2011年6月6日 星期一
The Century of the Self
To many in both business and government, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power is truly moved into the hands of the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis tells the untold and controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society. How is the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interest?
The Freud dynasty is at the heart of this compelling social history. Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis; Edward Bernays, who invented public relations; Anna Freud, Sigmund's devoted daughter; and present-day PR guru and Sigmund's great grandson, Matthew Freud. Sigmund Freud's work into the bubbling and murky world of the subconscious changed the world. By introducing a technique to probe the unconscious mind, Freud provided useful tools for understanding the secret desires of the masses. Unwittingly, his work served as the precursor to a world full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society's belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man's ultimate goal.
Part 1-Happiness Machines:
Part one documents the story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays who invented 'Public Relations' in the 1920s, being the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Part 2-The Engineering of Consent:
Part two explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany, and in response to this, they set out to find ways to control the masses so as to manage the 'hidden enemy' within the human mind.
Part 3-There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads, He Must Be Destroyed:
In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the influence of Freudian ideas, which lead to the creation of a new political movement that sought to create 'new people', free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people's minds by business and politics. This episode shows how this idea rapidly developed in America through "self-help movements", into the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation.
Part 4-Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering:
This episode explains how politicians turned to the same techniques used by business in order to read and manipulate the inner desires of the masses. Both New Labor with Tony Blair and the Democrats led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group which had been invented by psychoanalysts in order to regain power. Both set out to mold their policies to manipulate people's innermost desires and feelings, just as capitalism had learned to do with products.
2011年5月25日 星期三
2011年5月2日 星期一
NYT-Osama bin Laden
Obituary | Osama bin Laden, 1957-2011
The Most Wanted Face of Terrorism
Rahimullah Yousafzai/Associated Press
Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998.
By KATE ZERNIKE and MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
Published: May 2, 2011Digg
Osama bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan on Sunday, was a son of the Saudi elite whose radical, violent campaign to recreate a seventh-century Muslim empire redefined the threat of terrorism for the 21st century.
Multimedia
The Times's Michael D. Shear on the Announcement 
Related
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Bin Laden Is Dead, Obama Says (May 2, 2011)
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News Analysis: President’s Vow Fulfilled (May 2, 2011)
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Media Decoder Blog: How the Bin Laden Announcement Leaked Out (May 1, 2011)
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Amid Cheers, a Message: ‘They Will Be Caught’ (May 2, 2011)
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Text: Obama’s Remarks on Bin Laden’s Killing (May 2, 2011)
Times Topic: Osama bin Laden
Related in Opinion
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Op-Ed Columnist: Death of a Failure (May 2, 2011)
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Nicholas D. Kristof Blog: After Osama bin Laden... (May 2, 2011)
Al-Jazeera
As the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, here in video recorded in 2001, waged a terror war against the United States.
With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Bin Laden was elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for dictators like Hitler and Stalin. He was a new national enemy, his face on wanted posters, gloating on videotapes, taunting the United States and Western civilization.
“Do you want Bin Laden dead?” a reporter asked President George W. Bush six days after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“I want him — I want justice,” the president answered. “And there’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ ”
It took nearly a decade before that quest finally ended in Pakistan with the death of Bin Laden during a confrontation with American forces, who attacked a compound where officials said he had been hiding.
The manhunt was punctuated by a December 2001 battle at an Afghan mountain redoubt called Tora Bora, near the border with Pakistan, where Bin Laden and his allies were hiding. Despite days of pounding by American bombers, Bin Laden escaped. For more than nine years afterward, he remained an elusive, shadowy figure frustratingly beyond the grasp of his pursuers and thought to be hiding somewhere in Pakistan and plotting new attacks.
Long before, he had become a hero in much of the Islamic world, as much a myth as a man — what a longtime C.I.A. officer called “the North Star” of global terrorism. He had united disparate militant groups, from Egypt to Chechnya, from Yemen to the Philippines, under the banner of Al Qaeda and his ideal of a borderless brotherhood of radical Islam.
Terrorism before Bin Laden was often state-sponsored, but he was a terrorist who had sponsored a state. For five years, 1996 to 2001, he paid for the protection of the Taliban, then the rulers of Afghanistan. He bought the time and the freedom to make Al Qaeda — which means “the base” — a multinational enterprise to export terror around the globe.
