American Art in the 1960s (1972) - full transcript

I never decided to be an artist.

Uh, I grew up in Port Arthur, Texas.

And there weren't any artists.

Uh, no one knew what an artist was.

NARRATOR: For American artists, the 1960s

was an explosive decade.

And Jasper Johns Robert Rauschenberg

triggered the explosion.

There painterly style came from action painting of the '50s,

but their common subjects were derived

from the popular culture of the day.

Bold, colorful images reflected the optimism of the Kennedy

era, while mass media channeled these images back

to a public program for visual sensation.

John Cage's advice to artists, join the world around them.

MAN: This is 1963 in case this thing is ever found.

WOMAN: I think it's terrific.

I think it's a very--

GEORGE SEGAL: In a so-called joyous time of the '60s, famous

for happy rock--

you know, the Beatles were at the height of invention.

And optimism was there.

MAN: Where are we?

I can't remember.

Where are we?

Oh, at a party.

GEORGE SEGAL: Publicity and fashion and bright colors,

entertainment--

NARRATOR: Happenings, theater pieces, and technology

broke down boundaries between the arts.

New forms, new media, new techniques,

established the leadership of the American avant garde.

And many artists became intent on defining their art

as uniquely American.

Although Abstract Expressionism liberated American art

from Europe, it was left to the artists of the '60s

to consolidate their revolution.

The success of the New York School

now provided younger native born artists with local heroes.

As art was integrated into American Life,

it became more difficult to shock the public.

Serious, profound, frivolous, absurd, and ultimately tragic,

the contradictions and paradoxes of the '60s

were reflected in American art of that revolutionary decade.

I think artists aren't good people or bad people.

But, uh, the ability to--

for the work to be able to represent itself

instead of something else is very critical at this time.

Because the work begins from one point of view and is

accepted from so many others that the work loses its meaning

almost instantly.

GEORGE SEGAL: I think the most popular misconception

about Pop Art is that it failed to invent new forms.

And not only do I think that the pop artist invented

strong new forms, I think what's yet

unknown is the range of the ambition

of various so-called pop artists.

NARRATOR: A fantastic variety of new images

flooded galleries and museums.

Artists like James Rosenquist made gigantic paintings

resembling giant billboards that were based on advertisements,

magazine reproductions, and other commercially

generated popular images.

Familiar common objects were blown up

to room-sized proportions.

And fluorescent colors heightened

the psychedelic impact.

Artists like Jim Dine combined painted backgrounds

with real objects.

George Segal arranged his plaster sculptures

in pictorial groups.

Abstract artists evolved striking new formats,

geometric images which gave a greater priority

to brilliant optical effects.

Socially-oriented artists, like Ed Kienholz,

created sharp social satire and political criticism

in controversial works, while Jasper Johns and Robert

Rauschenberg took a more detached attitude

to the peculiarities of the American scene.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: Material's material,

but I was returned toward cardboard, because

of its yielding quality.

I mean, I don't have to be strong to use it.

All material has its own history built into it.

There's not better material.

I mean, it's just as unnatural for people

to use oil paint as it is to use anything else.

It's-- uh, an artist manufactures his material out

of his own existence or his own either ignorance or familiarity

or confidence.

Yeah.

Cardboard pieces are paintings.

I think it may be coming out of really being--

excuse me, mother-- real white trash authentically.

It gave me a sense of absolutely no fear of any other category.

There was an atmosphere at Black Mountain College, which

was in every situation, except to painting or in the arts,

was about freedom.

In the arts, it was about discipline and control

and control of control.

I needed discipline.

And Albers was the world's greatest disciplinarian.

John Cage had a fantastic influence on my thinking.

He simply gave me permission to go on thinking that--

he was the only one who gave me permission

to go on thinking the way I was thinking.

Well, what was important about it?

It seems to me that the--

the student's in it.

And the only thing I warned them about

was that I was interested in experimentation.

And that if they weren't experimental enough,

that I would tend to criticize them.

And it was Bob Rauschenberg who opened my eyes, really,

to the-- to what we then called--

I don't know what you call it now-- representational.

What do you call it now?

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: The nature of some

of the materials I worked with got so impossible to--

just to physically figure out how

they could be supported on the wall,

it was obvious that they had no business just hanging flatly

on the wall.

And that-- that's the beginning of the combines.

I guess the bed could--

could be considered the first combine.

When I did-- did the bed, it was--

I just literally ran out of things to paint on.

And there was this quilt. And it was summer.

And I didn't need that.

So I thought it's good, because I had been working on-- on flat

surfaces with--

and covering them with-- because I was into color then,

I was covering them with funny papers.

