Truth Copy

The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths

Window or wall sign was made in the winter of 1966-67 at a time when Nauman had established his studio in a disused grocery shop in San Francisco. The work was designed for the large shop window at the front of the studio, rather like the neon advertising signs that hung in the shop fronts nearby, although Nauman’s neon carried a rather different message: ‘The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths’.¹

Referring to the conception of Window or wall sign, Nauman stated, ‘I had the idea that I could make art that would kind of disappear-an art that was supposed to not quite look like art. In that case, you wouldn’t really notice it until you paid attention. Then, when you read it, you would have to think about it.’²

The most difficult thing about the whole piece for me was the statement. It was a kind of test-like when you say something out loud to see if you believe it. Once written down, I could see that the statement, ‘The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths was on the one hand a totally silly idea and yet, on the other hand, I believed it. It’s true and it’s not true at the same time. It depends on how you interpret it and how seriously you take yourself For me it’s still a very strong thought.³

The success of Nauman’s first New York exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in January-February 1968 prompted Castelli to suggest that works by the artist using fluorescent tubing be issued in small editions and Nauman authorised Window or wall sign to be produced in an edition of three. The two other versions are in the collection of the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, and in the collection of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basle.

Michael Lloyd & Michael Desmond European and American Paintings and Sculptures 1870-1970 in the Australian National Gallery 1992 p.372.

1. Nauman at this time also produced a transparent mylar window shade imprinted ‘The true artist is an amazing luminous fountain’, which also appeared behind the plate- glass window of the shop front.
2. Brenda Richardson, Bruce Nauman: Neons, Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1982 (exhibition catalogue), p.20.
3. ibid., p.20.

MANY HAPPY RETURNS (from art forum summer 2010)

Few individuals have so radically altered the vocabulary of architecture as REM KOOLHAAS, whose theoretical writings (Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan [1978]; S, M, L, XL[1995]) and groundbreaking structures (the IIT McCormick Tribune Campus Center in Chicago, 2003; CCTV headquarters in Beijing, 2010) largely gave form to our turn-of-the-millennium understanding of the metropolitan landscape and its cultures. As part of this nearly four-decade-long program, Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture have often engaged with questions of art, proposing buildings for institutions such as Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and, in fact, much of the analysis surrounding those projects was on display at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where the architect’s installation Expansion—Neglect presented vast amounts of information about the changing demands for contemporary art under the sign of globalization. Today, Koolhaas is immersed in his Hermitage 2014 Masterplan, a comprehensive reconsideration of the encyclopedic Saint Petersburg museum’s structure and function, slated for completion on the institution’s 250th anniversary. Artforum editor Tim Griffin sat down with Koolhaas this spring to discuss the architect’s plans for the site in light of his previous research.

Winter Palace galleries being used as a hospital during World War I, Nicholas Hall, Hermitage, ca. 1914.

TIM GRIFFIN: What’s been your relationship to the idea of the museum, and how do you see the status of the museum today?

REM KOOLHAAS: Well, I’m in the position of someone who, through competitions, has thought a lot about museums but has built relatively few. Through the late 1990s, museums started to expand in direct proportion to the rise of the stock market, and during this period we realized at a certain point that we had designed more than thirty-four soccer fields’ worth of museum space. The Hermitage, I should note, is an important counterpoint to both this trend and our participation in it, but collectively all this work enabled me to document the nature of the new, enlarged museum and its relationship to the art displayed in it.

Tate Modern—specifically, the Turbine Hall—is perhaps the ultimate example. I remember so well [Tate director] Nicholas Serota warning us architects at the beginning of the competition for it that, although he didn’t necessarily share this opinion (as he carefully pointed out), the “artists” did not care for strong forms and felt that former industrial space was more sympathetic to their work. Such space appealed to artists, one might suppose, for the reason that they could finally feel alone and triumphant in their own world, without interference.

But I think it has actually become a fantastically fascinating trap, this oversize incubator, in which nobody has ever said, “OK, I’m not going to be intimidated. I’ll just do a show there.” Rather, everyone has reached for the big statement. And if you look at these statements, they all seem to bear an apocalyptic message—Miroslaw Balka’s box of darkness, Doris Salcedo’s sinister crack, Carsten Höller’s existential leaps, Bruce Nauman’s alienated whispers, Anish Kapoor’s overstretched foreskin, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s postdisaster camp, and so on. From the cumulative Unilever Series, you would think the end is nigh—and maybe in a certain way it is. You really begin to wonder why the space is so susceptible to these apocalyptic kinds of projects, and I have a feeling that, like radioactive matter, there might be a half-life for the relevance of certain types of space and the art they promote. So here, the equating of industrial space, with its inherent nostalgia, with the contemporary sublime of Minimalism may be nearing exhaustion. Maybe we’re witnessing a moment where these massive nonspaces, once backed by Wall Street’s steep ascent, are actually reaching their ultimate impotence, sustaining and containing only the announcement of the end—a moment, interestingly, where it perhaps becomes relevant again for space to push back, to be more confrontational, more oppositional, more heretical, and more editorial.

