Alain SERVAIS

Hardting the Dream Weaver: illustrate 01

Interview : Alain SERVAIS

Alain Servais, self-portrait (with Nathalie Fournier), in front of a work by Anish Kapoor.

The young Belgian collector, Alain Servais, started collecting art in the late 1990s. In 2000, he moved into a 900-square meter old factory which he transformed into a three-storey loft, located in a working-class neighborhood of northern Brussels. This is where he lives and works, as well as showing his contemporary art collection. “There are two lighting systems, the artwork lighting system and the living lighting system. This is my way of living”, he said. The freedom he enjoys as an independent financial consultant allows him to travel at his own rhythm. Art is taking up most of his personal and leisure time. He visits more than 10 art fairs, festivals and biennales around the world every year. Other than collector and Financial Consultant, Alain is a happy father of two lovely daughters, Alexia (14) and Marie (12).

In the interview, we talked about how a collection betrays its master, the collector. Alain is very open and sincere in sharing his experiences and philosophy. I am very grateful for his generosity, and I really admire his courage to confront himself. “This is really the most revealing and personal interview I ever did and probably will ever do”, he wrote me a week after the interview.

AS - Alain Servais
ST – Selina Ting for InititArt Magazine

Click for Editor's Note on Meeting Alain Servais

What is Collecting Art?

ST: You are young, and a very active and “hard-working” collector. What are your basic ideas about collecting art?

AS: There are different things about collecting. The very first aspect concerns what you think of art. It’s almost the first question I am asking to everyone I meet to know in which artworld category to find them. It’s a tough question to answer, “What is art for you?”, and I ask myself this question regularly.

ST: Throughout the years you must have very different answers to your own question.

AS: Yes, of course.

ST: Perhaps it’s interesting for us to start with the question.

AS: I don’t know but let me finish your question first. So, you have the art then you have the collecting. Why is it? You said earlier that I am fascinated by collectors, and it’s very true. I am very interested in them across history, not just today, but in general about the phenomenon of collecting. There are many different ways of collecting, but I like the following definition that I read somewhere: The difference between a museum and a private collection is that, a museum is trying to illustrate an evolution of time, while a collector is encapsulating a point in time. A collector is very often active in a certain time span, usually they are good for 10 to 12 years, then they often become bad or they stop. Why? It’s because things are changing so much that you can’t adapt many times in succession. That’s why it’s so amazing to see some collectors changing and re-focusing their collection. It’s an amazing personal effort to do that. That’s also why you would see so often the same artists in different collections active in the same period.

ST: How can you try not to become a victim of this?

AS: That’s the second level about collecting, which means you have to try to give a message through your collection. I tend to explain it in this way: an artist is creating a sign, and the collector at a certain point is taking these signs and putting them together to give another message. He’s making a sentence, if you will. He’s creating something new. He’s expressing himself also. I think it’s important. I am trying to express something. Sometimes I have the impression that I am not being listened to… [Smiles] I ask the work of art to speak for me, on my behalf. I am hiding behind what they are saying, or in fact, I am saying what they are saying.

ST: Because you are the one who’s organizing the sentence.

AS: Yes, or sometimes, I can go to another level than what the artist really intended to say. I like the idea an artist told me, that once you sent the work of art to the world, you are losing control of its meaning. Some artists want to fight against this; some are just fine with it. Also, with the passing of time, you can never really see the work with the same eye as at its time of creation. That’s why I like to visit museums. I try to put myself in the mindset of times during which the work was created to understand how people in that time looked at those pieces. I don’t want to see the works only with my eyes of today because when one makes the effort to imagining oneself back in the artist’s own time you realize how those works could be really revolutionary and radical, and it feels even better to understand that. [Smiles]

Alain Servais creating the composition and anaylsing the dog, in the game installation of MIND-GAMES (2009) by Madelon Vriesendorp, in Arsenale, 53rd Venice Biennale 2009. Photographed by Selina Ting.

ST: Can we say that what we get from your comparison of a collector commanding the sentence is the subjectivity of the collector?

AS: That’s what I like: the subjectivity, but not the “command” in your question. [Smiles] I don’t feel myself as the “boss”. For example, I never commissioned a work. I don’t want to give instructions to an artist on what he has to do. At the same time, I don’t feel myself as the owner of the work. I am just a custodian of the work. Ok, I am given the work in exchange of a payment, I integrated the piece into my sentence, but it’s not my work. Because anybody coming here to see them can own them, appropriate them in their own way. That’s why I lend works to museums or others as often as I can.

ST: But then, we come back to the question, you can also go to the museums to look at them, to appropriate them in your own way. You don’t need to possess them.

