of the old Dada spirit
828
00:53:06,840 --> 00:53:09,080
of flat-out opposition to the world as it is
829
00:53:09,080 --> 00:53:11,520
have been the exception rather than the rule.
830
00:53:11,520 --> 00:53:14,680
Or, to be exact, ones that work convincingly as art
831
00:53:14,680 --> 00:53:16,400
have been the exceptions.
832
00:53:16,400 --> 00:53:20,160
Some have been produced by a Swiss artist, Jean Tinguely,
833
00:53:20,160 --> 00:53:22,760
who makes sculptures that wildly parody
834
00:53:22,760 --> 00:53:27,160
the rationalism of technology, of machines and interests they serve.
835
00:53:27,160 --> 00:53:31,760
I'm involved by our civilisation,
836
00:53:31,760 --> 00:53:34,160
in our technical civilisation,
837
00:53:34,160 --> 00:53:38,440
and the problem of machine is the problem of an all-new world.
838
00:53:39,960 --> 00:53:42,880
It is first of all a sculpture
839
00:53:42,880 --> 00:53:46,280
and I have tried to give him new dimensions,
840
00:53:46,280 --> 00:53:49,560
to give him the quality of a classical sculpture
841
00:53:49,560 --> 00:53:54,280
and to let him, in the same time, to become a fantastic machine.
842
00:53:58,080 --> 00:54:02,200
This has also the quality of a spectacle,
843
00:54:02,200 --> 00:54:04,960
of a show, at the same time.
844
00:54:04,960 --> 00:54:07,400
It has to have some different faces.
845
00:54:08,400 --> 00:54:12,680
The noises and the sounds are very important - it belongs to it.
846
00:54:14,520 --> 00:54:18,080
In art, perhaps the machine had nowhere to turn but on itself.
847
00:54:18,080 --> 00:54:21,480
One cold spring evening in New York in 1960
848
00:54:21,480 --> 00:54:23,840
in the courtyard of the Museum Of Modern Art,
849
00:54:23,840 --> 00:54:26,400
a small invited audience of trustees, collectors,
850
00:54:26,400 --> 00:54:29,600
critics and artists assembled to experience
851
00:54:29,600 --> 00:54:31,960
what Tinguely called his homage to New York,
852
00:54:31,960 --> 00:54:34,720
a machine which, with a little help from its friends,
853
00:54:34,720 --> 00:54:37,880
succeeded in its intention of assassinating itself.
854
00:54:37,880 --> 00:54:39,840
A self-destroying work of art
855
00:54:39,840 --> 00:54:43,080
for an audience composed mainly of millionaires.
856
00:54:52,800 --> 00:54:54,880
SIREN BLARES
857
00:55:04,040 --> 00:55:05,400
Bravo!
858
00:55:05,400 --> 00:55:07,600
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
859
00:55:07,600 --> 00:55:09,120
Bravo!
860
00:55:15,280 --> 00:55:18,400
MUSIC: "Happy End" by Kurt Weill
861
00:55:26,920 --> 00:55:30,400
This was a long way from the original spirit of Berlin Dada in the '20s,
862
00:55:30,400 --> 00:55:33,840
with its hope of changing society and to hell with amusing it.
863
00:55:33,840 --> 00:55:36,840
It was as far as the Berlin railway station of the '20s -
864
00:55:36,840 --> 00:55:41,440
when it was one of the hubs of a shuttling, changing European avant-garde -
865
00:55:41,440 --> 00:55:43,320
was from its form today.
866
00:55:47,760 --> 00:55:49,280
That particular hope -
867
00:55:49,280 --> 00:55:53,080
of having political effect through painting or sculpture - is ended.
868
00:56:11,240 --> 00:56:13,920
As far as today's politics is concerned,
869
00:56:13,920 --> 00:56:16,320
art aspires to the condition of Muzak -
870
00:56:16,320 --> 00:56:19,000
it provides the background hum for power.
871
00:56:19,000 --> 00:56:22,320
If the Third Reich had lasted until today, the young bloods in the party
872
00:56:22,320 --> 00:56:26,640
wouldn't be interested in old fogeys like Albert Speer or Arno Breker -
873
00:56:26,640 --> 00:56:30,280
they'd be queueing up to have their portraits done by Andy Warhol.
874
00:56:30,280 --> 00:56:33,320
It's hard to think of any work of art of which one can say,
875
00:56:33,320 --> 00:56:35,880
"This made men more just to one another",
876
00:56:35,880 --> 00:56:40,840
or, "This saved the life of one Jew or one Vietnamese".
877
00:56:40,840 --> 00:56:45,480
Books, perhaps, but as far as I know, no paintings or sculptures.
878
00:56:45,480 --> 00:56:48,040
The difference between us and the artists in the '20s
879
00:56:48,040 --> 00:56:51,840
is that they thought that such a work of art could be made.
880
00:56:51,840 --> 00:56:55,120
Perhaps it was their naivety that they could think so,
881
00:56:55,120 --> 00:56:56,920
but it's our loss that we can't.
882
00:57:27,480 --> 00:57:30,680
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