For years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the name of Al Qaeda and the fame of Bin Laden spread like a 21st-century political plague. Groups calling themselves Al Qaeda, or acting in the name of its cause, attacked American troops in Iraq, bombed tourist spots in Bali and blew up passenger trains in Spain.
To this day, the precise reach of his power remains unknown: how many members Al Qaeda could truly count on; how many countries its cells had penetrated; and whether, as Bin Laden boasted, he sought to arm Al Qaeda with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
He waged holy war with distinctly modern methods. He sent fatwas — religious decrees — by fax and declared war on Americans in an e-mail beamed by satellite around the world. Qaeda members kept bomb-making manuals on CD and communicated with encrypted memos on laptops, leading one American official to declare that Bin Laden possessed better communications technology than the United States. He railed against globalization, even as his agents in Europe and North America took advantage of a globalized world to carry out their attacks, insinuating themselves into the very Western culture he despised.
He styled himself a Muslim ascetic, a billionaire’s son who gave up a life of privilege for the cause. But he was media savvy and acutely image conscious; before a CNN crew that interviewed him in 1997 was allowed to leave, his media advisers insisted on editing out unflattering shots. He summoned reporters to a cave in Afghanistan when he needed to get his message out, but like the most controlling of C.E.O.’s he insisted on receiving written questions in advance.
His reedy voice seemed to belie the warrior image he cultivated, a man whose constant companion was a Kalashnikov rifle that he boasted he had taken from a Russian soldier he had killed. The world’s most threatening terrorist, he was also known to submit to frequent dressings down by his mother. While he built his reputation on his combat experience against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s, even some of his supporters questioned whether he had actually fought.
And though he claimed to follow the purest form of Islam, many scholars insisted that he was glossing over the faith’s edicts against killing innocents and civilians. Islam draws boundaries on where and why holy war can be waged; Bin Laden declared the entire world fair territory.
Yet it was the United States, Bin Laden insisted, that was guilty of a double standard.
“It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this,” he told CNN in the 1997 interview. “If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists. Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel. At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.”
The Turning Point
For Bin Laden, as for the United States, the turning point came in 1989, with the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan.
For the United States, which had supported the Afghan resistance with billions of dollars in arms and ammunition, that defeat marked the beginning of the end of the cold war and the birth of a new world order.
Agence France-Presse
Osama bin Laden in 1998 in Afghanistan, where he planned the Sept. 11 attacks while under the protection of the country's Taliban leadership.
Robert Fisk /The Independent
Bin Laden later returned to his native Saudi Arabia, but under pressure from the royal family he moved to Sudan in the 1990s.
Bin Laden, who had supported the resistance with money, construction equipment and housing, saw the retreat of the Soviets as an affirmation of Muslim power and an opportunity to recreate Islamic political power and topple infidel governments through jihad, or holy war.
He declared to an interviewer, “I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America.”
In its place, he built his own legend, modeling himself after the Prophet Muhammad, who in the seventh century led the Muslim people to rout the infidels, or nonbelievers, from North Africa and the Middle East. As the Koran had been revealed to Muhammad amid intense persecution, Bin Laden saw his own expulsions during the 1990s — from Saudi Arabia and then Sudan — as affirmation of himself as a chosen one.
In his vision, he would be the “emir,” or prince, in a restoration of the khalifa, a political empire extending from Afghanistan across the globe. “These countries belong to Islam,” he told the same interviewer in 1998, “not the rulers.”
Al Qaeda became the infrastructure for his dream. Under it, Bin Laden created a web of businesses — some legitimate, some less so — to obtain and move the weapons, chemicals and money he needed. He created training camps for his foot soldiers, a media office to spread his word, and even “shuras,” or councils, to approve his military plans and his fatwas.
Through the ’90s, Al Qaeda evolved into a far-flung and loosely connected network of symbiotic relationships: Bin Laden gave affiliated terrorist groups money, training and expertise; they gave him operational cover and a furthering of his cause. Perhaps the most important of those alliances was with the Taliban, who rose to power in Afghanistan largely on the strength of Bin Laden’s aid, and in turn provided him refuge and a launching pad for holy war.
