Beaubourg: The Pompidou Center, Paris

Beaubourg: The Pompidou Center, Paris is a television program written and presented by Michael Baldwin of Art & Language. It was created for the Open University's "A315: Modern Art and Modernism; Manet to Pollock" course which was taught from 1983 to 1992.

Worldcat

Open University

Synopses

BBC 2

The Beaubourg, or Centre Georges Pompidou, had been seen as the most controversial modern building in Paris since 1968.

The Roland Collection

Can one control art which criticizes 'the system' by absorbing it into the system, and elevating it to the status of the official avant-garde? And is that what the authorities were trying to do in Paris when they built the Centre Georges Pompidou after the upheavals of 1968? The students on the streets of Paris were demanding a social and cultural revolution; their ideas were apparently expressed in the founding of 'Beaubourg,' but at the same time its collections and exhibitions showcase French culture and France's importance as the perennial home of modern, and post-modern, art. So is Beaubourg an expression of cultural and political freedom, or is it really a symbol of central control?

Credits

Role	Person
Director	Nick Levinson
Writer, presenter	Michael Baldwin
Film cameraman	Daniel Karpinski
Film editor	Jane Wood

Release

Air dates

Station	Date	Day	Time
BBC2	September 27, 1983	Tuesday	6:05am
BBC2	October 1, 1983	Saturday	7:40am
BBC2	September 25, 1984	Tuesday	6:05am
BBC2	September 29, 1984	Saturday	12:40pm
BBC2	September 25, 1985	Wednesday	11:55pm
BBC2	September 27, 1986	Saturday	12:40pm
BBC2	September 26, 1987	Saturday	1:30pm
BBC2	October 1, 1988	Saturday	12:15pm
BBC2	September 30, 1989	Saturday	1:30pm
BBC2	September 29, 1990	Saturday	1:30pm
BBC2	September 28, 1991	Saturday	1:30pm
BBC2	September 27, 1992	Sunday	7:00am

The program is most often listed as "Modern Art: Beaubourg"

Physical release

A VHS edition was released by the Roland Collection in the mid-1990s(?). $49 for individuals, $99 for institutions. Out of print by 2000.

Retrospectives

Art & Language briefly critique the book The Museums of the Last Generation using its analysis of the Centre Pompidou in Albert, Joan and Sinbad (2007)

Quotes

Picasso and Braque: A Symposium

1992

David Cottington

[...] It is now perhaps a commonplace to argue that, in Michael Baldwin's memorable phrase, "the meaning and effect of works of art are products more of art's discourses than of its vulgar artificers," [...]

A Quiet Revolution: British Sculpture Since 1965

1987

Charles Harrison

[...] In the later 1950s and 1950s, Modernism was reexported from New York to Europe "like a slow-release Marshall Plan," transformed, metropolitanized, and - at least as regards the functions of criticism - substantially professionalized. [...]

Reviews

Arts TV: A History of Arts Television in Britain

1993

John A. Walker

[...] Another arts course — Modern Art & Modernism: Manet to Pollock — dates from 1983. [Nick] Levinson was again in overall charge of the course's TV programmes. OU academics worked in close collaboration with BBC production staff and technicians. Emphasis was placed on scriptwriting because the intention was to generate 'television essays' rather than 'illustrated lectures'. It was also decided to avoid artiness and pretension in the style of filming. The programmes, thirty-two in all (for the full list, see the appendix), Levinson later explained, were about art not pieces of art. Incidental music was outlawed for the same reason. In any case, the limited budgets of educational programming precluded lavish production values.

Members of the OU course team, such as Francis Frascina and Briony Fer, scripted and presented some programmes but the majority were written and presented by outside experts from both Europe and the United States; for example, Benjamin Buchloh, T. J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Clement Greenberg, Serge Guilbaut, Donald Judd, Fred Orton, Griselda Pollock and Peter Wollen. As this list of names indicates, the experts included arts and critics as well as art historians. The involvement of several members, or ex-members, of Art & Language - Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin and Charles Harrison - meant that this radical British 'conceptual art' group had a considerable influence on the intellectual content of certain parts of the course.

No single, format or presentation was adopted, but many programmes showed presenters standing in front of paintings speaking direct to camera. Not all scholars were at ease in this role — some lacked the smooth professionalism of regular TV presenters and actors, but Levinson later claimed this 'roughness' was a strength rather than a weakness. Other programmes consisted of filmed material with a commentary. [...]

