All language subtitles for S01E03 - What Lies Beneath

This programme contains
some strong language

Las Vegas. It isn't just a city.

It's the world's largest, brightest,
brashest neon work of art.

I also think it's a perfect symbol

of what America's been
for so much of the modern age.

It stands for its
irrepressible, unsleeping,

can-do spirit of optimism.

This astonishing something
created out of nothing.

An Emerald City rising
where 100 years ago,

there was just desert.

Like the rest of America,
Vegas was built on an ideal,

a place where anyone can turn
fantasy into reality.

Where anyone can get rich.

Where anyone can become President.

Free market, free society,
that was the dream.

But is it all a mirage?

In the new world of the
21st century,

America seems like a country in
crisis,

a nation that's lost its swagger,

and along with that the belief
that ITS values, life, liberty,

the pursuit of happiness,

should be THE core values of the
civilised world.

It's become a more plural society,
but also a more anxious one.

And I think if you want to truly
understand the vast changes

that have transformed America's
ways of seeing and thinking,

there's no better way to do that

than by exploring the story
of American art.

In the years after World War II,
suburban America

became the battleground
for the soul of the nation.

An unprecedented economic boom
enabled ordinary Americans

to enjoy all the pleasures of modern
life.

Motorcars, fridges,
freezers, television sets.

But this sense of security was
bought at a price.

The invention of the atom bomb
brought about a new world order.

From now on, the USA
and the Soviet Union

would be locked in a rival
nuclear stalemate,

each defining itself as hero nation

with a mission to vanquish
the enemy.

And with the most deadly of all
weapons available to the Russians,

no people in the world can
feel secure against this aggression.

We believe in freedom.

Freedom, born of the conviction that
every person is a child of God,

and is therefore of supreme worth.

We want freedom for ourselves,
for everyone.

In Russia,
the state owned everything.

The American way was about private
home ownership and free enterprise.

In the late '40s, the US government
encouraged entrepreneur builders

The American way was about private
home ownership and free enterprise.

In the late '40s, the US government
encouraged entrepreneur builders

like William J Levitt, to create
affordable homes for the masses.

Levittown, in Long Island, New York,
is a perfect example

of the new American suburbs
that went up in the 1940s and 1950s.

17,500 houses constructed in just
four years.

Built from cheap
affordable materials,

and assembled using a version
of the same production-line process

that Henry Ford had applied to
the mass manufacture of automobiles.

These simple, box-like structures

were the homes of
a new form of the American Dream.

But if Levittown's cookie-cutter
houses all looked the same,

then so did the faces.

Levittown rules explicitly barred
any residents

who were not of the Caucasian race.

The dream might be for you

if you were a white Anglo-Saxon
patriot, preferably male.

But of course, beneath the surface,

America was teeming with
desperate housewives,

blacks, Hispanics, and many others

whose fears and frustrations
remained completely obscured.

In 1954, small-town Southern boy,
Jasper Johns,

settled in New York city,

and began to paint the ultimate
symbol of American-ness.

The Stars and Stripes.

He painted subtle variations on it,

but always fetishising the same
familiar image.

At the time, most American artists
were painting

intellectual abstractions.

Johns' flags seemed refreshingly new
and direct.

But what were they?

Outpourings of patriotic fervour?

A different kind of abstraction?

Or something else?

The Metropolitan Museum in New York
houses my favourite

of Johns' flags, painted not in the
usual red white and blue,

but simply white
and on a vast scale.

When Johns first presented
his flag pictures

to the American public in the 1950s,

he was extremely reticent
about their meanings.

He said, "I simply paint things
the mind already knows."

The implication being that the
flag was almost a non-subject,

it was such a universally
recognisable symbol

that what meaning could
it possibly possess?

These were purely formal paintings.

What a load of nonsense.

These are angry, passionate
pictures,

they are Johns' way of saying,
of expressing

what he felt was wrong
with American society in the 1950s.

Contentless?

Hardly.

Look at what this picture is
made of.

It's made of a collage of newsprint,

a babble of muffled American voices,

muffled by this thick heavy layer
of encaustic beeswax oil-paint.

The picture is a metaphor.

The picture is a metaphor for Johns'
perception that America is a place

where you're supposed to have
freedom of speech,

you're supposed to have freedom of
behaviour

but actually, you don't.

This is a picture of America, as it
were, buried beneath

the thick, heavy snow of a cold

and illiberal idea

of patriotic duty.

Johns had good reason to be anxious
about the moral status quo.

He was living
in a homosexual relationship

with artist Robert Rauschenberg,

which was not only illegal,

but in an age
of McCarthyite witch-hunts,

it could also get you branded as
a dangerous commie subversive.