I showed a long time without anybody liking the work.

I was called a clown.

I was supposed to be either against art or just funny.

I don't believe in either accident or chance.

I come to terms with my materials.

Sometimes it works.

Sometimes it doesn't.

But I would substitute anything for pre-conception

or deliberateness.

I mean, if that moment can't be as fresh and as strange and as

unpredictable as what's going on all around you,

then it's false.

With respect to art, for instance, that long ago,

we thought of it as self-expression.

--a little higher.

Then-- yeah, I think that would be better.

Then more and more, it came to mean to me not self-expression,

but self-alteration.

I frequently stayed at Jap's house here on Houston Street.

It was such a pleasure to wake up

in the morning and converse with him

and look out those large windows.

And I remember when Jasper Johns saw the last work of Duchamp.

I asked him what he thought of it.

And he said, it'll certainly be the strangest thing

in any museum.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: There wasn't any resistance

to the Abstract Expressionist.

But, look, the painters that I knew at that time,

I think only Jasper Johns and myself gave him enough respect

not to copy them.

LEO CASTELLI: In March of '57, that was really

the turning point in my career.

Because I went there.

And there were all the familiar people.

And walking through these very familiar thing,

I suddenly stumbled upon a green painting.

That was in '57, March '57.

And I said, Jasper Johns?

That's-- that's just an assumed name.

That's-- something like that, who did it?

The day after that, I was going down

to Rauschenberg's studio to see the paintings,

to think about a show.

And at that very moment, Jasper came.

And I found out that he had the studio just below Bob's.

And so he took me down.

And I had this tremendous impression

of flags, white flags, red, white, and blue flags, targets,

numbers, what have you.

And it was one of the great impressions of my life.

And I immediately asked Jasper, would he

want to come to the gallery?

And so he said, in his spare way, yes.

He would consider it.

MAN: The two stones are ..

MAN: Two stones.

MAN: We got the proofs with all the other stuff on it.

Yeah.

Because I'm wondering, what wasn't right?

OK.

Whether it was this same?

MAN: Would you want to see the separation

proof for the next run?

Or would you like to see the final proof

that we've made for the date with all five?

MAN: I think everything together would be helpful.

MAN: So here it looks a little softer than here.

MAN: Yeah.

MAN: And I think that's better.

But the impact was immediate, because--

although, Pop Art came, say, two years,

about 2 and 1/2 years after this show occurred,

it took two years to mature.

There was a gestation of about two years

until Lichtenstein Oldenburg.

Oldenburg was actually much more expressionist

than, say, Lichtenstein at that time, or for that

matter Warhol or Rosenquist.

NARRATOR: In his encaustic "Flag,"

Jasper Johns raised the question of whether the flag was

an object or a painting.

Later, Johns continued his baffling juxtapositions

of three dimensional objects and their painted equivalents.

His pictures were full of tension, especially

the tension between recognizable images and abstract sensuous

brushwork.

Obsessed with verbal visual puns,

Johns labeled objects as Larry Rivers, another pop pioneer,

had done earlier.

I get left-handed compliments by other painters, who--

they may not like my work.

But they tell me that they found in the choices

that I made for certain kinds of subject matter, things

like that, a certain relaxed attitude that

enables them to choose things that they might not

have thought of before.

And why do I think that the paintings

of the '50s, most of the abstract painting,

ran its course?

I think, because it had built into it certain possibilities

which individuals got tired of it, of mining, and mining,

and mining, mining.

It then became--

I think it became business.

The general consensus is that it ran out of steam.

But as a matter of fact, what it did

was open up so many possibilities for other things

that people just got interested in the other things.

For instance, Roy Lichtenstein told me

that after he saw "Washington Crossing the Delaware--"

it was years later.

Because he hadn't seen the painting,

but he heard about it after his show.

I did it in '53, but it wasn't shown until about '55,

let's say, in the museum.

And he told me he did a painting on Custer's Last Stand.

I don't think that Pop Art is an art style.

I think there are-- there are some individual artists which

will be termed Pop.

And they're all so different from one another.

I think there's some common ground

in the emphasis on a commercial subject

or pseudo commercial ways of working.

But I think the images are so different that I

don't see much similarity between the artists.

I think a lot of painters were interested in doing works

based on other works.

It's not supposed to be a put down of the earlier work.

It's just that-- to re-see, to do in-- in your own terms

now some theme that interested lots of people.

I didn't paint only comic strips.

I think it was just inexpensively reproduced

graphic work.

It was the quality of printing and the quality

of communication, an inexpensive level,

the form change that went on in order to reproduce images

inexpensively.