AS: But the immense joy is that I don’t need to go to the museum every time, I can be here, look around, and say, oh, how lucky I am to live in a “museum”.

ST: Is there an obsession to own it?

AS: Yes and no. I have the obsession of putting them in evidence. Yes, I love the impact they have on me and others. It’s a nice feeling to see how the art work sometimes can influence people, can change certain things inside me and others, and can be useful to everyone. That’s why the works are not my property. They are the artists’ property, the world’s property, and I am happy to share them. I am just the lucky guy who’s living with them at the moment. [Smiles]

ST: Is it also your reflection from history that a collection can never stay in the same hand in view of changes of time and circumstances?

AS: Yes. That’s why conservation is very important for me. Because I hope someone will have them in 50 years, in 100 years. And if I don’t take correct care of them, they would be dead.

ST: When you have a huge collection, can your sentence still be coherent? Is there a limit?

AS: The sky is the limit! No, I should say the budget is the limit! So, why so many? At one point, I could say that you may realize what the core of the collection is (I don’t believe in collections consciously built from the beginning). Then you would have to have the courage to tidy it up. The big problem of many collectors, and sometimes myself, is the excessive drive of looking forward. You always look for the next piece and you forget a little bit about the past pieces. Then you have challenges concerning the storage, conservation, exhibiting, documentation, etc. This is the impulse and the weakness of a collector: What’s the next one I want to have?

ST: What about the coherence? When a collection expands to several hundred or several thousand pieces, can it still be coherent?

AS: More and more! There is more and more consistency as it gets bigger and more mature. But let me be careful about this word “consistency”. You can build collections in different ways. The hottest talk today, particularly in “courses” about collecting, [Winks] is to focus. But as I said, the collection is the sentence of the collector. It can be concerned by sports, sex, politics, death, love, etc. If you just want to talk about one of the chosen issues, then you are creating a much focused collection. But for me, there is diversity in each personality. There are people who are much more focused or disciplined, but I want to cultivate my diversity. There are many different elements in life that are interesting to me, and I don’t want to limit myself to one subject only. I know people who only collect black and white work. It’s a joke! [Laughs]

Left: Alain Servais. Right: Alain Servais and Cristina Savini. Images provided by Alain Servais. ©Alain Servais.

What you are looking at is inside you

ST: So your collection is more based on the subject-matter rather than a certain artistic movement?

AS: Yes, but someone’s history is where one is coming from and what one is. In my case, there are two sources of influence: first of all, I have been raised by Jesuits. The caricature of Jesuits is that they always answer questions with another question, and that they are always questioning perceived reality or conventions. They are a little bit manipulative [Winks] but they are attempting to examine things from different points of views and they teach you to look at your surroundings, physical and mental, from different perspectives. So, you come out of a Jesuit school either as a strong believer or as a strong disbeliever, and I came out as a very strong disbeliever in religion. They offer you a model of thinking about the world, but they give you the tools to destroy the model. So their views are very critical but very open-minded. They influenced my way of thinking in that if something looks to be white, I am going to ask myself where is the black of this white? [Smiles] So when you said my collection is very strong on messages, and you are not the only one saying so, then I will purposely add a work that speaks about the opposite, which is not at all about the message or the intellectual but perhaps the poetry. There is a very deep and obvious contradiction in the collection in that there are things that don’t seem to bear being together except that it is my intention – that they are contrary to one another.

ST: When you decided to destroy, when you become a disbeliever, I imagine you found yourself in the bewilderment with nothing to hold on to…

AS: Yes, I find it a difficult but exciting challenge to manage living with uncertainty. And that’s the other side in my history – Socrates. Socrates said, “One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing”. [Smiles] This is the basis of philosophy and the basis of my philosophy and my life. It’s true that human beings usually do whatever they can to avoid uncertainty but I try to live with this uncertainty, this permanent questioning. And it is not easy, particularly also for the ones living with me. [Winks] Sometimes we want to hold on to something solid but in reality everything is moving around. It definitely translates into the collection.

What’s interesting is that despite this impulse to keep changing, there are only very few works that I “reject” even though I bought them 10 years ago or more. Because each of them is a part of my history and very often their meaning is still alive. I can still feel the life coming out of them. [Smiles]

But this very intellectual and philosophical aspect is only one side of my philosophy, my personality and my collecting. Then there is another part which is the animal instinct and which is just as important. You think that we, humans, are superior, the creatures at the top of the evolution, but no, we are just another animal among other animals, the smartest animal, nothing else. Sometimes I like to cut off from all the rubbish, the illusion about human “intelligence”. Just look at what’s going on in the world. That’s just animals fighting each other. The way we behave when we want to have power, love, sex or drugs, is the same as for other animals most of the time. So let’s try not to make the human being what he’s not. So this other major theme express itself through the collection is, “Watch out for your animal instinct”. That’s why there are some very “crude” elements in the collection which disturb a lot of people. There is animal instinct behind the higher level of consciousness, and at one point the animal instinct would take over, be it for love, sex, politics, religions, races, power, etc., and that can be very violent and terrible.

