Civilisations - S1.E9 ∙ The Vital Spark
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00:00What can art do when horror comes calling?
00:07What can art do when civilisation itself is lost?
00:20I've been here before, half a century ago.
00:25Coming back is like the return of a bad dream.
00:33Theresienstadt, Terezin in Czech.
00:36It's about an hour's drive from Prague, an 18th-century garrison town.
00:42Classically designed bastions, tidy streets, a grassy square for parades.
00:49It was also the stage set for an evil charade, a sham culture.
01:00From 1941 onwards, Theresienstadt was filled with Jews, 150,000 in all.
01:08Deported from across Central Europe,
01:11to deceive the world into believing they were being treated humanely.
01:16Cheerful street scenes were staged and filmed.
01:21There was football.
01:24A children's opera.
01:36What the cameras did not record was the truth.
01:42The town turned into a terrorised ghetto.
01:47Beatings, hangings and shootings.
01:55At the heart of this malignant deception were the children.
02:00Separated from their parents, they played and performed for the SS cameras.
02:07When they were shipped on to Auschwitz,
02:10they would be the first, along with the elderly, to be sent to the gas chamber.
02:20In December 1942, an art teacher was deported to Theresienstadt.
02:27Friedl Dicke Brandeis, who trained at the Bauhaus,
02:31filled her meagre luggage allowance not with clothes, but with art materials.
02:40Childless herself, she would become an art mother
02:44to the children of Theresienstadt, fierce and inspiring.
02:49In this building, she held art classes and gave the children a momentary escape,
02:55if only in their imaginations.
03:02MUSIC
03:09After the war, two suitcases Friedl had hidden were found in the camp.
03:18They contained 4,500 pieces of art made by the children.
03:32These pictures are full of flights, literally, of fancy.
03:38This is a dream of flying.
03:40When we want to be somewhere else, we dream of flight.
03:44And there's this figure who is not a witch who's flying over a bed.
03:48And there's a little figure with red hair who's having the dream
03:52and with an arm extended like a conductor conducting celestial music.
03:58Who is she? She's Ella Steineve. And she lives, she survives.
04:02Good for her. One in the bloody eye for the damn Nazis.
04:06She survived. Bless her.
04:08This is a picture of enormous butterflies that have landed
04:12on a huge bloom of glorious colour.
04:17This is Ruth.
04:19Ruth Gutmanove, who does not survive, who is murdered, presumably,
04:24at Auschwitz, and we have slippery things, jellyfish and eels
04:28and seaweed and sea anemones, and it's all suspended beautifully
04:33in a place they can't get at you, underwater.
04:37And the flight continues.
04:39There's another very poignant view by a nine-year-old
04:43looking out of a window towards an imaginary landscape of light and air.
04:50Yeah, a lot of trains here. It's amazing.
04:53And there's no sense yet that trains are the angel of death, really.
05:00So, so profoundly moving.
05:06What I really love, it's a cut-out at the bottom here
05:11by Eliana Mandlova, who also doesn't make it out.
05:17And it's again an aerial view of an imaginary landscape
05:21of trees and mountains, but the imaginary landscape
05:25is made from a piece of official filing paper of some sort,
05:30and dates and columns, and here the material of bureaucracy,
05:35filing paper, has been turned by art into a place
05:41these children could go to for a while and feel alive and feel free.
05:53Of the 15,000 children who passed through Theresienstadt,
05:57barely 150 survived.
06:03Friedl de Cobrandeis was murdered at Auschwitz
06:07on 9th October 1944.
06:10But thanks to her, the imprint of a young pupil's vitality
06:14remains inextinguishable.
06:19Each picture defies the dehumanisation
06:23that was the condition of the Holocaust.
06:28But each picture also begs a larger question.
06:33What was art to do in the face of a century of total war and genocide?
06:41A century of revolution.
06:45A century of profound social and technological change.
06:50That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
06:56A century in which all the hard-won rules of art
07:00were themselves torn up and thrown aside.
07:03Was art destined to become no more than a Sunday afternoon distraction?
07:08Or would it seek to be something deeper,
07:11more lasting, a way of re-envisioning the world?
07:17Would it be content to occupy a corner of our lives,
07:22or aim to be at the centre of it?
07:27Is the art of our own time just so much buzz
07:30and fashion, a hot investment for the rich?
07:34Or is it an absolute necessity,
07:37the light from humanity's vital spark?
08:01MUSIC FADES
08:21This is one answer art makes to the woes of the modern world,
08:26not only to its brutality but also to its frantic materialism.
08:32And it's a very zen answer.
08:38In 1987, the Japanese entrepreneur Soichiro Fukutake
08:43decided that Japanese cities had become living hells
08:47of inhuman alienation and gross consumerism.
08:51He bought half the island of Naoshima in the Seto Inland Sea
08:56and on it he created an art island.
09:08It would be both a shrine to great works of modern art
09:12and, in its own right, a place of contemplation.
09:18People would come and immerse themselves
09:22in its aesthetic power and spiritual purity.
09:30And as they did so, all the ugliness and violence
09:33of contemporary life would be washed away.
09:38They would be put in touch with the elemental forms of the universe.
09:45And so would their true selves.
09:51You might call it retinal yoga, healing through purified vision.
09:58In its radical simplicity, the Chichu Art Museum,
10:01designed by architect Tadao Ando,
10:04is a testament to the enduring moral faith of modernism
10:09and its core belief that the renewal of civilisation
10:13only comes about when the stale clutter of the past has been cleared away.
10:23A century ago, the prophets of modernism tried to pull down the pillars
10:28on which art had rested for thousands of years.
10:33The human figure and face.
10:36The drama of nature's abundance.
10:41And the endless treasury of stories, sacred and profane.
10:48But what would be put in their place?
10:51Well, why not, the modernists said,
10:54just those things intrinsic to making art itself?
11:00Line, form, colour.
11:05That, at any rate, was what the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian
11:09came to believe, and it became his life's pursuit.
11:20But it was a long odyssey.
11:23In the early years of the 20th century,
11:25in Zeeland, in the southwest Netherlands,
11:28he painted an old lighthouse.
11:31The screaming colours of Expressionism were stabbed on,
11:35like fire-like squares with the end of a hog-bristle brush.
11:47As the mood of his vision took him,
11:50sand dunes could be turquoise undulations, veined in gold.
11:59But these paintings are still depictions of their subject matter.
12:06It wasn't until autumn 1914 that Mondrian had the epiphany
12:11which would bring true abstraction into the world.
12:17He was alone with his sketchbook and the sea.
12:21And it was, I think, because of that solitude
12:24that now something really dramatic happened.
12:29He was transfixed by the glitter of light on the waves,
12:34struck by the lines of the pier stretching into the sea.
12:40But instead of painting their appearance,
12:43he translated the afterburn of the Impression
12:47into a kind of rhythmic notation,
12:50just vertical and horizontal lines.
12:55Just vertical and horizontal strokes.
13:01This was a wholly new official language.
13:15It was art alone now.
13:18And Mondrian was pretty much on his own.
13:21No subject, no model, just sheets of paper and lengths of canvas
13:26in a place no-one had been before,
13:29the great boundless space of abstract vision.
13:41In the Paris of the 1920s, Mondrian simplified and magnified.
13:47Panels of primary colours were hung on a grid.
13:51Depth was ironed flat.
13:55Everything on the grid was so perfectly calibrated for balance
14:00that you could stare and stare and cross a threshold of sensation
14:05into Mondrian's self-contained universe.
14:10For the artists, the grids were more than just decorative games.
14:15They were meditation exercises,
14:18entryways to a place of deep harmony.
14:23And they weren't meant just for galleries or living rooms,
14:27but as a whole programme of visual re-education,
14:31capable of healing the world.
14:34Though the grids seem simple,
14:36they're actually miracles of fine-tuned optical calculation.
14:42The colours swell and press against the black rods of the armature,
14:47or else they lie captive to their confinement.
