Original subtitles

What can art do when horror comes calling?

What can art do when civilisation itself is lost?

I've been here before, half a century ago.

Coming back is like the return of a bad dream.

Theresienstadt. Terezin in Czech.

It's about an hour's drive, from Prague

an 18th-century garrison town.

Classically designed bastions,

tidy streets, a grassy square for parades.

It was also the stage set for an evil charade,

a sham culture.

From 1941 onwards, Theresienstadt was filled with Jews,

150,000 in all, deported from across Central Europe.

To deceive the world into believing they were being treated humanely,

cheerful street scenes were staged and filmed.

There was football...

..a children's opera.

What the cameras did not record was the truth.

The town turned into a terrorised ghetto -

beatings, hangings and shootings.

At the heart of this malignant deception were the children.

Separated from their parents,

they played and performed for the SS cameras.

When they were shipped on to Auschwitz, they would be the

first, along with the elderly, to be sent to the gas chamber.

In December 1942, an art teacher was deported to Theresienstadt.

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who trained at the Bauhaus,

filled her meagre luggage allowance

not with clothes but with art materials.

Childless herself, she would become an art mother to the

children of Theresienstadt, fierce and inspiring.

In this building, she held art classes and gave the children

a momentary escape, if only in their imaginations.

After the war, two suitcases Friedl had hidden were found in the camp.

They contained 4,500 pieces of art made by the children.

These pictures are full of flights - literally - of fancy.

This is a dream of flying. When we want to be somewhere else,

we dream of flight,

and there is this figure, who is not a witch, who is flying over a bed.

And there's a little figure with red hair who's having the dream,

and with an arm extended

like a conductor conducting celestial music.

Who is she? She's Ella Steinova,

and she lives, she survives.

Good for her. One in the bloody eye for the damn Nazis.

She survived, bless her.

And this is a picture of enormous butterflies that have

landed on a huge bloom of glorious colour.

This is Ruth,

Ruth Gutmannova, who does not survive, who is murdered,

presumably at Auschwitz.

And we have slippery things - jellyfish and eels and

seaweed and sea anemones -

and it's all suspended beautifully

in a place they can't get at you, underwater.

And the flight continues.

There's another very poignant view by a nine-year-old looking out of

a window towards an imaginary landscape of light and air.

Here, one of trains here. It's amazing.

And there's no sense yet that trains are...

..the angel of death, really.

So, so profoundly moving.

One I really love, it's a cut-out

at the bottom here by Eliana Mandlova,

who also doesn't make it out,

and it's again an aerial view

of an imaginary landscape of trees and mountains,

but the imaginary landscape is made from a piece of official

filing paper of some sort, and dates and columns.

And here the material of bureaucracy, filing paper, has been

turned by art into a place these children could go to for a while

and feel alive and feel free.

Of the 15,000 children who passed through Theresienstadt,

barely 150 survived.

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was murdered at Auschwitz on 9th October 1944.

But thanks to her, the imprint of her young pupils' vitality

remains inextinguishable.

Each picture defies

the dehumanisation that was the condition of the Holocaust.

But each picture also begs a larger question.

What was art to do in the face of a century of total war and genocide...

..a century of revolution...

..a century of profound social and technological change...

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

..a century in which all the hard-won rules

of art were themselves torn up and thrown aside?

Was art destined to become no more than a Sunday afternoon distraction?

Or would it seek to be something deeper, more lasting,

a way of re-envisioning the world?

Would it be content to occupy a corner of our lives

or aim to be at the centre of it?

Is the art of our own time just so much buzz and fashion,

a hot investment for the rich,

or is it an absolute necessity,

the light from humanity's vital spark?

This is one answer art makes to the woes of the modern world,

not only to its brutality but also to its frantic materialism,

and it's a very Zen answer.

In 1987, the Japanese entrepreneur Soichiro Fukutake decided

that Japanese cities had become living hells of inhuman alienation

and gross consumerism.

He bought half the island of Naoshima in the Seto inland sea,

and on it he created an art island.

