KNOCKING
A valuable package has just arrived.
It contains a work of conceptual art by Martin Creed,
one of Britain's most celebrated artists.
I bought this piece from Martin Creed's gallery online.
It cost me ?180,
and I've been given very specific instructions on how to open it.
Apparently, I have to use a scalpel to prise this box open
as delicately as I can, like this.
Let's open it up.
That's it.
I THINK that's it.
Oh, there's something in here.
A certificate - "Martin Creed work number 88.
"A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball."
Welcome to the puzzling, sometimes maddening world of conceptual art.
This piece perhaps encapsulates why so many people struggle
with conceptual art.
It doesn't seem to require much skill,
it's not particularly beautiful,
and ultimately, it feels like a bit of a rip-off.
But maybe we're all missing something.
'And so, in this film, I'm going to attempt the near-impossible -
'to really understand conceptual art.
'What is conceptual art?
'How should we approach it?
'And why should we care?
'To answer these and other questions,
'I'm going to examine its key works...'
GUNSHOT
..meet the movers and shakers of today...
'and experience some cutting-edge contemporary conceptual art...
'..in an open-minded guide for the perplexed.'
And who knows, by the end of it, we might have all changed our minds.
Before the 20th century,
there were objects,
and there were artworks.
Now, let's begin with the objects.
Some objects were natural,
some of them functional,
some of them not very beautiful.
Artworks, on the other hand,
were made by artists,
and they were very beautiful, and often very, very expensive.
Now, people were very happy with this distinction -
they knew where they stood.
But then, about 100 years ago,
that system began to fall apart.
Now, what happened was this -
objects became more and more like artworks,
and artworks became more and more like objects.
Gradually, they began to swap places,
until, eventually, it became difficult to know
which one was which.
Now, this left a lot of people very confused, and some people
very, very angry.
But it was the first major innovation of conceptual art.
And its first great innovator was the enigmatic Frenchman,
Marcel Duchamp, the chain-smoking sphinx of modern art.
Duchamp had started as a painter, but around 1913,
he became increasingly attracted to unassuming,
everyday objects, that he began presenting as ready-made artworks.
A bicycle wheel.
A bottle rack.
A snow shovel.
And, most famously, a urinal.
So what was Duchamp up to with his taste-defying ready-mades?
Taste is the great enemy of art, A-R-T, mm?
That was the difficulty -
to find an object that had no attraction whatsoever
from the aesthetic angle.
Of course, humour came in as an element.
It was very important for me to introduce humour.
That was my intention,
to do something that would not please everybody, mm?
Marcel Duchamp was being deliberately subversive,
while also making a revolutionary point.
Not everything was art, but anything COULD be art. Why?
Because the object didn't matter any longer.
What mattered was the idea, the concept.
And that was the beginning of what we've come to call conceptual art.
Duchamp did a hit-and-run on the art world.
After dropping his conceptual bombshell,
he abandoned it, and became a professional chess player instead.
But his audacious acts opened the floodgates.
20th-century art abounds with his disciples,
but one of the most original was a mischievous Italian aristocrat.
Piero Manzoni was a self-taught artist who rose to prominence
with his Achromes,
a series of white-surfaced works
made from increasingly unusual materials.
But by the end of the 1950s, Manzoni began questioning the nature
of the art object in bizarre new ways.
He signed real bodies to make living sculptures...
..drew never-ending lines...
..blew up balloons...
..and called the resulting sculptures Artist's Breath,
pressed his thumb print onto hard-boiled eggs
for the public to consume...
..and even created an upside-down plinth
that presented the whole world as a work of art.
But his most notorious conceptual creation
pushed both art and propriety to the limit.
AIR ESCAPES LOUDLY
In May 1961, Manzoni sat down and produced 90 unique sculptures.
He then tinned, signed and numbered them.
And they contain something, well...surprising.
Excrement.
Manzoni's own excrement, and if you don't believe me,
just look at the label,
which, helpfully, comes in four different languages.
"Artist's shit, contents - 30g net.
"Freshly preserved, produced and tinned, May 1961."
If you thought conceptual art was crap,
here's your proof.
But Manzoni wasn't done.
His outrageous asking price for these little tins
was a crucial part of the artwork itself.
Manzoni declared that each 30-gram tin was worth its weight
in gold - actual gold.
Now, you might think, "Who in their right mind would want to buy
"someone else's faeces, let alone for the same price as gold?"
well, as it turns out, quite a lot of people did.
Last year, Christie's sold a tin just like this - number 54 -
for ?182,500,
and that made Manzoni's turd, gram for gram,
almost 200 more times more expensive than gold.