The combination of reshaping the image

into some sort of an idealized product or person

plus reproducing in an inexpensive way

made certain images that I thought were useful

and which characterized our world.

I choose representation to give me a variety of forms.

It's an excuse to change the way you work.

Or it's just some reason to put a particular shape down,

rather than to invent a pattern.

I'm just masking, also, the part that I'm going to repaint,

because I'm going to take this yellow off completely.

And I don't want to mess up the rest of the canvas.

So I'm masking off that area.

And I'll scrub that paint off, and start from the beginning.

NARRATOR: On a farm in New Jersey,

George Segal uses an abandoned chicken coop as his studio.

GEORGE SEGAL: I asked many questions.

The Cage, Cunningham, Duchamp tradition

was a thrust for cerebral quality

and coolness, distance, removal.

I came from Abstract Expressionism's Earthiness,

gaudiness, expressionism.

You know, my belly sticks out too much.

And I love to eat.

I'm sloppy.

And I paint, you know, a lot of drips on my canvases.

It's sort of dying.

So did Oldenburg.

You know, like, we share some kind of common Expressionist

background.

But none of us could recapitulate

Abstract Expressionism quite.

This concern with going back to yourself with autobiography,

I think, is true in Pop Art.

It's one of those common denominators,

dealing with the things around you that are yours,

you know, out of your experience.

I started working in plaster, mostly because I was

disgusted with my own painting.

You know, I wanted to move into three dimensions, real space.

I had been painting figuratively,

you know, life size figures on canvases.

I was angry, impatient, and looking for fast material.

I had no money, couldn't afford bronze.

And I didn't like all the intermediate steps.

I wanted to be working directly.

So you go to a lumber yard.

And you buy 100 pounds of plaster for $0.08 or $0.09

a pound.

It's chalky white.

It takes the impression of any texture.

It flows like water.

I can handle it like watercolor.

It dries like a rock.

I can chip it.

I can model it.

I can be smooth.

I can be rough.

You know, like, all these qualities are there.

And they're useful.

And I like them.

Because of Duchamp, there's no hesitation

about using mechanical means, using machinery, using objects,

using helps, and aids in representation,

using reproduction process.

Because of a whole list of ideas in modern art

that have to do with conception, an artist

doesn't have to display his virtuoso drawing

ability and his ability to reproduce nature before he's

allowed to make any statement.

That terrible dilemma of personal pouring forth,

you know, the stroke, the touch, the meaning of the mark,

in collision with the outside world

and what happens in that collision could

be the mark of our generation.

Ah, this piece is the "Costume Party."

I did it about 1965.

This piece has been haunting me for years.

Ever since I've done it, I--

I've been continually changing it.

This piece doesn't have any setting,

I think because it doesn't need it.

It's really about internal state of mind.

Dark satanic things have to do with accepting

the presence of the devil, which means

having a moral standard, which means

believing in right and wrong.

And all of that seemed totally suspended in the '60s.

And yet, I was dogged by a sense of the devil.

NARRATOR: In Happenings, John Cage's advice

to mix art and life around fruition.

This artist theater was an outgrowth of painting

in which real action and real forms spilled out

into real space.

Recalling the absurdist antics of Dada, Futurist, and Bauhaus

performances, Happenings were part

of the '60s drive toward liberation

of primitive instincts and a call for spontaneous behavior.

GEORGE SEGAL: Most of my friends were

entranced with Cage's attitudes, which

had to do with heightening everybody's

awareness toward everything in the world around them.

And in its most vulgar, simplified form,

you know, like everybody could be an artist,

which was responsible for a lot of the participation ideas

in the Happenings.

CLAES OLDENBURG: There was never any plot in-- in, uh--

in the things that were called Happenings.

And it was just a series of--

of repeating actions over and over,

um, related to the construction.

Uh, I mean, my work has always been very closely related

to theater.

And a lot of the inspiration, especially in New York,

is directed towards theater.

Because New York is a place where people are always

acting out their emotions.

NARRATOR: In the late '60s, the center of the arts scene

shifted downtown to the low-rent lofts and warehouses of Soho.

A Saturday opening and concert of new music

draws crowds to the lively scene.

Although Pop Art became celebrated first,

other directions were also being explored.

The most important of these were Minimal Art and Hard-edge

and Color Field Abstraction.

The last, championed as post-painterly abstraction

by critics Clement Greenberg, emphasize

pure color relationships extending the ideas

of Impressionism and Fauvism.

But Minimal Art was a purely American phenomenon.

It stressed the specific quality of unaltered materials

and the concreteness of the work of art, which often resembled

a common object.