TG: I have found it impossible not to think along these lines when looking at shows such as Marina Abramović’s recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—where there’s a different public aspect to her work, because the terms are so radically changed by the space. In her ongoing performance there, to what extent is she actually in the same space as yours? Is it really a performance, or is it a representation? That setting for The Artist Is Present [2010] is so incredible, because it’s staged—I mean, it takes place on a set. There are cameras everywhere, and she doesn’t account for the effects of that.

RK: This is exactly my point: It’s not a stage but an atrium. The museum is so big that its spatial conditions don’t allow intimacy; they’ve become just too monumental.

I saw an early performance of her Imponderabilia at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1977, and, unlike now, where basically the experience is of having to choose between turning your back to a man or to a woman, what was gripping in that original performance, which of course she did with Ulay, was that not only did you feel you were invading private space—and were forced to be brutal about it—but you also felt you were interrupting a relationship, literally standing between two lovers. It was a perfect thing, in a perfect space. The Stedelijk Museum was this nineteenth-century classical building that had been completely whitewashed by [Willem] Sandberg [director of the Stedelijk Museum, 1945–63]. Its walls had a thickness that allowed the performance to exist entirely within the threshold, and they were covered in whitewashed burlap, whose roughness stood in total contrast to the artists’ naked skin. It was a combination you would never achieve today: the advantages of classicism, symmetry, monumentality, etc., with the advantages of “white space” and experiment.

In 2000, I was enlisted in Thomas Krens’s effort to create a fifth Guggenheim, in Las Vegas—the project that initiated our relationship with the Hermitage. He proposed inserting a large Guggenheim into the complex footprint of the Venetian resort, between the parking garage and the hotel, and, as part of the Venetian’s facade, a smaller entity dedicated to the Hermitage. I was aware I could not compete with Frank Gehry in terms of the spectacular, so I resurrected a model of the museum that had been imprinted on me by the experimental shows at the Stedelijk: the museum not as a holy place but as an accessible factory of the new. We produced a big, factory-like, almost theater-like space for the Guggenheim, and a more jewel-like condition for the Hermitage. We imagined a museum without form, but a museum that was able to perform.

Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present, 2010.Performance View, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Scott Rudd. © 2010 Marina Abramović/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

TG: To continue our thread about art in this context, I’ve wondered whether the real questions generated by the Abramović exhibition are less about the work than about its presentation—with curatorial decisions when it comes to how audiences circulate through the space, where the players are placed, what the lighting is. You know, Abramović is only one among many artists handling questions of performance and its historicization—or, better, its representation. What’s unique here is how these representations of previous works nevertheless interface with public behavior and expectation. They worm into social space. But again, she’s just one of many artists dealing with representations of historical work, and so I feel it’s important to consider whether this is part of a conversation best not confined only to the concerns of art.

RK: In Europe, she was always playing against history and trauma. I really wrestled with why she went to America. Maybe to escape the historical burden or to start a new chapter—or to start doing reenactments rather than submit herself to further suffering.

TG: But then the problem is really detachment from history.

RK: I think you could maybe relate this to the new scale of architecture as well. I was wondering, maybe if you try to reconnect with history then you lose any potency in the reenactment. Maybe reenactment can exist only in a context-free environment. It would be unbelievably exciting if you could actually perform Imponderabilia in a shopping mall. That would be interesting—maybe even approaching the authenticity it had at the Stedelijk.

TG: I was talking with Ann Goldstein, who is the new director there. As I understand it, the museum has a unique relationship to Amsterdam. People go there their whole lives. They have an attachment to it. It really is part of the city’s social infrastructure.

RK: Yes, and I am one of its products. My whole museum sensibility was greatly informed by the Stedelijk, particularly in Sandberg’s era.

But Amsterdam is now a really interesting case, because it’s kind of a reverse Bilbao. They’ve closed two of Amsterdam’s major museums for eight years—the Stedelijk and the Rijksmuseum—both to be enlarged and “prepared for the twenty-first century.” The Van Gogh Museum has remained open, and recently the Hermitage opened a very successful satellite, but the effects of those two closures on the city are devastating. It’s lost its mission and its culture, and the absence really made the entire city suffer. The whole artists’ “scene” withered, because there were no major outlets you could hope to show in, nor outlets for systematic inspiration or interaction with significant art. In fact, it’s a very serious political issue: Simply the closure of two museums has diminished the status of the city internationally in a way that has many people dismayed and pessimistic about whether it might ever recover. So in some cases, you wonder whether “Bilbao” might actually be a necessity. It’s certainly legitimate for cities that aren’t “major” and have no “major” histories to try to use architecture to enhance their reputation, but when it’s being applied to the self-image of major cities like Rome and Moscow, it becomes counterproductive. It’s as if these cities are losing their confidence and self-respect.