OU programmes differ from the general run of arts programmes in several ways: the intellectual level of their commentaries is higher; the camera is allowed more time to scan works of art; there is no attempt to achieve a balance of political opinion. Regarding this latter point: a programme about the Pompidou Centre in Paris, scripted by Michael Baldwin, provided a critique of the building from a Jean Baudrillard/neo-Marxist perspective. It was considered so partial by the BBC that they prefaced it with a disclaimer.

Freed from the requirement to entertain an unknown, unseen public or to attract large audiences, the OU programmes could risk being boring (though most in fact were not). They could transpose in a more systematic way the insights of the discipline of art history to the medium of television and acknowledge that art is a site of controversy and ideological struggle as well as pleasurable aesthetic and emotional experiences. In the case of the Modern Art & Modernism course, the aim was not art appreciation but a critical/social history of art (and that history included concepts, theories and issues as well as art objects). Not all programmes fulfilled this aim, but a fair number did. Besides Baldwin's programme, noteworthy ones were: Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton on Van Gogh's Potato Eaters; Tim Clark on Manet's Olympia and Bar at the Folies-Bergère; and Serge Guilbaut on a Jackson Pollock drip painting.

Once VHS video-recorders became widely available in the 1980s, they were acquired by individuals, schools, colleges, and universities. Broadcast arts programmes could then be recorded for later use as visual aids during classroom teaching. Some libraries in higher educational institutions now possess extensive collections of such video-recrodings classified in the same manner as their books. [...]

The Situationist City

1998

Simon Sadler

[...] See also the BBC Television program "The Pompidou Centre," made for the Open University course A315, Modern Art and Modernism, 1982, in which Michael Baldwin (from the conceptual art group Art & Language) launched an attack on the Centre of such ferocity that the BBC prefixed screenings with a disclaimer.

Architecture on British Television: 1950s to 1990s

2009

John A. Walker

[...] For more sophisticated and trenchant critiques, the viewer has to turn to Open University programmes such as those associated with the Modern Art & Modernism: Manet to Pollock course of 1983.

OU arts programmes differ from the general run of arts programmes in several ways: the intellectual level of their commentaries is higher; the camera is allowed more time to scan works of art; there is no attempt to achieve a balance of political opinion. Regarding the latter point: a programme about Rogers and Piano's highly popular Pompidou Centre in Paris, scripted by Michael Baldwin of the artists' group Art-Language, provided a critique of the building from a Jean Baudrillard/neo-Marxist perspective; it was considered so partial by the BBC that they prefaced it with a disclaimer. [...]

Art & Language Uncompleted: The Philippe Méaille Collection

2014

Carles Guerra

Michael Baldwin, a member of Art & Language, did the voice-over for a documentary about the Georges Pompidou Centre in 1982. In little more than twenty minutes, the artist provided a rigorous description of the institution. The editing combined footage of inside the Pompidou Centre, invaded by thousands of visitors, with other shots filmed outside in the streets. Outside the museum, various crowds demonstrated and were confronted by riot police. The programme, produced by The Open University in collaboration with the BBC, was originally supposed to be educational. To judge from the tone, however, it could be deemed an exercise in institutional critique, the same kind of artistic practice associated with Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher or Andrea Fraser. The political, economic and social questioning of the museum carried out by these artists constitute what we nowadays call, broadly speaking, artistic research. Baldwin’s commentary threw out a 'critical and provocative' observation about the modern art museum housed in the Pompidou Centre. To his mind, that was 'a strategic and administrative response to the 1968 events'. He went on to say that 'its raw materials are people', and after commenting on its genuine construction lattice, considering it a place for 'the spectacle following the death of culture', he concludes with a remark about the impression the massive building left. ‘Inside’, the voice-over said, ‘practice is made a mythology’. Meanwhile, the screen continued to show artworks hanging on the museum’s walls.

This television programme does not, officially, form part of Art & Language’s work. Instead, it comes across more as a journalistic variant of Art & Language’s discourse, something not to be taken as an institutional criticism. It consists simply of an analysis of cultural policy which avoids the theatrical components which institutional critique has made us so used to. This programme’s insertion into the realms of education associates it with one of the most downgraded genres in the chain of artistic production. 'The paradigmatic site of modern art in the mind of its producers is the museum.' Education sits apart from art production. It is segregated from the sphere of reproduction. 'The sites of modern art … [for example], the classroom, art school, studio, the art magazine and the gallery’ – to quote the very same ones Baldwin mentioned – make up an alternative distribution network. These other spaces, often misvalued, have brought about specific production conditions throughout Art & Language’s history: from the days when Michael Baldwin and Terry Atkinson were teaching at Coventry College of Art, then through the magazine Art-Language, the group’s principal interface with the public, and to the studio practice which the same Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden maintain today. [...]