So what does it all mean?
Is a turd the ultimate personal ready-made?
HE SNIFFS
Who is it meant to provoke?
And what was Manzoni's endgame?
I'll be honest - I really don't know what to make of this piece.
My instinct is that Manzoni's making fun of us.
He's making fun of museums, critics,
he's making fun of people who've got more money than sense.
He's making fun of the whole madness
and pretentiousness of the art world.
And I have to admit, part of me feels like
a bit of an idiot for coming all this way to look at something
that is, essentially,
a shit on a plinth.
But you know, thinking about it, I realise that for all its silliness,
it is actually an extremely clever conceit.
It could be anything in that tin, but we will never know,
because as soon as we open that tin,
the artwork's destroyed, the value is lost,
so we will never ever find out.
If this tin contains anything,
it contains an idea.
This piece feels like a shit-filled hand grenade
that Manzoni has flung 55 years into the future,
and we still don't know how to defuse it.
No wonder he looks so proud of himself.
Piero Manzoni died at the age of 29,
but he proved that conceptual artists had a Midas touch.
A good idea could convert practically anything
into a masterpiece.
And today, like Duchamp,
he's regarded as one of the forefathers of conceptual art -
a pioneering provocateur, whose influence lives on.
One of the figures he's helped inspire
is the artist who began this programme -
Turner Prize winner, Martin Creed.
# Understanding, I'm understanding
# I'm understanding
# I'm understanding! #
Over a freewheeling career that includes making music,
Creed has converted a whole range of things,
and no-things, into art.
# We were arguing... #
Blu-Tack... # I'm a victim...
..empty galleries with the lights coming on and off...
..and, yes, even excrement.
# What it felt like you were saying...
# I'm understanding
# Listening, I'm listening... #
I've come to Hackney in East London to meet Martin
as he launches a new album of songs.
One, one, one, two, one, two.
And I'm hoping he can shed some light on the ideas
behind work number 88...
..that scrunched up ball of paper that cost me ?180.
A few days ago... Yeah.
I purchased this, one of your pieces, work number 88. Yeah!
And I wonder if you can help explain it to me. Oh, right.
Well...
Shall we open it? Well... I was... Oh, yeah. There you go.
Yeah, that's it. Yeah, that's a crumpled ball of paper,
inside a nest of shredded paper, to keep it from getting crumpled up.
MARTIN CHUCKLES
So, tell me how did you... How did you come to that idea of doing that?
A friend was doing these editions where he was making booklets
made out of A4 paper.
He asked me if I'd make a book,
but I just couldn't think of anything that I could, you know,
put in a book, and I thought, well, if I crumpled it into a ball,
the paper, instead of making a booklet out of it...
Yeah, and that was it, and I thought it was funny,
because it looks like it's just a piece of garbage. Mm.
But I tried to make it...
as beautifully as I could.
So how do you do that? Do you have a particular method that you used?
Yeah. I mean, apart from scrunching, obviously. Yeah.
The best way is to get the paper, and loosely crumpling it
before you actually... So you don't just try to make the ball in one go.
Usually about one in three of these works out.
So, what is it that you're looking for?
You know, when you say that two out of three you throw away,
what is wrong with the two? A perfect sphere, you know...
I mean, it's never perfect, but I feel like a sphere,
or circle is a beautiful shape, cos it's equal in all directions,
you know, so you don't have to decide. Mm.
You know, I like circles. MARTIN CHUCKLES
How many of those do you think you've made through your career?
Well, I think they're numbered, so... But I don't know.
Oh, this is 695!
Martin's quest for the perfect paper ball
reflects a broader interest in things.
He's used cacti...
..chairs...
and that conceptual favourite, balloons,
filling half of room with them in a work called
Half The Air In A Given Space.
But the crumpled ball is perhaps the hardest thing to appreciate as art.
A lot of people, and probably a lot of our viewers, will be perplexed
at this being called art.
What would you say to those people?
How would you try to answer their concerns?
Er... Well, I wouldn't argue...
Well, really want to argue with them, cos this is...
I wouldn't call this art, either.
But if it's not art, what is it?
Well, it's something that, erm...
I did...
because I liked it.
Yeah. I'm, erm...proud of this, you know?
I wanted to get out of bed in the morning to do it.
You know, I thought it was worth doing.
I think a lot of the little things in life are important,
you know, so not just all the things
that are made out of gold, or whatever.
You know, who says anyway what's good and what's bad, you know?
If something is exciting, and it feels good,
that's the test of things, you know?
