‘My art is a form of restoration’

In a rare interview with one of the world’s greatest living artists, Rachel Cooke asks Louise Bourgeois to reflect on her extraordinary career 

RC: You moved to New York early in your career. What effect did this have?

LB: I was a ‘runaway girl’ from France who married an American and moved to New York City. I’m not sure I would have continued as an artist had I remained in Paris because of the family setup. In coming to New York, I was suddenly independent from them. I did feel the affects of being French. There was both isolation and stimulation. Homesickness was the theme of the early sculptures.

RC: Do you think women artists have an easier time of it today, particularly in terms of the market?

LB: To survive as an artist is difficult. The market is only one issue, and it follows its own logic. Even though what I do does enter the market, it doesn’t interest me. I am exclusively concerned with the formal qualities of my work. It is about the need and the right to self-expression. There are plenty of good artists that don’t have a market at all. In terms of the market, things have improved for women, but there is still a big disparity.

RC: The main focus of your work, according to some, is the relationship between an entity and its surroundings. But you have also been influenced by human relationships. Can you explain more about this aspect of your work?

LB: My works are portraits of a relationship, and the most important one was my mother. Now, how these feelings for her are brought into my interaction with other people, and how these feelings for her feed into my work is both complex and mysterious. I’m still trying to understand the mechanism.

RC: In the Fifties and Sixties, the art market ignored you a little. Was this frustrating? Was it connected to your sex? How and why did things change?

LB: The Fifties were definitely macho and the Sixties less so. The fact that the market was not interested in my work because I was a woman was a blessing in disguise. It allowed me to work totally undisturbed. Don’t forget that there were plenty of women in a position of power in the art world: women were trustees of museums, the owners of galleries, and many were critics. Surely, the Women’s Movement affected the role of women in the art world. The art world is simply a microcosm of the larger world where men and women compete.

RC: Today, your most famous works might be your ’spider’ structures. Is this pleasing? Can you talk a little about how they came about?

LB: The spiders were an ode to my mother. She was a tapestry woman, and like a spider, was a weaver. She protected me and was my best friend.

RC: Your parents worked with tapestry, and you initially studied mathematics. Some critics have traced both these influences in your work. How separate is the mathematician in you, from the artist, or are the two intimately connected?

LB: My love of geometry is expressed by the formal aspect of my work. From the tapestries, I got this large sense of scale. I learned their stories, the use of symbolism and art history. The restoration of the tapestries functioned on a psychological level as well. By this I mean that things that have broken down or have been ripped apart can be joined and mended. My art is a form of restoration in terms of my feelings to myself and to others.

RC: You work on a grand scale. Why?

LB: I want to create my own architecture so that the relationships of my forms and objects are fixed. Sometimes I need the large scale so that the person can literally move in relationship to the form. The difference between the real space and the psychological space interests me and I want to explore both. For example, the spiders, which are portraits of my mother, are large because she was a monument to me. I want to walk around and be underneath her and feel her protection.

RC: How do you feel now about Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous photograph of you?

LB: I am still fond of Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait. People seem to like it very much because they thought Robert and I were both ‘naughty’.

RC: Can you tell us a little of how you have worked over the years? Do you work only when inspiration strikes?

LB: I only work when I feel the need to express something. I may not be sure of exactly what it is, but I know that something is cooking and when I am on the right track. The need is very strong. To express your emotions, you have to be very loose and receptive. The unconscious will come to you, if you have that gift that artists have. I only know if I’m inspired by the results.

RC: A retrospective at the Tate. This isn’t the first, but how does it make you feel? Have you ended up making any reassessments of your career?

LB: When I see all the work that I have produced, I realised how consistent and persistent I have been. But I’m much more interested in what I’m working on now.

Milton’s republic

Our great dissident poet, born 400 years ago today, did more than just hymn the praises of revolt

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. The two intersect only in such absurd anomalies as the poet laureateship. But whereas Andrew Motion does his bit to keep the monarchy in business, one of the greatest of English poets played his part in subverting it. John Milton, who was born in Cheapside 400 years ago today, published a political tract two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, arguing that all sovereignty lay with the people, who could depose and even execute a monarch if he betrayed their trust.

We are not used to such revolutionary sentiments in our poets. When he left Cambridge, Milton refused to take holy orders and, in his first great poem Lycidas, he mounted a blistering assault on the corruption of the clergy. He was a champion of Puritanism at a time when that meant rejecting a church in cahoots with a brutally authoritarian state.

His political dissidence, however, had its limits: he defended the notion of private property, unlike the more communistic wing of the parliamentary forces. As for sexual politics, Adam in Paradise Lost is a priggish patriarch. Yet Milton was also an early advocate of divorce, claiming that a lack of love and companionship was a more important ground for separation than adultery.

At the heart of Milton’s political vision lay a belief in liberty and self-government. Pressed to an extreme, this doctrine could appear anarchic: grace freed humanity from law and authority. He thus came to reject the Calvinist doctrine of predestination in the name of personal freedom. One of his most magnificent pamphlets, Areopagitica, inveighed against the state censorship of books. He denounced the censorship of works before publication as a strangling of free inquiry. “Almost kill a man as kill a good book,” he observed. If truth were to be established, an open marketplace of opinions was indispensable. “So truth be in the field,” Milton insisted, “we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worst, in a free and open encounter?”

In an era of civil war, such liberalism could be a revolutionary force. Milton placed his literary genius at the service of Cromwell’s commonwealth, becoming secretary for foreign tongues. Yet as a staunch republican he also warned his master of the dangers of autocracy. He was aware that middle-class revolutions have a habit of selling out their left wing. Even as the restoration of the monarchy loomed, he published a reckless, despairing proposal for a new republican constitution.

Once the new royalist government was in place, Milton went into hiding, and some of his more offensive books were burnt. He was arrested and held in custody, but escaped with his life through the intercession of powerful friends. He then devoted himself to an epic poem mourning the loss of the paradise on earth in which, as a radical humanist and revolutionary Puritan, he had invested his fondest hopes. He is buried alongside his father in St Giles’, Cripplegate, in the City of London, an interment in Westminster Abbey being politically out of the question.

Milton did more than hymn the praises of revolt, as Blake and Shelley did. He was also a political activist and propagandist, an architect of the modern liberal state. As a militant ideologue in the defence of liberty, he assisted in the revolutionary upheaval that brought modern Britain to birth – a revolution all the more successful for us having quite forgotten that it ever happened.

Terry Eagleton is the author of the book How To Read A Poem

Interview with Simon Critchley, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Essex

Conducted by: Tom McCarthy (General Secretary, INS) 
Venue: Office of Anti-Matter, Austrian Cultural Institute, London 
Date: 29/03/01 
Present: Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley, Corin Sworn, Anthony Auerbach, Penny McCarthy, Victoria Scott, Paul Perry, Alexander Hamilton, Jen wu, Others

Tom McCarthy: You write in your book Very Little… Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature that the task of philosophical modernity is the thinking through of the first death, the über death, which is the death of God. So my first question is: what is the meaning of this death?

Simon Critchley: It’s a big question. Nietzsche said ‘God is dead’, and that’s written on toilet walls all over the world. But he then went on to say: ‘And we have killed him.’ So modernity, by which I mean that social, economic and intellectual process that begins in the early seventeenth century, culminates in the fact that we no longer require God as a metaphysical underpinning for our beliefs. So the death of God is part of a historical process. And philosophy, at a certain point – it’s arguable when that starts – also shifts its emphasis. In mediaeval philosophy, human beings were creatures, and all creatures were dependent on a creator who was himself uncreated, the self-caused cause of everything, a causa sui. So God was at the centre of the web, holding the universe together. With the advent of the modern world that focus moves to the human subject – so that for someone like Descartes, the first point of certainty in a philosophical system is no longer the existence of God but the existence of the self. 
Now, the problem with that is that the nice thing about God and religion is that it provides an answer to the question of the meaning of life. It does this by positing something outside of earthly life, the divine order. So the death of God in a sense is unimportant; what’s important is that it raises the question of the meaning of life. What is the meaning of life if there can be no religious basis to the meaning of life? There are various responses to that. One obvious one is that if religion is no longer the realm in which the question of the meaning of life is to be thought through, then what other realm is? One obvious candidate is art. Art becomes the way in which questions of the meaning and value of life are articulated; and the aesthetic movement associated with that is Romanticism. In Romanticism, the energy of religion gets transformed into an artwork: an artwork that would reveal God, or something like God, in nature – but what that actually means is an artwork that would provide meaning for a human self. For the German Romantics such as Schlegel, the aesthetic form capable of bearing that question of meaning is the novel, and the task becomes writing the great novel of the modern world. And then different spheres take up that same challenge over the next two hundred years. If you’re a Marxist you believe that realm of meaning is fundamentally socio-economic, for example.

