The Art of Machu Picchu & A Sculptures in a Volcano?! (Sculpture Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] [Music] it's the longest day of the year the summer solstice 4 30 in the morning and i'm standing in this field with 20 000 hippies and we're all waiting for the sun to come up now it's a big day the longest day of the year the sort of day that needs to be commemorated properly with a sculpture something huge monumental and appropriate which is exactly what we've got here [Music] so [Music] this is a film about a magnificent job share between nature and us a job share that's resulted in some of the world's mightiest and most intriguing bits of sculpture all over the world people and nature have got together to make remarkable things why are they doing it [Music] an excellent question most of the goodies you need to make sculpture stone wood water clay the sun are plentiful in nature and these are fantastic raw materials sturdy adaptable but they're not always in exactly the right place or quite the right shape and that's where we come in we turn up at places like this look around quite like what we see but think we can do better because that's us for you always trying to improve on the handiwork of our gods [Music] is back in the 60s a new art movement appeared in american art called land art its ambition was to get people out of the art galleries and to send them careering through the landscape looking for sculpture land artists did their stuff in places that were difficult to get to getting there was part of the fun and the harder it was to get there the more you appreciated what you saw when you reached the end of the journey providing of course you could actually find the damn thing excuse me hello yes uh i wonder if you can help me hi we're looking for um spiral jetty spiral jelly yeah we're told that you know the way yeah okay yeah well i do yeah that's right there just get out here and turn right first fork you're gonna make a left first fork left yeah second fork make a right second foot maker right thank you very much [Music] the most famous of all examples of land art was created on the edge of the great salt lake in utah by a chap called robert smithson its name is the spiral jetty a giant kiss curl of stone pushed out into the salty waters i'm gagging to see it but i'm not sure if it's still there smithson made the spiral jetty in 1970 what he didn't know at the time was that the water levels of the great salt lake we're at a historic low they've been a big drought so he built the spiral jetty and it was visible for a couple of years and then the water levels of the great salt lake rose again and it disappeared completely as far as anyone knew forever for 30 years spiral jetty was underwater gone disappeared but just recently it's been bone dry around here again and people say the jetty is back and nature has just been toying with us smithson like reading lots of sci-fi jg ballard was a particular favorite like ballard he was obsessed with this idea of entropy of worlds degenerating and dying and that is what brought him here to this mad max landscape of broken nature littered with the grubby remnants of post-industrial human junk [Music] the great salt lake is the second deadest stretch of water after the dead sea itself nothing lives in there except this brave little red shrimp the brine shrimp millions and millions of them which if the light is right make the lake look as if it's a wash with blood smithson liked that it was the chief reason he chose this place voila the spiral jetty [Music] it's actually made of black basalt collected on the shore a local construction company built it in a week for just nine thousand dollars the world's most famous bit of land art [Music] in your typical book of symbols the spiral gets lots of pages to itself it's a very popular and adaptable symbol you can read it as a snail the cosmos a star system an endless beginning that's also an end but i'm inclined to see it more literally than that as a sci-fi fan smithson clearly had an apocalyptic bent and this swirling stone whirlpool situated in the middle of the second deadest sea in the world can perhaps be seen as an atrophied slurp the kind of shape you get when you pull the chain and everything goes down the pan [Music] when smithson built this all these rocks were black as cold so when it came up out of the water again white as the driven snow it had a completely different effect hell has become lapland [Music] actually walking along it is a very strange feeling indeed look at the red it really does look as if 300 spartans have had their throats slit in it ah spooky it's halfway between some kind of weird moonscape and this totally natural place awesome it's really awesome nearly there you know people sometimes wonder what art is for it's for this feeling this makes you want to go [Music] hahaha [Music] robert smithson isn't the only sculptor who's felt the urge to trace giant spirals in the landscape it's an internationally popular need with a very long history [Music] the ancient peruvians who scrawled this super spiral in the sand treated the whole of this huge desert plateau like a giant drawing pad [Music] look a spider and here's a hand and a