To be a fine, upstanding member
of American society,

you had to embrace all its values,

above all, the freedom to shop.

This was the moment
when advertising came of age,

when ad men learnt
how to stop lecturing,

and instead practise
the dark arts of seduction.

They exploited hyperreal colours

and graphic brand logos
to repeat the mantra,

"You can never have too much".

By the early '60s,

a new generation of artists

was confronting the strangeness
of consumer society.

Jasper Johns and his flags had
already begun

to dig beneath the surface of
America's brave new world.

Those who followed
called themselves pop artists,

their subject being popular culture.

Their work seemed just as enticing

as the goods piled high
in the new shopping malls...

but it concealed
a bitter aftertaste.

Claes Oldenburg made supersize,

floppily repulsive hamburgers
out of stuffed cloth

as if to lay bare

the excesses provoked
by the rise of fast food chains.

The dot matrix language of comics

inspired the work
of Roy Lichtenstein,

but always with an uneasy sense
that the modern world

was simplifying human emotions
to cartoon stereotypes.

James Rosenquist created vast
canvases of collaged images,

poster-bright impressions
of the modern world,

mimicking the vomitous splurge

of America's
yowling jungle of signs.

Like most pop artists, Rosenquist
began as a commercial artist,

part of the very establishment
that he would go on to parody

in his later work.

Now 77,

Rosenquist is one of the last truly
great surviving pop artists.

And he's still making
his vast pictures.

Here's a late number
I did this year.

It's called,

"The Richest Person
Looking At A Universe...

"Through A Hubcap."

It's not THE universe,
it's A universe

because there's many universes.

In his early years,
Rosenquist earned a living

by painting ads on the billboards
of Times Square.

That's him, bottom right.

I painted everything you can imagine

in Times Square,

from food,

to movie stars,

to everything.

I mean, you know, when I was painting
big movie stars,

their heads were as wide
as this room.

So I'd paint the hair down
to the eyelid, right here,

it was a good place to stop
for blending skin.

Then after lunch,
I'd paint from the eye

all the way down cheeks

which were multicoloured pastel
things,

down to the corner of the lips.

Paint the top lip,

and then next morning finish the job.

You took all that and put it
in your art, billboard scale,

colours that shout at you,

images that shout at you,

was there a part of you that
actually was in love with that,

that was seduced by it?

No, I thought they were terrible!
They were like...

eyesores!

Since I was a kid I listened to,

# Rinse so white rinse so white
Happy little wash day song... #

I hated fucking advertising.

I hated it all my life
and here I was,

painting gigantic
advertisements in Times Square.

So I began to think,

"Can I take
fragments of billboard imagery,

"assemble them in a picture plane,
that meant nothing."

If you look hard enough,
it means nothing.

Are you saying to me

that those wonderful,
huge, early works,

are you saying that they are
in a sense anti-billboards,

kind of cutting against...?

Exactly, exactly.

This enlarged imagery
is really empty.

And that's what I wanted to show.

The one pop artist whose work
seemed to embrace consumerism

was Andy Warhol.

He took America's most familiar
mass-produced objects

and re-presented them as art,

an art of numb repetition

that mimicked the production line.

His critics accused him
of selling out,

but they didn't get
the true starkness of his message.

There's a common misconception about
Andy Warhol,

the idea that he was
a mere gimmick-monger,

a trickster on
the New York art scene,

a man purely obsessed by celebrity,

status and money.

But it's not true.

Andy Warhol...

was, for my money,

the single most significant
American artist

of the second half
of the 20th century,

a great philosopher, describer,

a man who really understood

what it was that made

this new,
post-war American civilisation

unlike any other civilisation
that had preceded it.

In this world there's variety,

but only of a certain kind.

That's the subject of this,

one of his earliest
series of pictures

I think it's one of his greatest
series of pictures,

the Campbell's soup tins.

We begin with tomato soup,

vegetable soup, green pea soup,

we come all the way through
to bean with bacon soup,

cream of chicken soup,
turkey noodle,

minestrone Italian style
vegetable soup,

new "great as a sauce too"

Cheddar cheese soup.

You can have all this,

but then again everyone
else can have all this too.

It's variety, but it's also a trap.

And I love the way that the
paintings are laid out,

almost as if they're lining a cell

that you can pace,

but you can't ever escape from.

I think this
is Warhol's way of saying,

"This is your world, America.

"This is the prison
you've made for yourself."

To help him generate
his mass-produced art,

Warhol surrounded himself with
a group of free spirits

in The Factory,

his aptly-named
Manhattan studio.

