The Shock of the New: The Threshold of Liberty: Part 2
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- Publication date
- 1980
The Shock of the New: The Threshold of Liberty: Part 2
Part 5 of an 8-part series which presents a social history of the impact and development of the visual arts in the 20th century by art critic and writer Robert Hughes. In each episode, Hughes examines the forces which monitored the directions painting, architecture and photography took from the late 1800's to the present. In this episode the desire for absolute freedom and the need to break away from social conformity in art is explored.
Search Educational Film Journals at Media History Project for references to this film
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- 2015-05-19 00:55:12
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- IA113014
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- theshockofthenewthethresholdoflibertypart1_20150518
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- For almost forty years Dolly as being one of the two most famous pictures of his mistrust for the only rival to the Gulf and the cash flows pipes you would have it published it's nighttime and you have to pick it up I think like that all does it stand out at night or in the night the president every night as you call me in front of them to be so I can I could groups doubt in my don't believe they don't fit at that in the morning after she guys I mean it's on the on three minute fix my list and then you'll feel you can face the well with that bomb from a star standing out years ago of the every day becoming much more like to go for them and the days but I'm fascinated to know that. There's also been a greater barest but the political views of talk from outta the greed of a barracuda and the vanity of the drag queen and there was a dog. Come on son pleasing to me is a little Drew but yum. Told a not so blue. Ball single men. Yeah it's truly I'm eccentric but even Visine dime from Fenton Dick eccentric unconsenting. He stole so timely enough is enough students in Madrid in the early twenty S. But around. Twenty five he discovered what religion could do it could subvert from sense of reality instead of a modernist surface Dolly went in for what he called all the most paralyzing tricks of I fully photographic accuracy masses of detail and smooth paint to this see added what he called his paranoia critical method. Basically this meant looking at one thing I'm seeing another as these figures make up of facts. Dolly used this trick again and again in these paintings. This one is called the middle more forces of Narcissus there he scratched on the left and on these me staring at his reflection in the pool and the giant hand on the right. Holding an egg from which a narcissist sprouts exactly mimics his body. Dolly's own considerable narcissism produced many self portraits. Some quite open like this. Others were concealed as in this painting called The Great master baiter. A grasshopper clings to the soft yellow shape which is Dolly's profile bones as it were and layered nose down on its side. And that same profile by now I was running as wax. Terms up on the beach in his most famous image the persistence of memory. Dolly had a brilliant sense of provocation even managed to elaborate on with this one and provoke a solemn argument among his fellow serialist upon whether a pair of pants. Spattered with P.C.'s was an acceptable dream image or not. Like a gland they were titled by constant scratching his mind free will of many such images before the end of the thirty's when they began to get rather tedious and predictable and most of them had to do with sex. Blob done and putrefaction mixed with declarations of impotence. For Dolly loved anything with spoke to flex to duty. Runny cheese flesh held up by questions. Soft watchers. Dolly inherited a lot from Spanish religious art and almost paralyzing morbidity about flesh it is phosphorescent always on the point of dissolution of rot in Delhi there is no such thing as the confident body of classicism but there is no spiritual transcendence either. He locked himself up in the prism of the narcissistic self and then threw away the key. Eventually the dreams weren't real tall just Dolly being Dolly the Nickelodeon of the it. He had not reached his fortieth birthday when Sigmund Freud had the last word on him. It is not the unconscious that I seek in your pictures he wrote but the conscious your mystery is manifested the picture is only a mechanism to reveal it. So there is not great enough for Marvel but just right for wax. It's proper that Dolly should have found this place here in the Paris wax museum the music. Representing culture along with the novelist françois and the clothes design a P.R. come down. For the wax museum was one of the favorite spots of serialism. It was a house of bizarre but second hand illusion. Wax works on either normalize their failures that sent us to hybrids and from that point of view the crude of Iowa the more potent I get. I mock the powers of ass and often none of the consolations of night no wonder the serialist. Except as a backdrop landscape was of no interest to serialism probably found out. Disagree college it was a city movement made by aggressive young eggheads his natural labs the cafe and who's a central city it was Paris in fact it's impossible to imagine serialism without parents. And their equivalents to the endless variety of night was the endless profusion of baffling objects which