Living Room of Alain Servais, Brussels. Photograph by Selina Ting, 2009. Courtesy of Alain Servais. ©initiArt Magazine.

ST: When you use the word “Watch out”, it’s also about intellectual control on the animal instinct.

AS: Yes, I try to control it and again I try to say: this violence that you don’t like to see in art is also inside you, so, don’t reject it! Because sometimes when you are conscious of that violence, you can control it; if you are not conscious of it, it can explode and then you don’t know how to react to it or control it.

ST: What about the artists who created them? How do they get there?

AS: If you look at sociology… Where do you see the inner workings of a society? It’s at the edges. It’s where the problems, the dark sides, the failures of a society lay. When you see what the problems are and the “solutions” applied to them, then you understand the way the society is. It’s fascinating to me the way our society treats minorities. This is another very central in the collection. What codes, perceptions, treatment a society has for the homosexual, the immigrant, the prostitute, the lower-class, etc.? What are these telling us about our so-called “smart”, “wealthy”, “democratic” society? That’s why it’s very interesting to see and understand how things are working together, not just at the individual level of an artist or an individual, but the society as a whole.

ST: If we believe that art has the power to speak for the subaltern or revealing the messages to us, then, are we really giving voices to them or just another interpretation / manipulation? As a white, wealthy, upper-class male, are you not patronizing them? Where is your position in all these?

AS: One of my “model collector” is Herman Daled .He once wrote that “art should disturb me”. Art should ask me questions if it cannot provide me withanswers. It should teach me something that I don’t know about myself or my environment. This is what art is for me. As I can stand the questioning, as I accept to be put into question, I can live with those voices of the art which are raising very difficult questions. A lot of my friends say, “oh, I like your art but I could never live with it”. It’s just because I am “different” in some ways that I can cope with that questioning. And let us be clear this difference is not a source of glory or pride. It is more often a burden. [Smiles]

The second part of your question: if I am patronizing? … It’s a very good question because it touches something in my core. The answer is: maybe I am a “minority” myself. Despite being a member of the so-defined “dominating elite class”, maybe I am still in my own way a minority. [Smiles]

ST: Because you don’t conform to the values of your own social class?

AS: You know the answer. [Winks]

ST: Do you identify with the labels of white, male, wealthy, social status, etc. etc.?

AS: It’s objective. It’s a fact. I can’t go against that.

Corners of the living room in Alain's house. On the right, Claude Closky's collage of 1001 "things to do" cut out from magazines. Photograph by Selina Ting, 2009. Courtesy of Alain Servais. ©initiArt Magazine.

What else…?

ST: Now you have many pieces in your collection and you change the hanging once a year.

AS: Yes, about 80% of the work is changed out. It’s a lot of effort, but if you don’t want to change the hanging, what’s the point of buying more? It’s a pleasure because it transforms the house completely. It’s also paying respect to the artists, and it’s a worthy effort for my guests as well. [Smiles]

ST: What is it like to live with the same work for 365 days? Do you still see them on the 300th day?

AS: A year is not long. [Smiles] Do I still see them? Yes, and I am doing the necessary to look at them again and again such as having group visits two to three times a month, and I guide the tour myself. Yes, I love art, it’s more than a passion; it’s a way of living, as I tried to explain. But outside this “intellectual” environment of art, I am as happy to live with my animal side [Winks] by watching football games and playing with my kids. There are two lighting systems in the house, the artwork lighting system and the living lighting system. This is my way of living. I love things with two or more sides. [Smiles]

ST: How do you decide and design the hanging?

AS: I make a list of works that I want to take out of storage. Then I see how they “work” with the physical environment of the house. The interesting thing is that, once they are there, suddenly you see the intrinsic link between them. I don’t work like a curator who starts with a theme, a theory then research into the work.

Alain Servais with an unknown audience, in the game installation of MIND-GAMES (2009) by Madelon Vriesendorp, in Arsenale, 53rd Venice Biennale 2009. Photographed by Selina Ting.

ST: What do you look at and what do you look for when you visit a private collection?