It would be both a shrine to great works of modern art

and, in its own right, a place of contemplation.

People would come and immerse themselves in its aesthetic power

and spiritual purity.

And, as they did so, all the ugliness

and violence of contemporary life would be washed away.

They would be put in touch with the elemental forms of the universe

and so with their true selves.

You might call it retinal yoga,

healing through purified vision.

In its radical simplicity, the Chichu Art Museum,

designed by architect Tadao Ando,

is a testament to the enduring moral faith of modernism

and its core belief that the renewal of civilisation only

comes about when the stale clutter of the past has been cleared away.

A century ago, the prophets of modernism tried to

pull down the pillars on which art had rested for thousands of years -

..the human figure and face,

the drama of nature's abundance...

..and the endless treasury of stories sacred and profane.

But what would be put in their place?

Well, why not, the modernists said,

just those things intrinsic to making art itself -

line, form, colour?

That, at any rate, was what the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian

came to believe, and it became his life's pursuit.

But it was a long odyssey. In the early years of the 20th century,

in Zeeland, in the south-west Netherlands,

he painted an old lighthouse.

The screaming colours of expressionism

were stabbed on in tile-like squares with the end of a hog-bristle brush.

As the mood of his vision took him,

sand dunes could be turquoise undulations veined in gold.

But these paintings are still depictions of their subject matter.

It wasn't until autumn 1914 that Mondrian had the epiphany

which would bring true abstraction into the world.

He was alone with his sketchbook and the sea.

And it was, I think, because of that solitude

that now something really dramatic happened.

He was transfixed by the glitter of light on the waves...

..struck by the lines of the pier stretching into the sea.

But instead of painting their appearance, he translated

the afterburn of the impression into a kind of rhythmic notation,

just vertical and horizontal strokes.

This was a wholly new visual language.

It was art alone now.

And Mondrian was pretty much on his own - no subject, no model,

just sheets of paper and lengths of canvas in a place no-one had

been before, the great, boundless space of abstract vision.

In the Paris of the 1920s, Mondrian simplified and magnified.

Panels of primary colours were hung on a grid, depth was ironed flat.

Everything on the grid was

so perfectly calibrated for balance that you could stare and stare and

cross a threshold of sensation into Mondrian's self-contained universe.

For the artists, the grids were more than just decorative games.

They were meditation exercises,

entryways to a place of deep harmony.

And they weren't meant just for galleries or living rooms

but as a whole programme of visual re-education,

capable of healing the world.

Though the grids seem simple,

they're actually miracles of fine-tuned optical calculation.

The colours swell and press against the black rods of the armature,

or else they lie captive to their confinement.

And those colour planes, which ought to seem inert

and gridded to death, are a living forcefield.

In 1940, to escape the rolling disaster of the war in

Europe, Mondrian moved to New York, a city built entirely around a grid.

But this grid moved and shook with lights and business and music.

So how could he not respond to a city rocking with syncopated energy?

The painting represents

as revolutionary a departure for Mondrian as Pier And Ocean did

all those years ago.

It takes the classic formulae of his grid paintings

and it throws it out of the 30th-storey window.

This is a picture about animation.

Of course it's affected by, if not really about, New York.

Of course it pulses with energy. Why are those lines broken,

if not to make the paint pulse and flicker and shine and shimmy?

Abstraction had been, under Mondrian's presidential authority,

a very sober, austere, deliberate kind of business.

People had treated him almost as if

he was a kind of high priest of philosophical purity,

and here he is essentially all about what? He is about play.

Broadway Boogie-Woogie was followed by Victory Boogie-Woogie.

Though it was unfinished at Mondrian's death in February 1944,

when victory was far from a done deal,

the patches and strips of colour paper,

which Mondrian could move around to fine-tune the composition,

give it a jumping, flickering energy - almost as

though he could sense the celebration that would come.

It's official, it's all over. It's total victory.

That hit of liberated, jubilant energy was

sustained by the abstractions painted in New York after the war...