washed up here in the flea market. Course that was in the good old days before they started calling junk antiques but even so you never knew what you might find. The flea market was like the unconscious mind of capitalism it contained the repressed surplus this is where the saying machine met the I'm on the operating table and into course gave birth to a whole flock of progeny a new app for the surrealist object. The object was color three dimension. The she really made secret affinities visible it was a way of declassifying the world and rendering a permeable to imagination. Ahead with the eyes closed with zippers became our sales Jones quietly sadistic image the spirit of the. Victim made a roof table. Dolly made a whole compendium of these fancy shoes. Golf gang problem called this club and the source of brain and the protection against it fused into one image. And matter I often time produced the most famous and contradictory to relist object of all the fur company the very essence of uselessness. One particularly good object makers the American photographer Man Ray veteran of Dada's an object. It's the result of looking at something which in itself has no quality are charming I pick something which in itself has no meaning. I disregarded completely the quality of the object. I'm against craftsmanship. Say the world is full of wonderful craftsman but there are very few practical dreamers in the early days and I face came over and I passed by hardware shop and I saw a flat iron and the window I think there is an object which is almost invisible maybe I could do something with that what could I do it to had something in it that was provocative so I got a box of tax a grilled on a roll of tax to it to make it useless as I thought. But nothing is really useless you can always find a useless even for the most extravagant the I'm in titled gift was pure malice this one he called object to be destroyed. The count of objects underlined another aspect of the she realist imagination the belief that the marvelous that state of almost sexual excitement but I talk called compulsive beauty was always available. Hidden just below the scheme of reality. The asses to produce the best evidence for the deal lived in a modest house in a Belgium suburb and his name is when I my greet. My greed. To the letter. Stocky taciturn. He died in nine hundred sixty act but he's working to news to serve its audience rather big tore him story painters there. People like stories. Modern Art doesn't tell many and my greet did. However his stories were narratives they were snapshots of the impossible. In one hundred twenty three the architect recalled Lucy I put this photo and he's tracked on the new machine architecture as an example of plain rational design apart. Five years later I'm agreed contradicted him with this painting this is not a part of it became one of the most famous phrases in modern art a manifesto about language the way meaning is conveyed or frustrated by simple because this indeed is not a pipe it was a painting work of art a sign that denotes an object and triggers memory. No painter had a vice a later that basic fact about up so clearly before denying the names of things took you through the mirror of illusion into a quite different world where things change their names and lose their meaning. A candle he calls a ceiling on the moon a shoe. The first characteristic of this world is drained sometimes with the crew dramatic level of the silent movies that my Greek used to watch which is echoed here in his painting the minister sassing. My grief has given us some of the most vivid images of alienation in the whole lexicon about this one is entitled The lovers. This painting of the most piercing sadness and sexual pungency is called the right. The usual tone of might reach workers of the world both matter of fact and slackly out of control. My greed painted things so ordinary that they might have come from a phrasebook and Apple. A glass. A stolid Belgium knew. Only human are. There wasn't much on that list that an average Belgian clock second nineteen thirty five might not have seen in the course of an average building but then that Clark was one of the greats favorite images to. Hear the clocks the same like Ryan on the roofs of build them as though they were commuting from heaven. In a painting you have a canvas on an easel in front of The View. Campbell spares a picture of The View this picture exactly overlaps the real view. And so the play between image in reality suggests that the real world is only a construction of mind and that somewhere among the infinite number of ways of experiencing that world there is one ideal angle from which often reality overlap match few that is the moment of serialist vision. Not great best images don't look like fantasy. Dr tightly painted a matter of fact and even pedestrian they seem to have more in common with reporting and with imagination and so the proper response to them is the double take my great love of paradox and he was its absolute master and these paradoxes needed the context of real life. His paintings are not so much about the world as about the ways we find to describe it. Margreet was obsessed by the weak hold that language has on what it describes that sense of slippage between Worden thing image object is one of the sources of modernist disquiets and in making it to subject my grete became one of the artist was asked to modernise culture come to be understood. His visual booby traps go off again and again because