TMcC: There’s something that confuses me, and perhaps confuses Nietzsche as well. The madman who announces the death of God in that passage from The Gay Science paints a horrific picture of skies decomposing and it getting darker and darker all the time. It’s not a great joyous liberation; there’s an absolute terror there. But then elsewhere in Nietzsche there is a sense of joy, albeit an ambiguous one: we must go forwards in joyous terror and terrible joy and so on. So is Nietzsche ultimately happy or sad that God is dead? Or is he just stating a fact?

SC: What makes Nietzsche interesting as a thinker is that he’s full of a religious passion. Nietzsche’s real twin intellectually is someone like St. Paul. He’s much closer to him than to John Locke or David Hume. Nietzsche is traumatised by the death of God, because he realises that it’s a collapse of the basis of meaning. You find a similar line of thought in Dovstoesky. Dostoyevsky says that the only thing that keeps humans above the level of cattle is the belief in the immortality of the soul. The name for this problem is nihilism. In my work I’ve tried to place the question of nihilism at the centre of philosophical concerns. Nihilism is the situation where, as Nietzsche says, the highest values devalue themselves: Daß die obersten Werte sich entwerten. The death of God is part of that process: God has become empty, nothing. The philosopher who most represents that position, for Nietzsche, is Schopenhauer – what he calls ‘European Buddhism’. In fact we could think about the whole contemporary interest in Buddhism as a way of thinking about the nihilism problem: nothing has any meaning, therefore I’ll affirm the void, and I’ll engage in practises of the self – yoga, tantric sex…

TMcC: Is that where devaluation slips over into transvaluation?

SC: In one sense, yes: nothing has any value, so I’ll affirm the nothing; nothing is the guarantor of meaning. But Nietzsche refuses that: that’s just exoticism. So the task facing the philosopher, and also the artist, is one of responding to nihilism. What people always get wrong with Nietzsche is calling him a nihilist. Nietzsche is diagnosing nihilism in modern culture. It’s that question, the question of nihilism, that I want to put at the centre of my agenda. It’s not a question which is a central one for much philosophy in the English-speaking world. It’s a question that’s been deemed to be almost indecent, because in a sense we can ironise our way out of it.

Victoria Scott: Can you explain the difference between passive and active nihilism?

SC: Nietzsche’s like the bible, in that it’s a question of interpretation, and there are various ones. Nihilism as a theme is explored in The Will to Power, which is put together by his nasty fascist sister, so it’s a miscellany, a collection of fragments. Books One and Two deal with nihilism, and early on in Book One there’s a discussion of passive nihilism and active nihilism. 
My interpretation is that passive nihilism is the European Buddhism I outlined a moment ago. Another version of passive nihilism would be to say: Nothing is of any value, but hey, so what, we can just get along without any of this anxious metaphysical stuff. That would be pragmatism, as typified by Richard Rorty’s response: he just shrugs his shoulders and says: Nihilism was something that preoccupied certain highly-strung European intellectuals in the nineteenth century; we’ve got beyond that. 
Then there’s active nihilism. Some people identify Nietzsche’s position with active nihilism. Now, they’re not wrong, but I think what Nietzsche means by active nihilism is what would have been reported in the press of his time as Russian nihilism. Terrorism. Nietzsche picks up the idea of nihilism from the Russian novelist Turgenev. In Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons there’s a conflict between the nihilist Bazarof and those who defend the status quo. So nihilism for Nietzsche was about a conflict within Russian culture between a pro-Europe, liberal, reformist view of Russia on the one hand, and on the other people who believed in the creative power of destruction through acts of violent insurrection to overthrow the stale liberal order. These people called themselves nihilists; and they had an implicit belief in science. So Bazarov in Turgenev’s book is very into science -

TMcC: Just like the anarchists Kropotkin or Bakunin -

SC: Yes. So that’s what Nietzsche means by active nihilism. Which was then part of the drama of Turgenev’s fiction, and also Dostoyevsky’s. And there’s a whole story about how that version of active nihilism moves through to Chinchevsky and Bakunin and Lenin. In many ways Bolshevism could be seen as active nihilism, the violent overthrow of the established order. There’s a link as well between a scientific, positivist conception of the world and insurrection. 
Now, Nietzsche doesn’t endorse that position at all. Essentially he’s neither a passive nor an active nihilist. He comes up with a third option which he calls eternal return or eternal recurrence. Again, what that means is debatable. I’ve got an interpretation – do you want me to go into it?

TMcC: Does it involve Vico?

SC: No. Well, it could do.

TMcC: Go ahead.

SC: Nietzsche’s response to nihilism is the doctrine of eternal return. You could read that in a cosmological way, as a belief that the universe is cyclical and is going to recur. Or, as you hinted, Vico’s notion of cycles of history could be seen as signalled. I think that’s all window dressing, though; I don’t think that’s what Nietzsche means. For him, eternal return is much more of a moral doctrine. 
There’s a story told by the poet Heine about Kant walking on the heath with his servant just after writing the first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, in which he takes God away. He looks at his servant and suddenly feels so sorry for him because he’s taken God away from him that he writes a second Critique, just to give God back. The essential thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason is that traditional metaphysics, God, freedom and immortality, is cognitively meaningless. We cannot know whether God exists, whether the soul is immortal and so on. That’s the First Critique. Then in the Second Kant says: But we can still maintain the idea of God, or immortality of the soul as a postulate, a postulate of practical reason. So although I cannot know whether God exists, I can still act as if he did, and that can orientate my ethical activity. 
Nietzsche ups the ante and takes it a stage further. He says: Well, this is ridiculous. What would it be to fully affirm the fact that God doesn’t exist? To fully affirm the complete meaninglessness of the universe? And to be able to do that again and again and again. If you’re capable of that thought, of affirming that this universe is not for us, that we’re just here by sheer chance, and you can do that again and again, then you’re equal to the force of eternal return. It’s a sort of moral test.

TMcC: There seems to be not just an aesthetics of recurrence going on in Nietzsche’s thought, but also one of transformation. Transfiguration is a meme that he throws up again and again.

SC: Yes. It’s an almost physical practise: to be able to physically withstand that vertigo of meaninglessness and then transfigure oneself in relationship to that. I’ve got my doubts about that, but that’s what Nietzsche says.

TMcC: Now, the other giant of philosophical modernity is Hegel; and death in his work seems to me to be even more central and instrumental than it is in Nietzsche. How would you characterise the way in which death, for Hegel, is bound up with knowledge?

SC: Death for Hegel is a conceptual process. But that’s deceptive, because everything’s a conceptual process for Hegel. But Hegel’s notion of death would be that to conceptualise something is to kill it. So if I name this thing, this orange, that’s on the table here in front of us ‘an orange’, in so far as I name it and it becomes separate I deaden it. So in that sense Adam in the Garden of Eden was a serial killer.

TMcC: That’s Kojeve’s take on it, too, isn’t it?

