Original subtitles

CAR ENGINE REVS

MUSIC: Promised Land by Elvis Presley

This is a film about a place people used to call the promised land.

They came here to follow their dreams and change their lives.

But I'm here to look for art.

Because the spirit of a place is always in the art.

That's the Spiral Jetty.

It's a famous piece of land art, made in 1970,

Smithson turned up here with a few thousand bucks in his pocket,

hired some bulldozers and created this giant stone spiral,

jutting out mysteriously into the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

The thing is, Smithson couldn't have made this anywhere else.

It had to be made in these conditions,

by this lake, in this landscape.

Because that's what land art is all about, fitting the art to the place.

And that's what this series is about as well.

It's about how the spirit of America

soaked into the art that was created here

and made it unique.

If you keep going across America,

you eventually get to the Wild West.

And that's where I'm starting.

Because the Wild West did strange and powerful things to American art.

These days, with all the bad cowboy movies that have been made here,

places like this no longer surprise us.

They've become a cliche.

But imagine seeing all this for the first time.

Imagine coming over the mountain,

on your trusty mule,

and this looms up in front of you.

Your legs would have turned to rubber

and your heart would have gone boom boody-boom, boody-boom.

Although most of the American West

had officially been part of the United States since 1803,

70 years later, it was still largely a mystery.

Getting there was dangerous and difficult

until, in 1869...

..this thing came along.

The iron horse with its relentless gallop and its dragon's breath.

TRAIN GROWLS, WHISTLE BLOWS

With the construction of the transcontinental railway,

the American West was finally open for business

and all kinds of shady characters

piled onto the trains

to take advantage of the opportunities.

Gamblers, bandits, gold-diggers, they all got on the train.

And so, too, did those especially dangerous desperados -

the artists.

This is Green River in Wyoming and that is the so-called Castle Rock,

made famous by this fellow here,

Thomas Moran, from Bolton in Lancashire.

Moran was seven-years-old when his father packed his family onto a boat

in Liverpool and swapped the Satanic mills of Lancashire

for the promised land.

Little Thomas grew up to be a talented artist and in 1871,

just after the railways got here,

he turned up in Green River

as part of an official government survey

that had arrived here to map the newly opened lands of the West.

When Moran painted the Green River,

this was already a squalid little town

with a railway running through it.

One of those feral frontier throw-ups

they called hell on wheels.

But you wouldn't know it from his sublime evocations of it.

One of his tricks was to build a scaffold from lightweight bamboo

and from the top of it, he would look down on the land,

a God's eye view, that made the West look even more awesome

than it already was.

The Indians he painted, trekking through the valley, were invented.

Where they're tracking is where the railroad was.

And as for those colours...

Those burning yellows and fiery oranges...

..those were stolen, directly, from Turner.

This is Moran's view of Yellowstone,

painted after he got back from his first expedition to the West.

And this was actually acquired by the government for 10,000 dollars.

A huge amount of money in the days when

the American government believed in art.

So persuasive was Moran's dramatic Yellowstone,

that this picture was the key reason why, in 1872,

Yellowstone was turned into a national park.

The first in America

and the first in the world.

The Grand Canyon, painted on Moran's second trip to the West.

And what you get from it immediately

is how these huge western lands felt so biblical

with these scary chasms and the towering deserts.

The scale of it, the sense of descent,

reminded people of Dante's Inferno.

When the critic from The New York Times saw this picture,

he described it as, "The most diabolical scene

"man has ever looked upon."

And here, at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles,

made famous by the singing cowboy, Gene Autry,

they have the third of Moran's great picturings of the American West,

The Mountain of the Holy Cross.

# On a hill far away... #

In the wilds of Colorado,

there's a mountain on which the snow forms

a miraculous white cross that never melts.

And which can be seen from far away.

This was the hardest place to get to,

but Moran was determined to paint it,

because the miraculous white cross on the mountain was such a perfect

symbol of America's divine destiny.

The waterfall and the raging torrents

were invented by Moran to heighten the symbolism...

..and to give his picture an even bigger storyline.

The holy waters, rushing down the mountain towards us,

baptising America.

Moran wanted to hang his three great paintings of the West,

the Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and this, all together,

like a giant altarpiece, a triptych,

but Congress wouldn't lend them,

so it never happened.

Not in real life, anyway.

But this isn't real life, this is TV.

And on TV, we can do what Thomas Moran wanted.

And we can do more than that.