..abstractions pumped up with the vitality of expressionism.

Jackson Pollock's pictures were monumental in scale

and ferociously physical in execution.

Mondrian's calculated finesse had been swept aside

by instinctive whiplash dripping and staining.

It was all "look at me" action, and when you did look,

you got a nonstop loop of the drama of the painting's creation.

Yet somehow none of this dissolved into chaos.

What the best Pollocks delivered

was a rhythmically orchestrated web of line and colour.

Pollock and the other giants of abstract expressionism were

hailed as heroic individualists...

..the answer to the production-line Technicolor glamour

of American life.

Yes, just watch the fur fly as the most talked-about

girls in Hollywood go out loaded for big game.

# Diamonds are a girl's best friend... #

But perhaps there was another way to look at that glitz,

a lovingly ironic look which would remake it as American iconography.

# ..big baguettes Time rolls on... #

Those artists who chose not to hold their noses at popular culture

but bring it into their art clearly owed something to that old

tease of Marcel Duchamp's,

that anything could be art if it was framed and labelled as such.

# Tiffany's!

# Cartier!

# Black Star... #

For the high priests of abstraction, pop was an outrage,

a wallowing in the junk from which art was supposed to redeem us.

Yet it's this visual greediness which has made contemporary art

such a hit, the sense that the quality of the art

and its subtlety isn't necessarily compromised by its playfulness.

But of course, enjoying pop art doesn't mean to say you can't

also surrender to the great abstract machines.

Everything, all of this, feeds into

the spectacular art universe of today.

But there are some contemporary artists for whom neither

abstraction nor pop art is quite enough,

because they want to return to the original, morally charged mission

of modernism, to rescue us from the numbing routine of daily life.

They want to bring us up short, to bring us close to the drama

of the human condition, to make us see,

feel and think it intensely all over again.

And it turns out that in order to do this, they have to return

and engage with exactly all those things that modern art thought

it had banished forever - the human figure, the materials of nature

and, above all, those endless, haunting stories

which never, ever go away.

On the outskirts of Paris, in what was once a warehouse, are the

studios of an artist who's dedicated himself to engaging with history.

What was once a car park is full of models of crashed fighters,

almost full size, all made of lead.

Lead poppies and sunflowers sprout from some of them.

And the site is repeatedly overflown by light

aircraft from a nearby airfield, as though the war is still going on.

Inside are the archives and research materials

of the great master of recovered memory, Anselm Kiefer.

# Der kleine, weiche Strauss

# Den ich dir geschickt ins Haus... #

Born, like me, in 1945, just before the end of the war,

Kiefer grew up in a bomb-site culture,

where dwelling on recent history was judged unhealthy.

I came late to the German history.

In school, we had not so much about German history.

It was like Alexander the Great,

and then came the Baroque and then the Renaissance, and

then for the Nazi, for the Third Reich, it was one or two weeks, too.

You know? But you had some of it,

because I thought you told me that there was almost none of it.

Later, when I was already in the art school, I found by accident -

I don't know how it happened -

a disc what the Americans produced to explain what German history was,

the last 15 years. You never told me that. So, a record?

And there was a voice of Hitler.

Die Partei wird fur alle Zukunft

die politische Furhrungsauslese des deutschen Volkes sein.

And I was so impressed and so fascinated, and so, erm...

..abgestossen, auch. Abgestossen.

Repelled. Yes. Repelled and fascinated

from the voice of Hitler, you know?

And then this was the moment

I started to study about the German history. Mm.

..diese Zukunft restlos uns gehort.

CROWD CHEERS

Kiefer's first project was called Occupations...

..a combination of performance and photography,

satirical poses meant to pierce the conspiracy of forgetting...

..a wound opener.

Off he went where the Panzer divisions had gone,

often wearing his father's Luftwaffe uniform,

Sieg Heil to scenery

but also to the seductive spell of German art memories.

But satirical provocations alone

would never have made Kiefer a great artist.

This did.