SC: Yes. Language is murder. Language, as conceptuality, is the murder of things by making them approximate to us. Then it becomes a question of: If language is murder, if creation is murder, then what does one then do, aesthetically? Blanchot talks about the two slopes of literature: there’s one slope where the human subject comprehends everything by murdering it – which Blanchot would identify with the Marquis de Sade. He puts Hegel and Sade together. So sadist literature and sadist art would be the art which kills its objects by conceptualising them. So pornography would be that. The way pornography captures its objects is by killing them. I think that’s true: it’s not just an objectification of people; it’s a killing of them too.

TMcC: Within that Blanchodian schema pornography would be the model for all cognition…

SC: Yes. But then for him the other slope of literature would be a form of art which leaves things to themselves in some way. So I would write a poem about the orange which let the orange be the orange and would put the reader in the position of letting the orange orange. Letting things thing.

TMcC: So someone like Francis Ponge -

SC: Ponge would be the -

Penny McCarthy: Or Wallace Stevens -

SC: Stevens would be the greatest philosophical poet of the twentieth century in the English language, full stop – in my humble opinion. And Ponge, who writes these lovely poems about oysters…

TMcC: He writes about oranges too.

SC: I think maybe he does. And Rilke, Rilke’s Duino Elegies. What do you say to the angel? What you say to the angel is not ‘I’ve discovered the secret of the universe!’ because they’ll know that already because they’re an angel. What you say to the angel is: ‘bridge, bottle, orange, jug, pen’. Wim Wenders understands this in Wings of Desire: what appeals to angels is the ordinary. So art can be about the condition of ordinary things, and let those things thing.

TMcC: There’s a wonderful moment somewhere in Derrida, which I think you cite in one of your books, where he talks about engaging with the world as being like a dredger that goes through and engages with the sand beneath the sea but ultimately lets most of it slip back and ’sand’.

SC: Yes. There are different ways of being a philosopher or an artist. One is by eating everything: this would be the model of Hegel. It’s a caricature of Hegel, and Hegel’s obviously better than a caricature. But Adorno has that nice phrase: ‘Idealism is the rage of the belly turned mind.’ So the idealist philosopher is like a ravenous belly that eats up the entire universe. The idealist philosopher or artist gorges themselves on reality and shits it out as works which declare the meaning of reality – whether that’s the great novel of the modern world or a system of science. The other, contrary model would be to attend to things in their particularity and let them be. Blanchot’s point is that we can do neither. So most art is characterised by an ambiguity. By the way, Derrida’s thinking specifically of a place on the South coast of France – I’ve actually been there -

TMcC: Les Saintes Maries -

SC: Yes: Les Saintes Maries de la Mer in the Camargue, which is full of mud. There’s a lot of dredging that goes on, as indeed there is where I live on the Essex coast. The task is dredging that mud. One version of philosophy would be to ingest all that mud and turn it into conceptual water, or bowls. Another version would be for the philosopher or artist to filter through that material and let that matter be. And in that second version there’s an acknowledgement of the impotence, or at least the limits, of creativity.

TMcC: You mention Blanchot. My organisation, the INS, is massively indebted to Blanchot, obviously. Not only does his work elaborate the irreducible, impossible paradox you’ve been describing, but it also conceives of death as a space and literature as a space. But I wonder if one could say that the two spaces are equivalent for Blanchot, or do they have a relation like two bits of acetate that slide over one another?

SC: Well, for Blanchot in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ (he changes a bit later on) there are these two slopes to literature: there’s literature as sadism and there’s literature as letting things thing. The first slope is a form of murder – so that’s one conceptual death. The second, trying to let things be, is another death-like condition. What Blanchot is trying to attend to in his work as I see it is a relationship to a space of dying which can’t be controlled or appropriated by the human self. And so literature, for him, is the exemplary way in which that space is to be attended to. There might be other ways of attending to it – visually, whatever – but for Blanchot literature has this overwhelming privilege.

TMcC: I love that expression ‘attend to’. Blanchot uses these avatars that attend to it, most notably Orpheus. Blanchot’s interpretation of the Orpheus myth is different from the popular one – in fact, it’s interestingly the same one that Cocteau uses in the film we’re screening later this week -

SC: Oh yes. There might be a relation. What Cocteau knew of Blanchot I don’t know. What year was the Cocteau film made in?

TMcC: Fifty-something. It’s post-war, because the landscapes are unmistakably post-war. But Blanchot’s Orpheus, in going to the underworld, has not gone there to get Eurydice back: what he really wants is the night at the heart of the night, the other night, the night whose face is eternally turned away. He wants death itself in its full absence and deathness. And another trope crops up at this point: sacrifice. That seems an enormously loaded figure, or motif. How do you understand it?

SC: It’s not a term I’ve used. I’m very hesitant about that, mostly because of the question of the holocaust. ‘Holocaust’ is the Greek term for sacrifice, and is, as many Jewish historians have pointed out, a rather questionable way of naming that event of mass death. Sacrifice of what to whom?

TMcC: Sacrifice takes place within a proscribed system of exchange…

SC: Yes, exactly: sacrifice has a meaning that’s recuperable.

Anthony Auerbach: If modernity arises from the death of God to some extent – and then there’s an investment in Romanticism and post-Romanticism, in which death is the space of meaning – so in Blanchot literature and death are kind of equivalent spaces because they’re spaces of meaning, which somehow can’t be found in life any more – so is it then possible that the holocaust, historically, is the death of death? And that this is why the question is so stressed in our age: because up till that moment death could be that site of meaning, but the holocaust proved that it’s not what we expected, or what we hoped?

SC: Yes. Firstly, Blanchot is a child of Romanticism. There’s a wonderful essay of his called ‘The Athenaeum’ from The Infinite Conversation, where he puts his finger on the central problem of Romanticism: that it was about producing the great ‘novel’ of the modern world (be that an actual novel or, say, Wordsworth’s Prelude) and it failed to do so. So a feature of Romanticism is both its aspiration to a work and the fact of failure. Blanchot’s ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ sees in Hegel and Sade literature as work, which would be death; and then the other slope takes on in another direction with the recognition of failure. It’s very tempting to see the holocaust in that historical perspective: it would be a work of death.

There’s a lot of discussion about the uniqueness of the holocaust, or the Shoah, or whatever we call it; but it seems to me that that uniqueness could only consist of one thing: the application of technology to mass death. The curious thing about the holocaust in comparison to other forms of mass death – in war, or what was going on in Rwanda or Kosovo – is its dispassionate relationship to death. The Nazis didn’t really hate the Jews with a passion; they thought they were vermin that had to be exterminated, which is different. They didn’t hate them the way a Kosovo Serb hates a Kosovo Albanian; other forms of genocide seem to be premised upon that passion. What’s unique about the holocaust is the attempt to depersonalise and take the passion out of death, and turn it into this industrial process.

Now, we could see that in some sort of weird continuity with the ambitions of the modern world. This is how Zigmund Baumann sees it in Modernity and the Holocaust. Basically, there are two views on the holocaust: it’s either the outcome of modernity or it’s a novum, something new in history. I think both are true. It’s an outcome of modernity: as Adorno says, it’s a consequence of rationalisation -

Anthony Auerbach: A consequence, or a flip side of…

SC: Yes, the dialectical underbelly of rationalisation processes that we associate with the Enlightenment. Or it’s what someone like Fackenheim sees as a novum, a new event in history. I think it’s both. Now, that completely reorganises, and should reorganise, the way we consider philosophical and artistic creation.

AA: And reconsider cherished notions about death?

SC: Also, yes. If I could go back to what I was saying about Nietzsche: what people get excited about in his work is this notion of affirmation: an affirmation in relation to death. I can affirm the meaninglessness of the universe and the ultimate meaninglessness of my own life, and heroically assume that. There’s something almost disgusting about that thought after the holocaust, it seems to me. Adorno puts his finger on this quite well in the final part of Negative Dialectic. He’s concerned with after Auschwitz. He says that a new categorical imperative has imposed itself on humankind: not to let Auschwitz repeat itself, and not to hand Hitler posthumous victories. He goes on to say that the situation of the death camps is best described not by descriptions of them, but by, for example, the work of Beckett. Why? Because it doesn’t say anything about them; it doesn’t attempt to represent what took place.