We can also jump ahead in time

and see how the rhythm and the dimensions

and the sublime presence of the American landscape

soaked into the national art.

These are by Clyfford Still, the loner of Abstract Expressionism,

and a man of the West.

Feel his moods,

look where they come from.

And what about this, from Jackson Pollock,

hero of the American West,

and this film's ultimate destination.

GUNSHOTS

While the landscape painters of the American West were imagining the

awesome landscapes of the promised land,

a second branch of early cowboy art

was turning its attention to the inhabitants.

Cowboys as we know them with their gunfights and their bucking broncos

were largely the invention of a

fellow called Frederic Sackrider Remington.

He was America's most popular cowboy artist,

but you wouldn't know it from looking at him.

Remington was born in New York state, so he was another Easterner

with an overactive imagination.

His family wanted Frederic to become something respectable.

But he had the artistic gene in him.

And it led him astray.

Remington had been drawing pictures of cowboys since he was a schoolboy,

as many of us little boys do.

But the rest of us grow out of it.

And he never did.

During the Civil War,

his father had been a colonel in the Army

and he wanted little Freddie to follow him.

But little Freddie grew up to become big Freddie

and, like me, he was too fat to be a soldier.

So all his fighting was done on paper.

He worked as an illustrator for various books and magazines

and he was immensely popular,

largely because he had invented this dramatic persona for himself

as the man who really knew the West,

who'd lived it and experienced it.

Remington's paintings had a reputation

for being strikingly authentic.

Full of insider knowledge and accurate details.

To me, they look like the covers of cowboy comics

and where Remington is much more impressive is in his sculptures.

This is his most ambitious horse sculpture,

it's called Coming Through the Rye,

and if you know your Scottish poetry,

you'll know that, "Coming through the rye,"

is a line from a poem by Rabbie Burns,

later turned into a famous song.

# Gin a body meet a body

# Comin' through the rye. #

# Gin a body meet a body

# Comin' through the rye

# Gin a body kiss a body

# Need a body cry? #

HORSE NEIGHS

The poem is actually pretty steamy.

A man meets a woman in a field of rye

and she's wearing a wet dress.

Well, you can imagine the rest!

# Gin a body meet a body

# Need a body cry. #

That's why JD Salinger referred to it as well in his celebrated novel

about the awakening of teenage sexuality,

The Catcher In The Rye.

But all that steamy stuff went over Remington's head

and what he actually shows us here

is some cowboys coming into town after a successful round-up.

And they're riding straight at us, through the rye,

whooping it up in this brilliant blur of sculptural movement.

Look down here. Can you see how only a few of the hooves are actually

touching the ground?

They're supporting the weight of the entire sculpture.

And this fellow round here,

his horse isn't touching the ground at all.

It's flying through the air at full speed.

It's a technical tour de force.

Remington's sculptures are as ambitious

as any statues produced in the Renaissance.

But where a Renaissance bronze might show you the labours of Hercules,

or the battles of the gods,

"Fat" Freddie Remington gives us a bunch of whooping cowboys,

heading for the saloon.

There's just one more thing I'd like you to see before we leave Cody,

Wyoming, and it's this, the Irma Hotel, built by "Buffalo" Bill Cody,

who gave the town its name - and that museum full of Remingtons.

The Irma Hotel was named after Buffalo Bill's daughter, Irma.

And I've brought you here because

somebody who's important for the story of American art

It was a fellow called Leroy Pollock.

Now, Leroy was a bit of a wastrel,

but he did leave American art one extraordinary gift,

because it was here, in Cody, Wyoming,

that Leroy had a son and he called him Paul Pollock.

Paul didn't like being called Paul,

it wasn't western enough for him.

He preferred his middle name, Jackson.

And since we're going to be hearing a lot about Jackson Pollock

in this film, I thought you should see where he came from.

Gunfighters and bronco busters were not, of course,

the first inhabitants of these extraordinary lands.

Long before "Fat" Freddie Remington began imagining his cowboys,

there was art being made here that was mysterious and profound.

The Native Americans, who had their lands stolen

by the invading cowboys, didn't have a written language.

They didn't need it.

They could communicate with something far better than words.

They could communicate with art.

All over the great outdoor museum of the American West,

you can find mysterious art

carved onto the boulders and painted onto the rocks.

This rock here, it's called the Birthing Rock,

has 8,000 years worth of ancient art incised into its stone by the

various native cultures who passed through here.

Why did they choose this particular rock?

Perhaps because there's something thoroughly mysterious

about the way it's just plonked down here,

as if it's dropped from the sky.