I remember when starting the competition for the MAXXI museum in Rome, the director told us, “We want the museum to do for Rome what Gehry did for Bilbao.” The city with Saint Peter’s and the Pantheon needs a Bilbao? I think that this is really the danger of Bilbao: It works in a city that had nothing, less in one that has everything. It threatens to provincialize major cities with massive histories, because by seemingly answering the need for an identity in cities that already have an abundance of identity, you in fact diminish it all. And the effect of this is really quite sinister, because it’s also become the basis of an anti-Bilbao discourse that is now so strong—for instance, I have people telling me that the CCTV [China Central Television] building, this new icon, has ruined the entire city of Beijing. But Beijing’s a city that already has thousands of icons, and this is only one of them. CCTV is therefore much more modest than this kind of critique acknowledges.

TG: So basically what you’re saying is that you see CCTV fitting with the syntax of the city?

RK: It’s not only a syntactical thing but a statistical thing. A city with the history and urban richness of Beijing just cannot be ruined by one building. The new critical discourse about the irresponsibility of Bilbao—the icon—when applied to bigger cities has no relevance. And I think that it is actually coloring a lot of anti-architect discourse, as if we are all irresponsibly transforming every city. You just cannot transform a city like Beijing. When working in such a city, you’re entering a very complex condition that makes you inevitably contextual, because the context is, in fact, almost overpowering.

May Day demonstrations in Palace Square, ca. 1920.

TG: So in the case of the Hermitage, which is rife with its own context and history, is your act as an architect of a similar nature?

RK: I think we much more rapidly and much more routinely erase and eliminate history from our museums than from our cities. I just went to see the Whitney Biennial, and for me, the most striking and interesting room was the one about the history of the Biennial itself. Maybe it’s there in part due to the financial crisis—as a way to produce something on the cheap—but I found it ten times more vivid than the actual show. What’s really staggering is that you realize how completely erratic shifts in culture have been. You suddenly see figures who have been totally absent and others who have been too present. But somehow by reintroducing history into the format of the Biennial, the works and the show become more sympathetic in their vulnerability—to, for instance, these erratic shifts or, more generally, to history itself.

In the case of the Hermitage, we started with the conviction that we wanted to abstain from any architectural work and act more as imaginative intellectuals, historians, or maybe archaeologists, to see whether the museum could be enhanced by simply using its existing stock of architecture, artifacts, and history under a more authorial regime. And what I realized is that to some extent it has been a therapeutic effort, enabling us to develop a retroactive and a prospective approach to both a number of previous experiences with museums and also a number of issues we confronted in those earlier efforts. We retroactively see how several things have evolved and now could be resolved, and prospectively we are in fact able to respond to them using preservation and history rather than construction and the new.

TG: Could you give an example?

RK: Well, many of our museum projects have been informed by an early awareness that the rapid increase in museum-visitor numbers (say, from two hundred thousand to two million) was introducing radically new conditions, and that in order to deal with those conditions, large sections of the museum had to be surrendered to new infrastructural needs—circulation, certainly, but also food courts, restaurants, museum stores, design stores, bookstores, etc. So as long as those two conditions—the exhibition of works and the need for new infrastructures—were not really being thought out concertedly, the original mission of the museum, to enable a degree of contemplation and a degree of direct relationship with art, was suffering.

So I think that in every museum project we worked on, to a greater or lesser extent, we tried to reinvent these two, so-far-conflicting components and to find new ways to negotiate their coexistence. Interestingly, when we worked on the Whitney competition in 2001, there were artists on the committee—Chuck Close but also some younger artists. In our project, we proposed two kinds of museum space: what you might call slow space and fast space, with fast space being that of circulation, commercialism, business, etc. All the young artists on the committee were completely uninterested in the slow space, preferring to be exhibited in the fast space.

TG: What are the differences between the two types of space? Is it a question of meditative versus commercial space? I know you’ve spoken elsewhere of the two as one.

RK: Well, it’s not so much a contrast between the contemplative and the commercial as between contemplative space and infrastructural space, which is demanded by the shift from a relatively small audience to a massive one—along with mass media, mass movement, and mass expectations. At some point, the visitor numbers begin to interfere with everything a museum is supposed to do.

TG: So what were some of the solutions you proposed in different projects?

RK: In the case of our MoMA proposal, there was the courtyard, the main building, and a more rarefied space we had designed, and to connect them we proposed an interesting invention that relates back to this idea of infrastructure, or fast space. We developed with Otis, the elevator company, a device that could carry people horizontally, diagonally, and vertically. It was almost like an internal train, but it was big enough to act also as a display entity, containing, for instance, information on works of art. It went through the museum proper, as well as to a series of private cubicles and viewing rooms—perhaps true slow spaces—where, by appointment only, individual visitors could view selections of works prearranged according to their own preferences, free from curatorial involvement. The idea was to create an almost Amazon.com-like catalogue, wherein any works of art could be summoned at any point, except the ones that were on display in a particular exhibition, of course.

