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(music) ("Sex Partners for Kindergartners" by Scalding Lucy)
Beth: Let's talk about Picasso's great painting
"Still Life With Chair Caning" from 1912.
Voiceover: It's barely a painting at all ...
makes it great. (laughs)
Steven: I think in many ways, it at least
looks at least like a disaster.
What's great about it is the ideas that
he's thrown into this painting.
Beth: Since it's not so beautiful to look at,
I guess we have to talk about the ideas.
Steven: Why isn't it beautiful?
What do you want from a painting
for it to be beautiful?
Beth: My big problem with why this is
not beautiful is that it's all grey and brown.
It's my big problem with analytic Cubist in general.
I like color.
Steven: This is why people walk by these paintings
in a museum and they say,
"I know that's important, but do I have to look at it?"
Beth: Also, all of these analytic Cubist paintings
tend to look the same.
Voiceover: So how does one then enter into
the painting and stop and pay attention?
What's the entree into this painting?
Steven: Well, it's pretty arresting.
If you were seeing this in the museum
as opposed to on a computer screen,
the first thing you would notice is that
only the top and the right side of the canvas,
that is only area here and this area here,
are really paint.
The entire bottom left part of the canvas is
this other material which is called "oil cloth".
Beth: Has anyone ever introduced oil cloth,
put oil cloth on a painting before?
Steven: [Brock] had, but just recently.
Before that, of course not.
The reason for "of course not", is because
oil cloth was the cheapest material ...
Beth: Right, you buy it like roller.
Steven: It's like contact paper.
It's the stuff you line your shelves with or
use on a cheap table so you can wipe up spills.
Beth: Hardly high art material.
Steven: So what does that mean?
What is that suggesting Picasso is doing here?
Beth: He's making art into garbage.
Steven: Into trash, that's right.
Voicemail: Or visa versa.
Beth: Or trash into art, absolutely.
Voiceover: But again, how does one enter
into this without understanding all of those things
which are keen to the common viewer?
Beth: I don't think one does.
I think this painting only becomes great when
one understands its place in the history of art.
Steven: I don't think that Picasso
actually expected many people to
look at this painting in the first place.
If they did, I think that he was speaking
to a very small audience.
Beth: How big is this painting?
Steven: It's less than two feet across.
Beth: So is it about the size of a table?
Steven: It's about the size of a table.
That's exactly what it is, in fact.
We're really looking at a breakfast table.
We're putting up on the screen now ...
What you're seeing is, on the upper right,
a detail of this "Still Life With Chair Caning."
But let's just stop and even just say what
this chair caning is, and this oil cloth business.
On the left, you can see some rolls of
oil cloth that are for sale.
You'll notice that there's a printed pattern on them.
Below, oil cloth being used as a tablecloth.
The printed pattern that Picasso bought
in a hardware store as if he had gone to
Home Depot or something and bought this material.
Had printed on it a photograph of,
well, it really wasn't a photograph, but
a drawing of chair caning, so this
sort of repetitive pattern.
He takes it and he literally just glues it down
onto a canvas and then just paints over it.
Beth: What's interesting to me is that the
chair caning in the painting is incredibly
illusionistic and looks really looks like
the chair caning on this chair.
Steven: So let me ask you then, is Picasso cheating?
Historically we've always tied the notion of
the conceptual and the great artist to his ability
his ability to render, her ability to render
illusionistically and so is Picasso cheating
by going out and buying this factory-made,
reproduced material and sticking it into the
painting and saying, "I don't have to paint this anymore."
Beth: Not only that, but the idea of skill and
greatness being calculated by how well
one renders reality becomes sort of moot
because machines can print reality on
cheap stuff and you can buy it at Home Depot.
Why wouldn't artists?
Male voiceover: Obviously this is a discussion
that we wouldn't have today because
we would never consider that cheating,
taking found objects.
Was that a discussion when this painting appeared?
Steven: It was. In fact, I think it's a discussion that
not only begins to really sort of
very consciously break those taboos
but it also sends out what will eventually,
in about 50 years, become known as "pop art".
This idea of actually looking to our
new industrial culture, or visual industrial culture
and saying, "What is the place of that world
in the realm of fine art?"
Voiceover: Didn't [DuSchoen] do that before pop art?
Steven: He did. Absolutely.
Beth: He was [unintelligible].
Voiceover: What is the JOU?
What do you think that's all about?
Steven: Well, the JOU had a couple of
different meanings as I understand it.
One is a reference to the French word for "game".
Voiceover: [JOUA], that's what I thought.
Beth: That's right.
Voiceover: That's exactly what I thought.
Steven: And the second is, those are the
first three letters of the French word "newspaper".
Voiceover: Journal.
Steven: Precisely.
So if you read this, the JOU, you can actually
read it in a very literal sense as a
rolled up newspaper on a table.
It also has that double entente and
suggests that the entire painting is
a type of play.
Voiceover: [French word]
Steven: Yes.
Beth: So what we're looking at is a table top,
but if we look at the pictures on the left of
cafe tables with chairs with chair caning,
those tables are round so ...
Steven: So what's the problem?
Male voiceover: That this is an ellipse as
opposed to ...
Beth: How do you get an ellipse?
You get an ellipse by looking at a circle
from an oblique viewpoint.