Martin Creed's a tricky man to pin down, and I'll admit,
I'm not totally convinced by his paper ball,
but he's helped persuade me of something really important.
When confronted with conceptual art, we really shouldn't worry about
whether it's art or not, because no-one really knows what art is.
Instead we should ask, is it funny,
is it original, and perhaps most importantly, does it make us think?
And, in a way, this little crumpled ball does all of those things.
In 1897, a French humorist called Alphonse Allais introduced the world
to a series of pictures.
Each of them was a plain sheet of coloured paper.
They appeared to depict nothing, until you read the titles.
This one was called
First Communion Of Anaemic Young Girls In A Snowstorm.
This one,
Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes On The Shore Of The Red Sea.
And this one, which I warn you isn't politically correct -
Negroes Fighting In A Cellar At Night.
Now, Allais was joking, of course, but his joke was
a really important moment in the pre-history of conceptual art,
because it showed that words
can be more meaningful than images.
When conceptual art really kicked off in the mid-1960s,
many of its leading protagonists were so determined to purge art
of its decorative frilliness, they turned more and more to words.
In a revolutionary atmosphere, words were used to explain...
..subvert...
..and occasionally replace the art they described.
And the results were often tricky to decipher.
One piece proved especially mind-bending.
In 1973, Michael Craig-Martin
placed a glass of water on a shelf in a gallery,
and titled it An Oak Tree.
The work was completed by an accompanying text,
a philosophical dialogue,
presented as a Q and A session between artist and confused viewer.
To begin with, could you describe this work?
Yes, of course.
What I've done is change a glass of water
into a full-grown oak tree.
It looks like a glass of water.
Well, of course it does.
I didn't change its appearance.
But it's not a glass of water.
It's an oak tree.
Haven't you simply called this glass of water An Oak Tree?
Absolutely not. It's not a glass of water any more.
Seems to me that you are claiming to have worked a miracle.
Isn't that case?
I'm flattered that you think so.
'In my opinion, this was neither an oak tree nor a glass of water.
'It was an empty exercise in semantics
'that deliberately confused its audience.'
But Craig-Martin agreed with Duchamp and Manzoni -
when it comes to conceptual art, it is the thought that counts.
This was certainly the view of the American artist Sol LeWitt.
In the 1960s he declared,
"The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
"It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art
"to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator,
"and therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry."
This is one of my problems with conceptual art.
It often put the brain before the heart.
But not all of it does.
Some artists used words to combine intellectual curiosity
with real emotional power.
One of the most talented was an American artist called Mary Kelly.
And this is her stomach, heavily pregnant.
Her resulting child went on to inspire
one of conceptual art's more intimate works.
In Post`Partum Document, Mary Kelly recorded and analysed
her changing relationship with her young son.
A six-part series, each section concentrates on
a different formative moment between mother and child...
..blending unusual materials with words.
Part One caused a scandal when first shown in 1976,
because Kelly used her son's dirty nappy liners
as a sort of canvas, onto which she typed
a log of everything he'd eaten that day.
This is the third section of Post-Partum Document,
and I'm pleased to report there are no nappy stains in sight.
In fact, it doesn't really leap out and grab you as a spectator.
It consists of a series of small, really quite murky images
that you could very easily miss when you're walking through the gallery.
So what we really to do is step in and take a much closer look.
The work is a kind of collaborative diary from the autumn of 1975,
when Kelly's son first began nursery.
Each picture contains a mixture of writing, coloured paper,
and her son's crayon scribbles.
So, what we're looking at is three columns of text.
The first column, on the left - that documents Mary Kelly's son's
own words, on the date 13th of September 1975.
And a second column to the right of it -
that documents Mary Kelly's response to her son's words on the same day.
And the third column, which is probably the most interesting,
and isn't typed, it's handwritten - this contains Mary Kelly's
broader reflections on the original exchange.
Now, it's quite complicated at first, but there is a logic to it,
and once you understand that three-column structure,
you can begin to understand the entire piece.
And the closer you read,
the more vividly their relationship comes to life.
The demands of motherhood are clearly taking their toll
by the final image, and it actually records some very fraught
exchanges between mother and son.
He refuses to go to sleep - he's bossing her about
over pillows and stories.
"He's bossing me around.
"He'll just have to read the story I choose this time.
"I'm trying not to be weak."
And there's a particularly moving passage here where Kelly writes,
"I feel somehow undermined. Not resentful, but just confused,
"because just being affectionate isn't enough any more.
"He tests me.
"I feel I have to gain his respect, where before I felt assured of it
"simply because I was his mother."