AS: I want to know who the hosts are. I want to meet the person, whether they are physically present or not. Visiting the private house of a person is to get to know that person for real. There is little he or she can hide. [Smiles]

ST: What about your own feelings of opening your own private, intimate living space for visitors, some of them are strangers?

AS: I am probably an exhibitionist. [Laughs] I don’t care. I have nothing to hide. You like me or you don’t like me, you judge me or you don’t judge me, good for you. There is nothing I can do about it.

ST: And when you visit a private collection, do you feel yourself a voyeur?

AS: A little bit. I am a voyeur as well. I am an exhibitionist and I am voyeur. [Laughs] So, there’s no problem…

ST: According to you, what’s the role of a collector in the making of art history?

AS: They realize that the very good artists cannot be understood today, that’s a bit caricature though…

ST: …Because the artists are ahead of their time.

AS: Most of the time for the good ones. A very good artist is a very good artist by nature; a very good collector is a also good collector by nature. Again, let me give you another metaphor: the artist is the “broken” or “twisted” transmitter, he’s gathering information from the world, good feelings and bad feelings about the world, and he’s expressing them in the work of art, he’s creating a sign. Most of the normal people can’t decipher it, can’t pick up the message immediately. But the collectors understand it because they are the receptors, often as “broken” or “twisted” as the transmitter is. [Winks] Look at Gertrude Stein, Peggy Guggenheim and many other collectors. They are very important because they support new movements and they are the ones taking the risks. Today, the galleries are promoting the living artists but how many galleries are still buying from their own artists? Who’s putting up their own money, taking risks and supporting the artists today? Collectors! Again, that’s simplifying the scenario, but the way to make a complex idea clearer is often to simplify it and exaggerate the point. [Winks] Of course, in reality and nuances there are different categories of artists, galleries, collectors, etc.

ST: Thank you very much.

Hardting the Dream Weaver: illustrate 01

Hardting the Dream Weaver: illustrate 01

Interview : Paul CHAN

©Paul Chan, Sade for Sade's Sake, three-channel animation projection, 5hr45mins. Courtesy of the artist

Sade for Sade’s Sake (2009), a three-channel animation projection that Paul Chan (b. 1973) presented for the 53rd Biennale di Venezia this year, depicts shadow-like human bodies in physical movement. These figures talk, argue, and plea with one another, walk and crawl, and beaten and whipped, and engaged in sexual activities and religious rituals. Interspersed among them are shadows of rectangles, squares, and other shapes and forms.

In the interview, Paul Chan talks about Sade, Freedom, Sexuality and Morality.

PC – Paul Chan
ST – Selina Ting for initiArt Magazine

ST: In your opinion, how many people have watched the video, Sade for Sade’s Sake (hereafter “SSS”) in its full-length of 5hours 45mins?

PC: None, let’s hope.

ST: We know that the video has a basic structure of 45 second per scene interspersed by some geometrical forms of objects. You once said it’s like a ballad. Does it bear any resemblance to the structure of Sade’s 120 days of Sodom, i.e. from Part 1 to Part 4 and the repetitive structure of Day 1 to Day 120?

PC: The whole piece is structured like a ballad. Each of the 45 second scenes I consider a line in the ballad. Four lines make up a stanza in a ballad, and so each stanza has a particular rhyming scheme. Visually this means that the lines that are suppose to rhyme have recurring visual elements in their scene, but in a different composition or way of moving.

ST: I’ve only seen a little part of it, but I am very curious to know how it develops within the 5hours 45mins. Is there "development" in it?

PC: Yes, SSS changes radically over the course of the 5+ hours. Things fall apart, bodies become disembodied, rhyme becomes reason, and colors change, and so on.

ST: What do these geometrical objects stand for?

PC: I don’t know. You know?

ST: Well, perhaps they are windows for escape…or they can be residues of visual spots in the mind, objects for worship, or a black hole where humanity falls. I am so often told by artists that once the work is done, they gained autonomy and have their own life in the world. Art is for everyone’s interpretation.

PC: Just the interesting observation that when something becomes free, or what you describe as something gaining autonomy, it tends to emanate an essential formlessness, whatever it looks like, which could be interpreted as something everyone can interpret. But for me this formlessness shouldn’t be seen as a kind of willful ambiguity. It is more like the stubbornness of someone not willing to belong to anyone or anything.

ST: Someone humorously commented that to attempt Sade’s 120 days of Sodom is a challenge. Because if you can’t persist till the end, you are a loser; if you successfully make it to the end, you made yourself a fool. Can this be applied to your work as well?

PC: No, because the only holy fool is me, for making it. It’s also a good question whether Sade wrote 120 days to be read. He wrote it during his imprisonment in the Bastille. And like any prisoner he wanted to escape. And how he escaped was by writing, by making literature. So in the end what is most vital is the time spent making it, not in having it received.

On Freedom

ST: You’ve also mentioned the idea of escape in Venice. You said that "the most intimate form of engagement is escape. Escape creates a sense of inner and outer integrity and gives a picture of what freedom looks like". Can you further elaborate the relationship between confinement, escape and freedom?

PC: Sure. Confinement is the condition that makes us desire escape most, and in escaping we achieve freedom. In freedom we find the truth of confinement, which is not something oppose to freedom, but in fact its grounding. I think this is what they call a Hegelian triad. But I’m most likely wrong.

ST: SSS has been largely regarded as a critique of the scandal of Abu Ghraib prison for its sexual violence, imprisonment and torture. However, from your previous work, it seems that your interest in Sade is less on sex or sexual violence itself, but on the idea of supreme freedom or the so call “Sadeian Freedom” where individual sovereignty becomes the supremacy without limit. How do you interpret Sade’s notion of freedom?

PC: I have written before on this project that, does it make Sade’s work more bearable to remember that his thinking around sex, pleasure, and freedom are inextricably tied to a ruthless critique of institutional power, whether it was governments, churches, or philosophies? Probably not. The blue and purple prose is what sticks in the craw of the mind, a seemingly endless accounting of perversities, debaucheries, and tortures. The law of reason compels sex to greater and greater extremes. In Sade, the Kantian notion of freedom as the power to follow the path paved by the series of causes and effects from one’s own reason for being fulfills Kant’s image of human autonomy and at the same time makes a mockery of its humanist potential.
Pleasure has its own reason and freedom its own law. Call it Sade’s law. And yet to follow Sade’s law to the letter is to pledge an allegiance to an imaginary power as rigid, cruel, and paradoxical as the one he was fighting against. The irony of this is on full view today. Since 2001, the US has waged a campaign to spread freedom and democracy around the world. But ironically, the more this freedom spreads, the more rigid, cruel and sexually inhuman the campaign becomes.

ST: In Must We Burn Sade ? (1955), Simone de Beauvoir accuses Sade for his solipsistic worldview, his denial of the reality of the Other and his oppression on the others. According to de Beauvoir, freedom and satisfactions for Sade can only be obtained in an imaginary or literary world where the others as embodied consciousness did not exist for him. In this sense, writing is a form of escape for Sade and his freedom lacks the possibility of action. How would you comment on de Beauvoir’s critique of Sade?

PC: You have reduced de Beauvoir’s essay to being merely a critique of Sade, when it is rather a more full bodied assessment of his work and its relevance then and now. One of the points de Beauvoir was trying to make was that Literature is a kind of action, and that the act of artistic creation has as much reality embedded in it than, say, digging a hole, or making love. That is why people wanted to burn Sade, they sensed in his work the gravity that comes from having made a concrete existence out of mere words.

ST: What about the critique on the oppression of the Other? What differs de Beauvoir’s notion of freedom from that of Sade is also her recognition of the inter-subjective lives and relationships of reciprocity.

PC: Yes, you’re right. The fundamental blindspot in Sade is that the people who populate his imaginative world are not really people at all, but things that can be used and dominated to their core. But isn’t this the mind simply wielding its power over the entire domain of artistic creation? Doesn’t Sade have a fundamental right as a thinking-and-making being to reflect and express whatever comes to him? This difference between Sade and de Beauvoir is not really a difference between different notions of freedom, but the irreconciliability between ethics and art.

ST: How relevant is Sade’s form of freedom to our society today?

PC: Sade is very relevant: he is the court philosopher for any country spreading democracy and freedom today.

On Sexuality and Morality

ST: Religion / Christianity is a point of attack for the Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment thinkers. Sex as the origin of human evil and slavery becomes the primal site of transgression and individual liberty, especially for Sade. Today, the role of religion as a regulator is largely replaced by law. Law and Order become the social architects that construct a framework within which individual sovereignty is delimited and constantly kept in check. In your project, My Laws are my Whores (2008), where you presented 9 charcoal drawings of America's Supreme Court justices vis-à-vis 14 large, textualized drawings based on the characters from Sade’s work. Can you share with us your dea under this provocative title and the juxtaposition of Law and Sade?