Minimal Art's most important spokesmen became Donald Judd.

His studio is a classic cast iron building in Soho

where he lives and works.

DONALD JUDD: I was, on the whole,

not influenced by any sculpture, because I didn't think I was

doing sculpture and still don't.

The real influence or something that is in the work

is the three or four general assumptions

that come from Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and so forth.

The first place I painted for a long time, 10 years.

I couldn't get what I wanted.

I didn't like the flatness.

I didn't like them being against the wall.

And I couldn't get around the problem of there always being

something within the rectangle.

I got a painting down where it was nothing but a surface.

I kept painting it and applying paint and pooling around

with it and still didn't like it.

And then finally, I bent up the ends.

The thing that really interests me

most is sitting around thinking about the pieces

and figuring out what I want to do.

The general point is that you deal with what you know

and with what you can do and a particular situation.

Like the people who would be called

minimal artists weren't all doing work at the same time.

I think Carl's work was a little later in development than mine

and Morris'.

And in the beginning, I didn't know Morris'.

And Morris and I didn't know each other's work.

And also, I don't think there's much connection between me

and Morris.

And you know, I think in 20 years,

it all look a little more similar than it might

have looked at the moment.

I keep telling people in here, one of these kids is not ours.

Well, he's--

--so much thinner.

Can you--

NARRATOR: Judd's sculptures, like those

of other minimal artists, are explicitly machine-made.

But Dan Flavin's use of standard fluorescent lights

eventually led him from specific objects

to a more elaborate system of designing entire environments.

Though the installation must look

very stable to a certain extent, I

think it's easily understood with a slight confounding

paradox as far as the lamps operate out of the corners

and with the corners.

NARRATOR: Flavin uses real light, rather than

the painted illusion of light.

Patterns created from the repetition

of standard industrial units are arranged

so that the total environment is perceived as a whole.

Light divides and illuminates three-dimensional space,

as Barnett Newman divided his canvas fields into zones

of color light earlier.

Minimal Arts' focus on the literal

may be traced to Frank Stella's early works in which Stella

first cut literal shapes out of canvas.

I knew Mondrian.

And I knew Albers.

That is, I knew their work.

And the distinction between what they did and, uh, what say, uh,

real action painters like de Kooning and Pollock did

didn't-- didn't seem to bother me or even especially

significant.

I never liked the Europeans.

It seemed to me they didn't--

simply didn't do it as well as the Americans,

or they did it in a more reserved or in a more--

not so much cagey as just a slightly more

a pampered way of handling the whole thing.

Color and surface and shape get tied together.

and become very interdependent.

That's all.

Some pictures that I did in the early '60s

and, you know, the very late '50s, like the black paintings,

were at the time considered very, very big,

particularly by the dealers who had to try to sell them.

I liked the quality of the black paintings.

And I particularly liked the quality

of their flatness or the--

the quality that they had that seemed

to go out more than recede.

In other words, when you looked at them,

you tended to see them there on the wall.

Or they had a slight tendency to come towards you

rather than fall away from you or let you get into them.

Since I have an idea of myself as being fairly small, maybe

thin, I got--

a little bigger than myself, a little--

a little bigger than life size, I guess.

But largely because it gives you room or an area

or just the feeling of having enough space to work on.

I had been working on the drawings, what

were the aluminum paintings.

And I had pretty much decided on the aluminum paint,

because I had seen some paint samples that I liked.

So then I simply took the drawing

and, uh, I erased out the corners.

And that eliminated the rectangular shape

of the drawings and made them into shaped drawings.

Metallic paint seemed to offer possibilities

for even more flatness or more resistance to the viewer.

I used fluorescent color for quite a while.

It's not so much that it literally jumps

a little bit more than the other colors, but it--

it affects the other colors, because

of its intensity around it in different kinds of ways.

I like the color in the stripe paintings.

And I like the color in the eccentric polygons.

I mean, I don't know exactly what a fine artist

technique would be.

But as far as technique used for making abstract paintings,

it seems to me that just about any technique will do.

What I find that I'm almost always involved in

is organizing whatever surface I am going to work on.

I tend to organize it in fairly regular or coherent

and, or at least consistent ways, which

tend to look like some kind of ordinary geometry.

I knew that Hard-edge painting existed.

And I could see the difference between, say,

Hard-edge painting, like Ellsworth Kelly, and kind of--

and the rest of Abstract Expressionist painting,

I mean, loose brush work and hard or geometric abstraction.

They seemed to be different.

Yeah.

I did a lot of panel pictures like this,

say, in the middle '50s.

And then a lot of the curved shapes

appeared in '54, '55, '56.