Mary Kelly's art is about self-understanding.
But it takes effort to understand it.
This art isn't simply for looking at.
You have to read it, analyse it, and decipher it.
And it repays your hard work.
You know, I'm actually really surprised
at how powerful I find this piece.
Because when you start investing in it,
when you start getting up close and reading it,
you really get drawn into this very intimate emotional world
that's intelligent and witty and moving.
Conceptual art - emotionally dry?
Not here, that's for sure.
Today, artists inspired by conceptual art
are still trying to use words in fresh ways.
One of them is Robert Montgomery.
Robert aims to take text art out of the gallery,
and into the wider world.
From light pieces...
..to fire poems...
..to public billboards like this -
one of two pieces he's invited me to come and see in London today.
It's really exciting watching the piece unfold.
It would take me at least two hours, what he can do in 20 minutes.
So, the piece is up, and it says,
"The air chases and scatters blue light
"more than it scatters red light
"That's why the sky is blue
"When we are cloudless, when it is big-gushed
"the screens which circle you like butterflies now
"All your tomorrow's turned to electric waterfalls
"Digital culture created a new kind of unconscious hipster capitalist.
"Unsuck the glamour from these glass towers
"Blank the sycophantic neon
"Undress in the streets this summer
"Make our universities free again
"Save our fragile libraries".
This is no picture, but it's chock full of imagery.
You've got a combination here of the romantic and the political.
So it starts with this wonderful description of the sky and clouds,
almost pastoral set of lines,
but then you finish with a very strong message.
Yeah, I think of myself as a traditional British romantic...
painter, in a sense, in the tradition of Turner.
I want to talk about those things.
I want to talk about romantic, transcendent sunsets,
and I want to bring that into the dirtier life of today.
You know, my idea of being an artist is to be engaged with the
culture and politics of your time in a real way.
It's also to do with billboards, in a way, defining the discourse
and conversation of the city,
and that becoming increasingly a conversation
that treats us as only consumers.
I want to touch on the subconscious mind
through a medium that is used to sell us shampoo.
So you are using the infrastructure of capitalism,
but you're not trying to sell anything.
In fact, you're trying to provide an antidote or...
To what people normally find on their streets.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I can be an antidote to capitalism
just on my own, entirely.
But I can certainly open up a more sensitive state of mind
in this place.
Do you find that people engage with these pieces?
Yeah, I do.
In 2004, I started in this neighbourhood
doing billboard pieces, let's say...
Would I say illegally? I would say unauthorised-ly.
And I'd get hugged quite a lot by drunk estate agents who were
wandering home to Essex, and would come up and say,
"What is that, then, mate?
"What's it an ad for?" "It's not an ad for anything."
"Oh, is it poetry, is it art?" They'd ask those questions.
And I would say, "Read it and see what do you think."
And so, the question is to try to make poetry and contemporary art
simple enough in 100 words that it's accessible to people.
"Accessible" - not normally a word you associate with conceptual art.
So, Robert, where are we heading now?
We're heading Bermondsey Wall East, which is on the south of
the River Thames, and we have a light piece there today.
What is it specifically about words that appeal to you as a medium?
I think there's a certain slowness to words.
I think we probably live in an age of accelerated image,
and we are bombarded with, like, hundreds of images a day.
And, ironically, in that context,
words can be a moment of quiet, or a moment of pause.
Wow.
"The people you love become ghosts inside of you
"and like this you keep them alive."
Yeah. It's a very personal piece, this one.
I had this really close friend during art school called
Sean Watson, and he got hit by a car on the Edgware Road,
and died very suddenly in 2004.
And it was the first sort of heartbreak of grief
in my adult life, in a sense,
and it affected me really badly.
And then a few months into that, I had this dream where
Sean was just there - he was alive and just around.
And I woke up the next day happier than I'd gone to bed.
And I thought, OK, this, maybe, is what ghosts are.
Maybe ghosts are a positive thing.
This very personal piece was always intended for public display,
but the scale of its impact caught Robert by surprise.
If you search "The People You Love", the title of the piece,
and my name, you get 4.39 million results in 0.7 seconds.
This is a tribute page to a guy called Chico S Las Mana.
"Always missed, always loved, type a message." Wow.
And that is how it is commonly used online. This was interesting.
This is a South Korean rapper called Taeyang who saw it in
a gallery in Paris, went home to Korea and just faked the whole thing
and put it in his video, rapping in front of it.
He seems to have missed the point of it. I'm not sure.
He might get the point of it, but he certainly just made it on his own.
And then you start to see it appear as tattoos. My gosh!