PC: Well, the first thing is that the title of that show is a parody of Diderot’s famous quip, 'My thoughts are my whores'. But the spirit is the same. And for me it exemplifies what Sade was trying to achieve. A law of pleasure unto himself. I’ve written on the idea that the world Sade portrays is as representative of reality as pornography is to actual sex. But they are not mere fantasies. They posses the prodding movements of a mind that imagines sex not merely as a pleasure, a job, or a weapon, but as a form of reason. Here is where the spirit of Sade resides. If human freedom is expressed in the sovereignty of sex, then Sade is pushing to create a form of expression that can free the reason of sex from both nomos (human law) and physics (law of nature).

©Paul Chan, My laws are my whores, 2008, Charcoal and paper, Courtesy of the artist.

ST: Sade has turned his subversive, sadist sexuality into an ethic of erotic or mode of living and expressed that ethic of erotic through writing. There is also an attempt to synthesize the violent and arbitrary justice of the aristocracy with bourgeois rationalism of his epoch. Do you see any transgression, in terms of sexuality, politics, social justice, in this strategy?

PC: This is the second hardest question I’ve ever been asked. The first was by a 9-year-old who asked me how big God was. Yes, it was a transgression then, and in many ways it still is transgressive. There remains in Sade an unbearable quality. And this is what renders him relevant.

ST: What does this transgression imply in the relationship between the individual and the world?

PC: The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote that a poem, among other things, is 'a violence within that protects us from a violence without'. In a way, the world trangresses upon us more than we will ever transgress it. The work of art, if it is art, gives us ways to abide in or resist the world.

ST: I read the mechanical sexual scenes in the video as numbing rather than shocking, like "violence for violence’s sake" or "torture for torture’s sake". Under what conditions would morality / humanity completely surrendered to cruelty and violence? Is this question naïve?

PC: Not a naïve question. There are many conditions that would render humanity into perpetual cruelty and violence. Poverty is one such condition. Inequality would be another one. Lack of civil rights another. Your read of the "sexual" scenes from SSS is not off the mark. Although there is tenderness in there somewhere, but like real tenderness, it is fleeting and not readily apparent.

ST: How far can one say that your work takes the same line as Sade that Sexuality is not a biological imperative but a social fact?

PC: I don’t know. One can almost say anything these days. The question is whether what is said has the force of material reality or not.

ST: You said in Venice that "a person is a world more than the world itself, and that a shift in a mind means more than a change in gravity itself." To what degree do you place your faith in humanity?

PC: I have no faith to place anywhere. Besides, humanity doesn’t need faith as much as a new reason to be itself.

About the artist

Paul Chan was born in 1973 in Hong Kong and currently lives in New York City. He received his BFA in video and digital arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his MFA in film, video, and new media from Bard College. His most recent solo shows include My Laws are My Whores in the University of Chicago in 2009, The 7 Lights in New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC in 2008, The Western Front in Vancouver, Paul Chan in Serpentine Gallery in London, Lights and Drawings in Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, all in 2007. His work was included in the Rotating Views #2 in Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo, in 2009; Medium Religion in ZKM Karlsruhe, T2 Torino Triennale, Turin, 16th Biennale of Sydney, Betwixt in Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm, Traces du Sacré in Centre Pompidou, Paris, Shadow Cabinet in Extra City, Antwerp, all in 2008.

Unsafe at Any Exposure - OtherWords

Unsafe at Any Exposure - OtherWords

Unsafe at Any Exposure

There's no safe level of radiation exposure.

By Dr. Ira Helfand

As the radioactive contamination of food, water, and soil in Fukushima, Japan worsens, the media is continuously reassuring us that these levels are "safe." But there is no safe level of radiation.

Yes, at lower levels the risk is smaller, but the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science has concluded that any exposure to radiation makes it more likely that an individual will get cancer.

The press is reporting that 100 millisieverts (mSv) is the lowest dose that increases cancer risks. This simply isn't true. According to the NAS, if you are exposed to a dose of 100 mSv, you have a one in 100 chance of getting cancer, but a dose of 10 mSv still gives you a one in 1,000 chance of getting cancer, and a dose of 1 mSv gives you a one in 10,000 risk.

Those odds sound fairly low for one individual, but if you expose 10,000 people to a one in 10,000 risk, one of them will get cancer. If you expose 10 million people to that dose, 1,000 will get cancer. There are more than 30 million people in the Tokyo metropolitan area.

To understand the danger of low levels of radiation exposure, consider several factors.

First, the total dose is the most important factor, not the dose per hour. When you get an X-ray, you're exposed to a one-time burst of radiation. If you work for 10 hours in a spot where the radiation level is 1 millisievert per hour, your dose is 10 millisieverts, and the dose goes up the longer you stand there.