Paint thick with memory,

physically encrusted with the debris of history's destructions...

..images that recall the blasted,

bombed-out cities in which Kiefer himself grew up.

But look closer.

There are names, written in Kiefer's spidery hand,

great figures of all the Germanic peoples

from history, culture, art...

..painters like Durer, generals like Wallenstein,

an indiscriminate gathering of both the gifted and the dangerous.

Their names recall a building

and a moment around which German national identity had been formed.

This is the Walhalla, near Regensburg,

finished in 1842, the pet project of Ludwig, King of Bavaria.

He took the Norse idea of Valhalla, resting place of the greatest

warriors fallen in battle, and Germanised it,

filling this neoclassical pantheon with portrait busts,

heroes of German culture...

..the very same names that Kiefer includes in his paintings.

In the 1930s, of course, the Walhalla became

a place of cultural pilgrimage for all good Nazis.

Kiefer called a recent show in London "Wallhalla".

In its central corridor, German memory has become a hospital ward.

The beds are empty...

..labelled, as though their occupants have

passed on, the obsessions of German mythology

taken off to history's mortuary.

I've always been moved by Kiefer's work

because it seems to share the historian's

version of the Hippocratic Oath, to wage war against forgetfulness.

His vast landscapes are often soiled and smoking.

On them, he lays down fateful railway lines

stretching away into a remote distance,

where the vanishing point of perspective

is also the vanishing place for people.

Well, welcome to the inside of Anselm Kiefer's brain.

Quite a place, isn't it?

He calls it his arsenal, but the only weapons we've got here

are the things that matter most to Kiefer - memories.

And there they are, printed on spools of lead.

He loves lead as a medium. It's a very unusual choice,

and the sense in which it's kind of dangerous is perfect for Kiefer.

It bears the impression of all sorts of catastrophes

and calamities on those great spools and ribbons hanging down.

This is also an archive, isn't it?

It's an archive of his own particular world.

So we've got the titles of his favourite stories,

but we also have the names of heroes there.

Together with the kind of raw, blond hank of hair, we have the Lorelei,

the Rhinemaidens, who lured sailors to their death on the rocks.

We have Freia and Hodr, all sorts of gods and heroes cluttered here.

I must say, this actual place makes even my own study look quite

neat by comparison.

But this is the sort of place that you feel you've

stumbled into after a bomb has dropped on it.

You know, you've just been abandoned. There's something else

about this place, which is not just an archive, not just an arsenal.

For me, it absolutely is a chapel.

And there's the altar, isn't it?

And those lead spools of printed photographs are supported

by the other instrument of memory, a printing press.

If Anselm Kiefer's life's work is to keep the past from oblivion,

he's not alone in that.

Memories live and burn, but, very often, they're edited memories -

customised histories, whitewashed - and only the bravest,

toughest artists can enter those battle zones.

Kara Walker was born in California

but grew up beneath the shadow of one of those customised memories.

Stone Mountain rises just outside Atlanta, Georgia.

On the face of the mountain, the largest relief carving

in the entire world commemorates the leaders of the

American Confederacy.

Jefferson Davis, Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson,

the principal defenders of the right to keep slaves -

the perfect backdrop for a family gathering.

Friends or colleagues would talk about Stone Mountain

just as recreation, you know, "Go to Stone Mountain..."

Place to have a picnic? You go to a laser show...

Yeah, you go, they had some rides and games...

Did you go to a laser show? Well, not until I was 16,

with some hippie friends, and we all got dirty looks.

They do an animated re-creation of the Confederate heroes marching off

on their horses and then you see an animation

of Ray Charles singing Georgia On My Mind.

# Georgia

# Georgia... #

We should also say that this is the place where the modern

Ku Klux Klan was founded... Exactly. ..in 1915. 1915.

The Stars and Stripes and the Ray Charles soundtrack say,

"Everything's OK now,"

but the carving enshrines the values of the Confederate

slave states and Stone Mountain has become the site for

annual gatherings of the Klan.