Sometimes... All along the arm, there.
And then this is a really beautiful one,
cos it was a brother and sister who I think had lost their mum,
and they wrote to ask if they could get tattoos of each other
reading the text as a sound wave on each other's arms,
as a sort of tribute to their mum, and that was lovely,
cos that was them making their own art from it.
They reinvented it. Yeah.
It has, really, a life of its own.
People have got to really like this piece
to tattoo it onto their bodies.
I mean, that's pretty flattering. It's really nice.
I mean, the thing is, the point of art
is to touch the hearts of strangers
without the trouble of ever having to meet them.
But if you can sort of touch their hearts from a distance,
and help a little bit,
you know, from your quiet studio, then it's very nice.
It's moving.
Very moving.
Makes you think of the wartime, I think.
All the memories. All what's happened along here.
We just came by the pub for a pint and saw it,
and it's just like amazing and stopped us in our tracks a bit.
I think against this dramatic sky tonight as well,
it just really stood out.
Perfect backdrop.
I mean, for me, I think about relationships lost. Yeah.
Especially cos I'm not actually from London and I'm kind of like...
I left those behind. And then here I am.
The statement is kind of poignant for us at the moment because
we have poorly relatives, and a new life.
I'm struggling to find the words. It's like a little discovery.
Robert's words aren't exercises in empty semantics.
They are big, bold, out in the real world.
Hungry for our attention,
and inviting us to stop, look, think and feel.
And it reminds me of something Robert said.
He said, "The great thing about words is they slow you down.
"They slow you down as you read them."
And that's what this piece has done.
It has encouraged people to briefly put their lives on hold,
and reflect on something really rather lovely.
I must say, I'm beginning to change my mind about conceptual art.
Maybe it isn't as pretentious and elitist as I once feared.
Perhaps all we need to do is give it a chance.
However, there is one facet of conceptual art that still
scares us, and shows little sign of being accepted by the public.
It's often known as - gulp - performance art.
Of course, art and the body have a long and healthy history.
Detailed study of human anatomy and appearance formed the
backbone of thousands of years of artistic output.
But the body's full potential was yet to be unleashed.
Art isn't simply about making things,
it can also be about doing things.
And from the 1960s onwards,
a number of conceptual artists embarked on a spate of acts,
performances and stunts, and put their own bodies centre stage.
In New York, artist Vito Acconci spent a month following strangers
through the city's streets...
..for minutes and sometimes hours at a time...
..until he could no longer track them.
A relatively unknown Japanese artist called Yoko Ono sat alone
and impassive onstage while her audience were invited to
come up and cut away her clothes.
And in London, an irreverent performance by a young man
called Bruce McLean attempted to redefine the nature of sculpture.
So, what was going on?
Well, fortunately, Bruce McLean is still very much active and has
suggested revisiting this pivotal moment of conceptualism with me.
Bruce. Hi. Good morning, nice to see you. You too. All right?
What is this you are doing? Sorry?
What are you doing, are these poses?
No, I'm just moving around the plinth a little bit. Limbering up.
So, what we've got here, these are three plinths... Yes.
Three different heights, just about. What are they all about?
I was hoping you weren't going to ask me that question, funnily enough.
In 1971 I borrowed 50 plinths from the Tate for an installation
called Objects No Concepts... No Concepts.
..as opposed to Concepts No Objects.
And three somehow got left.
And I thought, "What can I do with these, then? They seem to require some sort of sculpture."
So I started to play with them, cos I like playing.
I think it's quite constructive.
And I thought I could be the sculpture on these plinths,
and I could let these plinths determine what I did with my
very nimble and athletic dancer-esque body that I had at that point in time.
So, I just kind of got on them.
This was more than just a series of self portraits,
here the artist BECAME the art.
And I thought, that's quite a good...
I moved and I held it for a bit, then I moved and held it for a bit.
Did it for about an hour, I think.
And then somebody said, "Why don't we photograph that?"
I can't get up there any more.
I could help bring your leg up. No, thanks.
No leg cocking in this film.
What I like about it is you've got the plinths,
this black and white photograph, feels very formal,
and at the same time it's you subverting a tradition. Yeah. Trying to.
And having a bit of a laugh.
I wasn't doing it as a laugh, and I wasn't doing it as a "Ooh..."
solemn work.
I thought, well, let's look of these cliches and take them apart a bit.
When I look at something I don't understand, I'm interested.
And where did you get the idea of making your body part of the sculpture itself?
I liked the idea that you can use your body,
so you don't have to buy any material.
You don't need a bit of wood,
you don't need glue, paint, anything.