Second, there's a big difference between external and internal radiation. If you're standing in a spot where you're exposed to external radiation, that exposure ends as soon as you move away. But if you ingest or inhale a radioactive particle, it continues to irradiate your body as long as it remains radioactive and stays in your body.

Further, if you ingest radioactive particles, the dose isn't spread evenly over your entire body. It concentrates where the particles lodge. The average total body dose may be relatively low, but the dose at the site may be large enough to damage that tissue and cause cancer.

That's why the radiation being found in Japan in spinach, milk, and other food--as well as water--is so worrisome. If consumed, it will create ongoing radiation exposure and increase the risk of cancer.

A large majority of the hundreds of thousands of cancer cases that have occurred in the former Soviet Union because of the Chernobyl catastrophe were caused by people eating radioactively contaminated food.

Finally, it makes a big difference who gets irradiated. Children are much more vulnerable than adults. If a fetus is exposed to only 10 mSv in utero, his or her risk of getting cancer by age 15 doubles. So it's particularly dangerous when children or pregnant women consume radioactive food or water.

Reports indicate that the total radioactive releases in Fukushima have been relatively small so far. If this is the case, then the health effects will be correspondingly small. But it's not "safe" to release this much radiation. Some people will get cancer as a result. Most importantly, we don't know at this point how much more radiation there will be.

That’s why the U.S. government has said that people shouldn't be allowed within 50 miles of the plant.

If a comparable accident were to occur at the Indian Point nuclear reactors 24 miles north of New York City, 17 million people would need to evacuate. That's something to think about when we're told everything is OK at our nuclear plants.

Dr. Ira Helfand is an internist and a member of the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility. ww.psr.org

The battle of chenobyl

The battle of chernobyl shows that the Fukushima catastrophe could take years to clean up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiCXb1Nhd1o

800,000 people could contract cancer if not moved out of Fukushima

Dr. Chris Busby, a British scientist, predicts some 800,000 people out of about 8 million who live within 200 kilomters of the Fukushima nuclear plants will contract cancer if they are not moved out. http://www.infowars.com/fukushima-exposure-levels-going-up-everywhere/

Japan crisis forces rethink of the nuclear option

The Telegraph April 8, 2011

The reactor meltdown at Fukushima has forced the energy industry to reconsider its investment priorities.

Anti-nuclear activists in Bulgaria protest in Sofia in reaction to the dramatic situation at the Fukushima nuclear facility in Japan. They want the government to scrap plans to build second nuclear plant near Belene. Photo: AFP

By Josephine Moulds 9:00PM GMT 19 Mar 2011

16 Comments

With the eyes of the world watching, Japanese soldiers and workers continue to battle to keep the six nuclear reactors at Fukushima from meltdown.

The most technologically advanced nation in the world has been forced to resort to using police water cannons and buckets of water hurled from helicopters to cool exposed fuel rods. Authorities admit they may have to bury the plant in sand and concrete to prevent a catastrophic release of radiation.

The frightening situation is far from resolved, but the crisis has already sent shockwaves through global energy markets.

The dangers of nuclear power have been thrown into the spotlight – halting building projects all over the world; while the third largest economy in the world is desperately importing fossil fuels just to turn the lights back on after the earthquake ripped through the power supply, leaving 1.3 million people without electricity.

In the short term, the need for energy has dropped as factories sit idle and there is little movement around the country.

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But that will change rapidly as the reconstruction effort begins. Leo Drollas, chief economist at the Centre for Global Energy Studies, says: “Imagine all the girders needed to rebuild houses, cement for the flyways that have been destroyed, shipping fleets rebuilt, steel going into the trawlers.”

Japan has shut down 11 nuclear reactors in four different power plants. With talk of burying the Fukushima plant, it seems likely that at least six of those are lost for good. The question then is, what will replace them?

The country has more than 50 nuclear reactors – one in ten of the world’s total – squeezed on to its geologically unstable, densely populated land mass. Drollas says: “Obviously in Japan, there will be a major rethink.”

But it is not just Japan. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already said she will close seven of the country’s 17 nuclear plants; while China has put its plans to build 110 new reactors on hold.

Mark Lewis, head of energy research at Deutsche Bank, says: “The obvious beneficiary of all of this is gas. If you want to build new power stations with relatively low emissions, the advantage of gas is that it’s much cleaner than coal, you can build it within three years, and it is ideal to build in conjunction with renewable capacity.”

Gas works well as a back-up for alternative fuels such as wind or solar, because its output can be altered quickly as levels of renewable output change.

Liquefied natural gas prices shot up 15pc to peak on Wednesday, dropping back slightly by the end of the week.