So then there’s this question of death and representation: What would be the least disgusting aesthetic response to this situation? At one end of the scale we’ve got Spielberg and Schindler’s List, which for all its sincerity is a disgusting film. At the other end we’ve got, say, Remains of the Day, which is all about processes that are bound up with what becomes the holocaust, but it’s much more oblique. Or, in the French context, Landsman’s Shoah -

TMcC: That’s the eight-hour epic…

SC: Right. Landsman’s aesthetic, which is organised by lots of these concerns I’ve been talking about, is that he’s not going to represent what happened and he’s not going to judge what happened. He has interviews with, for example, an SS officer who was at one of the camps, and he’s got a semi-hidden camera; and the SS officer wants to either say he’s sorry or exculpate himself from guilt – and Landsman’s saying: ‘No, I’ve got no interest in that; I don’t care about what you feel. Just tell me what happened. What happened when the trains arrived? Who opened the doors? How did people get from there to there? How did they get into the rooms? Who put the Zyclon B in? What happened to the bodies? Who dug the ditches? How deep were they? How many?’ – these things. So there’s a sense in which that attention to factual description without representing the event would be adequate to that event. So to go back to the question: the way in which we’d be able to approach death is by not representing it, having an oblique relationship to it. So some cherished philosophical ideas of death, heroic ideas, would be gone. Beckett is interesting because he’s the anti-heroic figure.

TMcC: We were talking about Beckett at lunch. Paul Perry’s formulation of it was that Beckett puts all the markers in and then takes them away at the last minute. In the first draft of Happy Days, for example, the play started with a nuclear blast and a radio voice saying ‘Nuclear War has been declared; London’s gone, New York’s gone etc’ – and then Beckett just cut that but left the post-apocalyptic landscape intact. You get that throughout Beckett’s oeuvre. There are points where he almost spells it out, like where Vladimir says to Estragon towards the end of Waiting for Godot: ‘Can’t you see the bodies piled up in mounds? Can’t you smell the decomposition?’ He could almost be talking about Auschwitz. Come to think of it, it’s almost like Nietzsche’s madman in the market place.

SC: Or the farmers in Cumbria!

TMcC: Ah, well, this all opens up to another term I want to bring in, not least because I know you’re writing a book about it at the moment -

SC: Yes, it brings us neatly to humour.

TMcC: Yes. Beckett is also incredibly funny. It’s not a separate thing: his deep ethical engagement with this whole problematic and his humour are completely bound together. I mean, how do you see comedy and death as fitting together?

SC: They’re in an intimate relationship. Comedy is much more tragic than tragedy, I always think, and much more about death. Tragedy is about making death meaningful – with some exceptions: you could say that in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus there’s a different relationship to death. But conventionally the tragic hero takes death into him- or herself and it becomes meaningful; we experience catharsis in relation to that and we all go away happily. Comedy is about the inability to achieve that catharsis. So either you can’t die in comedy, which is why Waiting for Godot’s a tragi-comedy: nobody can hang themselves and it’s funny. Or if they do die they pop back up to life, like in Tom and Jerry cartoons. Now what’s the more tragic thought: life coming to an end or life going on forever? The latter’s much more tragic. Swift explores this in Book Three of Gulliver’s Travels: there are the Immortals, the Struldbrugs, who are marked with a red circle in the middle of their foreheads, and lie around in corners having lost all interest in life and not even speaking the language they grew up with. They’re tragic figures. The worst thing would be not death but life carrying on forever, and comedy’s about that. It’s also linked to depression and all sorts of things like that.

Anthony Auerbach: But is the repetition in Beckett the joke? Or is that the real tragedy? This theatre of the absurd that just starts again exactly the same once it’s finished. Does that have something to do with Nietzsche’s doctrine of recurrence?

SC: What’s great about Beckett is that you’re given the high drama of European culture through a strangely comical Anglo-Irish lens which is much more pragmatic and down to earth. Beckett’s ridiculing to some extent. He would be interested by the idea of eternal return but Nietzsche’s laughter is a laughter of affirmation and ecstasy, whereas Beckett’s laughter is a laughter of derision, a sardonic laughter, which is actually much more tragic. Jokes leave you in that position. The philosophically most nuanced discussion of Beckett is Adorno’s by several kilometres. But what Adorno will not see in Beckett is the laughter. Adorno will say things like ‘Laughter is the fraud practised on happiness’, ‘Laughter is complicity with domination’. I think that’s a mistake. Blanchot also misses the humour in Beckett. The humour in Beckett is at the level of idiom, in the fine grain of detail. There’s all sorts of stuff that we might want to call ‘Irish’ – although that would be too easy, but something like that – and it’s that that philosophy misses.

TMcC: I see the humour in Beckett as being slapstick, too. That’s the element he’s getting from Buster Keaton. It’s sort of like Bataille’s reading of Hegel. Hegel is all about an elimination of matter, turning it into golden shit as you say; but with Bataille matter becomes ‘that non-logical difference which represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to the economy of the law’. It’s something that gets in the way of the perfect Aufhebung, or synthesis, resolution. And I think that lots of the slapstick in Beckett is about that failure: the failure of tragedy, the failure of matter to get aufgehobt, to go up there and be sublime. We want to go to the heavens as heroes but we trip over our own shoelaces and piss ourselves.

SC: Exactly: we’re human.

Paul Perry: I’m thinking of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. It’s a study of a bullfight. He talks about the suppressed humour of the horses which have been disgorged and drag their entrails round the stadium, a kind of slapstick humour. Then there’s legislation, because of the North’s opprobrium, which makes them put these leather things around so the audience can’t see – but the horses still die. But he talks about the act of seeing, and the audience laughing in this grim moment of the horses’ disembowelling. He’s basically also discussing death and humour.

TMcC: But Hemingway never leaves that heroic mode that Beckett’s left way behind. Even Hemingway’s clowns are Homeric figures. Now, there’s something that you, Simon, said about tragedy and comedy and immortality that broaches the whole field of time. We haven’t really discussed this yet. Heidegger’s work is all about time: for him, time is the horizon of being, and time is facilitated by death – decay and death is what makes time possible. And there’s an emphasis on travel – which is something that interests this organisation, the INS, as well. Heidegger has this expression Holzwege – and didn’t he actually compose his work as he strode in manly fashion through these black German forests?

SC: So he would like us to believe.

TMcC: Is it not true, then?

SC: Oh, he walked a lot. He was a great walker.

TMcC: But do you see him as relevant to the discussions we’ve been having?

SC: Oh, very much so. I teach Heidegger a lot; it’s a big part of my job. It’s always a complicated pleasure, because he’s the sort of bête noir of twentieth-century European philosophy. So in relation to death and time: the first section of Being and Time ends up with the idea that we have to get the whole of human existence into our grasp. He calls that ‘care’. Care works through a three-fold structure at the head of which is Being-already-in-the-world as fallen. But that needn’t occupy us. What he then goes on to talk about is that in order to get existence into our grasp as a whole we have to have an idea of the end of existence; and as the end of existence is death, we must get death into our grasp. So the logic of Heidegger’s position is that death has to be something we comprehend. So it’s a logical point on the one hand. 
On the other, it’s also a hugely pathetic point. Heidegger’s discourse on death owes much more to the Christian tradition, particularly Augustine and Paul, than to other philosophers. Nietzsche says that to be authentic, to become what I am, I have to shatter myself against death and appropriate that within me, and affirm it like a tragic hero: that’s what Nietzsche calls fate. By the time we get to Heidegger, the choice for him in Being and Time is either to choose oneself as a hero or to choose the ‘they’, the ordinary mass, as one’s hero. Heidegger says you should choose yourself as a hero: Werde, was du bist – Become what you are. Now I just don’t think that’s possible. I think that death is something that always slips from view as you appropriate it. I’ve tried in other work I’ve done to unpick Being and Time along the faultline of the question of death. But death is something that I cannot appropriate. Heidegger says: ‘Death is the possibility of impossibility’. Death is a human possibility – it has to be; but it is also the point at which I can be no more. It’s death. But I can assume that as a possibility, and it can become the basis for becoming an authentic human being. Blanchot and Levinas invert that phrase and talk about death as the impossibility of possibility: so death is what halts my power of projection, my power to do things. But Heidegger is still very much taken with this heroic idea of death. If you look at his speech from 1933 on the death of the allemanic patriot Schlagete, who was shot by the French in 1919 for refusing the treaty of Versailles and then picked up by the National Socialists as a German hero: Heidegger, who’d just become rector of the university and embraced National Socialism, talks about Schlagete facing the French rifles and feeling death great within himself, with the allemanic hills in front of his eyes. It’s a heroic death. 
Beckett’s work would be an undermining of that – which would also have a political corollary. You can see Beckett as a stoic or a resigned pessimist, but there’s a link in his work between this impotence, this inability to do anything, and resistance. In terms of his life, Beckett was heroic.