You can make something up as you go along, with nothing.
And it was a time of the student revolution coming from France,
and the whole mood of the time was about a global mood, a global feeling.
Young people thinking, exchanging ideas,
being part of what became known as conceptual art.
People didn't want to make stuff with stuff for people to consume.
We are all anti-consumerism.
We were there to question the nature of sculpture.
While Bruce McLean played with the idea of ephemeral human sculpture...
..others were busy transforming their whole lives into allegorical artworks.
The most mercurial of them was a hugely influential German artist
called Joseph Beuys.
In 1974, Beuys flew into New York's JFK airport.
He was covered in a layer of felt, loaded onto a stretcher,
and taken by ambulance to a West Broadway gallery.
SIREN
It was all part of an elaborate performance piece called
I Like America And America Likes Me
in which Beuys was to share a room with a wild coyote
for three whole days.
TRIANGLE CHIMES
Confused? You should be.
Beuys once declared that art is not there to be simply understood,
or we would have no need for it.
Understandably, the coyote was also somewhat mystified,
and fairly angry, to begin with.
But over time, the animal appeared to grow tolerant,
even accepting of the eccentric artist,
and by the end, they had formed something of a friendship.
So was it just a stunt, or was there method in the madness?
I see Beuys' performance as a strange but powerful allegory
about peace, tolerance and respect for nature.
This was what Beuys called social sculpture -
an art form that turned life into art
in order to change both politics and society.
Elsewhere conceptual artists took a more direct approach...
..and distributed their political messages by any means necessary.
In Brazil, a young artist devised an ingenious plan to combat
his country's oppressive US-backed military dictatorship...
..not with coyotes, but Coke bottles.
Cildo Meireles began by purchasing a number of Coca-Cola bottles,
and then he made some careful modifications.
The bottle in the foreground reads "Yankees go home".
And the one in the middle has the recipe for a Molotov cocktail.
Crucially, when Meireles had made his modifications,
he then sent these bottles back out into circulation, where they
were purchased in shops and drunk by the public.
Meireles considered this to be an act of guerrilla warfare against
capitalism, against censorship, against dictatorship.
And he was fighting his foes with conceptual art.
Meireles's work again shows that conceptual art takes many different forms -
objects, words, bodies, actions,
even fizzy drinks.
But in the 1970s, artists found a new medium to exploit -
the media itself.
'I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Chris Burden.
'And today, on this tape, I'm going to show you
'excerpts or visual records from 11 different pieces that I've done,
'starting in 1971, into 1974.'
Chris Burden pushed himself to the limits in the name of art.
From balancing above electrified water
to being shot with a .22 calibre rifle.
GUNSHOT
Here was a man intent on exploring what both artist and audience could endure.
'Holding my hands behind my back,
'I crawled through about 50 feet of glass.
'Very few spectators saw this piece, most of them just passers-by.'
Strange, this piece.
It's almost unwatchable,
but at the same time, you can't stop watching it.
At least, I can't.
There is something horribly gripping about observing another person suffering.
That, I think, was the point.
This piece was made during the Vietnam War,
and it was all about people, Americans,
becoming increasingly desensitised to images of death and violence
that they were seeing in the media.
Burden realised that the very same media could potentially be infiltrated
to shock and confuse his fellow Americans,
and that television held the biggest captive audience.
So, in a separate artistic act he created a series of
guerrilla TV adverts to be broadcast almost subliminally amid the normal schedule.
'Raico presents Good Vibrations - 22 original hits with the Hollies...'
BURDEN: 'What you've been watching is the advertisement that actually precedes mine.'
'Well, that was it. You saw how short it was.
'I didn't have any illusions that people understood this.
'But I know it stuck out like a sore thumb,
'and that I had the satisfaction of knowing that 250,000 people
'saw it every night, and that it was disturbing to them.'
In a conceptual masterstroke,
the artist had hijacked the medium of TV, along with its audience.
To think that Burden actually bought air time and sent his commercials
into the homes of hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people -
it was utterly audacious.
Artists like Chris Burden blazed an edgy, provocative trail in
the relationship between conceptual artists and the mass media.
But they also reconnected with the creative potential of the prank.
Christian Jankowski is a German artist who has spent
the last 25 years masterminding a whole range of media pranks
that often rely on innocent collaborators.
He spoofed Supermarket Sweep-style daytime TV...
..persuaded a team of high-ranking Vatican officials to cast
Jesus in a talent show contest...
..and got Polish weightlifters to lift public sculptures in Warsaw
for a mock TV sports show.