Long before Sept. 11, though the evidentiary trails were often thin, American officials considered Bin Laden at least in part responsible for the killing of American soldiers in Somalia and in Saudi Arabia; the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993; the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia; and a foiled plot to hijack a dozen jets, crash a plane into the C.I.A. headquarters and kill President Bill Clinton.
In 1996, the officials described Bin Laden as “one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremism in the world.” But he was thought at the time to be primarily a financier of terrorism, not someone capable of orchestrating international terrorist plots. Yet when the United States put out a list of the most wanted terrorists in 1997, neither Bin Laden nor Al Qaeda was on it.
Bin Laden, however, demanded to be noticed. In February 1998, he declared it the duty of every Muslim to “kill Americans wherever they are found.” After the bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa in August 1998, President Clinton declared Bin Laden “Public Enemy No. 1.”
The C.I.A. spent much of the next three years hunting Bin Laden. The goal was to capture him with recruited Afghan agents or to kill him with a precision-guided missile, according to the 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission and the memoirs of George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence from July 1997 to July 2004.
The intelligence was never good enough to pull the trigger. By the summer of 2001, the C.I.A. was convinced that Al Qaeda was on the verge of a spectacular attack. But no one knew where or when it would come.
The Early Life
By accounts of people close to the family, Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in 1957, the seventh son and 17th child, among 50 or more, of his father.
His father, Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden, had immigrated to what would soon become Saudi Arabia in 1931 from the family’s ancestral village in a conservative province of southern Yemen. He found work in Jidda as a porter to the pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Mecca; years later, when he would own the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia, he displayed his porter’s bag in the main reception room of his palace as a reminder of his humble origins.
According to family friends, the Bin Laden family’s rise began with a risk — when the father offered to build a palace for King Saud in the 1950s for far less than the lowest bid. By the 1960s he had ingratiated himself so well with the Saudi royal family that King Faisal decreed that all construction projects be awarded to the Bin Laden group. When the Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem was set on fire by a deranged tourist in 1969, the senior Bin Laden was chosen to rebuild it. Soon afterward, he was chosen to refurbish the mosques at Mecca and Medina as well. In interviews years later, Osama bin Laden would recall proudly that his father had sometimes prayed in all three holy places in one day.
His father was a devout Muslim who welcomed pilgrims and clergy into his home. He required all his children to work for the family company, meaning that Osama spent summers working on road projects. The elder Bin Laden died in a plane crash when Osama was 10. The siblings each inherited millions — the precise amount was a matter of some debate — and led a life of near-royalty. Osama — the name means “young lion” — grew up playing with Saudi princes and had his own stable of horses by age 15.
Essam Draz/Balkis Press/SIPA
Bin Laden directing guerrillas near Jalalabad in 1989, when he was receiving assistance from the United States during Afghanistan's war against the Soviet Union.
But some people close to the family paint a portrait of Bin Laden as a misfit. His mother, the last of his father’s four wives, was from Syria, the only one of the wives not from Saudi Arabia. The elder Bin Laden had met her on a vacation, and Osama was their only child. Within the family, she was said to be known as “the slave” and Osama “the slave child.”
Within the Saudi elite, it was rare to have both parents born outside the kingdom. In a profile of Osama bin Laden in The New Yorker, Mary Anne Weaver quoted a family friend who suggested that he had felt alienated in a culture that so obsessed over lineage, saying: “It must have been difficult for him, Osama was almost a double outsider. His paternal roots are in Yemen, and within the family, his mother was a double outsider as well — she was neither Saudi nor Yemeni but Syrian.”
According to one of his brothers, Osama was the only one of the Bin Laden children who never traveled abroad to study. A biography of Bin Laden, provided to the PBS television program “Frontline” by an unidentified family friend, asserted that Bin Laden never traveled outside the Middle East.
That lack of exposure to Western culture would prove a crucial distinction; the other siblings went on to lead lives that would not be unfamiliar to most Americans. They took over the family business, estimated to be worth billions, distributing Snapple drinks, Volkswagens and Disney products across the Middle East. On Sept. 11, 2001, several Bin Laden siblings were living in the United States.
Bin Laden had been educated — and, indeed, steeped, as many Saudi children are — in Wahhabism, the puritanical, ardently anti-Western strain of Islam. Even years later, he so despised the Saudi ruling family’s coziness with Western nations that he refused to refer to Saudi Arabia by its modern name, instead calling it “the Country of the Two Holy Places.”
