Robert Hughes - American Visions - Episode 3 (part 2/5)

this extract starts with John James Audubon and Manifest Destiny "to see yourself as a force of history is to be absolved from both pity and from guilt. Manifest Destiny was America's great myth of redemptive violence, and art played a considerable role in promoting it."

Go here for a playlist of all the "American Visions" uploads: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DF4A4CCB9DB13FEF

"American Progress," painting by John Gast, 1872.
Currier and Ives prints
George Caleb Bingham's "Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap", 1851-52
interview with Prof. Richard Slotkin
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze and "Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way" at the US Capitol

Hughes then visits the Crazy Horse Memorial, by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, with one of his daughters.
go here to see updates and info on the Crazy Horse Memorial:
http://www.crazyhorse.org/


George Catlin is introduced

ROBERT HUGHES: Americans are constantly recreating themselves. They are constantly thinking in terms of newness as a regulating factor in a culture in the way that Europeans thought of antiquity. You know, the--this, after all, is the only major culture in the world that was predicated upon the idea of newness right from the start. The Puritans wanted to make a new heaven and a new earth, and this desire was transposed into landscape, into technology, into art -- everything.


originally aired on US television in 1997

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Robert
• Hughes
• American
• Visions
• Art
• History
• John
• James
• Audubon
• Crazy
• Horse
• Korczak
• Ziolkowski
• Caleb
• Bingham
• Leutze

[folklorish]

Hughes isn't expressing a singularly hostile view of the Gast painting, but he does have a tendency to not just buy smarmy aesthetic sentiment because it comes in a nice(?) package. And admittedly, that aerial goddess DOES look creepily similar to Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade balloons...covered in depth by Hughes in his discussion of Claes Oldenburg's art during the "Culture as Nature" segment of "Shock of the New."

[IExposeMormonism]

Good stuff in the words and the art. Esp the words. By the way, someday the average white American will become just like the "American Indian". You'll see. He'll be pursued and murdered in the name of progress and civilization. And for his debts, naturally. "there was a young lady named Myrtle, who had quite an affair with a turtle and whats more phenomenal a swelling abdominal proved to Myrtle the turtle was fertile".....

[Sajun777]

@oldstock1607 I think he's disparaging the content of the painting more than the form, but yeah, he does seem to be rather negative towards it. But the entire episode is critical in that way.

The painting IS beautiful, but that doesn't change the fact of what it conveys. She is a blond blimp. No getting around that. :)

[oldstock1607]

@Sajun777 come on. Clearly his words were calculated to disparage the painting.

[Sajun777]

@oldstock1607 He never said the painting was bad. He simply pointed out that, in fact, the 'Indians' are retreating, she's floating above the plains leading the colonists westward like a blimp, and that she's laying telegraph wire as she goes. Beautiful or not (and that is subjective), nothing he said was wrong or in poor taste, considering that that is exactly what is in the painting and is indisputable.

[oldstock1607]

His characterization of Gast's painting is in poor taste. "American Progress" is a beautiful work.

[apexxxx10]

John James 'Au-du-bon' Audubon. Hollywood should make a film about this dude.

Here America has taken the culture out of agriculture. Art for art's sake - before it became Andy Warhol and those darn mass produced Campbell tomato cans.

[flatoutt1]

this beyond good. its a US treasure.