14:51And those colour planes, which ought to seem inert and gridded to death,
14:57are a living force of imagination.
15:02In 1940, to escape the rolling disaster of the war in Europe,
15:08Mondrian moved to New York, a city built entirely around a grid.
15:15But this grid moved and shook with lights and business and music.
15:23So how could he not respond to a city rocking with syncopated energy?
15:34The painting represents as revolutionarily a departure for Mondrian
15:39as it is for him.
15:41It's a picture of a city in the mid-1940s,
15:44and it's a picture of a city in the mid-1940s.
15:48The painting represents as revolutionarily a departure for Mondrian
15:52as Piranotion did all those years ago.
15:55It takes the classic formulae of his grid paintings
16:00and it throws it out of the 30th-storey window.
16:04This is a picture about animation.
16:07Of course it's affected by, if not really about, New York.
16:11Of course it pulses with energy.
16:14Why are those lines broken if not to make the paint pulse and flicker
16:19and shine and shimmy?
16:22Abstraction had been, under Mondrian's presidential authority,
16:28a very sober, austere, deliberate kind of business.
16:32People have treated him almost as if he was a kind of high priest
16:36of philosophical purity.
16:38And here he is essentially all about what?
16:42He is about play.
16:47Broadway Boogie Woogie was followed by Victory Boogie Woogie.
16:51Though it was unfinished at Mondrian's death in February 1944,
16:56when Victory was far from a done deal,
16:59the patches and strips of colour paper,
17:02which Mondrian could move around to fine-tune the composition,
17:06give it a jumping, flickering energy,
17:09almost as though he could sense the celebration that would come.
17:17It's official. It's all over. It's total victory.
17:22That hit of liberated, jubilant energy
17:25was sustained by the abstractions painted in New York after the war.
17:32Abstractions pumped up with the vitality of expressionism.
17:39Jackson Pollock's pictures were monumental in scale
17:43and ferociously physical in execution.
17:49Mondrian's calculated finesse had been swept aside
17:53by instinctive whiplash, dripping and staining.
17:57It was all, look at me, action.
18:00And when you did look, you got a non-stop loop
18:04of the drama of the painting's creation.
18:07Yet, somehow, none of this dissolved into chaos.
18:12What the best Pollocks delivered
18:14was a rhythmically orchestrated web of line and colour.
18:23Pollock and the other giants of abstract expressionism
18:27were hailed as heroic individualists.
18:32The answer to the production line,
18:35technicolour glamour of American life.
18:44Yes, just watch the fur fly,
18:47as the most talked-about girls in Hollywood go out loaded for big games.
18:51These are a girl's best friend.
18:54But perhaps there was another way to look at that glitz.
18:59A lovingly ironic look,
19:01which would remake it as American iconography.
19:09Those artists who chose not to hold their noses at popular culture
19:14but bring it into their art
19:16clearly owed something to that old tease of Marcel Duchamp's
19:20that anything could be art if it was framed and labelled as such.
19:29Tiffany's.
19:34Cartier.
19:39For the high priests of abstraction,
19:41pop was an outrage, a wallowing in the junk
19:44from which art was supposed to redeem us.
19:47Yet, it's this visual greediness
19:50which has made contemporary art such a hit.
19:53The sense of the quality of the art
19:55and its subtlety isn't necessarily compromised by its playfulness.
20:08But, of course, enjoying pop art doesn't mean to say
20:11you can't also surrender to the great abstract machines.
20:15Everything, all of this,
20:17feeds into the spectacular art universe of today.
20:22But there are some contemporary artists
20:25for whom neither abstraction nor pop art is quite enough
20:29because they want to return
20:31to the original morally charged mission of modernism,
20:36to rescue us from the numbing routine of daily life.
20:41They want to bring us up short,
20:43bring us close to the drama of the human condition,
20:46to make us see, feel and think it
20:49intensely all over again.
20:52And it turns out that in order to do this,
20:55they have to return and engage with exactly all those things
21:00that modern art thought it had banished forever.
21:04The human figure, the materials of nature
21:08and, above all, those endless haunting stories
21:13which never, ever go away.