TMcC: He was in the résistance…

SC: He received the Croix de Guerre from Charles de Gaulle…

TMcC: But then he would refuse to discuss it. He said it was all childish japes: ‘I was just being silly’. And Blanchot, I found out recently – I was reviewing a book on him for the Times Literary Supplement – faced a firing squad: he was put against a wall, and somehow…

SC: It’s a wonderful story. There’s a pamphlet that came out in French in ‘95; it’s just come out in English, with Derrida’s comments on it. It’s called l’Instant de ma Mort – The Moment of my Death. It’s the last thing Blanchot’s written. There’s an memoir of his political involvement in the vaults at Gallimard which will come out when he dies, so there will be more. Anyhow, in l’Instant de ma Mort he recounts how in ‘42 or ‘43 he was living in the French countryside, and for complicated reasons got hooked up with a bunch of people who were occupying a French chateau and were taken out by German guards and lined up to be shot. And they thought that Blanchot, because he spoke a more elevated French, was the proprietor of the chateau, and some sort of landed gentry; so he was allowed to leave. So others died while he got away with it; and one aspect of the story is his unendurable guilt at this; the other aspect is that when he felt the rifles aimed at him, he felt a ‘légereté de l’être’, a lightness of being, which was almost joyous. And that, too, is an intolerable thought for him. So Blanchot, the great writer of infinite dying, harbours this desire for extinction, which is weird.

TMcC: Again and again in this discussion we’ve come back to the thirties, the forties, the period around the war. It drives home how the links between these thinkers are not just conceptual ones: didn’t Blanchot, who had himself dabbled in right wing politics, harbour Levinas, or Levinas’s wife, a Jew, during the war?

SC: Yes.

TMcC: For me, it all crystallises way later when Derrida, in the late sixties, early seventies, in The Post Card, is transcribing a sentence from his notes in which he mentions Heidegger, a former Nazi but someone to whom Derrida is hugely indebted as a philosopher, and Levinas, and himself, both Jews. And he has a footnote saying: ‘I want it to be known that at this point the telephone rang and I had the American operator saying: ‘Will you take a collect call, a reverse charge intercontinental call from a Martini Heidegger?’ – who’s been dead for six or seven years at this point.’ And Derrida says: ‘No. It’s a joke. I refuse.’ But then in an even longer footnote to the footnote he writes: ‘I do accept that there is a link – a telephonic, or telepathic, or tele-something, link between me and Heidegger’s ghost.’ It seems an incredibly overdetermined moment – and one that needs serious annotation in any history of necronautism.

SC: And completely humourless as well…

TMcC: What, him not taking the call?

SC: Yes.

TMcC: But if he had then he’d have worked out in two minutes which PhD student it was playing a joke on him, and it would have closed the whole thing down.

SC: But it was a joke!

TMcC: What would you have done?

SC: I’d have taken the call and we would have had a laugh. I wouldn’t have written a footnote about it in an already overlong book.

TMcC: It was probably you, wasn’t it?

SC: It’s a good joke. If you compare the French and English texts of Beckett, one thing that stands out is the jokes. The ones he writes in French are pretty abstract. There are gags in there – but he’ll amplify the gags when he’s translating himself into English…

TMcC: By adding Anglo-Irish idiom?

SC: Exactly. Christopher Ricks, in Beckett’s Dying Words – which is a good book, even if Ricks has pretty reactionary views about literature – makes that point very well: what Beckett adds when he’s translating himself is a layer of idiom and humour. Which then raises the question of humour and context and translatability and all that. ‘Humour’ is an English word. There is the French ‘humeur’ -

TMcC: But that means something entirely different.

SC: Yes, it means the medical doctrine of the humours. The first recorded use of ‘humour’ meaning something jocular, according to the OED (which should never be trusted), is 1682. The first real theory of humour is by Shaftesbury in 1709, in a book called Sensus Communus: an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour. For him, humour is about how one shares common sense, social wit. And it’s a specifically English language invention. If you look at Diderot’s Encyclopaedia, there’s an unattributed article in it, perhaps by Diderot or perhaps not, that begins: ‘L’humeur est quelque-chose qui appartient particulièrement à l’esprit Anglais‘ – something which belongs particularly to the English mind; and he goes on to give a summary of A Modest Proposal by Swift. Now the irony is -

TMcC: – that Swift was imprisoned for writing that!

SC: Well, that and that he was hardly English. At the heart of this English humour you’ve got an Irishness. Sterne was Irish too. So, anyway, there’s something recalcitrantly idiomatic about humour which resists translation. And humour is a practise by which we give meaning to all sorts of stuff, which I don’t think is fully colonised by, say, capitalism or any of that shit. It’s still something remarkable, and we engage in it on a day-to-day basis. We can’t render it – we just do it.

Anthony Auerbach: But is humour possible for Beckett? Because in a sense his characters are already dead. Is Beckett a clue to Adorno’s impatience about existence?

SC: Yes, in a sense his characters have already died. But within the endless pessimism of his prose, the imperative that comes back and back is ‘On, on…’

TMcC: I can’t go on; I must go on…

SC: Yes: fail again, try again, fail again better. There’s this sheer courage that defines Beckett’s work; this relentless determination to push.

AA: Without heroism…

SC: It’s sort of anti-heroic heroism. It’s a heroism that knows we can’t have heroes anymore.

AA: But there’s this kind of wretched monotony about Beckett. Is that a posthumous thing? Not being-towards-death but being-after-death.

SC: I see his characters as all being very much alive, in a useless way – which is how I see us being alive.

AA: But in Endgame…

SC: Yes, in Endgame, as Adorno says, they might all be dead.

TMcC: The danger in that play is that life might begin again. That’s why they’re terrified of the pubic louse and have to stamp it out.

SC: I’ve always thought that Endgame has attracted too much attention. If I were looking for a piece that summarises Beckett I’d go for Krapp’s Last Tape, which is both completely black and very funny and full of this Romantic pathos: at the centre of Krapp you’ve got this image of love.

TMcC: Floating on the punt with the girl…

SC: This impossible moment: ‘She is in my arms, my head in her lap, floating gently up and down in the boat…’

TMcC: ‘Beneath us, all moved…’

SC: So Beckett, for all his logical monotony (he uses logical forms in the prose to produce monotony), has these moments of real pathos.

AA: Lyrical.

SC: Yes.

TMcC: And pastoral. And to do with memory. That’s the ‘out’ in Krapp’s Last Tape: he doesn’t make a new tape; he just listens to the old ones again and again and again.

AA: Do you think that Adorno’s more sensitive to humour in Kafka than in Beckett?

SC: What does he say about humour in Kafka?

AA: The thing that stands out most from Adorno’s writing about Kafka is his interpretation of jokes. He doesn’t say that Kafka’s hilarious, but he still sees those as very important. Do you think there’s a connection between Beckett and Kafka in that sense?