CHANTING

You didn't sit around and talk about it at school or in the family

or anything? We didn't talk about it when we got American flags

with Ku Klux Klan flyers attached to them on out mailbox.

Everybody did, it wasn't a death threat, it was just a reminder,

you know, I think that was... I was perplexed by it but I don't

remember anybody saying anything in particular about it.

That wasn't the first time that I got a Klan flyers in my life.

It just kind of became, like, a regular...

It's good that we can - you can, especially - chuckle about it,

really, but it's deeply sinister. Yeah.

For more than a decade now, she's been making a shockingly

defiant art of resistance. Using the inescapable blackness

of the silhouette tradition to empty it of its myths and pieties.

Instead of sentimental storytelling, the kind that

features in children's books, these silhouettes picture the

violations and torments of slavery.

In A Subtlety - the term given to artistically fashioned confections

brought to European aristocratic tables -

the bitter history of sweetness made by slave labour

is embodied in a colossal sphinx-like figure

sculpted from sugar paste.

Surrounded by molasses-dripping little attendants.

It was made in the empty shell of an old sugar factory

and it is a great black and white anthem to every kind of ruin.

More recently, she's taken to making collages of drawings

done in sumi ink, though the shades of grey are only technical,

not moral.

A recent show portrayed, in a vein of horror/comedy,

the endless theatre of American violence, past and present.

The centrepiece of that show was not just mountainous in scale -

18-feet wide and 11 high -

but also in form, as if in answer to the dumb colossalist hyperbole

of Stone Mountain.

On this vast cliff face of cruelty, historic characters crash

their allotted dates.

Stonewall Jackson points his revolver at James Brown.

There are rapist slave masters and Black Panthers.

The current incumbent of the Oval Office hides gleefully,

defecating beneath the skirts of a Klansman.

These images recall another grim look at the un-lookable...

..Goya's unsparing confrontation with horror.

Not just - how can we do such deeds?

But - how can we bear to look at them?

There was a semi-common goodwill somewhere out there

in the period of time since, at least in my lifetime...

There was the election of 2008!

Exactly. And 2012. 2008, 2012, there was something that felt like,

"Yes, yes, we are better than all of these events that have happened,

"these racist events that have happened over the decades,

"over the centuries." But...

..yeah, that that could break down so quickly, so cataclysmically...

So violently. And so violently, um...

Oh, boy...

Not all of the art engaging with the endurance of tradition

ends up in a brutal, combative place.

The Ghanaian artist El Anatsui lives and works in Nigeria.

I think it's OK. His glowing, lustrous, robe-like hangings

seem to flow down the wall, as if sumptuously soft fabric.

This immense mantle-like robe is made of

tens of thousands of flattened bottle tops.

From bottles of booze - whisky, rum and beer.

But they are treated almost as if they were the work of a

medieval mosaic maker. These are glowing, shimmering tiles,

and they are connected, or wired, just by copper wiring.

So what you have, actually, in this extraordinary piece of work

is something that operates on so many different levels.

El Anatsui's father in Ghana wove kentae fabrics,

which were made for festive occasions.

So, bursting from this phenomenal array of colours

is that sense of memory and practice of rejoicing

but also these tens of thousands of bottle tops - it's about urban waste.

So what we have here is the experience of that African culture

in this huge metropolitan beehive swarm of the modern

West African city.

And it does something else, that is

quite hard to find sometimes amidst the self-conscious witticisms

and poses and intellectualism of contemporary art,

it does not hold its nose at the idea of beauty.

Not at all - it reinvents it.

The strongest contemporary art has this magical

power of transformation.

It can take last night's ephemeral rubbish,

souvenirs of the hangover, and turn it into something enduring,

something which actually sustains tradition.

And in the most artful hands,

the very materials of destruction can turn into the elements of creation.

These colour powders look like paint pigment

but in fact they are gunpowder.

And the medium of Cai Guo-Qiang's art is explosion.

ANNOUNCER: ..Two, one...

Gunpowder, which the Chinese invented,

has always been central to Chinese culture.