Newspapers have quoted anonymous sources — particularly, an unidentified Lebanese barber — about a wild period of drinking and womanizing in Bin Laden’s life. But by most accounts he was devout and quiet, marrying a relative, the first of his four wives, at age 17.
Soon afterward, he began earning a degree at King Abdulaziz University in Jidda. It was there that he shaped his militancy. He became involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of Islamic radicals who believed that much of the Muslim world, including the leaders of Saudi Arabia, lived as infidels, in violation of the true meaning of the Koran.
And he fell under the influence of two Islamic scholars: Muhammad Quttub and Abdullah Azzam, whose ideas would become the underpinnings for Al Qaeda. Mr. Azzam became a mentor to the young Bin Laden. Jihad was the responsibility of all Muslims, he taught, until the lands once held by Islam were reclaimed. His motto: “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogue.”
The Middle East was becoming increasingly unsettled in 1979, when Bin Laden was at the university. In Iran, Shiite Muslims mounted an Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah and began to make the United States a target. Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. And as the year ended, Soviet troops occupied Afghanistan.
Bin Laden arrived in Pakistan on the border of Afghanistan within two weeks of the occupation. He said later that he had been asked to go by Saudi officials, who were eager to support the resistance movement. In his book “Taliban,” the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid said that the Saudis had originally hoped that a member of the royal family might serve as an inspirational leader in Afghanistan, but that they settled on Bin Laden as the next closest thing when no princes volunteered.
He traveled like a visiting diplomat more than a soldier, meeting with leaders and observing the refugees coming into Peshawar, Pakistan. As the family friend says, it “was an exploratory rather than an action trip.” He would return twice a year for the next few years, in between finishing his degree and lobbying family members to support the Afghan mujahedeen.
Bin Laden began traveling beyond the border into Afghanistan in 1982, bringing with him construction machinery and recruits. In 1984, he and Mr. Azzam began setting up guesthouses in Peshawar, which served as the first stop for holy warriors on their way to Afghanistan. With the money they had raised in Saudi Arabia, they established the Office of Services, which branched out across the world to recruit young jihadists.
The men came to be known as the Afghan Arabs, though they came from all over the world, and their numbers were estimated as high as 20,000. By 1986, Bin Laden had begun setting up training camps for them as well, and he was paying roughly $25,000 a month to subsidize them.
To young would-be recruits across the Arab world, Bin Laden’s was an attractive story: the rich young man who had become a warrior. His own descriptions of the battles he had seen, how he lost the fear of death and slept in the face of artillery fire, were brushstrokes of an almost divine figure.
But intelligence sources insist that Bin Laden actually saw combat only once, in a weeklong barrage by the Soviets at Jaji, where the Arab Afghans had dug themselves into caves using Bin Laden’s construction equipment.
“Afghanistan, the jihad, was one terrific photo op for a lot of people,” Milton Bearden, the C.I.A. officer who described Bin Laden as “the North Star,” said in an interview on “Frontline,” adding, “There’s a lot of fiction in there.”
Still, Jaji became a kind of touchstone in the Bin Laden myth. Stories sent back from the battle to Arab newspaper readers, and photographs of Bin Laden in combat gear, burnished his image.
The flood of young men following him to Afghanistan prompted the founding of Al Qaeda. The genesis was essentially bureaucratic; Bin Laden wanted a way to track the men so he could tell their families what had happened to them. The documentation Al Qaeda provided became a primitive database of young jihadists.
Afghanistan also brought Bin Laden into contact with leaders of other militant Islamic groups, including Ayman al-Zawahri, the bespectacled doctor who would later appear at Bin Laden’s side in televised messages from the caves of Afghanistan. Ultimately Dr. Zawahri’s group, Egyptian Jihad, and others would merge with Al Qaeda, making it an umbrella for various terrorist groups.
The Movement
Through the looking glass of Sept. 11, it seemed ironic that the Americans and Osama bin Laden had fought on the same side against the Soviets in Afghanistan — as if the Americans had somehow created the Bin Laden monster by providing arms and cash to the Arabs. The complex at Tora Bora where Qaeda members hid had been created with the help of the C.I.A. as a base for the Afghans fighting the Soviets.
Bin Laden himself described the fight in Afghanistan this way: “There I received volunteers who came from the Saudi kingdom and from all over the Arab and Muslim countries. I set up my first camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.”