SC: Well, Kafka is the man. For Blanchot, too, Beckett was nearly, but not quite, Kafka. The measure of anybody has to be to be Kafka. I think you can read Kafka in different ways. As a naïve eighteen year old I read the novels in English and got filled with existential angst; but then when my German got good enough I read the Erzählungen and thought: ‘How did I ever take this seriously?’ I mean, a man wakes up to be turned into a giant beetle!

TMcC: But it seems to me that in Kafka, often, redemption happens. It’s quite Christian. Josef K realises ‘Oh yes, I am guilty’, and reconciles himself to his death. It’s almost a heroic death.

SC: ‘Like a dog’. What’s heroic about that?

TMcC: Well, the deaths in the Iliad are pretty gruesome too. Look: Vladimir and Estragon sit around saying: ‘If Godot comes, we’ll be saved.’ But he doesn’t come – whereas for Josef K, there is a kind of martyrdom.

SC: I’d want to get much more Hebraic than Christian at that point. I think it’s about unexpungeable guilt. But here’s a good story: Georg Lukacs was not a fan of Kafka, because Kafka was a modernist and his fiction couldn’t be said to coincide with the ambitions of socialist realism. Lukacs was in the Hungarian government in ‘56; he was the Minister of Culture when the Soviets rolled in and came in the middle of the night for him and the other ministers. So he’s taken from his bed into a truck which went out into the country; and he turns to one of his colleagues and says: ‘Kafka war doch ein Realist!’ – ‘Kafka was a realist’. So Kafka’s fault – that he wasn’t a realist – was made up for by the fact that reality confirmed him.

AA: It’s like Benjamin’s proclamation that the ideas of Kafka will only become known to the masses at the point of their annihilation.

SC: Yes… Philosophy is like Flaubert’s Temptations of Saint Anthony, in which Saint Anthony is prey to various temptations, the last of which is the Spinozist God appearing. Philosophy’s like that: there are are problems with, say, Kant’s philosophy – maybe thirty or forty which we could identify straight off. But what interests me is the way in which that system can represent a temptation, one that you can take on board. When you’re teaching philosophy you want people to be tempted by forms of thought which are not their own, and then to come to a position from which they can reject them. The idea of philosophy being wrong doesn’t interest me, though.

AA: So are you teaching temptation or aestheticism?

SC: Both. You want people to be tempted, and you want them to sublimate. If you’re going to do philosophy you’re going to have to spend eight hours a day reading books, which is the most bizarre way to spend one’s time; it’s a type of renunciaciation. But at the back of that there’s something else. Every great philosophical system constituts a temptation which is neither true nor false; it’s open to a variety of interpretations. A great text is like a machine capable of producing multiple interpretations.

AA: So what of this anxiety about truth? What’s the difference between knowledge and truth? Is it all just a game?

SC: No, not a game. Philosophy is about the truth. I don’t want to diminish that. Teaching the history of philosophy, though: is that the history of truth or the history of falsehood? It’s both. Plato was wrong about all sorts of things, but there’s a truth there in that it led to certain things that came after it. So teaching is about using philosophical texts to break down people’s convictions about truth in the name of truth. Students usually know what the truth is early on; you have to break that down, by saying: ‘Look, try to imagine inhabiting the world that Descartes inhabited; take that on board as a possibility, even if that conflicts with your intuitions.’

AA: I’m interested in Benjamin’s historical philosophy. It’s about an arrest of time: truth for him is instantaneous.

SC: Truth unfolds historically. We can have more truth by having different histories.

AA: Benjamin’s against that. He thinks history should cut into the present in a way that’s politically or messianically charged, and that philosophy shouldn’t be discursive, but rather an aspiration towards doctrine.

SC: Benjamin would see history as the history of the victors: Every document is a document of barbarism. That’s his response to a Hegelian accumulative notion of history. If I were teaching Benjamin, I’d try to show the plausibility of both systems. The notion of messianic time that shatters the present is interesting: Benjamin has this wonderful image of revolutionaries in Paris shattering the clocks – the first revolutionary act is to arrest time. It’s wonderful – but I’m not completely persuaded by it.

TMcC: I wonder if we could rehouse the whole question of truth, and of approaching truth, by taking it out of philosophy and rehousing it in literature. In tragedy, for example: Aeschulus has this formulation, in Agamemnon -

SC: Suffering to truth.

TMcC: Yes: the gods love us, and so they make us suffer – and the reason they make us suffer is so that we may learn the truth. It’s very straight-forward. That’s the formula of tragedy. It takes place in time, and time is the horizon of decay, whether this be in Faulkner or Beckett or Aeschulus -

SC: And in the past.

TMcC: In what sense?

SC: A mythical past.

TMcC: Okay. But it’s always this movement towards truth. And then in other types of literature – say in Kafka: the court of the emperor in The Great Wall of China is like the angels in Rilke or the gods in Aeschulus, the place where truth is. There’s that same impossible gap: I want to be in the court of the emperor, to be taken up by and clasped into its breast, so that I may behold it and join with it; and yet I’m not. It’s the same movement, the same thrust. So I wonder: is that rapprochement you get in literature parallel to the movement towards truth in philosophy, or is it one and the same?

SC: Yes. Philosophy doesn’t begin with people falling into ditches and looking at the stars. The pre-Socratics are interesting; but philosophy really begins in drama; it’s a competitor discourse to tragedy. Which is why Plato’s Republic excludes the poets: they’re the competition; gotta get rid of them.

TMcC: He says: ‘We’ll deck them in flowers and give them the best wine…’

SC: Yes: and then kick the bastards out! 
 

Metal Works

Richard Serra’s new show of monumental sculptures heralds the artist’s first exhibition in London for 16 years. In a rare interview, he talked with Adrian Searle about the evolution of his ideas and his plans for the future

For over 40 years, American artist Richard Serra has tested the limits and possibilities of sculpture, film and drawing. In the 1960s he began his investigation into the imaginative and physical potential of materials and their relationship with the site and viewer. Since the early 1970s Serra has become best-known for the monumental sculptures he has created for various architectural, urban and landscape settings. In 2007 New York’s Museum of Modern Art honoured Serra’s career with a retrospective and earlier this year his major work Promenade was installed at the Grand Palais, Paris. His current show at Gagosian Gallery, London, runs until 20 December, and includes three new steel sculptures. It is the first exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK since Weight and Measure was presented at the Tate Gallery in 1992. He gave a rare interview to Adrian Searle in London in late September.

ADRIAN SEARLE You have mentioned that Mark Rothko’s late paintings remind you of the poems of Fernando Pessoa, after whom you’ve named a recent sculpture. Could you elaborate on that?


RICHARD SERRA I recently read Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet [which was written in the 1920s but first published in 1982]. In it Pessoa constantly probes his thought and analyses his personal sensations. The book is made up of fragments by a writer who is obsessed with his own emotions. His voice is one of unsparing introspection. The questions he asks over and over again are: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Why do I write?’ By extension, I find myself asking: ‘Why do I make what I do?’ The same probably held true for Rothko. For Pessoa, to think is to live and to feel is merely food for thought. These fragments deal with an endgame, they are Kafka-like, and similar to Rothko’s last 12 years. 


AS Pessoa really only wrote for his friends, which was a problem with the arts in Portugal for much of the 20th century; he was talking to a small bunch of people.

RS Portugal feels very nostalgic. The Portuguese constantly look back to their lost empire. Although it is part of Europe, when you are there, you feel like you are on an island. 


AS Yes, in fact, in José Saramago’s novel The Stone Raft (1986) Portugal drifts away from the coast of Europe. I found myself, not long ago, reading something you wrote for Steve Reich, for his 70th birthday tribute. You were talking about Yvonne Rainer and the whole gang in New York in the 1960s and how you were each others’ critics, which is not unlike Pessoa writing for his friends.


RS We were a small group making work for each other – and the women led the charge. 


AS Yvonne Rainer was here in London a few weeks ago, talking about dance. 