So the meditative spaces and the infrastructural spaces were very clear, and the infrastructure was in a way so concentrated and so powerful that it allowed the rest of the museum to preserve its mandate and presence.

For the Whitney, we proposed something similar. The museum comprised the Breuer building and the brownstones, and we proposed this kind of looming structure above them. So in terms of the slow space, we used, for instance, the small scale of the brownstones to create small spaces, which could only accommodate small numbers. The circulation, similar to the MoMA design, was a concentrated channel for movement, equipped with art and information

The Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s China Central Television (CCTV) tower under construction, Beijing, March 23, 2008. Photo: Associated Press.

TG: In both cases, you’re concentrating the circulation, as opposed to allowing the circulation to actually move through the entirety of the structure. I mean, you’re trying to preserve the meditative space.

RK: Yes and no. The idea is that by distilling fast circulation out of the exhibition spaces, you can reintroduce slow circulation that doesn’t interfere with the experience of works.

The beauty of the Hermitage is that it really encapsulates the argument. We produced this incredible diagram of the way visitor paths actually operate within the complex currently—according to language and geography—the “Russian-visitors tour,” the “Asian-visitors tour,” etc. Presumably, the logic is that if everyone were to be on the same tour, you’d face perpetual congestion, so it’s a way of spacing and enabling particular sites to be visited as part of every tour. But when you see it as a whole, you realize it is a system of fast tracks through the entire territory, determining the vast majority of experiences of the museum.

Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark [2002] inevitably came to mind as we considered this. Commentary on the film invariably said that it was this amazing confrontation with the richness of Russian culture, the nuances of historical events, and so on, and then acknowledged Sokurov’s claim to fame, which was that the film was shot in a single take. But analyzing these reviews carefully, you realize that everyone was describing a very generic impression—that is, a confrontation with Russian culture within which not a single detail stood out, only a blur of art and architecture and history. And the single take was not really an achievement. It was, to some extent, just a further erasure of difference and ultimately a simulation of the degraded experience of the visitor who keeps to the prescribed pathway. So it was in fact precisely the enthusiasm for the movie that enabled us to identify what was wrong within the Hermitage.

As a first gesture, we proposed reintroducing the individuality of the five buildings of the complex as a way to reintroduce slowness and an obligation to take seriously each one of the components and its relationship to the exhibitions and displays within it.

TG: How did you propose to achieve this?

RK: The buildings of the complex—the Winter Palace, the Small Hermitage, the New Hermitage, the Hermitage Theatre, the General Staff Building—were all originally built as individual buildings within the imperial palace complex, and each for its own unique purpose. So our proposals are primarily based on using and amplifying the already-individual architectural and historical identities they possess.

We imagined, for instance, that the curatorial regime of each building could be more explicitly tethered to its individual history. The Small Hermitage, for example, was built by Catherine the Great as a private gallery for her unbelievable collection of mostly very contemporary works (for the time). So what we’ve proposed for that building is the introduction of a kunsthalle that could accommodate more experimental exhibitions and more contemporary works and exist independently, or more privately, maybe, from the larger mandates of the Hermitage. So on one hand we proposed it to create a more animated curatorial regime for the Hermitage, but on the other to reconstitute a tradition of the Hermitage and use that tradition to reassert the identity of the building once built precisely for it.

Also, the buildings of the Hermitage, with the exception of the General Staff Building (separated from the others by the Palace Square), currently operate as a single composite with a single entrance—all the outdoor spaces between the buildings have been blocked for public access and are barely perceptible from within the museum. So we’ve proposed to reintroduce some of the individual entrances for the buildings and to reopen the streets by which they’re surrounded so as to further assert their individuality through a more urban conception of the complex.

TG: Could you elaborate on this “urban conception” of the Hermitage? In the back of my mind is this idea of the flaneur moving through a complex like this, walking and seeing the architecture and displays in a meandering continuous take. Do you see your proposal to create more individuated experiences of the buildings as counter to this possibility?

RK: On the contrary, actually. The whole mentality is to diminish the obligations of a directed path and to pronounce the freedoms that exist within the system—to introduce individual intelligence as a greater force and allow information to be a guiding principle rather than a form of manipulation.

But this is also the beauty of the project: It is really a series of hypotheses and conversations—a series of experiments with how the museum can perform. And we have the possibility to test them and consider the results and, if they don’t work, the possibility to address and adapt them.

Aerial view of the Hermitage complex, Saint Petersburg, ca. 2010.

TG: It is unique, actually. We were talking earlier about how a kind of curatorial role is being handed over to you—because as soon as you determine circulation, much of the meaning and the context of the work are in play.

RK: I don’t really see the role as curatorial; to me, curatorial means to impose a vision through an arrangement. We are not trying to impose a single vision here nor to impose any particular sequence or color codes or other traditional manipulations from the architectural palette. We are trying to bring back some of the authentic qualities that the buildings initially possessed and then see how this could perpetuate new interactions within the museum.