very elegant hummingbird crisscrossed with lines doodles faces and squiggles nazca in southern peru is a prehistoric flick book of ancient land art the nazca lines as they're called were only discovered in the 1920s when passengers on the first commercial air flights to go across here looked out of their windows and saw these most of them are so big you can't really make any sense at all of them from the ground to see them properly you have to go up there [Music] the technical name for these things is geoglyphs giant drawings in the landscape this is the biggest and most numerous group of them in the world and they're located here for a very specific reason this desert the nazca plain is one of the driest places on earth just 20 minutes of rain a year [Music] and it gets almost no wind so when you draw something in this desert it stays drawn in this case for perhaps as long as a couple of thousand years we don't know much about the nazca people their empire lasted about a thousand years and was wiped out by earthquakes in 1500 and something but of course when we humans know nothing about something it inspires us to speculate ever more feverishly on the subject the nazca lines have had a particularly creative going over from the conspiracy theorists in 1968 a book came out by eric von daniken called the chariots of the gods i read it a few years later von danikan's theory if i can call it that is that these constituted an intergalactic landing strip a bunch of aliens turned up on earth and built them so they could land their spaceships properly in this desert unfortunately the soil turned out to be unsuitable so they abandoned their unfinished airport and set off for another planet taught to draw in the sand by the aliens the abandoned locals set about trying to persuade their departed sky guards to return by drawing tempting pictures for them secret invitations and incantations sprinkled about the nazca desert that's the pottiest theory anyway there are many others hello nazca alas has become a giant magnet for the international eccentric hello hello victoria nikitsky yeah well de mayosia from london i've come to find out about the nazca lines oh very interesting and you're the person i hear who's going to tell me everything about it okay yeah okay so this is the entire nascar lines almost in diagrammatic form yes i recognize the tower i've come here because i've read so many theories about what the lines are for alien landing strips we don't believe that do we astronomical calendar a little bit more likely yeah what's your opinion victoria you studied them for so many years well now we have new studies that the lines indicate underground water because now it's internet every corner but there's no water in asca and ancient they knew exactly where the water was marvelous so the straight lines straight lines they will indicate we're exactly on a vein of water under us trapezoids like this is a trapezoid trapezoid this one this also indicates what in the upper part a bit upper path that's water there so it's a kind of grand plan for life for the nazca people everything they need to really to know about here yeah it's like a book a book of life amazing uh victoria wants to show us a place that's very significant for some of her ideas about the water channels yeah ah beautiful place yeah wow here we can see one triangle no like this triangle yeah and it points it's not a straight a bit curve why because there's a fault a fracture there in the mountain for a fault indicates exactly that's water there actually you're right i could just see there's a channel in the mountain straight ahead and a line leading right to it can you see that i like victoria's water theory a lot it definitely makes sense of the alien landing strips but what about the giant hands the elegant hummingbirds and well whatever that is when you make something as big as these something that can only be seen properly from a bouncy twin engine cessna you're surely trying to communicate with someone or something up here two thousand years ago the only inhabitants up here were the gods those clever nazcans were using land art as a loud speaker [Music] long long before they began doing that back in ancient britain we were doing it too there are few places on earth that have had as much nonsense written about them as this one depending on who you read stonehenge could be an ancient observatory or the first planetarium or even an astronomical supercomputer according to the arthurian legends it was built by merlin who transported the giant stones from ireland using his magic more recently this excellent lot the druids have claimed that it's one of their ancient temples but they've only been saying that for a few hundred years and the stones have been here for thousands my own view is that stonehenge celebrates the momentous union of the sky and the earth and that the handiest way to imagine it is as a giant stone vagina here's how it worked prehistoric man believed that the earth and the sky were ruled by two powerful gods the earth mother down here and the sky father up there and these two powerful gods were responsible for everything and once a year round about now at the longest day the summer solstice and only