Steven: Go to the next image, one forward,
now you know the table you're seeing on the right
is in fact, a perfectly round table,
but we're looking at it obliquely,
we're looking at it at an angle and so we're
actually seeing it as a kind of ellipse that
Picasso's offering us.
So is it possible that we're actually looking at
a glass-topped table and in fact,
what we're seeing as chair caning is
the chair flipped underneath it.
Voiceover: What a neat way to look at the painting.
That's really cool.
Beth: Why take apart all the forms that are on top?
We're looking through the table,
we're thinking about the idea of
looking through the table and the table is glass,
also suggests an idea, an important idea of
western art of the painting being a window
into a world that looks very real.
But on the other hand, Picasso's making it
really clear that he's not looking at things
illusionistically, he's looking at the objects
on the table from lots of different places [unintelligible].
Voiceover: You're seeing everything simultaneously
without any kind of distinction.
Everything's been flattened so they all
share the same plane almost.
That's an interesting, disconcerting way of looking at things.
Steven: I think you're both right on target where
he wants to show us his entire visual understanding
of this sort of place, this event.
He's not just giving us the table top,
he's giving us the table top with the chair,
and all of the objects really deconstructed so
that they include not what he would see from
a single perspective, as you said,
but what he would see in his full visual understanding
of each of these forms over time with his visual memory.
Beth: So what we have on the table apparently is a clay pipe.
Steven: You can see that right below here.
Here's the bowl of the pipe and here's its stem
down here which is obviously leaning
right up over the newspaper almost
intersecting that newspaper.
Beth: And then over here, that's a little bit more obvious.
We've got a detail over here on the right.
Steven: You can see the segmentations of
some citrus; we put a lemon up as an example,
but it's being cut through by the knife.
Can you see the blade of the knife?
Beth: Where's the blade of the knife?
Steven: That's right, more like a cleaver than a knife.
This would be the blade and this here, the handle.
Beth: Oh.
Steven: In between, of course the newspaper,
the pipe on the left and, I'm sorry ...
The newspaper and the pipe on the left,
and the knife and the lemon on the right is
well, can you make it out?
Voiceover: Where?
Steven: This and everything above it.
Beth: A bottle of wine?
Steven: A glass.
Beth: A glass.
Steven: A piece of stemware.
Beth: A little bit like what we had on the table.
Steven: That's right. If you look at the glass of red wine,
you'll see not only this kind of wonderful
reflectivity in it, but you can see the lip of the top of the glass,
you can see the plane of the top of the wine,
and then of course, the stem and the base of the glass.
If you go back over to, lets see if we can zoom in
on the central glass.
Maybe by going forward.
Beth: I think if we go back to the painting
that we had in the beginning you'll see it.
Steven: Okay, so now if we look at this carefully,
you can see here down at the bottom,
this kind of wonderful ring and can you just
imagine that now as the base of the glass
that it's resting on?
Look at it. We're looking down at it and
then look at this line that's more horizontal.
Is it possible that Picasso's taken
a second viewpoint and we're looking across
this sort of thick object, the stem,
the base of the stem, the bowl from
several different angles and then
looking at the top, looking across the top
and then looking down at the top here.
Voiceover: So basically what we're looking at
is a painting within which there are multiple
viewpoints of different objects and
they're all fused together.
But I have a couple questions about the rope.
Is the rope literally a rope?
Steven: It's a real rope that Picasso actually
went to a ropemaker and had specifically
custom made for this canvas.
Voiceover: It's funny that you have the rope
containing something, it's the one literal container
of something that seems so uncontained in a way.
Everything inside of it seems,
you don't know what's holding it together
and it's the rope itself functions as
some glue to keep it all together.
Steven: It really bundles this mess.
Voiceover: It does bundle it and then adds a little,
when you show this painting next to the table top,
it's the one literal reference to the table ...
to that, I guess it was a silver edge to the table.
Steven: I think we've seen a sort of theme
restaurant, seafoodie places.
Voiceover: Right.
Steven: Tables with ropes around them.
I think the rope really is a problem.
I think it's a question as to why ...
Voiceover: It seems like it doesn't fit.
Steven: Yeah.
Voiceover: It seems like an attempt to
domesticate something that's not domesticatable.
Steven: But does it point out some of the
conflicts that exist between the oil cloth
and the chair caning inside,
and the little rendering through paint in
a sort of Cubist portion of the painting at the top?
By showing this sort of contrast between
the evidentiality of the rope and the
space of the view within it,
sort of very consciously setting up
something that's clearly actual and tactile,
like something that is truly visual.
Beth: We have a lot of levels of reality
We think Plato would have had a lot of fun with this
because we have the real rope,
we have the real chair caning,
oil cloth with the chair caning ...
Steven: Which has an illusion.
Beth: Which has an illusion of chair caning,
and then we have the painting which creates
a kind of, in a way, probably a higher level of
reality by showing all viewpoints at once
instead of a single viewpoint to a greater or
almost divine reality.
Voiceover: Wouldn't this be wonderful as
an actual table top? (Beth giggles)
Voiceover: As opposed to a painting?
Voiceover: You might put just a pane of
oval glass on it, it'd be fabulous.
Beth: It would be fabulous. (laughs)
Voiceover: And I think you'd pay a lot
more attention to it.
(music) ("In The Sky With Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy)