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[background music] We're in the Museum of Modern Art

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and we're looking at Constantin Brancusi's "Bird in Space" from 1928.

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Brancusi was a Romanian who worked

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for almost his entire career in Paris.

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He worked in lots of media and often pushed

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the materials to really new expressions.

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This is bronze.

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It's bronze. It's been highly polished.

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So it looks like gold...

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But it's not just bronze, because for Brancusi

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the pedestal was part of the sculpture.

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And it's got a stone pedestal.

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It's got limestone below that and very often you'd see

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a wooden pedestal even below that creating a hierarchy

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of materials what he considered the most primitive to the most industrial.

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It's kind of a Neoplatonic idea of ascending

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from the material up to the immaterial.

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I think that's exactly right.

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The reflectivity of the bronze drives that point home.

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It is really about light and movement, right?

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This is not a sculpture that is in any way

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a literal depiction of a bird,

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it's a depiction of this gentle organic arching

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of this soaring figure.

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It's not a bird in so much as a representation

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of the thing that birds to that we love.

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As one moves around it and looks at it,

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the light that reflects on it shifts and changes and flickers,

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so it does have a sense of something almost kinetic.

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As if it were moving and soaring,

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but it's not a propulsion that seems mechanical,

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even though it's metal and we see it as an industrial material.

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There's a great story about this sculpture.

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This was included in a famous 1936 exhibition at MoMA

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called "Cubism and Abstract Art"

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and when this came over from France,

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the customs agents kept it and wouldn't let it out.

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Why?

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Because MoMA was claiming it is a work of art

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and they didn't believe it.

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This is 1936 and they thought it had some industrial use

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and therefore could be taxed

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and MoMA said "No, it's a work of art,

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it should not be taxed"

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and it was actually held in.

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There was a court case about it.

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But what purpose could this possibly serve?

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If I remember correctly the papers suggested

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it may be a propeller or a piece of a propeller.

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It does really speak to the radicality

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- which I think we forget - of just how abstract this is.

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It doesn't really in some ways look so abstract.

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It does suggest flight and upward movement

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and we're used to things suggesting things like that.

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[background music]