This was one of the earliest theses of the project. At the time of our first encounter with the museum, I was particularly interested in the degree of “neglect” or “purity of the ruin” and the qualities it could allow. In a way, this has somewhat dissipated, as the emphasis on neglect at some point becomes really counterproductive because it risks being condescending; also, in the past few years, the Hermitage has become slightly richer and slightly better maintained—so now maintaining things as they were is generally the rule. It’s a subtle difference but an interesting one, because beyond slow space, it allows for almost “rural” space—the kind of space that doesn’t have the full paraphernalia to produce what a museum space is now supposed to be: highly conditioned, highly illuminated, etc. There’s still the possibility of very low light or controlled dimming, for example. This simple absence of conventions reveals, on the one hand, how unconsciously we have accepted all those new conditions and, on the other, how exhilarating it is that things still somehow manage to escape from them.

In certain cases, we’re actually proposing to reassert authenticity. We have been working on the redesign of the permanent exhibition of the Islamic collection, located in the Winter Palace. In the current exhibition, in order to make the coexistence between the historic spaces and the art possible, almost all evidence of the history of those rooms has been erased. So we’ve been trying to experiment with methods by which to restore the historical part and in fact further densify the exhibition of works as a kind of linear, almost miniature city that runs through the space. The idea being to investigate the potential for new interactions not only on the part of visitors but also between the art and the architecture and the history of the museum.

TG: You mentioned the Hermitage being a kind of therapeutic project. Does this relate, and, if so, in what ways?

RK: Well, what’s been incredibly exciting for me is that through working essentially with history and preservation, we’ve been able to address a number of issues that became more and more vivid, difficult, problematic, and urgent in our contemporary architectural work.

Issues like, let’s say, the Turbine Hall question, or the infrastructure question and the question of managing the masses. We wrestled with these in a number of contemporary projects, but here we can address them in a more pure and fundamentally undesigned way. So in this way, I think therapeuticmight be the right word in that it’s been a discovery at the end or whatever you want to call this point—the culmination of a career or the end of a career, or let’s say late in a career—of the luxury of nondesign as a method for dealing with issues rather than the always serious effort of intelligent invention or insertion. It’s just so amazingly malleable; you can develop it in many different directions, much more than with a building designed from scratch.

But also polemically, of course, it’s a very interesting moment to mobilize and deploy the Hermitage project as a different kind of paradigm, or as a box of paradigms, against a number of failings and problems of other cultural institutions. For instance, museum extension has become a major contemporary phenomenon, and the Hermitage is, in a way, the extended museum par excellence—extended so far that it begs for the reintroduction of the autonomy of its parts. Go and tell that to the Whitney or to MoMA.

Ultimately, what’s exciting is that the project and its relevance exist by the vivid coincidence of a unique institution, history, director, and contemporary moment—in terms of Russia after the Soviet Union and within the museum world and the larger cultural/economic context.

TG: What is the current museum-world context as you see it?

RK: I think there is a new, maybe even oblivious, confidence in the burgeoning cultural territories like Asia, whose potential we should really theorize, as opposed to exporting our own hand-wringing. Across Asia, there is currently incredible museum activity. But as soon as you introduce European or American curators into the discussion, they all say the museum is in crisis. So in terms of globalization, what’s so interesting right now is perhaps the very fact that the discourse is not globalized: Part of the world can be pessimistic and stuck, and another part can be optimistic, perhaps even silly at times, but still thrusting forward in an interesting way.

I think we have to be very careful not to export our anxieties or export our impasses. We are now working on a cultural master plan for Kowloon[in Hong Kong], and we are developing ideas with a very select and interesting group of cultural figures. But it’s astonishing to what extent all their arguments are based on warnings, rather than “A museum for so many thousands of people … Wow! Fantastic. Perhaps this is what you could do … ”

We are facing a very important moment within globalization: The West is a railway car that can disconnect itself or simply be happy to hobble at the end of the train, but we’re definitely not the engine. And I think that also demands a change in the outlook on culture. In a certain way, we have to relearn optimism, because in the face of such evidence of it, at such a scale, to refuse it becomes slightly ridiculous.

Post-American AGE from 032C Issue #16 — Winter 2008/2009: Post-America

Above & Below (unrelated to the original text), title: It is what it is, USA, 2009, by Jeremy Deller

“The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over,” says JOHN GRAY. The prominent British philosopher and historian sits down with Hans Ulrich Obrist to discuss the cult of belief, the death of utopia, and the enduring legacy of the last superpower.