There's art all the way round it

and these are called petroglyphs.

They're cut into the rock,

so you scratch the outer layer of the stone and reveal this brighter

sandstone underneath.

It's called the Birthing Rock because of this scene, here.

Can you see?

It's a woman giving birth to a baby.

But it's a breech birth,

so the baby's feet are coming out first.

Why is it here?

What does it mean?

We'll never know for sure,

but it must be something to do with fertility and survival...

..because rock art is always about the big issues.

Up the road from the Birthing Rock is another

dramatic location for Native American rock art,

the place they call Sego Canyon.

Most of the huge figures here are painted onto the rocks rather than

scratched, so these are pictographs not petroglyphs.

All kinds of wacky proposals have been put forward to explain these.

A particularly popular one is that they show aliens

who landed on Earth in ancient times,

visitors from outer space come to see if America was for them.

In a way, this mad aliens idea isn't that far away from the truth,

because rock art, wherever it's made,

and you find it right across the globe,

is an attempt to communicate with another world -

the world behind the surface.

When we didn't know where water came from, or where babies are made,

or what the sky is, when everything was a mystery,

that's when art came to our rescue.

Imagine waking up in the morning 8,000 years ago

and remembering your dreams.

Where have you seen the things you've just seen?

Where have you been?

There must be another world out there, another reality.

And artists were special,

because not only could they visit this other reality,

they could describe it, too.

I don't like the word "shamans".

It's loaded with so much spurious hocus-pocus.

But sometimes it's the only word that will do.

The miraculous power of artists to enter the dream-world,

and come back with images of it, was a power like no other.

In the world of the ancients, art wasn't there to decorate things.

It was there to change them.

And even if we can't understand what it's saying any more,

we can still feel its power.

And that's why American rock art has been so influential.

Wind the clock forwards to the age of Abstract Expressionism

and you'll see its impact on modern American art.

The paintings of Adolph Gottlieb

were a 20th century search for ancient mysteries.

And look at the fierce art of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

If you came across this scrawled onto a rock,

you wouldn't be surprised, would you?

After bumming around America

searching for work in Arizona, California,

the Pollock family from Cody, Wyoming ended up,

like so many pilgrims before them, in the City of Angels.

Paul Pollock, or Jackson as he became, went to this school here,

the Manual Arts High School,

from which he soon managed to get himself expelled

for producing a leaflet attacking the school's sports department.

Pollock wasn't alone in getting himself thrown out of Manual Arts.

A second delinquent was expelled with him.

He was known in those days as Philip Goldstein.

But he too changed his name

and we know him better today as Philip Guston.

The two of them had an art teacher called Frederick Schwankovsky.

Now, even by LA standards, Schwankovsky was eccentric.

He had long hair down to here, wore purple jackets and sandals,

and he believed in all sorts of strange Eastern philosophies,

and he's the one who introduced Guston and Pollock to theosophy.

The occult doctrine of theosophy has been brutally redacted

from the story of modern art.

Even here in California, it's an art historical embarrassment.

No-one wants to believe that theosophy changed anything.

But it did.

Actually, theosophy changed everything.

Without it, abstract art would never have happened.

All the pioneers of abstraction,

all of them, Kandinsky, Mondrian,

Malevich, the Italian Futurists Boccioni and Balla,

all of them were fascinated by theosophy.

And Jackson Pollock was fascinated by it, too.

This shady grove in Ojai is where Frederick Schwankovsky

to hear the teachings of Krishnamurti,

the Californian guru of theosophy.

Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, John Lennon.

They all came out here to hear Krishnamurti speak.

So, what's theosophy about?

Well, frankly, life's too short to go into it in detail.

To understand any of it, you have to have read this,

The Secret Doctrine by Madame Blavatsky.

And that's not something I'd wish upon anybody,

especially not you nice, sensible people watching this film.

So I've read it for you and tried my best to comprehend.

The most important thing that theosophy teaches

is that the universe has an underlying order,

that the stuff on the surface is just stuff on the surface.

Below it, there's a deeper reality,

and that's what artists need to show.

that there was a universal reality beyond the visible reality,

and that only artists could see it.

And it wasn't just theosophy that Schwankovsky

introduced to Pollock and Guston.

He was also a fervent Communist

with a passion for Mexico and its art.

In Mexico in 1910, just across the border from Hollywood,

so right under the nose of the movie industry,

a real, live revolution had broken out.