It was THE hip
hangout for bohemians,

speed freaks,

anyone hoping to attain

Warhol's 15 minutes of fame.

So glamorous! Oh!

One of The Factory stalwarts
was photographer Billy Name,

who started out as Warhol's lover,

but quickly became the visual
chronicler of The Factory scene.

45 years on,

Billy lives in the town
of Poughkeepsie

in upstate New York.

These are actually

silkscreen prints of some
of my photographs.

Here's Andy on the telephone.

Now what's more important
than Andy on the telephone?

In the early years especially,

he was always on the telephone.

You were the original
fly on the wall,

I mean, in the sense that
you were so ever present

people just stopped seeing you.
I was.

They stopped seeing you, you
could just record what was going on.

I just could live there, be there,

and no-one would even pay any
attention to me.

And I did know Andy from the time
he was a commercial artist,

through the transition period to when
he was a celebrated fine artist.

So I went through
that whole period with him.

So I've known all the changes,
all the Andys and...

All the Andys! I like it!

If you wanted to explain to somebody
who'd never heard of Andy Warhol,

you know, who never knew
who this guy was,

you know, what would you say the
point of those Brillo boxes

and those Del Monte boxes,

you know, remade and presented
as works of art?

What was he trying to say,

or what were you all trying
to communicate with this?

Well, what we were trying
to say was that

you live in art.

You go to the supermarket

and you go down the rows of cans
and they're all just

stacks and stacks

of icons on your shelves,

and you're living in art.

And Andy was fascinated
with the lucidity of repetition,

the absolute clarity
of what you can see

because in a supermarket they really
want you to see what's there.

And so we produced

these boxes like the Brillo box

in a numerous occasion
so you saw what was there,

and you could not escape
the Brillo box

and the reality of it.

I think of him as almost
like a mirror,

I think of his art
like a mirror. Yes.

It's like, "Look, this is your
world, I'm mirroring it to you."

He is, yes.

The older artists considered

the artist as a hero

whereas when Andy came,

he was the artist as a zero.

The previous generation had been,

turn your back
on the surface culture,

you don't want to deal
with that, it's cheap,

it's shallow,
and don't go into that water.

Whereas Warhol would say,

instead of turning our back on it,

let's just turn around, face it,
and take it over and manipulate it.

Warhol saw that America
treated celebrities

just as it treated products,

as objects replicated
for mass consumption.

A single image,
screenprinted over and over,

evokes a row
of magazine covers,

the frames of a film,

a stack of TV screens.

But Warhol's most powerful work

is his "Death and Disaster"
series, begun in 1962.

Race riots.

Atomic bombs.

Electric chairs.

Car crashes.

All are made
from actual press photographs.

In America,

even death is reproduced

and homogenised.

I think what Warhol was driving at

in those pictures was the way in
which the big media,

television and the newspapers,

were desensitising Americans
by exposing them continually

to horrific images,
whether of war, or of car crashes.

Warhol said in relation to the car
crash paintings,

"When you see a gruesome image once,
it shocks you,

"when you see it again
and again and again,

"you stop thinking about it,
it stops bothering you".

I think he felt that something

strange and bizarre and unpleasant

was happening
to the American psyche,

he felt that Americans
were being desensitised.

Perhaps his darkest statement of all

was simply when he said,

"I think in the 1960s,

"Americans forgot what emotions
were supposed to be,

"and I don't think
they've ever remembered."

Warhol portrayed the car

as just another
of America's morbid machines,

mass producing road crash deaths

for tabloid readers to gawk at.

But others saw the car
in a far more romantic light.

It was a way to leave behind

the suburbs
and the shopping malls...

..and disappear
down the endless open road.

As Jack Kerouac wrote,

"Nothing behind me,
everything ahead of me,

"as is ever so on the road."

For several generations
of American artists,

above all American photographers,

the car on the road,

becomes, literally,

a mobile studio-cum-darkroom,

from which...

a whole series
of photographers create

a set of disconcerting,

kaleidoscopically fractured images
of America, all seen

from the perspective
of the two lane blacktop.

When pictured from a car,

the subtle differences and
dissonances of American society

often became more apparent.

The road photographers showed

that within Warhol's
mass-produced society,

same church,

same shopping mall,

same gas station,

there was still room
for the individual.

And that people who seemed rootless,

alienated and unhappy,

still travelled on in
search of a better life

somewhere else.

Because in one form or another,

the trailblazing spirit

still lived on in America.

PRESIDENT JOHN F KENNEDY:
'We choose to go to the moon

'because that challenge is one
we're willing to accept,

'and one we intend to win.'