In truth, however, the American contact was not directly with Bin Laden; both worked through the middlemen of the Pakistani intelligence service.
In the revisionism of the Bin Laden myth, his defenders would later say that he had not worked with the Americans but that he had only tolerated them as a means to his end. As proof, they insisted he had made anti-American statements as early as 1980.
Bin Laden would say in retrospect that he was always aware who his enemies were.
“For us, the idea was not to get involved more than necessary in the fight against the Russians, which was the business of the Americans, but rather to show our solidarity with our Islamist brothers,” he told a French journalist in 1995. “I discovered that it was not enough to fight in Afghanistan, but that we had to fight on all fronts against Communism or Western oppression. The urgent thing was Communism, but the next target was America.”
Afghanistan had infused the movement with confidence.
“Most of what we benefited from was that the myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims,” Bin Laden later told an interviewer. “Slumber and fatigue vanished, and so was the terror which the U.S. would use in its media by attributing itself superpower status, or which the Soviet Union used by attributing itself as a superpower.”
He returned to Saudi Arabia, welcomed as a hero, and took up the family business. But Saudi royals grew increasingly wary of him as he became more outspoken against the government.
The breaking point — for Bin Laden and for the Saudis — came when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Bin Laden volunteered to the Saudis that the men and equipment he had used in Afghanistan could defend the kingdom. He was “shocked,” a family friend said, to learn that the Americans — the enemy, in his mind — would defend it instead. To him, it was the height of American arrogance.
The United States, he told an interviewer later, “has started to look at itself as a master of this world and established what it calls the new world order.”
The Saudi government restricted him to Jidda, fearing that his outspokenness would offend the Americans. Bin Laden fled to Sudan, which was offering itself as a sort of haven for terrorists, and there he began setting up legitimate businesses that would help finance Al Qaeda. He also built his reserves, in 1992, paying for about 500 mujahedeen who had been expelled from Pakistan to come work for him.
The Terrorism
It was during that time that it is believed he honed his resolve against the United States.
Within Al Qaeda, he argued that the organization should put aside its differences with Shiite terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the better to concentrate on the common enemy: the United States. He called for attacks against American forces in the Saudi peninsula and in the Horn of Africa.
On Dec. 29, 1992, a bomb exploded in a hotel in Aden, Yemen, where American troops had been staying while on their way to Somalia. The troops had already left, and the bomb killed two Austrian tourists. American intelligence officials later came to believe that that was the first Bin Laden attack.
On Feb. 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in a truck driven into the underground garage at the World Trade Center, killing six people. Bin Laden later praised Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of the bombing. In October of that year in Somalia, 18 American service members were killed — some of their bodies dragged through the streets — while on a peacekeeping mission; Bin Laden was almost giddy about the deaths.
After leaving Afghanistan, the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle, thinking that the Americans were “like the Russians,” he told an interviewer.
“The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat,” he said. “And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda about being the world leader and the leader of the new world order, and after a few blows, they forgot about this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat.”
By 1994, Bin Laden had established new training camps in Sudan, but he became a man without a country. The Saudi government froze his assets and revoked his citizenship. His family, which had become rich on its relations to the royals, denounced him publicly after he was caught smuggling weapons from Yemen.
This only seemed to make him more zealous. He sent an open letter to King Fahd outlining the sins of the Saudi government and calling for a campaign of guerrilla attacks to drive Americans from Saudi Arabia. Three months later, in November 1995, a truck bomb exploded at a Saudi National Guard training center operated by the United States in Riyadh, killing seven people. That year, Belgian investigators found a kind of how-to manual for terrorists on a CD. The preface dedicated it to Bin Laden, the hero of the holy war.
The next May, when the men accused of the Riyadh bombing were beheaded in Riyadh’s main square, they were forced to read a confession in which they acknowledged the connection to Bin Laden. The next month, June 1996, a truck bomb destroyed Khobar Towers, an American military residence in Dhahran. It killed 19 soldiers.
Bin Laden fled to Afghanistan that summer after Sudan expelled him under pressure from the Americans and Saudis, and he forged an alliance with Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban. In August 1996, from the Afghan mountain stronghold of Tora Bora, Bin Laden issued his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Who Occupy the Land of the Two Holy Mosques.”