Pancho Villa, the notorious rebel leader,

was even said to have signed an exclusive contract

with the Mutual Film Company to film him in action.

Pancho, they say,

would delay his battles so that Hollywood's cameramen

could get there in time to film him.

Thus Mexico, its revolution, its politics, its passion,

began to exert a powerful hold on American art.

Mexico City, where your pulse quickens as soon as the plane lands.

What an exhilarating city it is,

and what great art treasures it holds.

I love Rome, I love Venice, I love Paris, St Petersburg, New York.

They're all great art cities.

But for sheer excitement,

for that raw artistic thing that

makes your heart go boom boody-boom, boody-boom,

the art of Mexico City is in a league of its own.

This is the Ministry of Education.

Painted in the years 1922 to 1928,

the mural masterpiece of Diego Rivera.

This used to be a Dominican convent,

but after the revolution, it became the Ministry of Education,

and Rivera was handed the entire space, 15,000 square feet of it,

to fill with his revolutionary murals.

They call this "The Sistine Chapel of the Americas".

It's a display of ambition and invention,

the like of which the New World had never seen.

Rivera had travelled extensively in Italy and he'd seen how,

during the Renaissance,

the monasteries of Florence were filled with frescoes.

But this is more than a tribute to the Renaissance.

This is an attempt to outdo it.

Anything Giotto could do in Florence,

Diego Rivera could trump in Mexico City.

All together, there are 235 fresco panels in here

and Rivera single-handedly painted most of them.

Here's The Day Of The Dead,

when everyone in Mexico gets annually happy.

And this is The Burning Of The Judases,

when unpopular politicians are turned into puppets

and set alight in the streets.

But Rivera saves his best moments for up here on the next floor,

where the gringos and their filthy capitalism

come in for a fearful bashing.

This is called The Wall Street Supper.

The rich bankers of Wall Street, the Rockefellers, the JP Morgans,

are seated at a capitalist dinner tucking in

to the gold ticker tape of the stock exchange.

And the culmination of it all is up here,

the overthrow of the capitalists in the Mexican Revolution.

Here's the battle in the trenches in 1910

and then a few years later, handing out guns to the soldiers,

there's someone you may recognise.

Ah, yes. The proud and redoubtable Frida Kahlo.

Rivera's wife, heroine of the revolution,

handing out rifles to the rebels.

So, yes, it's agitprop, but agitprop that thrills and delights.

When this was painted,

most Mexicans had never been to school and were still illiterate.

Murals became the chosen art of Mexico

because they spoke to all of the people, all of the time.

And it wasn't just Mexicans that painted them.

Visiting Americans were at it, too.

This faded whopper in the small town of Morelia,

three hours out of Mexico City,

was painted by Jackson Pollock's buddy Philip Goldstein,

It shows the forces of evil being bashed up by the forces of good.

And, if we leap forwards 40 years to the Nixon era,

here's Philip Guston again,

expressing his respect for his president, Mexican-style.

Do you know when The Star-Spangled Banner

became the national anthem of America?

You'd think it was the 19th century, wouldn't you?

But, no, it was the '30s.

1931.

It was originally a drinking song

written for a gentleman's club in London.

But new lyrics were added about the land of the brave

and in 1931, it became the national anthem,

another resonant creation of the American imagination.

So we've caught up with Philip Goldstein, who became Philip Guston,

but what about his buddy Jackson Pollock? What was he up to?

Jackson went through a cowboy phase in his art as well,

and had his high noon moment.

But he was a restless soul,

and his cowboy imagination was soon seeking other trails to follow.

His father LeRoy...

Remember him? ..had gotten a job as a surveyor

and he'd take Jackson with him on his long trips into the desert.

And remember how Jackson had got interested in eastern mysticism

with theosophy and all that?

Well, it was here in the desert that he first encountered

the sand art of the Native Americans.

With sand art,

you make pictures by dropping or dribbling

coloured sand onto the ground.

So, it's a physical way of making art with your whole body -

an action art.

So you can see straightaway what influence

that might have had on Jack the Dripper.

But not just yet.

First, he needed to go through another of his phrases.

What we might call his regionalist phase,

when he fell under the influence of a powerful and significant American

artist called Thomas Hart Benton,

who specialised in depictions of rural America.

Rural America was a hot topic in the 1930s.

A subject that stirred deep emotions.

And Thomas Hart Benton was the chief stirrer.

This was painted especially for the Country Music Hall Of Fame,

a marvellous museum here in Nashville,

and it shows the origins of country music.