As the US and Russia raced skywards

to reach the furthest
frontiers of space,

ordinary men and women

followed their astronaut heroes

from the comfort
of their living rooms.

But for anyone in search
of their own frontier,

American history favoured
just one direction -

west.

A century after the last pioneers
trekked across the continent,

the west was still seen
as the direction of progress -

the future.

And if you kept going west,
you reached Los Angeles.

In the '60s,
it was one of the youngest,

fastest-growing cities in America,

home to Walt Disney's
first theme park,

and of course, Hollywood.

Here, the car was not only
a symbol of freedom,

it was a necessity,

the only way to navigate
a city so vast,

so strung out.

I'll never forget the first time
I came to LA,

I was very young, it was
a very long time ago.

I rented a Buick and I set off

with naive enthusiasm

to find the centre
of this great megalopolis.

After about three days
of driving and driving

and driving and driving,

the penny suddenly dropped,
I realised

this is a city
that doesn't HAVE a centre!

What it's got

is a huge sprawl

of districts and neighbourhoods,
seemingly the same as each other,

all linked together by a vast
spaghetti of a road system.

I have to say I hated
the whole experience,

I found it thoroughly alienating.

I just couldn't cope with it.

Now over the years,

I feel I have learned,

actually, to appreciate
and enjoy this place,

and I now think of LA as one of the
most thrilling, vibrant,

visually exhilarating
built environments

ever created by mankind.

But it took something to unlock

that in me,
and what that something was,

was the art created by painters
who've lived here in LA,

it was looking at how
they painted the city,

at how they saw the city,

that taught ME how to enjoy it.

For artists, LA was a place

free of the long, European oriented
history of the East coast,

a blank canvas
on which to experiment.

The quality of light
was different here.

Richard Diebenkorn saw the city's
bright planes of colour,

the sky, the sea, the tarmac,
and distilled them in paint -

romantic images that borrowed from
cubism and expressionism,

to conjure an abstract beauty

from LA's endless samey sprawl.

Wayne Thiebaud's candy-coloured
objects of desire

captured the plastic brightness

of LA's must-have pop culture,

a sickly-sweet temptation.

And Ed Ruscha used advertising's
flat graphic shorthand

to pick out
some of LA's defining images.

Back in '56,

Ed Ruscha had left Oklahoma City

to follow the same route
as countless wannabe starlets,

west to LA.

His pop art paintings
of the Hollywood sign

seem at first glance to glory
in the thrill of Tinseltown,

in this case

a big screen sunset as seen
from behind the sign,

up in the Hollywood hills.

It doesn't take long to realise,

in fact pretty much as soon as you
get here

you realise you can't actually
achieve the point of view

suggested by Ruscha's painting

because he's placed
the Hollywood sign

on the summit of a hill
that doesn't actually exist,

the sign's on the side.

I think that's part of the joke
of the painting,

I think it's an affectionately
artificial play

on the artifice that he saw
as being central

to this whole culture.

He saw the Hollywood sign as,
if you like,

the quintessence
of Hollywood itself.

As he said with a mixture
of affection and irony,

"This is what Hollywood is,

"a piece of fakery
held up on sticks."

LA in the '60s
just loved artificiality.

From the unfeasibly tall
imported palm trees

to the shape of the buildings,
this was a city inventing itself.

Its unique new architecture

was known as Googie.

Cheeky, referential,

evoking a stack of jukebox records,

or the speedfins of a Cadillac,

it borrowed from the language
of the car,

the space rocket,

the subatomic particle.

This was modernism

for the space age.

I think the only way to really get
the crazy beauty of LA

is to drive through the city
at night.

When you do that,
you realise this whole place...

..is a kind of extraordinary,

vast collective work of art.

And the reason for that, is the fact

that this is a city where everyone
is always on the move.

And that's why

the architecture
and the signage of LA

has to shout
in the way that it does,

because it needs you to stop.

It's saying, "Hey, buddy,
come and buy my liquor,

"come and get some gas,

"enjoy the live nude girls,
girls girls!"

That's why this is,

more than any other city
in the world,

it's the city of the sign.

As the signs and symbols
of advertising

crowded in ever closer
on American life,

so pop art had mirrored the excesses

of capitalism's increasingly loud,

evangelical gospel -

to consume.

But a new wave of artists
was emerging,

who seemed to reflect a more
puritanical side

of the American character.

They were known as the minimalists.

They shared the pop artists' cool
disdain for consumer society,

but took a profoundly different
approach to it in their art.

What the minimalists
hated about pop art

was its apparent celebration
of the bright,

gaudy, tacky packaging

in which American consumerism
wrapped itself.

