WEBVTT

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[ birds chirping ]

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

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

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

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You can’t do 
that with almost anything else.

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

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Painting doesn’t give you any of that 
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 
of it, you look at it, you’ve seen it.

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I live here in the country and I 
see wonderful sunlight and great

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cloud formations and all kinds of stuff 
all the time.

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Fields that are covered with a certain yellow flower at one 
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 
in any direct way.

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

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

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I do a lot of works on paper building up 
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 
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 
this way or something?" So they’re really all tryouts.

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In some cases, one idea follows 
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 
interested me and so I thought,

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

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

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

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

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

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The latter part 
of Abstract Expressionism.

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Pop art, which 
had just arrived.

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

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It was all part of what 
later became minimalism.

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It was all a kind of seemingly simple, single idea 
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 
getting rid of so that you could begin, start things over.

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

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

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

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

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

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that you can’t read that way. It’s my thwarting 
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. 
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 
right here because almost anything would do so

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that I could see the work. I can decide later 
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. 
You have them bent into a wheel.

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- Get a little fresh air.
[ exhales sharply ]

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Okay, come back 
and take a look.

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

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Sylvia and I were in a building that Bob Ryman was in, 
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 
each other’s studios.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Whether you ride a bus or a cab or subway 
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 
you’d see gaps between buildings going by.

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And I became very interested
in this idea of

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pieces of architecture that were both solid 
and that were atmospheric.

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And the idea that a similar form one way could be a gap between a 
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 
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 
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 
good here, I think it’s all right.

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I was approached about doing something for 
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 
all farmers and I worked for them.

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

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

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

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

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There were people making weaving and people making jewelry 
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 
just had plans in front of me.

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It’s like working blind. For someone who likes to 
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 
entryway and the courthouse itself,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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column ideas that I was working on 
at that time.

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

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

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of humanist sense of color and light that would 
be...

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beautiful, you know? It would be beautiful.

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The show was composed of ring images 
and split ring images.

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

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

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Majority of my paintings have dealt with the 
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 
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 
idea another place and seeing what’ll happen.

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And I’m a romantic artist. And I think 
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 
"Art in the Twenty-First Century"

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and its educational resourcs,

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please visit us online at: 
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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