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[ birds chirping ]

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[ ROBERT MANGOLD ] The thing that began [br]to fascinate me about painting was that

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it didn’t deal with time in a sense [br]that almost every other medium does.

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You could take out a camera and take [br]a picture of the painting and you’d have it all there.

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You can’t do [br]that with almost anything else.

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If you come into a sculpture gallery, you can walk [br]around the sculpture before you have to come to an opinion.

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Painting doesn’t give you any of that [br]time.

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It plants itself in front of you and says, here I am, plunk.

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You know you get in front [br]of it, you look at it, you’ve seen it.

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I live here in the country and I [br]see wonderful sunlight and great

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cloud formations and all kinds of stuff [br]all the time.

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Fields that are covered with a certain yellow flower at one [br]moment. But I’m never aware of any of

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that coming into my art, ever.

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It may, but it doesn’t come [br]in any direct way.

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Rather than my influence coming [br]from nature, it comes from culture:

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the culture that comes from the history [br]of art and the culture of our times.

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I do a lot of works on paper building up [br]to the idea of work on canvas.

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I want to see how something’s going to look.

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So if it presents me with a visual structure that’s a little off from what I’ve done in the past,

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then that gets my curiosity more interested.

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This is kind of like juggling an idea and going [br]from, do you do one and then you go and you say,

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"Okay that’s interesting but what if I did it [br]this way or something?" So they’re really all tryouts.

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In some cases, one idea follows [br]another and in some cases, it doesn’t.

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When I get to one that really interests me,

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like this one I think really [br]interested me and so I thought,

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"Okay, I’m going to do a larger one of that." [br]I like the way the lines hung from the diagonal.

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So then I do it with colors so that I [br]can get a sense of you know, what it,

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what it looks...what it would look like if [br]it were done that way.

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I ended up not being so crazy about it in the end, [br]because I didn’t like this big droopy curve.

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As a young artist I was very connected [br]to what was going on at the moment in New York.

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The latter part [br]of Abstract Expressionism.

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Pop art, which [br]had just arrived.

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It was a time to start [br]over, go back to the elements of painting.

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It was all part of what [br]later became minimalism.

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It was all a kind of seemingly simple, single idea [br]exposed in a raw way for people to experience.

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And it was a refreshing and got rid of a lot of stuff that needed [br]getting rid of so that you could begin, start things over.

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Maybe all generations feel like [br]they’re starting things over for themselves.

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But this was really I think [br]a period when it was certainly true.

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I got this invitation to the Barnett Newman [br]show in Philadelphia.

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On the invitation card was this vertical piece of his. Almost all of [br]my work had been horizontally, left to right reading art.

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I suddenly thought it would be really [br]interesting to work on a vertical painting

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that you can’t read that way. It’s my thwarting [br]the viewer kind of idea.

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Me, the viewer. You can’t read a vertical painting from left to right.

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So then how do you read it? Do you go up and down, or, I don’t know. [br]It was just a kind of sense like,

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it was something I wanted to deal with.

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It’s not so important that I get the color just [br]right here because almost anything would do so

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that I could see the work. I can decide later [br]to change the color.

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If you think of the rings as being two connected columns,

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I’m still working off that in a way. Only now I’ve brought them back into a completed form.

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Two vertical lines going up. [br]You have them bent into a wheel.

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- Get a little fresh air.[br][ exhales sharply ]

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Okay, come back [br]and take a look.

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There was a group of us who had studios near [br]the Bowery.

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Sylvia and I were in a building that Bob Ryman was in, [br]Lucy Lippard. Sol LeWitt was around the corner.

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Eva Hesse across the street.

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So we would all visit [br]each other’s studios.

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There was a lot of action there. There were people doing videos. There [br]were people who were performing dance,

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making happenings of one kind or another. [br]It was an incredible time in the visual art scene.

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There was something exciting going [br]on all the time. And it was contagious.

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I loved being in New York City. And [br]I loved the industrial quality of it,

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I loved Lower Manhattan. There was [br]just a quality of being there and the sounds.

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I was very romantically [br]in love with New York at that point.