that trigger is thought itself. When the Canon files the walls of familiar images go down and we stand as the title of this painting tells us on the threshold of Liberty. The. Serialist had no heroes among politicians. Dead or alive but they did have a gallery of sites men and women who are considered to have lived up the ideals of the movement before its time and the V.A. is the greatest was the Marquis decide whose castle here of like Austin for violence was considered one of the sacred sites of the serialist movements the divine Mark was first the one eighteenth century man whom the surrealist respected because it was he who would preach the supremacy of desire and it was he who had shown what has become a commonplace in our century that in order to establish the rule of reason the imagination must be censored and repress solvers the first writer to understand the relationship between sex and politics he did most of his writing in prison which is a good place for thinking about the I think of all he became the M. speak about answer to Rousseau these milky doctrine of the natural goodness of man when left in a state of nature not sire said we don't know what our natures are and moreover we can't find out what they are unless we follow our desires to the absolute limits no matter how appalling the disclosures made the. Sub is a blasphemer an atheist and a traitor to his class the aristocracy No wonder then that he had such an appeal to the she realists who are also atheist. Less famous and traitors to their class the board of. The she relapsed. Tributes to suffer like this proposed monument to him by Man Ray often had a blast from a stone which may seem a little dated today but the serialist almost all baptized Catholics living in France when the church still had a great deal of time. The best crackled by Max the Virgin Mary spanking the infant Jesus. Watched by the three wise men but on himself. Six paying loaded with to boo was one of the greats you realest thing but the serial sternly stood for one kind of sexual freedom which insisted that imagination could only be set free by single minded devotion to one woman. Yet this romantic spirit did not translate into their art. There the idea of woman was a thing. American or a piece of furniture. In Homs Bell male sculpture the woman is no more than a sexual doll. Abused manipulated intensely pornographic as the thirty's war on through the Spanish Civil War towards nineteen thirty nine. Their tone was less frustration than apocalypse and accidents. Summed up the sense of foreboding in one prophetic painting called Europe after the Rhine a place reduced to creep in namelessness of the catered planet all rooms and jungle on the current. When the rain in fact did come in the German army rolled into fronts The Serialist prudently ran. Many of them went to America and so it was in New York that the remains of serialism took root to new places. But the greatest American artist of the irrational was already living there in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens. Outside Manhattan. His name was Joseph Cornell and he made boxes. In one sense the box was a metaphor of Cornell's own shyness very few American artist of ever so banished altitude lives to preserve there in that well and there were it's emblematic preserved under glass. Filed away inside the wooden wall. They represent a distant reality not a historical reality exactly more like a theatre of memory whose images keep crossing and recombining the birds the planets the charms the provincial hotels that are a nose and foreign postage stamps. It could have looked precious like Victoriana but it didn't because Cornell had such a rigorous sense of form. Strict and spare like good New England cap and trade. To kill because paintings were full of nostalgia last experience but in Cornell There is much less sense of loss. Everything is there and possessed as memories in the mind. Some of the boxes were very good lab rats. This one he called the Egypt of Mademoiselle clay or the memo that. She was a famous French Quarters and of the eighty ninety is renowned equally for Agreed on her beauty in effect Cornell compares her to clear a path for and makes a custard for with the emblems of Egypt in it a sprinkle sand pearls of the Nile and so all. Cornell was already are developed out of them before the she realised came to America the side of the American irrational that got most from serialism in the forty's was the work of painters like Jackson Pollack Mark Rothko going to ASH and I go key later to be numbered among the abstract expressionists and among them the main bridge was gone. He had a peculiar career this Armenian refugee but he's Florida magination deep insecurities and eventual suicide at forty four. For the best part of twenty years he turned out. Pastiches of the artist that he wanted to become of the Castro and then of Miro imitating him in paintings like this. And then quite suddenly gone he found himself the spidery fluent line that he had got from Miro began to describe landscapes of not quite abstract form shapes like flowers stems tendons sexual organs livers and feather. The canvas post cites it's filled with a kind of blowing the sweaty pre-conscious life it looks into the body and not out from it's. A greater issue among the New York painters was made like The Serialist playfield rational civilization had let them down. They wanted painting to return its audience to what they imagined was primitive reality to art as a magical side. And