Its embrace of the whole ethos

of mass marketing and advertising,

the ethos of buy two get one free,
57 varieties, the hard sell.

The minimalists
didn't avert their gaze

from characteristic spaces
of American life

but they looked
at them with different eyes,

like Andy Warhol with
his Campbell soup tin paintings,

they drew inspiration
from the supermarket.

And while they purged

and purified it of colour,

image,

detail,

packaging, they still retained
its strategies and its forms.

Theirs would be an art

made from mute accumulations
of objects,

carefully composed,

rigorously arranged,

neatly stacked.

The minimalists reflected
the coldness of consumerism,

with the formal coldness of a new,

scarily empty, art.

A gallery full of their work

is like a supermarket where the
products can't actually be consumed,

only contemplated

in all their blankness.

Minimalism is a good name

for their vision of what
American life had become,

a life dominated by objects
without meaning,

without hope of transcendence.

And yet, even in minimalism's
rather bleak universe,

there was room, perhaps, for hope,

for dreaming,

for light.

In 1963, artist Dan Flavin
began creating sculptures

using nothing but that ubiquitous
modern lighting unit,

the fluorescent tube.

As a gallery for his work, Flavin
bought this former Baptist Church

in the town of Bridgehampton,
Long Island.

Flavin's astonishing luminous art

is perfectly minimal, in one sense.

He's taken an element
of modern life,

common to supermarkets,
offices, even seedy motels,

and emptied it of meaning,

used it to create a series
of implacable geometric forms.

But why put all this in
a deconsecrated church,

and arrange it
like a series of chapels?

Though Flavin denied any spiritual
aspect to his work,

it's surely significant that
he'd studied for the priesthood

before becoming an artist.

Is there a nostalgia here,

a yearning for divine light

to pierce the godless soul
of modern life?

Or is he saying that the very idea
of religious transcendence,

is nothing more than an illusion,

like a neon sign
to be switched on or off?

You can read it either way.

By the late 60's, a succession of
shocking clashes with authority

was beginning to unravel the fabric
of American society.

Civil rights marchers
were beaten by police,

students protesting
against the Vietnam War

were gunned down
by the National Guard.

Faith in the established order

was crumbling.

Until now artists
in post war America

had expressed their unease
with society

in cool, ironic terms -

pop's hard realism,

or the chilly objectivity
of the minimalists.

But now the sheer atrocity
of the times

demanded a radical new response.

For years, Philip Guston had painted
subtle, tasteful compositions,

like this of 1953.

He was of the old
pre-pop, pre-minimalist school,

the abstract expressionists,

rising above the mundanities
of modern America

to search for higher truths.

But by the end of the '60s

Guston felt he could no longer keep
the world out of his art.

"What kind of man am I", he said,

"reading magazines, going into a
frustrated fury about everything,

"and then going into my studio
to adjust a red to a blue?"

So he began producing angry,
comic-book satires,

a shocking seismic shift

that would change the course
of American art itself.

Guston's daughter, Musa Mayer,

has preserved his studio
pretty much as it was.

So this is the studio.

It feels to me
almost as if he just left here!

The painter's table,
still spattered with paint.

I love it when there's paint
on the floor. Yes...

I always think of...
..we left it.

..it somehow
as painter's blood.

There it is, all the effort.

You've left the paints
and the brushes neatly arranged...

Yes, and that cabinet
is full of old paint.

Still? Still full
of old paint, yes.

But tell me, because what
I'm curious to know is,

when he made this great shift,
this great change,

this new start,
had the first exhibition...

..what was the response, what did
everybody in New York think,

you know, when they turned up,

and there it is, the new work?

Well, very negatively, actually.

Almost universally,

the critics panned the new work,

they were really shocked.

But when you look at, say,
a picture like this,

the Ku Klux Klan,

what's it called this one?

This is called Riding Around.

Riding Around. I mean,

what do you think he was driving at
by painting pictures like this?

He had a whole cast of characters,
he called them characters.

And they were hooded
figures,

and yes, they resembled Klansmen,

but they have a broader meaning,
I think, that has to do

with concealment and...

what we reveal, and don't reveal,
about ourselves.

Do you think
having these hooded figures,

smoking their cigars,

is his way of saying,

"America is a place where people
are concealing things,

"concealing the truth from you.
It's a place full of bigotry,

"full of racism, it's a place..."
It could be.

I mean look at the blood
on the hoods there. Oh, yeah, right.

So they're definitely up to no good.

I get the feeling that in a sense,
with this late work

it's as if he's almost

popping the boil of his own
frustration that's been building up,

it's like he's lancing it,
and all this pus is coming out,

which is sort of...
Good metaphor!

You brought out this picture.

So this is Nixon, with phlebitis,
which he was plagued with,

at San Clemente, which was his
retreat on the beach in California.

What do you think it symbolised for
your dad, I mean this pussy leg?

Is it the corrupt administration?
To me it looks like a map.

Doesn't it look like a map to you?
In a way.

I've always thought that this
is like the body politic.

Oh, that's a brilliant idea,

so this is America, seeping pus...

Seeping pus and blood,

with the state lines drawn
in blood and pus.

That's a brilliant idea,
hadn't occurred to me.

So it really is a portrait
of America,

and he's got the American flag.

I like to think this is almost
a little embedded reference

to Jasper Johns' flag paintings,
the flag, but it's the flag melted,

it's somehow gone rotten
and there's Nixon, literally,

presented as a dickhead,

with a cock for a nose
and two testicles for cheeks.

I mean it's such a sort of
vicious, satirical,

angry picture isn't it?
Yes, it is.

And I notice that you've placed
this wonderful picture...

pride of place, centre stage. Yes.

I'm guessing that it has a special
place in your heart?
It does, it does.

In a sense
it's a self-portrait.

Um...it's a self-portrait
of a self-portrait.

The artist, the hooded figure.

Because he acknowledged the...
dark side of himself.

He painted the dark side of himself,
he had the courage to do that,

which is something not many artists
at that time were able to do.

'Guston's disconcerting paintings

'tore up the rule book
of American art.

'Until now,
movement had followed movement

'in a seemingly inevitable way -

'abstract expressionism,
pop, minimalism.

'But after Guston
anything was possible.'

Postmodernism was the label
critics tried to stick on
this new uncertainty,

but all that
meant was that, from now on,
art can be about anything you want.

It was a reflection of what was
happening in American
society in the '70s -

the rise of the individual.

Black power, gay rights,
women's lib.

The emergence of marginalised,
hidden voices.

And art became a means of exploring
those newly formed identities,

whether through the street language
of graffiti

or the unflinching eye
of the camera.

In 1978, a 25-year-old
photographer called Nan Goldin

moved from Boston
to Manhattan, New York.

She came to the Lower East Side,
then an extremely shabby district,

because she was fascinated by
its subculture,

a mix of drag queens,
heroin addicts and all other
kinds of social outsiders.

Nan Goldin photographed herself
and the people she knew,

in tenement buildings
just like this one.

Her pictures documented
intimate moments,

intentionally raw,
unaltered, unstaged.

She set out to capture
her friends' lives,

often lived in secret,
behind closed doors.

And when some of her friends
began to die of AIDS

she documented that too.

But these pictures
weren't voyeurism -

they were Goldin's
chronicle of her own life.

She said,
"My camera has saved my life.

"It's made bearable things that
feel unbearable."

When I think of Nan Goldin's work,

I can't help thinking back to
Jasper Johns' White Flag,

that image of the American flag,
almost as a...as a quilt laid down,

smothering the teeming multiplicity
of America's many voices
and many cultures

and I think her achievement
was to...

was almost if you like to...
lift a corner of that sheet

and reveal this
hidden, secret, quite dark world,

but to do so in a beautifully
affectionate and vibrant way.

When Ronald Reagan was elected
president in 1981,

he repackaged the American Dream.

In an echo of
1950s Levittown,

he believed the US could be made
great again through home ownership.

Now not only the marginalised voices
would be heard, but the voice too of
the little man -

aspirational middle America.

After all, if a B-list Hollywood
actor could make it as President,

then anyone could make it,
regardless of class,
background or taste.

The artist who most perfectly
captured that idea was Jeff Koons.

His work transfigured
the seemingly vulgar,

the telltale lapse of taste
of the nouveau riche.

Most critics were horrified.

Others saw a witty take
on eclectic materialism.

I think of Koons as
Andy Warhol take two,

but a Warhol who wants to liberate
Americans to wallow in their taste,

no matter how kitsch or obscene.

But it's hard to know
whether I'm right,

or whether Koons has his tongue
firmly in his cheek.

Because if ever an artist
was deadpan,

more so even than Warhol,
it's Jeff Koons.

Andrew, how are you? I'm very well,
it's so nice to see you.

So what are you working on at
the moment, paintings or sculptures?

Well, you know, I'm always
working on sculptures
and paintings together

and I'm working on
a series called Antiquity right now,

so I'm just in the process of
finishing off some of the first ones.

I know this is a work in progress

but we've got a lot of, as it were,
your motifs here,

in the sense of the shiny
inflatable, the sexy girl,

this wonderful dolphin, and these
again all seem to me

to be playing into...imagery
that everybody likes.

So I think you've said to me in the
past that you want everyone to feel
they can participate in your work,

you don't want to exclude anybody
from it.

Well, a piece like this I think
an average viewer could look at...

My daughter Scarlet, who's only
one year old, was here at the studio
three days ago,

and I brought here in here and she's
just pointing, "Ah, ah...", you know,
and she loved the painting

and she was relating to maybe
the childlike quality of the monkey

or just the feminine quality
of the painting or the dolphin.

When you're that age, you're open.

I mean, it's just like...

I mean, there's nothing that
you're not open to,

I mean, you're open to everything.

And it's the opposite of being closed
down, that... "Oh, that's kitsch."

I don't believe in kitsch.

I believe in things that they
are as they are

and they're perfect as what they are.

And if lots of people like it,
what's wrong with it?

Yes. I see that as...
as being generous,

because what you want to do in life
is remove anxiety.

And the way you remove anxiety is
through acceptance.

My work always has been trying to
communicate to people that

it's all right to accept your own
history, your cultural history,

the things that you grew up with.
I grew up with little knick-knack
kind of little ceramic pieces.

My grandparents had it,
my parents would have had ceramic
lights. That's OK.

The painting that we had
above our fireplace,

which was just some commercial
painting of some little hut
out in a forest,

that's what I looked at
every evening. That's OK.

My father and mother made us feel
very much as though we were
participating in the American Dream,

that we were the middle class,
but there was always a sense
that we were moving up.

And I was always brought up to be
very self-reliant, self-sufficient,

and a lot of it's about
this sense of mobility.

Can I ask you about these huge,
almost billboard-sized photographs

of you making love
to your then wife La Cicciolina?

There was something weirdly pure
and innocent about it,

as if you'd taken pornographic
imagery and somehow made it
sort of innocent.

Were you trying to take that form

and say, well, you needn't be
degraded by it, or...

You know, I still find myself
puzzling over those pieces.

Yep. What I wanted to do was to make
a body of work

that communicated
the removal of guilt and shame,

because I'm dealing with cultural
guilt and shame.

So I tried to use the body,
and the insecurity that people have,

the guilt and shame
that they have with their own body,

to again communicate this state
of not having guilt and shame.

And that's the highest state
that art can take you.

And there's no judgment,
there's complete acceptance.

However harshly most of the art
establishment judged Koons' work,

it scored a bull's-eye with wealthy
bankers and social climbers.

In fact, his work has
since commanded

some of the highest prices
of any living artist.

Economically, the '90s were
a bit of a rollercoaster.

But US confidence
was at an all-time high.

The old Soviet enemy had collapsed.

It seemed like the good guys
had won - game over.

America sank back into
a deep armchair of complacency.

And the quintessential
artistic expression of that

appeared, aptly enough,
not on a canvas,

but on millions of
television screens.

The Simpsons are hardly
a model family,

and the programmes exude a
corrosive cynicism about the ideals
behind the old American Dream.

Take Homer's advice
to his children -

"Well, kids, you tried and you
failed, the lesson is - never try."

And yet somehow the adventures
of this curiously yellow family seem
to me to announce a seismic shift

in the story of American art.

The whole show is saturated
with cultural references
of the broadest possible kind,

guest appearances are made
by characters as various
as the pop musician Jon Bon Jovi

and the reclusive artist
Jasper Johns.

But what the Simpsons says
first and foremost is that
anything and everything,

from Dunkin' Donuts
to the New York Philharmonic

can be considered legitimately part
of American culture.

The Simpsons reflected the cultural
overload of images streaming through
the media and the internet.

It became harder to tell,
through this information blizzard,
which way America was headed.

And then, on September 11th 2001,
the world changed.

The terrorist acts of 9/11
were a murderous outrage,

the public massacre of
thousands of innocent people.

And they were also planned

with a hatefully potent sense
of visual symbolism,

flying American planes
into American skyscrapers,

those towering symbols
of ascendancy, optimism,

the free market economy,
everything really that America
stood for in the 20th century.

And I think it had
a shattering effect

on this nation's sense
of its place in the world,

I don't think it's
any exaggeration to say
there was America before 9/11

and there's America after 9/11,
and they aren't the same place.

Architect Michael Arad's
9/11 Memorial,

built on the site
of the World Trade Center,

is a solemn, heartfelt monument
to a great tragedy,

but also an
unintentionally startling sign
of America's lost confidence.