And then I started doing the panel pictures again.

I was- I was doing the pictures with the two

different panels like that.

And then I was--

I did some drawings and collages of this.

And I just liked it. and kept on going with it.

Each of the reds is a little different, you know.

And it's a question of the two colors together.

It's like seeing, you know, like the shape of your pants, say,

you know, like that, a Y, a thick blue Y

against the background.

It's just a shape, you know, and color.

It has more to do with that than, I guess, with, you know,

geometric painting.

Uh, I went to Paris in 1947.

That's where art was then.

And that's where I went.

I liked-- you know, I liked French architecture, I mean,

Romanesque things, the way Paris is built.

And I like living there.

The first thing thatr would completely

get to me were the ink drawings.

The cut paper works, I saw those only later,

only after I returned to New York

and had been living in New York for several years.

I think that getting away from nature

is almost an impossible thing to do.

And I like, in general, the use of mass

in American art, the big surfaces

and massive drawn forms, like in Rothko

and also the work of my friend Kelly.

I like very much the things he was doing then

which were simple and delineated massive, monumental shapes.

And I think that the bigness and expansion of American paintings

relates in a very direct way to the foreign expansionism

of foreign policy.

And it's very much like in the time of the Caesars

when everybody was trying to make

bigger and bigger sculptures.

You can say that Modernist art makes explicit everything

that the old masters took implicitly.

And in making everything explicit,

every aspect of the art of painting begins to count.

The surface begins to count much more than it ever

did before in an explicit way.

And that's why these technical modes began to bulk so large.

I met Noland at Black Mountain.

And I taught there one summer, Black Mountain College.

And he was one of the students there.

We stayed in touch.

And Noland brought Louis to see me here in New York in 1953.

NARRATOR: Morris Louis died in 1962 of lung cancer.

But before his death, he created three major series

of paintings, The smokey "Veils,"

luminous, "Unfurleds," and the late optically brilliant

"Stripes."

His technique remains a mystery, because he refused

to be observed painting.

Pouring, spilling, and soaking acrylic paints

into a raw canvas, Louis eliminated brush strokes

in favor of a unified color field.

Louis' seriousness and dedication especially

impressed fellow Washingtonian Kenneth Noland.

KENNETH NOLAND: I--

I suppose that the turning point for me as an artist was

around 1957, '58, and '59.

The tendency to center had been latent in painting ever

since Cezanne's time, actually.

Of course, Pollock tended to center, too.

It began to appear in quite a few different artist's work.

I mean, first Albers went to homage to the square pictures.

Johns made targets.

Rothko, more or less, centered everything

in a kind of a frontal way.

So while it didn't really come out emphatically in my work

until I began to paint my circle pictures,

my pictures have to be able to move

through multiple scales of focus,

and then reaffirm the shape and size of the picture.

I first saw Jackson Pollock's paintings at a show he had

at Betty Parsons in the Fall of '50.

And I think what I particularly responded to was

that there was an all at once overall "this happened" quality

to it.

Uh, the picture called "Mountains and Sea"

I painted in October 1952.

I've done a lot of landscapes on folding easels that summer

and had already been very aware of Pollock, Gorky, Hoffman, de

Kooning and had already started to really break out

of collegiate Cubism.

I think what I wanted was exposure

to Hans Hoffman's spirit.

I didn't need the push pull vocabulary,

because I'd already gotten that through Cubism.

And actually, it was about the same thing,

which had to do with how linear planes move in perspective

on what is, in fact, a flat surface with four corners.

ARTIST: Well, actually, the staining technique, of course,

comes from Pollock, like originally.

And Helen Frankenthaler was staining.

And then Morris Louis found a way of using it for himself.

And then a little later, I found a way of using it for myself.

Cubism went to contours, went to edges, overlapping planes.

When you stain, you get whatever area of color

that you're using to become kind of common with the ground.

But if you've got an extent of blue, say, an area of blue

or a field of blue, then you would probably say,

that's a beautiful blue.

You would identify it as color rather than

as something that is colored.

HELEN FRANKENTHALER: I had to develop my own technique,

but I think technique determines aesthetic

as much as one's aesthetic determines a new medium.

The making of them, controlling them,

and the surprise from them is a gesture

that I do best feeling that the edges can spread

and that I can manipulate the paint and the sides in relation

to top, bottom, drawing, spilling,

staining, tending with much more reach and fewer limits.

My best pictures are generally my large pictures,

which I think is true of most abstract painters.

And I think that's because of edges and surface

and another kind of perspective and limitlessness.

Crossing is-- hm.

Well, I haven't cut this yet.