Christian has agreed to meet me at his Berlin studio,
but I have to admit that, what with his track record,
I'm feeling a little bit nervous.
I've been told to just go with the flow
and enjoy the experience, whatever happens.
Christian! Hi, James. Very good to meet you. Good to meet you, too.
Thanks for having me. Come on in.
You've got a really lovely studio here. Thank you.
This is all yours? Yeah. We can go over there, or over there.
Over here. Great.
Do you like to shock people, Christian?
Yes and no. I mean, shock for the shock's sake, no.
I'm interested in images
and I'm interested in seeing images I have not exactly seen before.
I was born in the '60s.
I didn't grow up looking at an oil painting,
I grew up looking at the television set.
Doesn't mean I'm not into paintings, I love paintings, too.
I love all kinds of media, but I'm very much, my thinking,
has been informed a lot by television.
And one of the most successful TV formats of the last ten years,
I suppose, has been the talent show.
And the piece I'm thinking about of yours that relates to that is Casting Jesus.
Can you tell me a little bit about how that concept,
how that idea came about? Yeah.
I was in Rome,
and then I thought in Italy about all of these different artists
over the centuries that needed models to, you know, act as Jesus.
Because Jesus had to be refreshed from century to century to
really reach the audience.
And I thought, what are really strong formats of our days?
And I thought, the casting show is a great format to bring
real Vatican priests on board and be the jury.
And have casting agency to send you different Roman actors that
could act in the Jesus role,
and so they were in competition with each other,
in front of these priests that had to, you know,
look for the perfect Christ.
Are you trying to make people laugh?
Is that an important strategy of years?
I think there is something quite,
quite anarchistic with humour because you can express feelings,
you can express opinions with it, but not in the teacherly way
of saying, "This is bad and this is good,"
it's a different style.
For Christian, all media formats are potential conceptual playgrounds.
'This is Christian, he is from Germany.' 'Hello.'
'We are talking about artistry, we are talking about how God...'
Be they Texan televangelism...
'And so he shared something with me which is a point...'
'Hello, Peter.' 'Hey, it's good to see you.'
..pop video piss-takes...
Can I start the bidding here at 300 Euro for this?
..or vehicles to satirise the art market.
1,200. Very popular, it is. LAUGHTER
1,200 Euro, now. 2,200 Euro. GAVEL FALLS
And whether his collaborators are in on the joke or not,
without them, there'd be no artworks.
You bring lots of people together in your work, don't you?
It's not just about you doing something on your own,
the audience participate,
you get strangers and people in the street and weightlifters,
everyone is participating. It is a real group enterprise, isn't it?
Yes, because that is where I find the unexpected.
For me, if you call people the medium or the material you work with,
it sounds a little bit sick.
I am not saying you are a paintbrush right now,
but you are also a medium.
Everybody I drag into my pieces from this world outside of the art,
may it be sportsmen, may it be anchormen, you know,
they all bring a new perspective.
Art at the end of the day is about reaching to a new perspective.
So, Christian, to deal with the elephant in the room, so to speak,
I can't help noticing you're naked and have been naked throughout this interview.
Can you tell me why?
Don't you see why? It's quite nice, no?
I just thought, what can I add to a situation like this?
How can we have a little bit fun creating images that are out
in the mass media? If I would zap to a programme like this,
I would think, "Hey, what are they doing there?"
And it's very conceptual,
or maybe it also is I have nothing to hide.
I'm just telling you what I think about conceptual art,
it might not make you the most happy, but maybe it does.
Who knows? Well, you have certainly made me feel overdressed.
You make me feel underdressed.
Well, that was one of the more surreal experiences I've ever had.
I've interviewed a lot of artists over my time,
but I've never interviewed a naked one.
But I really actually enjoyed meeting Christian,
and he was one of the artists I thought I was going to struggle with the most.
I really thought of him as a prankster,
but he clearly is a very, very intelligent, thoughtful man
who uses humour and uses the media to ask really
profound questions about the society which we are living in.
I have to confess, I've grown to rather like conceptual art
because in the hundred years since Marcel Duchamp's urinal,
conceptual artists have achieved a lot -
they have made us laugh, think, and feel,
they have redefined art and beauty...
..they have taken bold political stances...
..and they've tried to make the world a more unpredictable and
imaginative place.
But to really understand how far conceptual art has come today,
we must delve deep into the final frontier.
Katie Paterson is one of the most exciting talents of my generation,
and for a few years now she has been boldly going
where no conceptual artist has gone before.
She's melted down and recast a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite,
before sending it back into space.
She's mapped all the dead stars we know of in the universe -
27,000, apparently.