21:20On the outskirts of Paris, in what was once a warehouse,
21:25are the studios of an artist
21:27who's dedicated himself to engaging with history.
21:31What was once a car park is full of models of crashed fighters,
21:36almost full-size, all made of lead.
21:40Lead poppies and sunflowers sprout from some of them.
21:46And the site is repeatedly overflown
21:49by light aircraft from a nearby airfield,
21:52as though the war is still going on.
22:00Inside are the archives and research materials
22:03of the great master of recovered memory, Anselm Kiefer.
22:08HE SINGS IN GERMAN
22:16Born like me in 1945, just before the end of the war,
22:20Kiefer grew up in a bombsite culture
22:24where dwelling on recent history was judged unhealthy.
22:30I came late to the German history.
22:34In school, we had not so much about German history.
22:37It was, like, Alexander the Great,
22:40and then came the Baroque, and then the Renaissance Baroque,
22:43and then for the Nazi, for the Third Reich,
22:46it was one or two weeks, too, you know?
22:49But you had some of it, because I thought you told me that...
22:52Yeah, yeah, I had some of it.
22:54I had some of it.
22:56But you had some of it, because I thought you told me
22:59that there was almost none of it.
23:01Later, when I was already in the art school,
23:03I found by accident, I don't know how it happened,
23:06a disc, what the Americans produced
23:09to explain what German history was the last 15 years.
23:13You never told me that. So, a record?
23:16And there was a voice of Hitler.
23:19And I was so impressed and so fascinated
23:23and so, um...
23:28...abgestoßen auch, abgestoßen, repelled.
23:31Repelled and fascinated from the voice of Hitler, you know?
23:34And then this was a moment I started to study about the German history.
23:49CHEERING
23:56Kiefer's first project was called Occupations.
24:00A combination of performance and photography.
24:04Satirical poses meant to pierce the conspiracy of forgetting.
24:09A wound opener.
24:11Off he went where the Panzer divisions had gone,
24:14often wearing his father's Luftwaffe uniform,
24:17Sieg Heil to scenery,
24:19but also to the seductive spell of German art memories.
24:27But satirical provocations alone
24:30would never have made Kiefer a great artist.
24:35This did.
24:39Paint thick with memory,
24:42physically encrusted with the debris of history's destructions.
24:48Images that recall the blasted, bombed-out cities
24:53in which Kiefer himself grew up.
24:57But look closer.
24:59There are names written in Kiefer's spidery hand,
25:04great figures of all the Germanic peoples from history, culture, art.
25:10Painters like Dürer, generals like Wallenstein,
25:14an indiscriminate gathering of both the gifted and the dangerous.
25:20Their names recall a building and a moment
25:23around which German national identity had been formed.
25:28This is the Valhalla near Regensburg.
25:32Finished in 1842, the pet project of Ludwig, King of Bavaria.
25:40He took the Norse idea of Valhalla,
25:43the resting place of the greatest warriors,
25:46fallen in battle, and Germanised it,
25:49filling this neoclassical pantheon with portrait busts,
25:53heroes of German culture.
25:56The very same names that Kiefer includes in his paintings.
26:05In the 1930s, of course,
26:07the Valhalla became a place of cultural pilgrimage for all good Nazis.
26:14MUSIC CONTINUES
26:22Kiefer called a recent show in London Valhalla.
26:28In its central corridor, German memory has become a hospital ward.
26:33The beds are empty.
26:37Labelled as though their occupants have passed on
26:41and become part of German mythology,
26:43taken off to history's mortuary.
26:49I've always been moved by Kiefer's work
26:52because it seems to share the historian's version
26:55of the Hippocratic Oath to wage war against forgetfulness.
27:06His vast landscapes are often soiled and smoking.
27:12MUSIC CONTINUES
27:18On them, he lays down fateful railway lines
27:21stretching away into a remote distance,
27:24where the vanishing point of perspective
27:27is also a vanishing place for people.
27:42Well, welcome to the inside of Anselm Kiefer's brain.
