Grayson Perry: En Garde
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 22 August 2017
⏱️ 60 minutes
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Summary
Grayson Perry goes backwards in the archive in search of the moment the avant-garde died.
It's a century since Marcel Duchamp submitted his artwork called Fountain to an exhibition staged by the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Fountain was a urinal -- not a painting of a urinal or a sculpture, just a urinal, bought from a Manhattan hardware store and signed R.Mutt.
The Society of Independent Artists rejected Duchamp's provocation and the original object was lost.
Nowadays Duchamp's urinal is canonised as the fountainhead of conceptual art and the high water (closet) mark of the avant garde. Replicas of the Fountain grace museums around the world - emblems of the avant-garde spirit of experimentation and confrontation.
Somewhere in the intervening years though, something changed - contemporary art lost its ability to shock and critique. We're still hopelessly drawn to the idea of art that's 'cutting edge', 'ground-breaking', 'revolutionary'. But is that possible at this point -- haven't we seen it all before?
Maybe the death knell was sounded when the Saatchi Gallery opened on the South Bank? Or with the advent of protest and radical chic in the 1960s? Maybe it was when the CIA funded the abstract expressionists? Or when the post-war art market began to reign supreme? Or when the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors in 1927?
Or maybe it was all a matter of style the very moment Duchamp's Fountain was conceived?
Featuring Brian Eno, Kenneth Goldsmith, Nnenna Okore, Cornelia Parker, and Sarah Thornton.
Producer: Martin Williams.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the Maze, listen first on BBC sounds. |
| 0:34.0 | This is the BBC. I'm fairly sure we all have that friend that liked a band, before they were cool. |
| 0:56.2 | Bought the records, definitely didn't just download the songs, and saw them play in a tiny |
| 1:01.5 | gig in some obscure venue. So many of us want to seem cutting |
| 1:07.0 | edge or groundbreaking, or maybe avant-garde. |
| 1:15.4 | The phrase avant-garde is a military turn. |
| 1:18.2 | It means an advanced detachment preparing the way for the main fighting force. In other words an avant-garde is the |
| 1:24.8 | spearhead of progress. I'm Riana Dylan and today's seriously interesting story |
| 1:30.9 | is brought to us by Grayson Perry. The Turner Prize winning British artist |
| 1:36.0 | well known for his ceramics, writing and flamboyantly dressed alter ego Claire. |
| 1:42.0 | 100 years on from when the artist Marcel Duchamp infamously declared that even |
| 1:46.5 | a urinal can be art, Grayson wants to know when the avant-garde, the ability for art to |
| 1:52.0 | shock and critique, died. This is Grace and Perry on guard. |
| 1:58.7 | With this idea of the avant-garde that's the kind of story that's being marketed that some people came up with some brilliant ideas |
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