Two vast pits mark the exact
footprints of the Twin Towers,

powerful reminders of the horrifying
destruction that was wrought here.

But there's no sense of hope -

none of the old American spirit,
determined to survive
and overcome any challenge.

Instead, a great wall of tears
flows endlessly down,
into the deepest pit of oblivion.

And when the light catches
these flecks of falling water,

it evokes the most awful
9/11 memory of all -

the image of those who chose
to jump to their deaths

before the towers collapsed.

The "War on Terror" and the economic
meltdown have created in America,
if not a sense of impending doom,

then certainly a national anxiety
that surfaces in art.

And if you want to take the
temperature of American art today,

there's no better place to come
than Brooklyn, home to a hive
of younger artists' studios.

In this warehouse,
a team of assistants help sculptor
Matthew Day Jackson

to produce work that tries to get
under the skin of modern
America's predicament.

These look like sort of
aerial views of cities.

Yeah, they're from a series
called August 6th 1945.

Is that the date of Hiroshima?
Yeah.

They're pretty amazing looking.

Yeah, these are all in a stage
before...

before they get, uh, burnt.

Burnt? Yeah, they get burnt.
I want them to be burnt uniformly,

as if to suggest that
there wasn't a detonation,

but just a sort of continuation
or an atmosphere of fire.

Are you going to film?
Actually, I have,

not to record the act
but to create an illusion.

So I'm not interested in the act,
but when you look down the side
of the painting,

tilt your head to the side,
that you can begin to see
streets and buildings.

And to see a rush of fire move
through the alleyways and streets.

So in a sense it's this idea

that when we invent nuclear energy
and when we invent the atom bomb,

we also invent this ability to...

Eradicate all life on planet Earth?

HE CHUCKLES

Yeah, but it's also in terms of the
sort of mythology of the Cold War,

we believe that it's over,
it definitely is a much more
comfortable thought

than to think that it's just
continued and moved to
different places, and...

So you're sort of saying to us,
"Hey, did you forget that?"

Oh yeah, totally, I think
that we have forgotten.

I'm intrigued by this,
I was just thinking that
if somebody didn't know your work,

it'd be pretty hard to guess
that the man who created these
pieces also created these.

Tell me what the skeletons are,

are they based on the
oldest ever found human skeleton?

No, there's a range of current
to three million years old.

And then from three million years old
back to current again,

but in one continuous spectrum,
in a rainbow.

So it's a kind of spectrum
evolutionary skeleton.

Yeah, if you were to take the toes
and tip them right next to
each other,

the colour of the toes are one step
away from the colour of those toes,

so that essentially it'd
create a sort of Mobius loop.

So I could almost imagine them
looping round and round. Yep,
for ever and ever and ever.

But if I walk it, I'm starting
with me, and I move through time...

1.5 million years to...

and then now you're probably like
three... Million years ago.

Yeah, and so
in terms of thinking about progress.

To move to a point in technology

where we've found this ability
to return ourselves
to a pre-technological past.

How do you mean?
Because we can blow the world up?

Yeah, but it's also in terms
of if that technology was
ever used in wide scale,

it wouldn't just destroy life,

but also all the tools that we've
used in terms of our evolution.

I see, so if I get it right,
if I follow the piece,
if I follow the spectrum,

if I follow the idea...
this small brain, Homo sapiens,

evolved to have such a large brain
that he was able to
create the possibility

of destruction on such a vast scale
that he would return himself back

to a state of primitive man.

I see quite a lot of apocalypse
in your imagination, but I do
also see it as exultation,

almost kind of maybe a certain kind
of laughter in the dark?

If that's the right phrase?
Yeah, yeah.

Or as Ronnie James Dio might say,
a rainbow in the dark.

THEY CHUCKLE

Jackson is one of several artists
in America today who seem to
exude anxiety through their work,

as they challenge their country's
old assumptions about the
inevitability of progress,

the idea that all frontiers
must lead to a promised land.

In one sense,
they're part of a tradition.

For centuries, American artists have
played a vital part in shaping the
American sense of nationhood.

They've given visual form
to America's dreams and ideals,

they've questioned its ideologies,

and above all, they've tried
to define just what it is that
makes this civilisation unique,

unlike any to have preceded it.

Through it all, there's been
this sense that because America
was a nation unburdened by history,

it was the home of the new,
this was where the future was made.

But I think that's all changed.

I think many Americans fear
that they're no longer in charge
of their destiny,

that their destiny's
being shaped elsewhere.

And that's why so much
recent American art seems
so hesitant, so uncertain.

It's an art of questions,
not of answers.

And at the centre of it
lies one particular question -

what does the future hold?

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