“Muslims burn with anger at America,” it read. The presence of American forces in the Persian Gulf states “will provoke the people of the country and induces aggression on their religion, feelings, and prides and pushes them to take up armed struggle against the invaders occupying the land.”
The imbalance of power between American forces and Muslim forces demanded a new kind of fighting, he wrote, “in other words, to initiate a guerrilla war, where sons of the nation, not the military forces, take part in it.”
That same month in New York City, a federal grand jury began meeting to consider charges against Bin Laden. Disputes arose among prosecutors and American law enforcement and intelligence officers about which attacks against American interests could truly be attributed to Bin Laden — whether in fact he had, as an indictment eventually charged, trained and paid the men who killed the Americans in Somalia.
His foot soldiers, in testimony, offered differing pictures of Bin Laden’s actual involvement. In some cases he could be as aloof as any boss with thousands of employees. Yet one of the men convicted of the bombings of the embassies said that Bin Laden had been so involved that he was the one who had pointed at surveillance photographs to direct where the truck bomb should be driven.
Bin Laden was becoming more emboldened, summoning Western reporters to his hide-outs in Afghanistan to relay his message: He would wage war against the United States and its allies if Washington did not remove its troops from the gulf region.
“So we tell the Americans as a people,” he told ABC News, “and we tell the mothers of soldiers and American mothers in general that if they value their lives and the lives of their children, to find a nationalistic government that will look after their interests and not the interests of the Jews. The continuation of tyranny will bring the fight to America, as Ramzi Yousef and others did. This is my message to the American people: to look for a serious government that looks out for their interests and does not attack others, their lands, or their honor.”
In February 1998, he issued the edict calling for attacks on Americans anywhere in the world, declaring it an “individual duty” for all Muslims.
In June, the grand jury convened two years earlier issued its indictment, charging Bin Laden with conspiracy to attack the United States abroad, for heading Al Qaeda and for financing terrorist activities around the world.
On Aug. 7, the eighth anniversary of the United States’ order sending troops into the gulf region, two bombs exploded simultaneously at the American Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The Nairobi bomb killed 213 people and wounded 4,500; the bomb in Dar es Salaam killed 11 and wounded 85.
The United States retaliated two weeks later with strikes against what were thought to be terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, which officials contended— erroneously, it turned out — was producing chemical weapons for Al Qaeda.
Bin Laden had trapped the United States in an escalating spiral of tension, where any defensive or retaliatory actions would affirm the evils he said had provoked the attacks in the first place. In an interview with Time magazine that December, he brushed aside President Clinton’s threats against him, and referred to himself in the third person, as if recognizing or encouraging the notion that he had become larger than life.
“To call us Enemy No. 1 or Enemy No. 2 does not hurt us,” he said. “Osama bin Laden is confident that the Islamic nation will carry out its duty.”
In January 1999, the United States government issued a superseding indictment that affirmed the power Bin Laden had sought all along, declaring Al Qaeda an international terrorist organization in a conspiracy to kill American citizens.
The Aftermath
After the attacks of Sept. 11, Bin Laden did what had become routine: He took to Arab television. He appeared, in his statement to the world, to be at the top of his powers. President Bush had declared that the nations of the world were either with the Americans or against them on terrorism; Bin Laden held up a mirror image, declaring the world divided between infidels and believers.
Bin Laden had never before claimed or accepted responsibility for terrorist attacks. In a videotape found in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar weeks after the attacks, he firmly took responsibility for — and reveled in — the horror of Sept. 11.
“We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower,” he said. “We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all.”
In the videotape, showing him talking to followers nearly two months after the attacks, Bin Laden smiles, hungers to hear more approval and notes proudly that the attacks let loose a surge of interest in Islam around the world.
He explained that the hijackers on the planes — “the brothers who conducted the operation” — did not know what the mission would be until just before they boarded the planes. They knew only that they were going to the United States on a martyrdom mission.
Bin Laden had long eluded the allied forces in pursuit of him, moving, it was said, under cover of night with his wives and children, apparently between mountain caves. Yet he was determined that if he had to die, he, too, would die a martyr’s death.
His greatest hope, he told supporters, was that if he died at the hands of the Americans, the Muslim world would rise up and defeat the nation that had killed him.
2011年4月26日 星期二
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?
©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.
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