RS I wonder if young people now know anything of the pivotal role she played in the 1960s. She opened up and carried much of the scene for six or seven years.


AS The talk was full, although it was 90 percent dance people; but I was chatting to a successful young choreographer working in London, and he’d never heard of her.


RS She was one of the best performers I’ve ever seen. She would bring all kinds of objects into play. Her dancers would throw powder, dirt, each other and mattresses around and use different sorts of people and different body types: young, old, fat and thin, running and jumping and falling constantly. I remember in one performance she lowered an enormous transparent flat, a grid, in front of the entire width and height of the stage, held it for a couple of seconds and lifted it. This was one grand mocking gesture: the frontality, the stage, the grid, the perspective measure, every part of it dissected. I never forgot it.


AS I know you think a lot about duration as one of the dimensions of sculpture.


RS Duration is a subtext of how the space of the work is experienced: the diversity of time, the intensity of time or time in particular is what individuates us more than anything else. Everyone’s relationship to their own time is more personal, more private and more singular than anything I can think of. My interest is in what animates movement, what fragments movement, what dislocates movement, what disorients movement. For me temporality is a value.


AS There is still so much interest in the conversations artists were having in the 1960s, when there wasn’t much of an audience for art.


RS I’ll give you an example. We’d all go to Max’s Kansas City, and one night, when I was with Michael Snow, we heard there was a performance across the street and we went over to watch it on the 22nd floor. The choreographer and dancer Simone Forti was going to present a performance along with Rauschenberg. When we arrived, the Rauschenberg performance had already begun. He was pulling a series of boxes across the floor with people underneath them accompanied by random musical sounds, a predictable Cageian event. All of a sudden the performance ended, the room went dark and light appeared in the space outside of one window and then someone fell outside the window; then another, and another, and another. At least two dozen people dropped through space. It was then that you realized that the first person who had fallen by, fell by again. This was repeated four or five times. What was out of view was that mattresses had been piled on the roof of the 21st floor so that the performers could land, run up the stairwell and return to jump again from the 23rd floor. Michael was completely stunned. I remember what he said: ‘This is a Muybridge framing device in real time.’ These were performances we did for each other and afterwards we would always pass a hat around. Talk about a cohesive group, we were each other’s audience. At the time I was living with Joan Jonas and Robert Smithson was my best friend.


AS These kinds of dialogues happen against a work and a context that have been lost. 


RS I think every generation defines itself; only the issues and options change. In the 1960s there was no cultural industry. Large scale merchandising did not exist. It could be that the over-emphasis on merchandising has become problematic for a younger generation. But I don’t know.


AS There’s certainly a real break between generations – perhaps we all felt that. When I was an art student, I didn’t want to hear about David Hockney or about the American Greenberg acolytes we were being told about either. Perhaps it’s the same now – art students now don’t want to hear about Damien Hirst. For you, were you trying to break with something or make with something?


RS Breaking or making did not seem to be on the radar. Postmodernism has created an overt interest in historical references. It was not our problem. Back in the mid-1960s, if I had to give a brief on what I thought sculpture needed to be, it was to do away with the object, to get sculpture off the pedestal and expand the space of the field, to open up the container and to foreground time and bodily movement in relation to the intensity of place and context. I am basically still doing that. When I graduated from Yale in painting, I went to Paris for a year, got a Fulbright and went to Florence where I stopped painting and decided to start over again. I began to stuff animals. I did not have the faintest idea what I was doing.


AS You did taxidermy?


RS Yes, I was stuffing animals. I started juxtaposing live animals with stuffed animals, making surrogate zoos. I collected 22 animals of all kinds – some live, some dead – and a lot of other debris. In a broad sense it was a kind of assemblage that was an extension of what was going on with Rauschenberg and a lot of other people who had come out of the American scene. I had reduced it to barnyard Surrealism. Even then, I thought of it as student work, nothing more, and went back to America. But it did get me into using the diversity of non-art materials.


AS Facts, factual materials, real materials. Which is a kind of distinction, isn’t it? I was thinking earlier today, of a nice resonance between your installation in the Tate’s Duveen Galleries in 1992, Weight and Measure, and Martin Creed’s piece Work No. 850 which is taking place now.


RS What is he doing?


AS Every 30 seconds a runner appears at one end of the empty Duveen Gallery and runs as fast as they possibly can to the other end of the empty gallery, where they disappear around the corner, go downstairs, walk the length of the Duveen Gallery, climb the stairs again, go up near the entrance and run. 


RS He’s a performance artist? 


AS Martin makes sculptures and performances and works with orchestras. I feel it’s about the body and it’s about time.


RS It seems to be about measuring a space.


AS There are no barriers. 


RS I like it. 


AS The runner has to dodge gallery visitors, and they have to dodge the runner. It’s a bit like something that was happening between those two blocks you placed there.


RS I told Nicholas Serota, prior to mocking up Weight and Measure, that it would have three components, but then I realized that the centre of the Tate’s Duveen Hall with its circular intersection was an obvious magnet; a collecting zone for the viewer. I decided that I did not need a weight in the middle so I reduced the sculpture to two blocks of differing heights and weights at either end of the hall. I wanted to deal solely with the elevation over the distance. I remember Nick came down to see what I was up to, and for a minute he was taken aback, but he came around. David Sylvester was a big help. He was one of my closest friends at the time.


AS I think Sylvester compared it to an ice-cream van that had somehow arrived in his front garden – a big, ­obdurate mass outside his window blocking the daylight. I remember him trying to deal with his physical relationship to it. There was this strange thing happening between the two related sculptures you showed at Gagosian in New York just after 9/11: you had to go into two different rooms. It’s sort of doing that here in your new show in London. It’s about the presence of the piece you can see and the other one, which you can feel behind your back and which is nearby but not visible. One also had this same sensation walking between the five enormous elements of Promenade (2008) in the Grand Palais in Paris.

RS Promenade was totally driven by the context. The internal relationships of measurement and placement related to the central axis of the site. The placement of the rectangular plates followed a strict logic in that the plates tilted away and towards the center line in an asymmetrical counterpoint. However, the perception of the sculpture contradicts the logic of its relation to the site. As you walk inbetween the plates you see fragments, you see the work in part, you cannot grasp the whole. The plates appear and disappear, lean away or toward you depending on your location. I work in different ways with space. Take Open Ended (2008) in my new show in London which belongs to a series of sculptures that combine toruses and spheres. Open Ended grows out of a piece called Blindspot (2002–3), which comprises three toruses and three spheres that diminish in length as they create a path that leads to a dead end: you have to reverse to exit. The corners where toruses and spheres join are not on axis. Each path as you turn the corner leads you directly into a wall, so you have to counter step and it throws off your cadence.


AS Because you don’t actually see the turn until a little too late.


RS Yes, it dislocates your orientation and then you have to step off in another direction, and you are not quite sure where you are headed.


AS That’s part of the control of the piece, isn’t it? 


RS The control of your duration. It breaks your cadence. 


AS Exactly, and you don’t want to turn it into a fairground ride, so it’s mis-stepping you without becoming some squeaky entertainment. It’s not playing with your body in the way that a roller-coaster might. 


RS The experience of these works has nothing to do with entertainment. There is an obvious disorientation and at some point you lose your sense of direction. You are trying to navigate an unknowable condition.


AS When I was inside Open Ended, I kept thinking, this is too big. 


RS There seems to be more space than can possibly occupy this place and the room has completely evaporated. 


AS It is as if the space that’s outside is too small for the space inside.


RS Open Ended makes me more anxious than Blindspot. Now you’d say it’s open-ended, and it ought not to be because there’s a release in this piece in that you have two entrances/exits. I am not interested in the number of parts but I am interested in their interlocking or their spatial unfolding. The interest for me is not the specificity of form, the fact that they are toruses and spheres. I am interested in what they can do. The interlocking of three sets of toruses and spheres sets up a seemingly irrational continuation of spaces. In effect, you lose track of where you are and you cannot anticipate where you are going. The internal differences explain the various moments of tension and release. The singular dynamic of bodily movement close to the surface of the curvature is responsible for the intensity of the experience of space.