27:45Quite a place, isn't it?
27:47He calls it his arsenal, but the only weapons we've got here
27:50are the things that matter most to Kiefer, memories.
27:53And there they are, printed on spools of lead.
27:56He loves lead as a medium.
27:58It's a very unusual choice,
28:00and the sense in which it's kind of dangerous is perfect for Kiefer.
28:04It bears the impression of all sorts of catastrophes and calamities
28:09on those great spools and ribbons hanging down.
28:14This is also an archive, isn't it?
28:16It's an archive of his own particular works.
28:18We've got the titles of his favourite stories,
28:21but we also have the names of heroes there,
28:24together with a kind of raw, blonde hang of hair.
28:28We have Lorelei, the Rime Maidens,
28:30who lured sailors to their death on the rocks.
28:35We also have Friar and Hodor,
28:37all sorts of gods and heroes cluttered here.
28:41I must say, this actual place makes even my own study
28:44look quite neat by comparison.
28:46But this is the sort of place that you feel you've stumbled into
28:49after a bomb has dropped on it, you know, you've just been abandoned.
28:53There's something else about this place,
28:55which is not just an archive, not just an arsenal.
28:58For me, it absolutely is a chapel, and there's the altar, isn't it?
29:02All of those layered spools of printed photographs
29:07are supported by the other instrument of memory,
29:11a printing press.
29:18If Anselm Kiefer's life's work is to keep the past from oblivion,
29:23he's not alone in that.
29:26Memories live and burn,
29:28and they're edited memories, customised histories, whitewashed,
29:33and only the bravest, toughest artists can enter those battle zones.
29:44Kara Walker was born in California,
29:47but grew up beneath the shadow of one of those customised memories.
29:59Stone Mountain rises just outside Atlanta, Georgia.
30:05On the face of the mountain,
30:07the largest relief carving in the entire world
30:11commemorates the leaders of the American Confederacy.
30:15Jefferson Davis, Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson.
30:19Principal defenders of the right to keep slaves.
30:23The perfect backdrop for a family gathering.
30:28Friends or colleagues would talk about Stone Mountain
30:31just as this recreation, you know, we'd go to Stone Mountain.
30:34You'd go to a laser show.
30:36Yeah, you'd go, they had some rides and games.
30:38Did you go to a laser show?
30:40Well, not until I was 16 with some hippie friends,
30:42and we all got dirty looks.
30:44They do sort of an animated recreation
30:47of the Confederate heroes marching off on their horses,
30:51and then you see an animation of Ray Charles singing Georgia on my mind.
30:56Georgia!
31:00Georgia!
31:02We should also say that this is the place
31:05where the modern Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915.
31:08Exactly, 1915.
31:12The stars and stripes and the Ray Charles soundtrack
31:15say everything's OK now,
31:18but the carving enshrines the values of the Confederate slave states,
31:23and Stone Mountain has become the site for annual gatherings of the Klan.
31:34You didn't sit around and talk about it at school or in family?
31:37We didn't talk about it when we got American flags
31:41with Ku Klux Klan flyers attached to them on our mailbox,
31:44as everybody did.
31:46It wasn't a death threat, it was just a reminder.
31:48You know, I think that was...
31:50I was perplexed by it,
31:52but I don't remember anybody saying anything in particular about it.
31:55That wasn't the first time that I got Klan flyers in my life.
31:58It just kind of became, like, a regular...
32:01It's good that we, and you, can especially kind of chuckle about it,
32:05really, but it's deeply sinister. Yeah.
32:11For more than a decade now,
32:13she's been making a shockingly defiant art of resistance,
32:18using the inescapable blackness of the silhouette tradition
32:22to empty it of its myths and pieties.
32:27Instead of sentimental storytelling,
32:29the kind it features in children's books,
32:32these silhouettes picture the violations and torments of slavery.
32:38MUSIC CONTINUES
32:46In a subtlety,
32:48the term given to artistically fashioned confections
32:51brought to European aristocratic tables,
32:54the bitter history of sweetness made by slave labour
32:58is embodied in a colossal sphinx-like figure,
33:02sculpted from sugar paste,
33:05surrounded by molasses-dripping little attendants.