And she's even made music with celestial objects.
PIANO PLAYS
This is one of Katie Paterson's most famous works.
You may recognise the music as Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
But let's have a closer listen.
MUSIC: MOONLIGHT SONATA, WITH SOME NOTES OMITTED
Now, you might have noticed that this rendition is actually missing a few notes.
But you won't believe why.
Because what Katie Paterson has done is taken a score of
the Moonlight Sonata, converted it into Morse code,
and sent it by radio transmission all the way to the surface of the moon,
and then bounced it back into this room, and into this piano.
So, where have the missing notes gone?
Well, they have actually been lost in the valleys, the craters,
the shadows of the lunar surface.
So, in many ways, this is the Moonlight Sonata remade by the moon itself.
In the same way that Duchamp's Fountain was just a urinal,
this is just an everyday piano plonked inside a gallery,
but it's been transformed by an extraordinary idea.
My final stop on this conceptual journey is to try and discover
where these cosmic brainwaves come from,
and to see what else Paterson has been dreaming up.
So, what have we got here, then, Katie?
We have got a number of different samples and bits and pieces from the
different artworks that I've been working on for the last few years.
This is a candle that smells of outer space.
I didn't think outer space had a smell.
It has a lot of smells, it turns out. It is quite a scented place.
Here's the sun, what does the sun smell of? Welding fumes.
Actually, that doesn't seem so surprising. Lots of hot metal.
I like that idea that Mars smells of an old penny.
Some of the scents have come from astronauts' clothing that
has been analysed, like the scent of the moon.
I worked with a biochemist to develop these very particular perfumes.
That's just amazing. I'm looking -
burnt almond cookies, the smell of the moon.
How do you come up with an idea like that, the idea of, you know,
"What does the universe smell like? Yeah, let's turn it into a candle."
That's just an amazing idea.
Where are those concepts coming from?
Oh, my goodness, where do the concepts come from?
I still surprise myself with where the concepts come from.
I was thinking as if you are taking a journey through space and
through time, and how to translate the smell of a journey into
a physical thing, and that became a candle.
What is it that inspires you as an artist? What kind of things get you going?
It's almost everything.
Nature and geology and geography.
The planet and the wider universe. It's pretty wide!
What are these, then?
This is from a series called History Of Darkness,
and I've been taking images of nothing, effectively,
of dark spaces, from throughout the universe.
So these are slides. Right.
They are slides, and they are all just black.
But they are from multiple places in the universe
that span billions of years.
So what is that saying? That is the distance from Earth in light years.
Which is four billion... Four billion... ..239,108,820 light-years.
Light-years from Earth. Exactly.
I kind of like to think these spaces of emptiness could now be
filled with life and other planets.
It's so remarkable that in this little slide you've got
four billion light years. Yeah.
That's an amazing, awe-inspiring idea in its own right, isn't it?
And one of the concerns a lot of people have about conceptual art,
and I have to confess that I've had these concerns as well in the past,
is that it's somehow easy, that anyone can do it,
but looking at your work, I realise that it's completely the opposite,
this is not easy at all, it's painstaking.
My goodness. Yeah, it's not easy,
because these ideas are kind of on the brink of the possible and the impossible.
There's so many things that go on behind every single work,
but ultimately I hope the audience make it come alive
by activating that idea through their imagination.
And that, dear viewer, is where YOU come in.
Most conceptual art only comes to life when you are prepared to
put in the work.
Understanding often takes effort,
but you can complete the circle of an artist's big idea.
And here's one of Katie Paterson's biggest.
Wow!
It may only be a mirrorball,
but it is like no mirrorball I've ever seen before.
Katie Paterson has painstakingly compiled and arranged 10,000 images
of solar eclipses,
almost every one ever documented by humankind,
and these transient spectral moments,
brought together in this otherworldly object,
have been granted new life as they scatter and dance all around me.
It feels like I've stepped out of the solar system,
out of time and space,
and I'm staring back at the entire universe from a great distance.
This is conceptual art, all right, but what's there not to like?
It's intelligent and beautiful and hugely ambitious.
Conceptual art is above all about ideas.
Now, as we've seen, those ideas can come in many different shapes and sizes,
but Katie Paterson deals with the biggest ideas imaginable.
Space, time, the cosmos.
Those ideas are relevant to each and everyone of us,
because they help define our place in the universe.
So, let's stop being scared of conceptual art,
because art without ideas is just decoration, isn't it?
# Fly
# Fly me to the Moon
# And let me play among the stars
# Let me see Oh, I wanna see what spring is like
# On Jupiter... #