at the summer solstice the sky guards sun beams were at exactly the right angle to penetrate to the center of the stones and to bring warmth and fertility to the earth [Music] it's not happening today it's a bit too cloudy but if the sun was rising strongly enough in the east then this stone here the famous heel stone will be casting long phallic shadow right down the middle of stonehenge and we'd all be watching a cosmic coupling [Music] so that's the idea i go with the vagina interpretation what's unarguable is that whatever's being commemorated or worshiped here is being done with sculpture someone has dragged these huge rocks into this field shaped them cut them put one on top of the other and created this mighty circle but i've got another reason for bringing you here i wanted to draw your attention to one of the key pleasures of sculpture i'm not going to explain it fully because i can't but i can feel it right now right here at stonehenge it's the exciting presence of a great big lump of stuff the attraction of the blob and i suppose it's inherited from rock formations and termite mounds or something like that and you feel it when you're standing next to a great big raw tottering pile of something that's much much much bigger than you plenty of good sculptors have gone in search of this feeling through the ages and even if i can't name it i can certainly show you some examples [Music] stonehenge has got me thinking about the impact of the sun and the stars on land art which to cut a long story short is how i've ended up in a desert in america completely lost [Music] god but this country is big we've been driving around utah for hours and hours looking for another of these iconic pieces of american land art it's out there somewhere for all i know we could be right in the middle of it we're not going to find out till morning anyway i'm really looking forward to it sun tunnels by nancy hultz [Music] you know what the stars up there it's unbelievable it's so magic looking up at the sky here i brought my deep sky chart which i'm studying because although this piece we're going to see tomorrow the sun tunnels there's a thing in it about the stars as well so what i need to do tonight to get ready for it is to identify four constellations i need to find capricorn perseus columba and draco so i've been looking up there and begin to get an idea of it all perseus columba capricorn and drake yeah i got it there perseus [Music] got up this morning you could see them about a mile away on the horizon some tunnels what's more you can see why they're called the sun tunnels because the sun's just coming up now it's magic [Music] sunrise [Music] two things i wasn't expecting one the color you see these in the daytime and they look like inert slabs of concrete kind of stuff you see by the side of a motorway but actually they really fit the colors the desert this clay soil stuff anyone something falls on it some color look at that you can see the reds inside that tunnel and then all around us there are these beautiful fields of ochre and yellow and brown and khaki hundreds of different colors it's just gorgeous and the other thing apart from me prattling on there's no sound listen to that the sound of the sun tunnels [Music] the thing about land art is it isn't just about the bits in the middle the stuff that nancy holt made and put down here in the desert what land art does is it brings everything else into play when you stand here the mountains over there big horizon around here the sun all of it seems to take on an extra significance so the actual piece these four concrete tunnels lying in the middle of the desert that's just like the final piece of a jigsaw you put that in and all of it's [Music] completely [Music] nancy holt was robert smithson's wife she made this in 1973. she came down one day into the desert i was wandering about here and was overwhelmed she said by the feeling of the sun she said if you come from the city you don't really see the sun but when you come out into the desert the sun becomes everything so she came up with this piece which for her was a way of framing enfranchising the sun in the middle of the desert [Music] and what she did she took these four concrete tunnels they're huge and nine foot tall and arranged them in the desert along the two lines of the winter solstice and the summer solstice so this set of tunnels here is aligned with the summer solstice that set of tunnels there is aligned with the winter solstice we're not here on the perfect day if we were here on the summer solstice you would see the sun coming up right in the middle of the second tunnel which i'm sure is really dramatic so that's this this just here perseus named of course after a great greek hero who slayed medusa the one with all the snakeheads and who rescued andromeda from the dragon so the way this works is that when the sun comes over the tunnels each of these beams throws a circle of light onto the ground so what you'll be doing when the sun is right up there in the sky is literally walking over the stars they'll be on the ground and you'll be walking over them delightful idea and nancy holt when she was planning this she got a team of astronomers at work here and