It's like a Jamie Oliver recipe of all the ingredients

that went into country.

A bit of gospel.

A bit of banjo.

Lots of fiddle and guitar...

..and a big smoking train bringing its chug, chug, chug

to the sound of country.

And Benton knew what he was talking about.

HARMONICA PLAYS Hear that harmonica blaring out

and drowning out my words? HARMONICA CONTINUES

That's Benton himself playing on one of his records.

The mural was Mexico's great gift to American culture,

a way of telling stories that everyone could understand.

And Benton didn't half pump them out.

This one here was painted for the state capital in Jefferson City,

Missouri, Benton's home state.

And it tells the story of Missouri.

The industry, the cornfields, the fun that was had here...

..and the horror.

I love the way he stood up for the oppressed

and poked fun at the Establishment.

And the brain work involved in planning all this is so impressive.

The way it unfolds around you with these interlocking scenes.

It's like a 3-D comic book.

We know exactly how he did it

because there's a film of him making his murals -

and the process is fascinating.

ARCHIVE: He first experiments with rhythmic designs,

or dynamic patterns...

He'd start with a flow chart of the mural's abstract movement.

No figures, just the rhythm he wanted, the abstract underpinning.

He has a good, basic pattern.

Once he'd got the overall rhythm, he'd start sketching in the figures,

still keeping the abstract design,

but filling it with recognisable shapes.

Next, he'd make a sculpture in clay of the entire scene.

Position all the figures to see how the light falls on them.

And when that was done, and only then, he began painting.

Putting in the colours, the final layer, the icing on the cake.

So, all these great mural cycles of his

have an abstract framework to them

lurking under the bottom of the image.

You can't always see it, but it's there.

And they're all painted with egg tempera.

And when he painted this,

his masterpiece in the Metropolitan Museum in New York,

it's called America Today, the rumour is

that he was paid with eggs.

Not money, eggs.

Painting with egg tempera is a wispy, delicate and busy process.

The brush flicks and slides, dances and twitches,

and there's a sense of perpetual motion to it all.

Now, all these lessons about starting with an abstract rhythm,

painting in layers, painting quickly and wristily,

these were all things that Benton was teaching his students.

And his students repaid him by modelling for his murals.

Like this fellow here,

who's whipped off his shirt

and who twists heroically like a Michelangelo slave.

That is Benton's most loyal and celebrated pupil.

That is Jackson Pollock.

Pollock arrived in New York in 1930.

He was 19.

A hick from the West,

who wore cowboy boots and a Stetson,

and who strutted about Manhattan like Wyatt Earp.

As soon as he got here,

he enrolled as a student at the Art Students League.

An independent arts school for painters who wanted to get better.

Benton was a teacher here

and he had his work cut out because, according to

the people who knew Pollock in his first days in New York,

when it came to art, he wasn't a natural.

This is his first and only self-portrait.

It's scarily intense.

Black, bleak and clumsy.

Benton, to his credit,

saw through the clumsiness and spotted something real in there.

He took Pollock under his wing,

nursed him, educated him, and as we saw, used him as a model.

There's Jackson again, playing the harmonica,

in another Benton mural, which lists all the fun you can have in America.

They were so close that Pollock moved into the same house as Benton,

here in Eighth Street, number 46.

And that's where he developed a fierce crush on Benton's wife, Rita,

who played with him flirtatiously

and helped to derail him.

Pollock had been a drinker since he was 15,

but it was in New York that it became a problem.

There was something harsh inside him,

something brutal and primitive.

It came out when he drank

and it came out when he painted.

The drinking got so bad he was forced to see a shrink,

and for four years, he was in psychotherapy,

and it all came spilling out.

Pollock's Jungian therapist encouraged him

to get in touch with his unconscious self.

And boy, did he do that.

With Pollock, now and later,

there's a feeling that he's hanging on for dear life

while all this stuff comes bursting out of him.

His breakthrough picture, the one that made him famous,

was painted in 1942 for his new dealer, Peggy Guggenheim.

And according to legend, the whole thing was painted in a single night,

the day before he was due to deliver it.

It's called Mural and it's the size and shape of a Thomas Benton mural.

It originally showed a stampede of Wild West Mustangs,

and they're still in there somewhere,

but where Benton started with abstraction, then added the figures,

Pollock reverses the process.

He started with the Mustangs, but ended up with their rhythm.

With Peggy Guggenheim supporting him, he finally had some money.