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- Yeah, I might have to make [br]the line a little stronger.

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Whether you ride a bus or a cab or subway [br]or whatever you see everything in bits and pieces.

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You see everything in parts.

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You'd see buildings going by and [br]you’d see gaps between buildings going by.

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And I became very interested[br]in this idea of

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pieces of architecture that were both solid [br]and that were atmospheric.

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And the idea that a similar form one way could be a gap between a [br]building and in another way, could be a building.

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I like setting up problems for the viewer.

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And that viewer isn’t someone detached from me, I’m the viewer, I’m the first viewer.

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I like setting up problems like how do you visually deal with a ring

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when what’s usually in the center [br]of a painting is very important?

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It was the idea of what was missing that’s in a lot of my work.

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It keeps coming back in one form or another.

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By picking away the center, that forces [br]that viewing a step further.

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It’s like the main course isn’t there and you’re having to deal with everything around what would normally be the main course.

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- Yeah, that looks pretty good.

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Yeah, the reflected light is pretty [br]good here, I think it’s all right.

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I was approached about doing something for [br]the Buffalo courthouse.

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The only reason I considered it was I come from that area.

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Most of my childhood, we lived in relation to Erie Canal.

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Instead of having a railroad, the barge canal with the tugboats was a romantic illusion I guess.

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I lived so far in the country, my uncles were [br]all farmers and I worked for them.

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I was pushed into being artist by teachers. I liked [br]to draw, so the idea of art school seemed fine.

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At that point, my idea of art school was probably [br]Norman Rockwell, Saturday Evening Post covers.

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I don’t think I knew that [br]there were contemporary painters.

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I went away to art school and I chose Cleveland. [br]It seemed like a little art factory.

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There were people making weaving and people making jewelry [br]and doing paintings and illustration.

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So I thought, "This looks good to me."

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- So the entrance is over there, that’s the main entrance.

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- Right, people, people come in this way and then they turn that way to go into the courthouse. Or they can come.....

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[ MANGOLD ] The building wasn’t built yes. I [br]just had plans in front of me.

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It’s like working blind. For someone who likes to [br]have more control over what he’s doing,

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it’s like taking a chance on something. It’s tricky.

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My idea was that if this

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wall became a transition between this [br]entryway and the courthouse itself,

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which was very formidable and very big, if in fact [br]this wall could become a really beautiful thing,

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it would be a nice experience going [br]from the one building to the other.

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I’m not a person who does stained glass [br]a lot.

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It’s kind of tricky understanding that you’re dealing with light in a [br]way that is totally dependent on the

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world you’re situated in and the time [br]of year and the time of day and so on.

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It seemed like an area that would [br]really work out for these tall

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column ideas that I was working on [br]at that time.

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It was a continuation of what I was doing in my paintings and [br]drawings of 2004 when this all began.

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I wanted this to be both inside the [br]pavilion and outside the pavilion, a kind

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of humanist sense of color and light that would [br]be...

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beautiful, you know? It would be beautiful.

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The show was composed of ring images [br]and split ring images.

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My titles are always redirected into the painting, like [br]"Square Within A Circle."

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The reason I don’t title them something more pointed is [br]that I would rather leave that book open.

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Majority of my paintings have dealt with the [br]curving line, the elliptical line, the ovoid,

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the circle in one way or another.

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It’s the same elements juggled in a more complicated way.

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It’s like the column paintings led to the [br]ring paintings.

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The ring paintings have kind of led me to this.

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It’s a way of taking the [br]idea another place and seeing what’ll happen.

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And I’m a romantic artist. And I think [br]romanticism by nature implies something

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that takes it beyond a formal idea.

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Sometimes I think, "Oh Bob, you’re just a damned formalist," but then there are other times when I argue with myself about it.

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[ ANNOUNCER ] To learn more about [br]"Art in the Twenty-First Century"

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and its educational resourcs,

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please visit us online at: [br]PBS.org/Art21

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“Art in the Twenty-First Century” is available on DVD.

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The companion book is also available.

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To order, visit us online at: shopPBS.org

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or call PBS Home Video at: [br]1-800-PLAY-PBS