all this is actually absolutely to the centimeter it's all perfectly aligned one of the things i really like about land art is that it's always about these big subjects the cosmos the summer solstice the sun the stars big ideas so much more than art is about cheap ideas you know it's about movies it's about celebrity it's about what's on tv it's about what it's like to go shopping interesting relevant ideas but cheap ideas small ideas land art it's impossible to make land art about celebrities and tv and going shopping if you're making land art you have to make art about this about the big ideas so of course it's no coincidence that most of the really good land artists are americans to make land art you need all this [Music] yes you're right an idiot on a train is trying to sing when he can't but that's because i'm so excited sometime in july 1911 an american explorer called hiram bingham climbed up a very steep hill in central peru and he discovered a lost city of the incas it was called machu picchu at that time no one had heard of it no one went there but now they've all heard of it and they all want to go there including [Music] [Applause] me [Music] i'm here for very obvious reasons i want to see the landscape being adapted and changed by man man at his most skillful and dogged and that means examining the handiwork of the incas [Music] where you or i build things on the ground the inca built them in the clouds [Music] the thing about machu picchu the reason why i turned to jelly up here with pleasure is that the whole place makes no sense why do all this all the way up here we're not on any strategic route between anywhere and anywhere else it's a terrible place to grow things an unimaginable place to build things the effort that went into creating that is scary so why do it the answer hits you as soon as you open your eyes up here whichever way you look in whichever direction all you see are mountains mountains mountains everywhere the inca were mountain worshippers they believed the mountains were sacred the source of all life and up here in machu picchu they were as close to those mountain gods as they dared to go so close they could almost touch them these days machu picchu has become a famous center for new agers and space cadets of all sorts they particularly like this mountain shaped rock which was put here especially by the inca to mimic and represent the mountains behind sacred rock you have to touch it and there's another one there there's another one there this one here it's the most famous sculpture in machu picchu it's right at the top of the highest hill all sorts of people have all sorts of theories about what it represents popular theory is that it's some kind of sundial others say that it's specially aligned to the various solstices but i go with the latest theory which is that like the other mounted shaped rocks we've seen it's actually an abstract representation of the mountains behind it and if you get the alignment right get the sun in the right place you'll see that the shapes the ridge along there the big peak in the middle match up oh yes the inca loved their mountains they carved them cut them shaped them but their greatest sculptural achievement the one for which they will always be remembered is their walls [Music] so beautiful no mortar no cement just carefully perfectly fitted blocks of individually hand carved stone each one a sculpture in itself that's been carefully shaped and then fitted together like a jigsaw this effect here that's called pillow carving it makes the stone look as if it's been inflated with air from the inside and this puffy look makes the walls seem somehow weightless [Music] look at this one two three four five six seven eight nine ten sides ten sided stone [Music] this one stone here weighs over 250 tons how do they get it here how did they do any of this well it's a remarkable process if you or i were building a big stone wall we'd carve the individual bits of stone and pile them up one on top of the other but that's not how the inca did it the inca chose each stone for each position and having carved the one underneath they would lower the one on top backwards and forwards down and up down and up onto the stone below and every time they would see what needed doing did they need to carve a bit here did they need to add a bit there until eventually it all slotted together like this perfect jigsaw [Music] it's a remarkable process and it's worked because these walls have survived the earthquakes of peru which are about as big as earthquakes come [Music] i salute the incas walls they're exquisite bits of sculpture and look how many sculptors who came afterwards have tried to match them [Music] even the minimalists have had a go but i see we've drifted off the topic of mountains and that's wrong if you're investigating land art you mustn't forget the mountains [Music] most places you go in america the wild west has clearly finished but in arizona i'm not sure that the news has got through yet there's two things that everybody should come to arizona for one the grand canyon of course everybody's heard of that but the second thing you may not have heard of roden crater remember that name it's the largest work of