Explosions, which have about them an echo of disaster

as well as delight, have long been Cai's chosen medium.

But their effect, while spectacular, is also short-lived.

Sometimes, Cai wants to make something which will endure.

And that was his aim on a hot summer's day on Long Island,

when he set out to make a work of art especially for our cameras.

He's proposing to do something with his fire art he's never done before.

He begins in the world of tradition,

with elements of a paradise landscape.

Fluttering birds, oversized flowers, deer tripping through

an enchanted woodland.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

And for good measure, as if prescribing from a book of spells,

there was something of a benevolent wizard about Cai Guo-Qiang.

Actual leaves and flowers are reverently laid down

for immolation.

Oh, it's beautiful, absolutely amazing, yeah.

The effect of the explosion is breathtaking

but also surprising.

Against the blackened ground, the natural forms

stand out with intensified brilliance.

Blooms more, not less, radiant.

The paradise garden still lives.

But not for long.

Yeah, that is wonderful. I don't want you to do anything more to it!

For the first time ever, Cai is going to subject his own work

to a second act of violent consummation by fire.

He has no idea how it will turn out

but whatever happens, he wants a print of it.

So, five blank canvasses are laid on top of the already-scorched utopia.

The little spray of, you know... That is just so beautiful.

I very much like this part too. Yeah, yeah, me too.

It looks very mysterious. Yes.

With his second explosion, Cai has taken the work, and us,

into a different world - deep bituminous darkness

now mantles everything.

All of nature seems hit by choking storms of soot.

Or the black rain of a nuclear winter.

And on those pristine white canvasses appears the

ghost of the explosion.

The risks Cai has taken have paid off beyond anything

he'd himself imagined.

The enactment of the uncomfortable closeness of destruction

and creation stands revealed.

APPLAUSE

But the two properties of gunpowder -

exhilaration and damage -

hang in space,

along with a lingering smoke.

This is beauty,

but of the terrible kind.

Chinese history, distant and present, is full of grieving

as well as rejoicing.

And there are some artists for whom the woes not just of China,

but of the whole world, weigh on their creative conscience.

Slowly, slowly, slowly! THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

BABY CRIES

BABY SHRIEKS

There are some contemporary artists for whom art for art's sake

is not only not enough,

it actually amounts to a kind of betrayal of their vocation.

For as our own world slips ever more into destruction and distress,

they want art to mount a resistance to complacency,

to catastrophe fatigue.

They want to shock us

out of our expectations that, every day on the nightly news

and every day in newsprint,

we're going to see dead body after dead body.

Now, for Ai Weiwei,

the calamity of our time right now

is the disaster of the multitudes of displaced,

those who are uprooted through no fault of their own,

cast adrift on an infinite ocean of terror and despair.

Ai Weiwei's Law Of The Journey

packs 258 inflatable figures, large and small,

into an inflatable raft.

They are the shipwrecked of civilisation.

But doesn't Ai Weiwei, always so sharply attuned to history,

have something else in mind as well?

The very beginnings of human representation in the Chinese

tradition, another mass of figures, made more than 2,000 years ago -

a whole army created to accompany the Qin emperor into the afterlife.

Fully featured, each one,

because they're ennobled by the service they're offering to power

and immortality.

But nobility has gone.

That long tradition has ended here -

in a vessel suspended between ceiling and floor,

life and death,

on a journey to safety

or to an annihilation...

..so the faces of these figures are featureless

because they are, after all, the flotsam of humanity.

And this kind of disaster happens over and over

again and again.

INDISTINCT SHOUTING

The fate of the uprooted, their ceaseless, epic wandering,

is also at the heart of the work of the Israeli artist

Michal Rovner.

On the walls of her studio in a farm village,

long lines, trails of figures, not computer-generated

but animated individual photographs,

move incessantly across unforgiving arid landscapes.

Settlement denied.

Civilisation presupposes a settled city population,

but Rovner's is an art of the human condition of migration...