By HANS ULRICH OBRIST

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I was interviewing Damien Hirst the other day and quoted Gerhard Richter: “We cannot live without belief.” Damien Hirst agreed, saying, “My belief in art is a completely religious one. We’re all trying to find a pathway through the darkness, and we need a bit of science and a bit of religion, but it’s impossible to live without belief.”
JOHN GRAY: Well, I disagree with that. Maybe it’s just the word. I don’t think religion is a part of belief. I think beliefs are the most transient features of human life, and that there’s nothing shallower or more deceptive. The traditions of Western Christianity were influenced by Greek philosophy, in which true belief is very important. But in most of the world religions, including other traditions of Christianity – Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and original forms of Christianity like Coptic or Gnostic – belief wasn’t all that central. There wasn’t a set of propositions or arguments of “I believe in this,” or “I don’t believe in that.” It was either certain types of practice or certain types of what would now fi t under the vague heading of mystical experience. For one thing, belief implies expressibility, that you can tell someone else what you believe in. Whereas it might be a part of religious experience, and in many traditions it is, in that it’s ineffable – you can’t tell yourself what it is that you’re experiencing or have experienced. So I’m not too persuaded by this, but of course it could be that what Damien says and what he means is maybe not a belief. Belief sounds like a proposition, a sentence, or something you can transmit to others. And once you start putting beliefs at the center of things you’re not very far from evangelism, conversion, and crusades. This is why I’m adamantly anti-missionary, and opposed to evangelical atheists who believe you can pacify humanity if you deconvert it from religion. But it’s absurd because it would be exactly the same thing with just a different set of beliefs.

This is what so many artists like in your work.
Well, that thrills me because what I wanted to do with my earlier work was to break out. Francis Bacon said, “If I could say it, I wouldn’t paint it.” And my view is that there are modes of language which involve constantly trying to say something that can’t be said. So it’s a paradox, and that’s why I’m interested in artists. I’m not trying to use language to convey some banal message or to convert anyone to anything like some kind of argument, and certainly not to any belief of mine, or even disbelief. But I’m rather trying to open up perception. Rather than the systematic derangement of the senses, it’s the systematic derangement of the concepts. Because as long as we think in these grids we won’t get very far.

But despite your intentions to uncover and “systematically derange concepts,” there’s also an interest in pointing to something that’s not yet there, especially in your political writings?
I published an essay at the end of February 2003 in the New Statesman, before the Iraq invasion and before Abu Ghraib. The dates are important. I published it as a “Modest Proposal” in the Swift tradition, and there was a photo of me in the magazine with Jonathan Swift’s wig, the title reading: “A Modest Proposal for Preventing Torturers in Liberal Democracies from Being Abused.” In other words, it was an ironical argument to be kind to torturers, and in favor of torture. But despite these extremely explicit, even labored warnings that it was satire – like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” in which he recommended the poor sell their children to be eaten by the rich – despite these explicit references, quite a few readers didn’t see the satirical intent and ran out to cancel their subscriptions. I thought that was interesting.

What is interesting is the way that you presented it, as if you were anticipating something. Do you think philosophy can anticipate the future?
My view of history is cyclical, though not progressive or regressive. I think there are cycles. And the anticipation of it came from a number of factors. If you look at wars that are similar to Iraq, like Algeria, or Afghanistan when the Soviets were there, torture was used on a vast scale. Why would this be different? That was one reason. The other reason was that I thought that liberals – liberal people, liberal thinkers, liberal opinion formers – were beginning to succumb to a certain kind of moral panic. But what was going to be interesting, and that’s the nature of this satire, is that torture would not only come back, it would be embraced by liberals, and defended by liberals. The support I had for this when I wrote the piece was that Alan Dershowitz (the American left-liberal civil libertarian and constitutional thinker) was already arguing for torture. In other words, it would have been less surprising for someone connected to the Bush Administration, or to the far right of American politics – some grizzled conservative or crazy reactionary – to come forward and say, “I favor torture.” But now there are a lot of people, both liberal and conservative, who say, “Well, it’s a very complicated moral issue.” It wasn’t complicated until recently. They didn’t say that five or ten years ago. I thought torture would be taken up by liberals, and that happened.

And now we’re in 2008. What’s next?
Have you read my article “A Shattering Moment in America’s Fall from Power,” inThe Observer the other week:

Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, how ever large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the WWII, is over.

You can see it in the way America’s dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity. Yet the setback of America’s standing at the global level is even more striking. With the nationalization of crucial parts of the financial system, the American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated. In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina, and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions at the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China’s success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.

Despite incessantly urging other countries to adopt its way of doing business, America has always had one economic policy for itself and another for the rest of the world. Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America’s economic future.

Which version of the bailout of American financial institutions cobbled up by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is finally adopted is less important than what the bailout means for America’s position in the world. The populist rant about greedy banks that is being loudly ventilated in Congress is a distraction from the true causes of the crisis. The dire condition of America’s financial markets is the result of American banks operating in a free-for-all environment that these same American legislators created. It is America’s political class that, by embracing the dangerously simplistic ideology of deregulation, has responsibility for the present mess.

In present circumstances, an unprecedented expansion of government is the only means of averting a market catastrophe. The consequence, however, will be that America will be even more starkly dependent on the world’s new rising powers. The federal government is racking up even larger borrowings, which its creditors may rightly fear will never be repaid. It may well be tempted to inflate these debts away in a surge of inflation that would leave foreign investors with hefty losses. In these circumstances, will the governments of countries that buy large quantities of American bonds, China, the Gulf States, and Russia, for example, be ready to continue supporting the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency? Or will these countries see this as an opportunity to tilt the balance of economic power further in their favor? Either way, the control of events is no longer in American hands.