Coal will also enjoy a renaissance if nuclear’s future is defined by the ongoing Japanese situation, even though this could have disastrous effects for the environment as coal emits one tonne of CO2 for every megawatt of power that it generates, compared with nuclear, which emits no CO2.

Subsequently the cost of carbon surged this week to its highest level since 2008.

These prevailing forces will boost the market for renewable power. As fossil fuels get more expensive, alternative energy needs less subsidies.

But, argue nuclear advocates, the world cannot build renewable capacity fast enough. Kevin McCullough, chief operating officer of RWE npower, the German-owned company seeking to develop two nuclear power stations in the UK, said: “We mustn’t forget about climate change, the impending UK energy gap and the need to keep bills affordable. None of those challenges has gone away.

“No one source of energy can deliver all that, even if you take the most optimistic view of energy efficiency gains. The country needs new nuclear as part of its mix and we must focus on delivering that with safety as the priority.”

Safety is, of course, the sticking point. Nuclear power was only just emerging from the shadow cast by the catastrophic explosion in Chernobyl in 1986. Now Fukushima has given critics the ammunition they need to urge governments to halt their nuclear ambitions. Although this crisis has been much less severe than Chernobyl, commentators say it is worse for the industry as it happened at a modern reactor in a first world country.

Barclays commodity analysts said the Japanese nuclear plants were constructed with an extremely high level of technological sophistication to withstand earthquakes, with safety mechanisms including a tsunami wall.

In response to these safety concerns, the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA) came out fighting. NIA spokesman John Mcnamara said: “Effectively that power station shut down safely. When the earthquake struck, the station shut down and the safety systems kicked in. Obviously there are going to be learning points about the strength of the tsunami .”

Around the world, governments have ordered reviews of nuclear programmes, to “learn the lessons” from the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.

In the UK, Liberal Democrat Energy Minister Chris Huhne commissioned a report from chief nuclear officer Mike Weightman.

The UK has 10 existing power stations, nine of which are scheduled to close by 2023. The previous Labour-led Government committed in 2006 to building a new generation of plants and eight sites have so far been shortlisted for replacement. But final investment decisions have not yet been made. As Deutsche’s Lewis points out: “No-one is close to the stage where they can start pouring concrete into the ground . This is going to push the timeframe back further still.”

He says it is inevitable that the cost of nuclear power will go up. “The amount of capital investment required to build a nuclear power station to the level needed for public confidence will be greater. And the perceived risk will go up, so the cost of financing [it] will go up. On an economic level it makes nuclear less competitive.”

Funding a nuclear power station is particularly risky in the UK, where the energy market has been liberalised.

“All the nuclear power stations in the UK were built before electricity markets were liberalised,” says Lewis. “You would expect to recover your cost because [of] the price of electricity . Liberalisation changes the game completely.”

Chris Huhne, energy and climate change secretary, has admitted there is an “ongoing potential risk” that investors will lose appetite for nuclear power in the UK following the crisis.

Anecdotal evidence suggests his fears may be realised. Gerard Reid, cleantech research analyst at investment bank Jefferies, says: “From the investor community, the energy funds I am speaking to, not alternative energy funds but funds who have had complete '360s’ on this and were pro-nuclear, they have gone anti-nuclear.”

The Japanese crisis will also buffet Huhne’s planned electricity market reform, which he has called the biggest shake-up of the industry since the 1980s.

The energy White Paper due in late spring is expected to drive towards a much more open market. Drollas says: “This might make people reconsider whether market solutions have to be pursued at all costs.”

In Germany, which receives 23pc of its electricity from nuclear, the situation is even more acute. The German nuclear power industry has been at the centre of a raging political debate for decades. Last year,

Chancellor Merkel’s government took the controversial decision to extend the life of Germany’s nuclear power plants by 12 years. So it was a major shock when she announced the closure of the oldest reactors this week, ordering a three-month review of the other 10 remaining plants.

Further afield, President Barack Obama has ordered a comprehensive review of domestic nuclear plants.

In Asia, the picture is mixed. China is currently the world’s biggest builder of nuclear reactors, driving government plans forward without the lengthy consultation required in democratic countries.

It, however, appears cowed by the events in Japan, with the Chinese State Council decreeing: “We will temporarily suspend approval for nuclear power projects, including those that have already begun preliminary work, before nuclear safety regulations are approved.”

India, on the other hand, remained firm in its nuclear ambitions. The country of one billion people aims to generate 63GW of nuclear power by 2032, compared with the less than 5GW it generates today.

Until the situation in Fukushima stabilises, the global reaction will keep changing. But already the face of energy markets has changed, possibly for good.