IMAGINING AMERICA: ICONS OF 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN ART, airing on PBS Wednesday, December 28, 2005, 9:00-11:00 p.m. ET, is a journey through the transformations that took place in 20th-century America, told through the words and work of some of the century's most significant artists. Through images and interviews with an array of American artists and art historians, IMAGINING AMERICA traces how art, over the course of the century, provided a place in which to re-imagine America, to visualize what we were and what we felt about our country, our society and ourselves. By examining the lives and work of such seminal artists as Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, IMAGINING AMERICA illuminates the evolution of 20th -century American art, from pictorial explorations of our vast natural and industrial landscapes, to abstract depictions of our collective psyches, to complex explorations of lives lived in a noisy barrage of visual, aural, technical and cultural data. Featuring archival interviews with artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquait, and new interviews with artists and art historians including Ed Ruscha, Wanda Corn, Jonathan Fineberg and Grace Hartigan, IMAGINING AMERICA provides a window into 20th-century America through the eyes of those who both chronicled and transformed it. Each section of the film examines one of three basic questions: How do American artists represent the world around them ("America Pastoral"); how do American artists represent themselves ("Songs of Myself"); and how do American artists help us understand how mass media has transformed our sense of self and society ("The Media Is the Message")? Through the work, ideas and lives of more than 50 leading artists and scholars, these questions are stimulate the viewer to think about what makes us distinctly American. "America Pastoral"--IMAGINING AMERICA begins with a look at the artists' understanding of their place in nature and the world around them. At the start of the 20th century, America began an adventure different from any other nation in history. Vast natural resources, amazing inventions and the influx of people from around the world made America the birthplace of a new kind of human experience. American artists were the first to imagine how nature gave way to culture. From the vast spaces of the West to the teeming, electrically lit cities, American artists were blessed with a visual landscape like no other. In exploring the changing realities of the American urban and rural landscapes over the course of the century, "America Pastoral" looks back to Thomas Cole's The Oxbow of 1836, painted in the same year Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential essay "Nature" was published. The segment contrasts the pastoral aspects of American nature with the rise of industry in the early 20th century, culminating with a series of artists - including John Sloan, Alfred Stieglitz, Joseph Stella and Georgia O'Keeffe - who depicted the modern forms of New York City. O'Keeffe left the city and migrated to the Southwest desert, where she sought to find a more spiritual relation to the American landscape. From O'Keeffe's abstractions of nature, IMAGINING AMERICA arrives at Jackson Pollock's non-representational embodiment of his famous declaration, "I am Nature," his bold assertion that human nature was as "natural" as a landscape. From there the segment looks forward to the latter half of the century, to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, which illustrated how the altered physical environment of contemporary America is the "nature" in which we live. Whether it is the vast spaces of the Plains, the dank urban alleys or the constant process of building, tearing down and re-building, American artists have illustrated and continue to illustrate the desire to both romanticize and control "nature." "Songs of Myself"--Unlike their predecessors who went into nature to find an original way to express their notion of the world around them, artists in the second half of the 20th century looked inward. After World War II, radical changes were taking place, brought about by machines and mass media. Americans were enjoying unprecedented material comfort, but also what Henry Miller called "an air-conditioned nightmare." The expression of the anxiety of modern life gave another meaning to the abstract forms in Jackson Pollock's paintings: he not only found a new nature in his own mind, but also depicted a new kind of psychological identity that millions of Americans shared, one that was fragmented, scattered and tense. "Songs of Myself" concentrates on the change in the depiction of self over the 20th century, from the inner life of the mind expressed by Pollock and de Kooning to the assemblage of ordinary materials and cultural symbols in the later work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat. "The Media Is the Message"--By the second half of the 20th century, artists found that it was not enough to channel their personal psychology into art. Artists became obsessed with the form and language of art itself and how that paralleled the way in which America had become a visual culture, one in which advertising, news, television, movies and celebrity had transformed America from a society based on making things into a society focused on consuming images and information. "The Media Is the Message" shows how 20th-century American artists created a new visual language to represent this new image-laden consumer landscape. The change begins with the use of the "ready-made" in the work of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, whose Fountain (a common urinal) shattered conceptions about what could be art, as would Warhol's Brillo Box years later. The work of Stuart Davis, who represented the signs of mass media in art for the first time, paved the way for Warhol's use of pop iconography. The segment concludes with a look at how contemporary artists such as David Wojnarowicz turned Pop Art on its head. His idea that media culture was devastating the American spirit just as industry devastated nature in the earlier part of the 20th century continues to inform American art.
|