..being forever between places.

There are projections on stone in which Hebrew letters morph into

people who dip and bow, as indeed they do in fervent Jewish prayer.

Others are ghost documents covered in script,

but, when you look closely, you realise the characters are humans.

We are what we write, our language defines us.

Today, she's working on an installation she calls Makom...

SHE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

..which means "place" in both Hebrew and Arabic.

It's a series of structures of different sizes and shapes.

The Makom series started in 2007 when there was a very strong

moment, intifada, going on, with buses exploding in Jerusalem,

that I was so scared to even drive

next to any bus for a long, long time.

At that point, I started to collect stones from all these places.

Jerusalem, Haifa, Hebron, Nablus.

The structures are made from stones taken from ruined Israeli

and Palestinian houses and so become, in her hands,

the material of a kind of restoration.

TRANSLATION

Each stone is carefully labelled

so that the structures can be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere.

Like the migrants whose motions Rovner animates,

her Makom has itself gone nomadic,

most resonantly to the courtyard

of the Louvre, close to the echo of another ancient structure,

IM Pei's glass pyramid.

The masons are themselves a mix of people from all over the country -

Israeli Arabs, Jews, Druze and Palestinians.

I wanted to do this work with Israelis and Palestinians,

I wanted to try to take all these stones

and fragments of different periods of time...

Yeah. ..and then, after, build one which was so coherent and complete,

almost like a library, almost like an index of places, of times,

of stories, a mosaic of different places that fit together,

which are this place. Yeah.

How can you talk about Israel without talking about Jerusalem,

Haifa, Hebron, Nablus?

The structures are meant to be problematic.

They embody the difficulty of settled foundations -

architecture echoing politics.

What, after all, do you build on a rift?

Here, near the northern end of the Great Rift Valley,

fault lines are unavoidable -

masonry will pull apart.

One house is impossible to enter.

Another is marked by a widening crack.

They're works which speak to contemporary fears of homelessness

but which are also imprinted with memories of ancient habitation.

We are, after all,

in the place where the earliest civilisations made their dwellings.

These are in every sense our primal building blocks.

There is this amplified, you know, break going on between Israelis

and Palestinians, which I'm aware of

and I'm upset about

and I'm feeling sometimes I need to do something about it,

and this was kind of to do something about it, erm... Mm.

And do you think art can do that or...?

Someone has to believe in it and I think that, you know,

if you go very back in time,

which is that moment that I'm always moved by,

the moment when I see these very ancient objects, you know,

somebody at a far point in time had the urge to

leave a mark on a stone.

You know, to leave a permanent mark, to make something that would

last and to really actually send a communication to an unknown future.

For 50,000 years, humans have been setting these marks down,

likenesses and patterns on every conceivable material

and in every imaginable style.

Great art collapses the time and space separating us

from its moment of creation.

It gives us pause.

It makes us reimagine the world in countless, unanticipated ways.

That's why even amidst our modern,

hepped-up lives of digital swipes and flickering screens,

we find in art something that can't be found anywhere else -

a rush of delight that somehow also connects us with the enduring

and the profound,

and that's why people come

in their millions to see it in galleries and museums.

Civilisation is such a grand word, isn't it?

But, as I think we've seen,

its true strength lies as much in simple gifts - pots and prints

and rugs and carvings - as it does in mighty buildings

and fine paintings,

and those things spring less from the officious

demands of state and the status hunger of the rich

than they do from the unruly

urges of gifted artists, from one end of the world to the other,

to make something for everyone.

And because those things are not dependent on the fate

of empires, or the moneyed or military, I think they will

stick around, they will endure - not forever, nothing survives

forever - but at any rate for the next millennia, as unmistakable

evidence of the best things that our species was capable of creating -

things that have been made by the liberated thought,

the acute vision and the unquenchable creative fire

of our shared humanity.

The Open University has produced a free poster that explores

the history of different civilisations through artefacts.

To order your free copy, please call...

..or go to the address on screen

and follow the links for the Open University.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media