But clearly, it will be cut, so that you don't see that.

And then I don't want a border or line

or strip all the way on one side of this picture,

so that the stretch here, if you can

imagine, as I said that line, straight up and down.

In other words, the yellow will show here.

It won't show here.

That'll be cut off.

It will show from here to the edge.

And I like this sort of brushing unfinished-looking part.

JULES OLITSKI: It's-- it's too thick.

WOMAN: OK.

Add some water.

Water?

OK.

I'll start here and see what happens.

And just keep going.

And then, suddenly, you stop.

And I use a rather primitive mixing gadget.

And began by just pouring it on--

on the canvas.

If I begun with a notion, I want to use a roller

and see what will happen with thick paint and a roller,

so that a certain kind of surface may develop,

if I go slowly, it's making for a surface of a kind

that I may not have used before.

And seeing what-- what will happen

in the process of doing that, I may find I don't like it.

And try it out.

Here I am in this position.

And this has happened as I've pushed the squeegee across.

I would find it, probably, irresistible

to wonder, well, what will happen

if I pull it back this way?

You know, will anything happen?

Well, that's happened.

And so I have to decide, do I want that or not?

Now, a lot of times you put something on that

you anticipate what may happen.

But I don't really know for certain.

Because it depends on-- a lot on what something

will dry looking like.

ED KIENHOLZ: You-- you ask if California breeds eccentricity.

Sure.

I think-- I think, in a way, it does.

Not that it breeds it, but it welcomes it.

California is the great dream.

And people who can't stand the grind in Pender, Nebraska,

or Oshkosh, or Tampa, they pick a spot.

It's either New York, or it's California.

The ones that come to California make a bigger pilgrimage.

They are more in tune with the people

who originally came with-- with a wagon across the Mojave

Desert.

to find the West Coast.

NARRATOR: During the '60s, an important arts center

developed outside New York and Los Angeles.

The influence of European art was virtually nonexistent.

So California artists felt free to pursue

highly individual and sometimes bizarre personal styles.

With its balmy climate and folksy informality,

Los Angeles fostered a vigorous independence.

ED KIENHOLZ: I grew up on a farm.

And I drove tractors.

And I worked in mental hospitals.

I even sold cars in car lots.

A two-dimensional surface is really a stupid illusion.

I can't abide it.

I-- I just get really bored with it all.

But you take the same surface and build it out

or make an armature or put an-- affix an object to it,

and it suddenly has a whole other quality.

It has another dimension.

It's like running.

To me, to work in two-dimension, it'd

be like running a foot race with one leg and a crutch.

"Five Car Stud," it's a tableau concerned

with a black man and a white woman in a pickup truck.

And they are sitting drinking.

All the evidence within the truck

indicates that they are just sitting

there talking and drinking.

And the-- there's four other cars pull up around him.

The guys get out.

And they drag the black man out of the truck.

And they're in the process of castrating him.

Um, yeah, what it has to do is--

to me, is the psychological castration

that this country imposes upon anyone that is different.

And there's a great connection between the myth

of the black's sexuality.

Yeah, I've been censored quite a bit

in my work, censored in the sense

that people won't show them.

I make what I want to make.

America's got a lot of faults.

But at least the problems and the questions

are out on the surface.

Most often what happens to me is

that I'll wake up early in the morning, like 5 o'clock or so.

And, like, things--

I think about things.

And then I go to sleep for a couple hours.

And I just woke up one morning.

And I knew that I wanted to see a-- a woman in place

of a keyboard on a piano.

I just wanted to see how that would look.

And, you know, since doing it.

ED RUSCHA: You know, when I left Oklahoma,

I had a choice of two places, really.

I-- I could go to New York.

And I could go to California.

And I just--

I liked to hot rods and palm trees.

And-- and it was an extension.

It was an extension of Oklahoma.

I've always wanted to paint images.

And I usually paint images that are same size.

And when I paint a-- when I paint an object,

I'll paint an object that it's the same size as it is.

And there's only a few examples of times when

I've painted pictures that--

uh, that they haven't been the same size as they are.

The reason I like to paint letters

is because there is a-- there's a world of no size in this.

Billboards had effected me just by their pure size, not because

of their giant abstraction or anything like that.

Uh, well, I started this about three or four months ago.

And I worked on it right here on the floor all the time.

And I'm building a big easel now to put this on,

so I can-- don't have to lean over and break my back.

But it's just a sheet of paper.

I just picked tobacco, just because of the--

of the marks it makes.

I suppose I have learned from Surrealism.

I mean, it's just as surreal in Oklahoma,

as it is, you know, in Texas, as it is in Montana,

as it is everywhere else.