33:11It was made in the empty shell of an old sugar factory,
33:15and it is a great black-and-white anthem to every kind of ruin.
33:23Not all of the art, engaging with the endurance of tradition,
33:27ends up in a brutal, combative place.
33:36MUSIC CONTINUES
33:50The Ghanaian artist El Anatsui lives and works in Nigeria.
33:55I think it's OK.
33:57His glowing, lustrous, robe-like hangings seem to flow down the wall,
34:03a kind of sumptuously soft fabric.
34:17This immense, mantle-like robe
34:21is made of tens of thousands of flattened bottle tops,
34:27from bottles of booze, whisky, rum and beer.
34:31They're fitted almost as if they were the work of a medieval mosaic maker.
34:36These are glowing, shimmering tiles,
34:39and they're connected or wired just by copper wiring.
34:44So what you have, actually, in this extraordinary piece of work
34:48is something that operates on so many different levels.
34:51El Anatsui's father in Ghana
34:54wove kente fabrics, which were made for festive occasions.
35:02So bursting from this phenomenal array of colours
35:06is that sense of memory and practice of rejoicing.
35:11But also, these tens of thousands of bottle tops, it's about urban waste.
35:16So what we have here is the experience of that African culture
35:21in this huge, metropolitan, beehive swarm
35:25of the modern West African city.
35:29And it does something else that is quite hard to find sometimes
35:34amidst the self-conscious witticisms and poses
35:38and intellectualism of contemporary art.
35:41It does not hold its nose at the idea of beauty.
35:46Not at all. It reinvents it.
35:50The strongest contemporary art
35:52has this magical power of transformation.
35:57It can take last night's ephemeral rubbish,
36:00souvenirs of the hangover,
36:02and turn it into something enduring,
36:05something which actually sustains tradition.
36:09And in the most artful hands,
36:12the very materials of disarray,
36:15and in the most artful hands,
36:17the very materials of destruction
36:20can turn into the elements of creation.
36:31These colour powders look like paint pigment,
36:34but in fact, they're gum powder.
36:38And the medium of Tsai Kuo-chang's art is explosion.
36:44Two, one...
36:52Gum powder, which the Chinese invented,
36:55has always been central to Chinese culture.
37:08Explosions, which have about them an echo of disaster,
37:12as well as delight, have long been Tsai's chosen medium.
37:17But their effect, while spectacular, is also short-lived.
37:27Sometimes, Tsai wants to make something which will endure.
37:32And that was his aim on a hot summer's day on Long Island,
37:37when he set out to make a work of art especially for our cameras.
37:44He's proposing to do something with his fire art
37:47he's never done before.
37:54He begins in the world of tradition,
37:57with elements of a paradise landscape.
38:02Fluttering birds.
38:05Oversized flowers.
38:08Deer tripping through an enchanted woodland.
38:32HE SPEAKS CHINESE
38:45And for good measure, as if prescribing from a book of spells,
38:49there is something of a benevolent wizard about Tsai Kuo-chang.
38:54Actual leaves and flowers are reverently laid down for immolation.
39:02HE SPEAKS CHINESE
39:15HE SPEAKS CHINESE
39:18HE SPEAKS CHINESE
39:21HE SPEAKS CHINESE
39:47Oh, it's beautiful.
39:52The effect of the explosion is breathtaking, but also surprising.
40:00Against the blackened ground,
40:02the natural forms stand out with intensified brilliance.
40:12Blooms more, not less radiant.
40:17The paradise garden still lives.
40:22But not for long.
40:26Yeah, that is wonderful.
40:28I don't want you to do anything more to it.
40:33For the first time ever, Tsai is going to subject his own work
40:37to a second act of violent consummation by fire.
40:46HE SPEAKS CHINESE
40:53He has no idea how it will turn out,
40:56but whatever happens, he wants a print of it.
41:00So five blank canvases are laid on top of the already scorched utopia.
