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In 1914, when the First World War began,

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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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00:17:10,880 --> 00:17:16,520
"Under the guise of turning inward, the Expressionists have banded together into a
generation

248
00:17:16,520 --> 00:17:21,600
"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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