AS Your body is a pendulum. 


RS Yes, and you want to get out of there, so your cadence speeds up.


AS It engenders feelings of anxiety and of losing one’s place, and being made very aware of one’s equilibrium or lack of it. And yet we habitually suppress these feelings of doubt and uncertainty, or we wouldn’t be able to cross the road, would we? 


RS Or we deny them, because we don’t want to take the time to investigate them. I got interested in curves because I felt it was very difficult to understand them, to understand what is on the opposite side, to understand the difference between convexity and concavity. Not too many contemporary architects or sculptors have worked with curves.


AS Oscar Niemeyer has, a bit.


RS In Brazil, OK, and maybe Le Corbusier, but very few people have dealt with that problem. I think that one of the things that really outraged people about Tilted Arc (1981) was not that it was a big sculpture that bisected a plaza, but that it was a big curve.

AS Most curves can only be seen from the air.


RS In circulation, maybe, but not in structure. And certainly no one was using reverse curves in structure.


AS Is that for technical reasons? Is it easier to do that now than it was 20 or 30 years ago?


RS There was not much interest in the invention of form. It was easier to mass produce right angles than to mass produce curves. Today you can easily mass produce curves because of developments in computer technology. The right angle reflected the zeitgeist of the 20th century but that is over. I think the speed of the skin dominates now. 


AS There’s a lot of globby architecture and blobs. Norman Foster’s done a few, but I’m not a fan of them at all. Zaha Hadid has made some wonderful maquettes of forms that curve, of envelopes, so you’re not sure whether you’re on the inside or the outside, like undersea molluscs.


RS I’m interested in the structure of the form that makes the space. I’m not so interested in the free-flowing blob, although I can understand why people are interested in them. When I was working in rubber, very early on, I actually made a piece called Blob.


AS So you made a blob, and you made Charlie Brown (2000). How did you get from the blob to Fernando Pessoa?


RS I also named pieces after David Sylvester, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Charlie Chaplin.

AS It seems to work very well. They have something to do with the people and nothing at all to do with them.


RS Well, they have nothing to do with them. But somebody may ask, who’s Pessoa? And if that encourages curiosity about him, that’s all to the good.


AS He should be much better known than he is. Or perhaps he is known just enough, in the right way, at the moment.


RS That might be true. The people who need to will find him.


AS It’s true of art too in some ways. All that debate about Tilted Arc – wasn’t there a stage play about it, or a novel? Did William Gass write a novel about it? 


RS I think a lot of people used it for a lot of purposes, I didn’t follow it. For a while it just got to be an albatross.


AS There was a bit of a fuss about your Abu Ghraib drawing (Stop Bush, 2004) in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, wasn’t there? It was then reduced to Stop BS, I think, when it was turned into a poster.


RS It wasn’t the Whitney that made the fuss. In order to mass produce posters for distribution by political action committees we couldn’t use Bush’s name.


AS It means the same thing anyway, bullshit or something, one or the other. In a way it was contiguous with the sculptures, or your other oil-stick drawings. That silhouette is so unmistakable now. That silhouette has become the ideogram of the entire war.


RS It also has a multiple read-out. In the States it’s the Ku-Klux-Klan, racism, atrocity, Bush, American aggression, it’s all of it. I tried to reduce the detail in order to open the image up to multiple readings.


AS We reduce, and we read things, and just as we walk through a sculpture we think we know, we imagine what the other side of the concavity is going to be like, and then when we meet it, it’s even more of a surprise because we’ve got a mental image.


RS I think that a lot of depiction and illustration leads you back to the references that are contained within them, not within you.


AS Are you still looking at a lot of younger art?


RS I try to look at as much as I can. In New York right now there’s a lot of neo-assemblage, a lot of bricolage and photographs. The big influential figure once again seems to be Rauschenberg.


AS Yes, I saw the sculpture show at the re-vamped New Museum in New York and that was very much the mode, and also at the Whitney Biennial. Have you ever wanted to use lighter materials – straw or balsawood?


RS I’m interested in weight and mass and measure; it’s what my sensibility responds to. 


AS When you were in Paris for the Grand Palais show earlier this year, talking with the curator Alfred Pacquement, you described walking the space and thinking about it, and then going back to your sandpit where you arrange elements like a model. How big are those maquettes?


RS Small – some an inch to a foot, but mostly half inch to a foot.


AS Do you approach a work in the landscape in the same way?


RS If I can, I mock up full scale. I mocked up a full-scale piece recently for a collector. He didn’t want it. It happens.


AS I guess this has probably always been a problem between artists and their patrons, going back hundreds of years. Now it seems that the market is king. 


RS We are all implicated in the market, we can’t get away from it. But your work does not have to be market-driven, and you don’t have to produce merchandise. I think right now for a lot of artists the market is the context and that explains the recent mass production of luxury goods.


AS It’s just that everyone else’s interests become implicated in your interests when you’re asked to do things, and you have to say no, a lot. That’s the big thing.


RS The fact that the market has become the context is just a recent phenomenon. I think there’s a fiction perpetrated by the market that the aesthetic value is synonymous with price. The art market is probably one of the only unregulated speculative markets out there.


AS They haven’t got someone trying to punch 70 billion dollars into it. 


RS No, I think the bubble might just burst. 


AS It’s terrifying. The physical experience of being with someone’s work – your work, for example, doesn’t just resist the lie: it resists all that flim-flam. It slows you down.


RS My work is not motivated by resistance.


AS It seems to be a function of its physicality and its specificity.


RS It brings you back to yourself and the place where you are. You have to deal with your internal relationships, both physical and psychological and you either deal with it or you don’t.


AS Fernando Pessoa, which is a rectangle, is positioned so one longer side faces the window. The other side is always in shadow. It holds its space, and it invites a particular physical relationship with it and with the space it occupies.


RS It was the most simple and most singular statement I could make and it deals with everything that’s relevant to my work.

Richard Serra with Fernando Pessoa  (The poet is a faker who is so good at his act… He even fakes the pain of pain he feels in fact)


AS There’s such a nakedness with the kind of work you make too: it will either cut it or it won’t. 


RS That’s what artists do: they deal with their vulnerabilities. But you can’t foresee how you’re going to be misused. 


AS They have Mark Rothko T-shirts at Tate Modern and scarves in his autumnal russets and oranges and what looks like a tie-dye T-shirt in grey and black, which is, for me, a horrible apotheosis and an appalling idea. Anyway, what are your plans now?


RS I went to Dunkirk. There’s a possibility of building a piece there. Then I’m building a piece for Norman Foster for his home in Geneva, and two pieces for the Prado.


AS Dunkirk is amazing. Hard to escape the history of that coast. 


RS I’m going to have to deal with it. That is the context. 


AS All those incredible concrete structures from both wars.


RS What’s interesting about those concrete structures is that there is no foundation to them, so they’re continually shifting in the sand.


AS Do you think about getting older?


RS It’s interesting, yesterday someone asked me that, and I said, I try not to. I never want to look over my shoulder. 


AS There’s a great last interview with Frank Zappa when he had prostate cancer. They said, how do you want to be remembered, and he said, it doesn’t matter, really, if I’m remembered or not. It’s not the point.


RS Exactly, and all he was really interested in was making his work. There is a purpose and dignity to that.


AS So, will Barack Obama win? That’s the other thing.


RS I hope so. But there’s a strong racist element in America and it is hard to predict how that will influence the outcome of the election. When people pull that lever, you don’t know what’s going to happen. I met Obama and I found him intelligent and intellectually adroit. It may be that America can’t deal with a statesman of that stature.

                                 Serra portraying ‘The Architect’ in Matthew Barney’s ‘Cremaster 3′

Adrian Searle is art critic for the Guardian. 

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Published on 27/10/08

Richard Serra, TTI London (2007), weatherproof steel, installation view