41:07HE SPEAKS CHINESE
41:16HE SPEAKS CHINESE
41:23HE SPEAKS CHINESE
41:26HE SPEAKS CHINESE
41:57HE SPEAKS CHINESE
42:08The little spray, you know, that is just so beautiful.
42:15I very much like this part, too.
42:18Yeah, yeah. It looks very mysterious.
42:20Yes, too.
42:23With his second explosion,
42:26Tsai has taken the work and us into a different world.
42:30Deep, bituminous darkness now mantles everything.
42:37All of nature seems hit by choking storms of soot
42:42or the black rain of a nuclear winter.
42:53And on those pristine white canvases
42:56appears the ghost of the explosion.
42:59HE SPEAKS CHINESE
43:23The risks Tsai has taken
43:26have paid off beyond anything he'd himself imagined.
43:30The enactment of the uncomfortable closeness
43:33of destruction and creation stands revealed.
43:44But the two properties of gunpowder,
43:47exhilaration and damage, hang in space,
43:50along with the lingering smoke.
43:52This is beauty, but of the terrible kind.
44:00Chinese history, distant and present,
44:03is full of grieving as well as rejoicing.
44:07And there are some artists for whom the woe is not just of China,
44:11but of the whole world, weigh on their creative conscience.
44:16HE SPEAKS CHINESE
44:39There are some contemporary artists for whom art for art's sake
44:43is not only not enough,
44:45it actually amounts to a kind of betrayal of their vocation.
44:50For as our own world slips ever more into destruction and distress,
44:56they want art to mount a resistance to complacency,
45:00to catastrophe fatigue.
45:02They want to shock us out of our expectations
45:05that every day on the nightly news
45:07and every day in a news programme
45:09we're going to see dead body after dead body.
45:14Now, for Ai Weiwei, the calamity at our time,
45:20right now, is the disaster of the multitudes of displaced.
45:26Those who are uprooted through no fault of their own
45:31cast adrift on an infinite ocean of terror and despair.
45:38Ai Weiwei's Law Of The Journey
45:41packs 258 inflatable figures, large and small,
45:45into an inflatable raft.
45:50They are the shipwrecked of civilisation.
45:53But doesn't Ai Weiwei, always so sharply attuned to history,
45:58have something else in mind as well?
46:01The very beginnings of human representation
46:04in the Chinese tradition.
46:06Another mass of figures made more than 2,000 years ago.
46:11A whole army created to accompany the Qin Emperor
46:16into the afterlife.
46:18Fully featured, each one, because they're ennobled
46:22by the service they're offering to power and immortality.
46:27But nobility has gone.
46:30That long tradition has ended.
46:33That long tradition has ended here,
46:36in a vessel suspended between ceiling and floor,
46:39life and death, on a journey to safety or to annihilation.
46:47So the faces of these figures are featureless
46:50because they are, after all, the flotsam of humanity.
46:55And this kind of disaster happens over and over again and again.
47:04SIREN WAILS
47:15The fate of the uprooted, their ceaseless, epic wandering,
47:20is also at the heart of the work of the Israeli artist, Michal Rovner.
47:26MUSIC CONTINUES
47:32On the walls of her studio in a farm village, long lines,
47:36trails of figures, not computer-generated
47:39but animated individual photographs,
47:42move incessantly across unforgiving, arid landscapes.
47:48Settlement denied.
47:51Civilisation presupposes a settled city population,
47:55but Rovner's is an art of the human condition of migration,
48:00being forever between places.
48:08There are projections on stone in which Hebrew letters morph
48:12into people who dip and bow, as indeed they do in fervent Jewish prayer.
48:21MUSIC CONTINUES
48:26Others are ghost documents covered in script,
48:30but when you look closely, you realise the characters are humans.
48:35We are what we write. Our language defines us.
48:40MUSIC CONTINUES
48:49Today, she's working on an installation she calls Makom...
48:55..which means place in both Hebrew and Arabic.
49:03It's a series of structures of different sizes and shapes.