Well, I think all paintings are illusion.

I think all paintings are flat.

That's how I've defined it, at least, for myself.

I first started working with isometric shapes, and then one

point, two point, and three point perspective.

See, I stopped painting on canvas in 1965--

'66, I guess.

Up to that time, I had rolled acrylic on canvas

with paint rollers.

But then I--

I got to spray gun.

I was spraying on canvas.

But when you spray canvas, you get a fur.

So I got a piece of glass, which was my first mold

and just made a sheet, sheet of plastic,

then adhered a wooden stretcher bar to that sheet of plastic.

So I had a hard, smooth surface, which

didn't take a lot of sanding.

Ready to paint on, but it seemed very easy at that point.

'Cause why not just put the color right in the plastic?

The technology is available here in California.

They make a lot of surfboards and a lot of plastic cars

and boats and things.

It's been going on here for 25 years at least.

What I consider to be my most major series

would be the dodecagons, which are a 12-sided shape.

And it derives from a section of a Uccello painting.

I started working with illusions in 1963.

I don't like to give anything up.

And, uh, so I've added on the soft edges.

I hope I feel free to use transparent colors,

or opaque colors, or hard-edge, or soft-edge,

or painterly edge, or--

the drips and the splatters, and the marbleizing

are part of my vocabulary.

And the only difference is just whether or not

the brush is touching the surface or is--

is- just lifted off the surface.

The arm movements, as it were, are the same.

I think Pollock led the way in terms of introducing what

I like to call galactic space.

I'd like to introduce so-called galactic space

into my perspective interiors.

So even though there is an illusion of an interior

there, the painting itself will be, perhaps, galactic.

In the beginning, the New York School

was very impressive to me.

When it came West, my early painting

was a very personal expression and, for me,

not a question of all over or not all over.

You know, it was, I think, in terms of Pollock- it was--

I mean, if he was an influence when I was young,

you know, and that whole New York scene, it--

it unlocked in me a certain particular kind of energy

that I could get a hold of and very important to me

in that way personally.

But I couldn't tell you what the meaning of it was, you know,

the all over.

Or, I couldn't describe it to you.

WOMAN: Were you always an abstract painter?

Yeah.

I was always an abstract painter.

No, I don't think my paintings belong to the New York school.

I'm interested in internal oppositions, yeah, right.

Well, I'm-- I'm interested in, let's say, all opposites.

I don't get light in my paintings.

There's a maximum of light there.

And I take away until I--

to the point where if I took more away,

it would be too bad, then I stop.

My attitude towards color is that it's

another form of energy.

that radiates.

Definitely, all art is a religious and mystical

experience to me.

ROBERT IRWIN: I don't really think that revolutions cause

change.

Change causes revolutions.

What happens is that at a certain point when

the shape of our heads has changed

to-- to a great enough degree that the world around us,

the physical world around us, becomes restrictive in a way,

we're forced to, in a sense, carry out a kind

of revolutionary activity.

In other words, we have to act it out socially.

Real change comes over a long span of time.

And it's probably not recognizable

and can't be assigned to an individual.

KEN TYLER: I think in America you

are driving large Cadillacs.

And you live in large houses.

And everything is large anyway.

So it wasn't really very surprising to come out

with a 6' print.

But we believed in the magic of California,

that the sun shining makes you very happy,

that you don't have to fight the taxicabs or the rain

or the elements of winter et cetera.

But it would affect the artists, that they would come here

and leaving the cold winter of the East

Coast, come to the warm sunshine,

swim in California pools.

They would certainly be more relaxed.

And I think the concentration, perhaps,

was greater in the medium than if it was

transposed into New York City.

In the Sam Francis prints, you have

a situation where Sam has worked directly onto the silk.

He's painted on the silk with tush, with paint brush.

And he puts all the screens together

with a light underneath, so that he can see all the, uh,

superimposition of each color.

Then they go through a series of color proofing with a printer.

Sam selects the color.

And each one is scrambled, so that he can get it a--

a chance to see the screen images in various positions

on the sheet of paper.

I think the reason why Gemini wanted to make the large print

was in the beginning we were involved in increasing

the dimension of lithography.

And we considered increasing size one

of the important things to do in this area.

As we announced this to each artist that we worked with,

the artist would be very excited, normally,

about the size, the scale.

You'd have to see something.

So we produced stones, laminated stones, together,

got large plates.

And by constantly showing them the equipment, the facility,

they were impressed.

And they got stimulated.

And then they started to make designs and ideas

for larger prints.

CLAES OLDENBURG: The soft sculpture,

I think very definitely, came out of--

of performances.