And in 1945, he moved

to a house on Long Island and began making

his celebrated drip paintings.

They were done on the floor.

He would put a canvas on the ground

and, inspired by the sand paintings of the Navajo,

he'd prowl around it and drip paint onto it.

He began with some figurative shapes.

Heads, bodies, faces, whatever jumped into his mind,

indicated quickly

with a runny black paint that responded

immediately to his twitches and thrusts.

And there was always music playing,

not country music like Benton, but jazz.

That's the music that suited his rhythm.

He would put jazz on the record player and play it night and day,

over and over again.

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

Everything he was interested in was pulling him in the same direction,

the theosophy, the Jungian therapy,

the sand art of the Navajo,

Benton's murals with their hidden abstraction,

and what they all had in common was the belief that

the visible world was just a surface

and that underneath this surface lay something bigger and more important,

and the artist was the conduit through which

this bigger reality could be reached.

All he had to do was trust...

..his instincts.

This one is called Lavender Mist.

It's in the National Gallery of Art in Washington and it's one of his

greatest paintings.

Now, because of the way he made these, the dripping,

the prowling around the canvas,

Pollock was called an action painter.

But to get the most out of his art, you need to be an action visitor.

There's no point standing in one place to look at Jackson Pollock.

You, too, need to dart about.

In and out, left and right, backwards and forwards.

The art never stops moving, so neither should you.

Sometimes it's like looking through a microscope at tiny details.

Other times, it's like staring up at the cosmos.

It wasn't the Stetson or the cowboy boots

that made Jackson Pollock a Wild West artist.

It was the bigness of his vision,

the cosmic scale,

that taste for infinity.

So, this is abstract expressionism,

the first truly American art movement,

when all the dumb and inchoate stuff inside came bursting out

in an unstoppable torrent.

While Jackson Pollock in New York was reimagining the West as a bit of

abstraction, in the West itself,

the landscape was impacting on American art in more tangible ways.

Land art is the only American art form that couldn't have happened

anywhere else.

It had to happen here.

You need this landscape...

..these dimensions...

..and this sense of place.

This is Double Negative by Michael Heizer.

He made it in 1969.

Heizer brought some bulldozers up to this impressive Mesa in Nevada

and carved two huge artificial canyons in the rock,

two great trenches stretching altogether 1,500 feet.

To create his artificial canyons,

Heizer had to dig out 240,000 tonnes of rock.

These days, the sides have crumbled

and obscured the clarity of the Double Negative.

But Heizer didn't mind, it was part of his plan.

He always knew that nature was bigger than him.

And these here are the sand tunnels,

created by Nancy Holt in 1976,

in the great basin desert of Utah.

All these concrete tunnels are aligned to the sun,

and at different times of day,

the sun and the shadows do different things.

But the daddy of all examples of American land art,

the greatest land art moment in the West,

is the Spiral Jetty.

When I was an art history student,

this was on the cover of every book about modern art that I had,

and the reason it was so famous is because it wasn't there any more.

When Smithson created the Spiral Jetty in 1970,

the waters of the Great Salt Lake were at a historic low.

But soon after he finished, they rose again, and for 30 years,

the Spiral Jetty disappeared from sight.

It popped up again in 2002, just in time for the new millennium,

and I've been to see it a couple of times since then, and every time,

it's different.

The first time I saw it, it was gleaming white.

The salt crystals in the water had caked the rocks

and given the Jetty a Christmas look.

So I hopped across it, like a kid in the snow.

But that's not how it looks today.

Today, the changing climate has turned

the Great Salt Lake into a desert.

And Smithson's stones stick out of the sand like bones.

And see how the water around the stones is this spooky red.

That's this tiny shrimp that survives in these salt waters,

millions and millions of them,

looking like blood that's soaked into the Great Salt Lake.

Smithson never intended this to be a happy artwork.

He was a sci-fi fan and he chose this location, he said,

because it had a sense of decay about it.

An atmosphere of entropy.

MUSIC: Born In The USA by Bruce Springsteen

And that's the thing about the Wild West,

it was largely a work of fiction.

Everyone who has looked at it has imagined things

that may or may not be there.

What you see is what you want to see.

# Born down in a dead man's town

# The first kick I took was when I hit the ground #

In the next film, we're heading for that other quintessentially

American territory -

the city.

Where some look up

and others look down.

That's The Story of the American Metropolis,

the next stop on this artistic road trip.

# Born in the USA

# I'm a cool rocking Daddy in the USA. #