49:11The Makom series started in 2007
49:13when there was a very strong moment in Tifada,
49:16going on with buses exploding in Jerusalem
49:20that I was so scared to even drive next to any bus for a long, long time.
49:29At that point, I started to collect stones from all these places.
49:34Jerusalem, Haifa, Hebron, Nablus.
49:41The structures are made from stones
49:43taken from ruined Israeli and Palestinian houses
49:46and so become, in her hands, the material of a kind of restoration.
50:01Each stone is carefully labelled
50:03so that the structures can be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere,
50:08like the migrants whose motions Rovna animates.
50:11Her Makom has itself gone nomadic,
50:14most resonantly to the courtyard of the Louvre,
50:18close to the echo of another ancient structure,
50:21I.M. Pei's glass pyramid.
50:29The Masons are themselves a mix of people from all over the country.
50:34Israeli Arabs, Jews, Druze and Palestinians.
50:40I wanted to do this work with Israelis and Palestinians.
50:43I wanted to try to take all these stones
50:46and fragments of different periods of time
50:49and then after build one which was so coherent and complete,
50:53almost like a library, almost like an index of places, of times, of stories,
50:58a mosaic of different places that fit together, which are this place.
51:03How can you talk about Israel without talking about Jerusalem, Haifa, Hebron, Nablus?
51:13The structures are meant to be problematic.
51:16They embody the difficulty of settled foundations,
51:19architecture echoing politics.
51:22What, after all, do you build on a rift?
51:25Here, near the northern end of the Great Rift Valley,
51:28fault lines are unavoidable.
51:31Masonry will pull apart.
51:34One house is impossible to enter.
51:37Another is marked by a widening crack.
51:42They are works which speak to contemporary fears of homelessness
51:46but which are also imprinted with memories of ancient habitation.
51:51We are, after all, in the place
51:54where the earliest civilisations made their dwellings.
51:59These are, in every sense, our primal building blocks.
52:09There is this amplified break going on between Israelis and Palestinians,
52:14which I'm aware of and I'm upset about
52:17and I'm feeling sometimes a need to do something about it
52:21and this was kind of to do something about it.
52:25And you think art can do that?
52:27Someone has to believe in it and I think that, you know,
52:30if you go very back in time, which is that moment that I'm always moved by,
52:34the moment when I see these very ancient objects, you know,
52:38somebody at a far point in time had the urge to leave a mark on a stone.
52:43You know, to leave a permanent mark, to make something that would last
52:47and to really actually send a communication to an unknown future.
52:58MUSIC CONTINUES
53:06For 50,000 years, humans have been setting these marks down.
53:11Likenesses and patterns on every conceivable material
53:15and in every imaginable style.
53:19Great art collapses the time and space
53:22separating us from its moment of creation.
53:26It makes us pause.
53:29It makes us reimagine the world in countless, unanticipated ways.
53:36That's why, even amidst our modern, hepped-up lives
53:40of digital swipes and flickering screens,
53:43we find in art something that can't be found anywhere else.
53:48A rush of delight that somehow also connects us
53:52with the enduring and the profound
53:55and that's why people come in their millions
53:58to see it in galleries and museums.
54:04Civilisation is such a grand word, isn't it?
54:09But as I think we've seen,
54:11its true strength lies as much in simple gifts.
54:15Pots and prints and rugs and carvings
54:18as it does in mighty buildings and fine paintings.
54:21And those things spring less from the officious demands of state
54:26and the status hunger of the rich
54:29than they do from the unruly urges of gifted artists
54:33from one end of the world to the other
54:35to make something for everyone.
54:38And because those things are not dependent on the fate of empires,
54:42whether moneyed or military, I think they will stick around,
54:46they will endure, not forever, nothing survives forever,
54:49but at any rate for the next millennia
54:52as unmistakable evidence of the best things
54:56that our species was capable of creating.
55:00Things that have been made by the liberated thought,
55:04the acute vision and the unquenchable creative fire
55:10of our shared humanity.
55:19www.cbs.co.uk
55:49Transcribed by ESO, translated by —