The fate of empires is very often sealed by the interaction of war and debt. That was true of the British Empire, whose finances deteriorated from the WWI onwards, and of the Soviet Union. Defeat in Afghanistan and the economic burden of trying to respond to Reagan’s technically flawed but politically extremely effective Star Wars program were vital factors in triggering the Soviet collapse. Despite its insistent exceptionalism, America is no different. The Iraq War and the credit bubble have fatally undermined America’s economic primacy. The US will continue to be the world’s largest economy for a while longer, but it will be the new rising powers that, once the crisis is over, buy up what remains intact in the wreckage of America’s financial system.

There has been a good deal of talk in recent weeks about imminent economic Armageddon. In fact, this is far from being the end of capitalism. The frantic scrambling that is going on in Washington marks the passing of only one type of capitalism – the peculiar and highly unstable variety that has existed in America over the last twenty years. This experiment in financial laissez-faire has imploded. While the impact of the collapse will be felt everywhere, the market economies that resisted American-style deregulation will best weather the storm. Britain, which has turned itself into a gigantic hedge fund, but of a kind that lacks the ability to profit from a downturn, is likely to be especially badly hit.

The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support America’s over-extended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well planned.

Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side effects. Consider Iraq. The success of the surge, which has been achieved by bribing the Sunnis, while acquiescing in ongoing ethnic cleansing, has produced a condition of relative peace in parts of the country. How long will this last, given that America’s current level of expenditure on the war can no longer be sustained?

An American retreat from Iraq will leave Iran the regional victor. How will Saudi Arabia respond? Will military action to forestall Iran acquiring nuclear weapons be less or more likely? China’s rulers have so far been silent during the unfolding crisis. Will America’s weakness embolden them to assert China’s power or will China continue its cautious policy of “peaceful rise”? At present, none of these questions can be answered with any confidence. What is evident is that power is leaking from the US at an accelerating rate. Georgia showed Russia redrawing the geopolitical map, with America an impotent spectator.

Outside the US, most people have long accepted that the development of new economies that goes with globalization will undermine America’s central position in the world. They imagined that this would be a change in America’s comparative standing, taking place incrementally over several decades or generations. Today, that looks an increasingly unrealistic assumption.

Having created the conditions that produced history’s biggest bubble, America’s political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that American global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

But do you see a different direction for America with Barack Obama as the most likely forthcoming president?
Obama will surely mark a significant change in American politics. But he will come to power with a dreadful inheritance. America has been defiled by torture; it is heavily implicated in unwinnable wars in Afghanistan; the American-led finance capitalism of the past twenty years has collapsed, and the baby boomer generation has been ruined by the effect of the stock market crash on American pension funds. Nothing that Obama does can later these events, or prevent a precipitate decline in American power. Also, Obama may be more stuck in conventional American thinking than many people believe. During the election campaign he supported American military incursions into Pakistan — a potentially disastrous line of action. So Obama may be better than the alternative. But the pattern of events to come may be not all that different.

You’re not optimistic?
[laughing] No, no. But I’m not pessimistic either because a pessimist has preconceptions or a theory of regress, or looks back to a golden age, which I definitely don’t do. The Middle Ages was a time of almost incessant warfare, and there’s no point in the past where I would say things were better in general. Things might be better in certain ways and at certain times. Perhaps controversially I would say if you were around during WWI and just after in Central Europe — now mind only very few people perceived this at the time and they were very much condemned for it — you would probably realize that if you belonged to any minority group in Europe you’d be better off under the Habsburg Empire than what came later. Some things are better in some ways in the past, but there’s no golden age. If you think about the end of the 19^th century and what was going on, for example in the Belgian Congo … one-fifth of the population, perhaps more, were killed in King Leopold’s genocide.

What about this idea of millennialism and its presence in contemporary culture?
Well, I’ve always had doubts about what secularism is, or what secular thinking is, or whether or not there can be secular thinking with the kind of history that we’ve had in Europe. There are striking similarities between early modern and late medieval and Nazism and communism. There are also connections with the Bush Administration after 9/11, when apocalyptic thinking came straight back. What’s interesting is that the few months before the Iraqi invasion people were saying, “The Americans won’t do it. It’s obviously too disastrous. They just won’t do it. They won’t be mad enough to do it.” But that showed me that they didn’t understand that for a time, perhaps even a small amount of time, a part of the Bush Administration had been sort of captured by a way of thinking that had apocalyptic elements.