And sewing is very much a part of theater

in that you're making costumes and props.

And the quickest way to make anything in theater

is to sew it.

I found that that's a great way to-- to fill space.

I really got to like soft things.

I got to like the way they fall, the way they look.

They change all the time.

And, again, subject to condition,

they really express whatever situation they're in very well.

They take the stamp of where they are.

In the end of '61, The Store was opened as a--

as a sort of gallery, but in the form of a store.

And people walked into The Store,

and they could enjoy the structure of The Store

as well as--

and the pieces in it individually and totally--

as well as purchase the items which were in the store.

The whole point of it was really to me

to get into color, which is always

my struggle is to get into some kind of a color mass sensation,

you know, something-- something between painting and sculpture.

And-- and seeing things in the stores,

like toys, especially toys, it suggested a way of doing that.

And so I began to imitate toys and clothing

and all things in the stores.

So it's really-- my work is about--

it takes place in an urban atmosphere,

but it's about nature.

It's about natural things to happening.

The flag is related to the forces of nature

by softening it, by--

by making a substitutional material,

let's say, by substituting a yielding

material, like canvas--

this to be denim--

for the hard material, which one would associate

with a mechanical or urban landscape,

it's really not-- urban is not the point.

It's mechanical.

Well, I think that all mechanical objects

have a tendency to relate to the human body,

because people make them in their own image.

Some artists do make things when they-- when they imitate,

uh, existing things or reproduce them,

such as Jasper Johns and George Segal.

They make them the same size as the original.

But, of course, if I made an electric plug

the same size as the original, it would be very small.

And I couldn't do any monumental projects with it.

Just as a softening, a substituting material,

creates a metamorphic effect, so scale

has also the capacity to change the effect of a-- of an object.

So if I make a very small drawing

of a-- of a large object, that's a kind of magic,

you know, in itself.

And then-- then the problem of detail comes in much more.

There's a lot of detail created in the soft sculptures

simply by the way that the fabric moves and falls.

Because I did it with public property using,

say, the island of Manhattan for my technique,

I intruded into other people's lives.

And when they saw it, they didn't

see it as an artist technique for establishing scale.

They saw it as a bonafide proposal.

And therefore, they had to come to certain conclusions

about what this proposal might mean.

See, what I developed was a whole set of symbols

that I took from my surroundings.

And I keep using these symbols over and over again

in different contexts.

Originally, this-- this particular piece,

I acquired it, because I wanted to make a soft version

of the "Winged Victory."

Anything we want out of Western civilization, I guess,

that survives we can--

we can have in some form or another in a photograph or--

or a reproduction.

ANDY WARHOL: Uh, Western civilization

is, uh, um, it's the other side of the Eastern civilization.

So there isn't-- I don't think there's really any big change.

Well, I don't think people really like art.

They just, uh-- it's just displayed nicely in museums.

Culture is slowly disappearing.

I guess, actually, it's--

well, it goes in two directions.

It goes up and down and, uh--

and hard and soft.

And I guess anything that is easiest is really culture.

Oh, I like-- I like painting, because it just, uh--

well, I liked mechanical painting better before.

But now, I like abstract, uh, pseudo painting.

Because you can do it without even thinking more so easier.

It can be messy and--

and just drip all over the place.

It's so easy.

Mostly everything is easy if you do it,

uh, without thinking about it.

Nowadays, you don't have to be talented to be an artist.

My paintings are more like magazine pictures,

because they're actually some pictures from magazines.

I guess to be an artist now, it's--

uh, well, there's more of them.

Because there are more people.

And, uh, but-- just going to Europe and seeing artists that

have done a lot of-- you know, have done art work that--

there were artists then, too.

GEORGE SEGAL: My feeling about Andy Warhol

is that most people don't yet understand

that he lives a lifestyle of imitation of Christ, you know,

that his most affective images are icons, almost

religious icons that you can only

compare his lifestyle to that of Genet or Gorky

in the lower depths.

or finding incredible value in discarded human beings.

No, I don't think I'm a revolutionary artist.

What I learned from old art was to do old art.

Old art is, uh, painting on canvas.

And I paint on canvas.

Uh, the art of the future?

It's not movies.

It's, um-- I think it's, uh, political art.

MAN: There's a certain dilution, maybe, thanks to mass culture.

Mass culture invades.

You know, everybody wants to be avant garde now.

JOHN CAGE: And Sartin made the most lovely remark

about criticism.

He said, in an article concerned with the music among animals,

he said, they don't have any critics.

He said, the wolf doesn't criticize the sheep.

He eats him.