art in the world [Music] if you look through the windscreen over there you should just see a great big volcano on the horizon that's rodent crater an artist called james terrell bought that volcano about 30 years ago he loved it it's a beautiful thing but it wasn't quite right for him so he spent the past 30 years working on it reshaping it making it more perfect and filling it with secret chambers it hasn't been opened yet it's not due to open until 2012 but we're getting a sneak preview james we're standing right on the rim of the volcano here and you get a fantastic sense of why this landscape must have appealed to you when you first saw it could you talk us back through those early days well i really wanted to find a space that was a bowl shaped space held up above the surrounding plain i had in 74 begun looking and i flew all the western states basically from the rockies to the pacific and all the way down into mexico and chihuahua i was looking for a space that had its own power this was my favorite i saw it in a november day at the end of the day so that the sun was strongly on the western side of it and it just looked fantastic as i saw it come into view i was flying on the north side of the peaks here coming on an east-west direction and so i landed out down below and then spent the night here at the crater and then went in to see the ownership and what the story was it wasn't for sale he said he bought land he didn't sell it but i went and saw him every friday for three years when he paid his cowboys and so i got a lease on it in uh i guess 76. i've just moved 1.4 million cubic yards and hardy looks like i've done anything [Music] welcome to jim's world wow this is the sun and moon space here where actually this side is the sun the furthest north sunrise the opposite side is the moon the furthest south moon said so it's north sun rise and south moonset so the white disc that's in the middle of the stone here will be like a movie projection screen almost and and on it we'll be able to see the the the sun rising and then on the other side we'll see the moon yes yes so when you come here those are the kinds of things you will experience this is essentially like a giant pinhole camera here isn't it yes it's actually like a giant telescope [Music] these are gestures to events that do come but come regularly what you'll see is spaces that are set up for certain events awaiting them but it's also possible to make things that won't be experienced in my lifetime but i know where they'll happen [Music] how deep down in the volcano are we we're 120 feet underneath the top of the crater so we're heading up to what looks like like a giant um keyhole yes that it is now what was the circle becomes an ellipse ah so if you stare up you can just see the circle stretching strange feeling ah for animation it's quite wonderful artists and architects are making all these structures and things that we inhabit to have these feelings to have a sense of awe than anything that's said or read in them so this has always been the territory of art we have this relationship to the cosmos it affects us physically as the tides do and planting cycles as well as the cycle of women and fertility i mean it's quite amazing and yet we have lost some of that understanding intellectually we know it but we don't really feel it that well this chamber down here is called the east portal and i think it's the most spectacular of all the chambers in the volcano you come out of a dark tunnel and there in front of you is this golden staircase leading right up to the sky and when you come up the golden staircase you look around and you find you've come out right in the middle of the volcano's bowl [Music] what i also like is when you look back down again there's a blue circle in the ground that looks exactly like the earth as the earth must have looked when neil armstrong looked back down on it from the moon it's a kind of god's eye view of the earth [Music] you know part of this is to take something awesome this idea of coming to grips with the whole the whole sky the entire cosmos and yet have it feel somewhat personal that this space is for you and we are a part of nature and one of our greatest conceits is to feel apart from it we have this great hubris to think that we own a piece of the earth when we buy it and have these certificates of sale and ownership and all that but that's sort of like a fly thinking it owns the banana it lights on flies on a banana i suppose that does sound like us but at least sculpture gives us a shot at eternity long after we're gone our land art will still be there [Music] there are a million stories in the world of sculpture this has been a few of them you

Channel: Perspective

Views: 41,650

Rating: 4.924706 out of 5

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, sculpture (visual art form), waldemar januszczak, waldemar januszczak documentary, waldemar, waldemar januszczak sculpture diaries, waldemar januszczak sculpture, famous statues, iconic statues, statue history, art history, modern art, contemporary art, stonehenge, roden c, art history documentary

Id: Q6MVuCHQFiQ

Length: 48min 22sec (2902 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 03 2020