You describe the experiments as failures, but you also say that the advanced knowledge of humanity does not become more reasonable. How does this relate to climate change?
For example, right now there’s something known as the “100 Months Campaign,” which gives us 100 months to clean up the environment. To me, it’s inherently implausible that science would give us this number, which obviously has a psychological significance. The planet has arranged to give us another 100 months? Not 98 or 103, but 100? More importantly, when we’ve used up this time, what will they say? No one can predict the future, and I’m certainly no Cassandra, but I’m absolutely certain that in 100 months, nothing will have been done to mitigate climate change. It’s not about the shortness of the time, but more about what the state entities in this world are most concerned with. And they’re concerned with winning wars, grabbing what remains of the world’s natural resources — the oil and the polar caps — vanishing credit, restarting the economy and growth. About a week before the Iraq war, maybe two weeks, I talked to an environmental think tank and they asked what could be done to stop the Iraq War. I said “nothing.” All the material was already out there and to think they spent six months sending it out, only to send it back again? All you could do then was think about how to cope with the disasters it will bring. One of them said he couldn’t get up in the morning if that were the case. It’s so childish. If you say that in 100 months nothing will be done – even if there is a big event, even if there is a Katrina-like event, even if it hits L.A. or Amsterdam it won’t provoke …

A great change.
No, it will simply provoke the behaviors that human beings have always exhibited, but with more advanced technological characteristics. I’m very sympathetic to environmental causes, and support them. But there is this sort of incurable unrealism in environmental thinking, which is partly connected to anthropocentrism. To put it simply, environmental thinking is right: climate change is happening, and humans have caused it. But where it’s wrong is that they think humans can stop it.

That’s interesting, because in your book Straw Dogs, you use Schopenhauer to criticize anthropocentrism. The West is very anthropocentric and Schopenhauer is one of the few Western thinkers that is not. 
There are very few and Schopenhauer is one of them. He says the same will that is manifest in us is manifest in all the other animals. I’m glad you talked about it, because it’s very interesting in terms of climate change. What happens when you’re in month 99 and still absolutely nothing is done? Would you say we have 100 days? 100 hours? 100 minutes? And what do you do after that? They’ll say we have another 100 months. They’ll have another end.

Can you talk about our moment right now as post-apocalyptic?
Not yet [laughs]. Or at least not fully. One reason is that the political form of apocalyptic thinking has been utopianism, and something I analyze is how the utopianism that the far right or far left created became centrist, even liberal. It’s interesting how utopian modes of thinking, or utopian projects, which were expressed by Tony Blair and others, became post-ideological and pragmatic. With Iraq there’s been a big setback to the large utopian project and even if there would be large wars in Iran or Pakistan they will creep up on us by a series of bad decisions — it won’t be launched necessarily as part of a new world order. I say we’re not in the post-apocalyptic age because there’s been a utopian way of thinking without the readiness to launch large projects. People wonder how we can eradicate obesity, or drug use, or terrorism, and the answer is we can’t. But that’s sort of unwelcome. In order to be really post-apocalyptic one would have to embrace the idea of the intractability of human affairs, and accept that the most serious human problems are never fully soluble, and I don’t think that’s been embraced at all. People always criticized neo-cons and extremists, but the most unreal view of all comes from cautious-minded liberals who work inch-by-inch towards slow improvement. We’re not like that. Even the last ten or twenty years have been formed from a series of discontinuous jumps and transformations. The return of torture is one example. The Soviet collapse is another. The sudden collapse of American financial capitalism is yet another. What will come next? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if over the next ten or twenty years, America will seriously and radically shrink in terms of world power. This is not going to be the American century like the last century was. And I’m not saying this because I’m a European, because it’s not going to be the European century either.

It’s going East with a seismic shift.
Do you know who I think first said it clearly? Paul Valéry.

What did he say?
He asked, in “Crisis of the Mind”: “Will Europe become what it is in reality — a little promontory on the continent of Asia?” This was 1919. He also said, “The secret dream of Europe is to be ruled by an American commission,” which has evidently been the case since WWII.

I’d also like to talk about the influence of the philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin in your writing.
He did have a big influence on me. There’s a tendency in liberal thought to harmonize conflicts. He of course believed that in politics you should compromise a lot. Obviously there are some things too important to lose, or at least to lose without fighting for. But what he was interested in was the way in which central values, including liberal values, conflict with each other. It’s not just anti-utopian, because there are lots of anti-utopians, especially in the postwar period. Isaiah Berlin also had insight into the endemic character of conflict in liberal societies as well as in every human being. And one of his favorite writers was Alexander Herzen, who was totally free of teleology. Nothing’s going anywhere. And this scriptless approach to history came long before postmodernism.

So you follow in this tradition of not instrumentalizing the reader?
Exactly. I’m not trying to provide an agenda, but more trying to disarrange the thoughts in certain ways and leave it to the reader to do what they will with that. They might do nothing. They might hate it. They might reject it. They might say that it’s nihilism. That’s up to them – I don’t mind. But you can’t avoid narrative in many cases. Telling a story was a big part of Black Mass, though I’m not just trying to tell people that it’s terrible that Iraq happened, which it is. It’s more a presentation of the different ways of telling stories, which trigger different patterns of thought in the reader, which they can pursue as they wish.