so Jackson Pollock in the years before he began to deplane directly on the canvas. Use these charge meaty squiggles of paint to translate the shapes of South West Indian out of rock pictographs and sand paintings into images like this one the key done in one hundred forty six. On male and female. Painted for years before. Painting. Accumulated wisdom and spy appealing to MIT but the myths were in decline in the painters were not Indians or cave men but New Yorkers living in the age of psychoanalysis they will act religious artist without a context and like to see realists they concluded that the only I'm polluted areas were left of the modern imagination with the unconscious in the distant past. With their tiny audience of their exalted sense of the artist row American painters like Mark Rothko or here comes Hoffman in the 1940's with the last rematch ix the last artists to paint it as though it had the power to change the objective conditions of life for them. The she realist ideal still held true although there was no chance that it would come true. No promised liberation of the mind could compare to the real liberation of Europe in one thousand and forty five. The fact that so many of the serialist have gone to America. Guaranteed that she religion would be a date issue in France after the war but well after all they had run away and they could no longer command the respect burned by writers like John course up I'll bet a move and stayed and resist so as a movement she religion faded and its absorption industry which it began in the late thirty's became almost complete the movement that had hoped to reshape the mind of wish to man ended by advertising blues of cigarettes. But was that all. Not quite for the memory of serialism. It's a positive ideas was strip mined by artist after artist in the sixty's and seventy's as a proposition about freedom it still remained in front of the intrigue. In nineteen sixty nine the Rumanian artist Christo wrapped a whole section of Australian coastline in plastic and right. This harked back to nineteen twenty when Man Ray wrapped a sewing machine in a blanket and called it the enigma of is adored you catch. By the same token rate all right but the simplest cereal stacked the most gratuitous one would be to walk into the street shooting a revolver at random into the crowd. Again. Almost fifty years later a California named Chris Burton fodder revolver is an airliner taking off over Los Angeles he missed and this action he called out. It is surprising when you look back on the sixty's to see how much of the cultural surface was affected by she religion a lot of the time the kids were on acting the pantomimes of revolt. Didn't know everything illusion that the world is being born again. The old contracts torn up in a new way and the key to this recently being yourself whatever that self much. From love in most of the Living Theatre the catcher warnings of stone poets the word went out that me me me. Anything made by anyone called and asked quite the question the Such up is the same question that a lot of sure realistic to put the skin. Is the self that right sacred cow about culture. Automatically interest. Cannot only hold our interest to the extent that the producers called obstruction. Looking back I don't think there's much choice but in the sixty's they won't because then the fuse through the West is in the twenty's you had a dandy you stick the African based upon the culture of you which likes to realize I'm with you a method with. Ecstasy. Irrationality old time i see us trying to assert himself again dressed like a pantomime was a little natural about some cosmic conscious. If there was one link between she relies on in the sixty's it was the you're losing the view was truth by being born months a past history. Hunting reality intolerable one became a profit. There was another war in Vietnam this time to help create an ideal puff pastry. So it was thought to rob a film. That will describe it to be easy time apart in the city. So what remains of surrealism not not it became exactly what it set up not to be stopped and not a very durable stylus that it took European office to the best part of two hundred years to digest the implications of Michelangelo nudes but she really isn't was completed to just within a matter of fifty years a quarter of the time and in the meantime it's devices of come to look more nostalgic The Revolutionary the migrates and Ernst the ones Hobnobs of contradiction now and often the sale rooms pitching enormous process is just more units on the smooth flow of exchange the blues the meetings of all. But there is another side to the culture religion is. The most vulnerable you know of the mind the show's painting as a vehicle it may not choose to be in have a painting again. Yesterday the poltergeist risk throwing fights in the kitchen. Tomorrow it might turn up in the hole you don't know. It's a very durable spirit and it's hard to exercise but he loves everything that is contrary extravagant from free and is very cussedness its perversity was a poll of innocence and decoration with a. No With put put. Put put. Put. With. Push push. Push push. Push push. Push push push. Push push. Push. To put it best to. Put. The put his foot. Put. To a way to put. To. The. The.
- Run time
- 30:35
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- Internet Archive HTML5 Uploader 1.6.2
- Sound
- sound
- Worldcat (source edition)
- 220158933
- Year
- 1980
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