Hans Ulrich Obrist: To begin at the beginning, how did you start writing?
Hakim Bey: I always wanted to be a writer, an artist, or possibly a cartoonist. Or a pirate. Those were my ambitions. But I didn’t have enough talent for cartooning. And I’ve discovered that art is very hard to do when you’re not sitting in one place. I don’t know if everybody finds this to be true. But when I took up a life of travel in the 1960s, I gave up art because writing is so much easier to do when you’re traveling. But I always felt equally called to all of these things. It’s a question of fate. Fate made me a writer more than anything else.
HUO: And how did you begin traveling?
HB: Well, when I was a child I was of course fascinated by adventure stories, figures like Richard Halliburton and other world travelers who wrote books for children, and National Geographic magazine—I inherited a whole closet full of National Geographic issues going back to 1911 from a friend. And then when I grew up, I became interested in Eastern Mysticism, the way everybody began to be in the 1960s. I specifically wondered whether Sufism was still a living reality or whether it was just something in books. There was no way of telling at that time. There were no Sufis practicing in America, or at least none that we could discover. I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and then we had May ’68, and that revolution failed. It clearly wasn’t going to happen. So I decided to make my trip to the East and discover whether Sufism was a living reality or not. And, of course, it turned out that it was. And so were a lot of other things that I hadn’t even anticipated, like tantric Hinduism, which I also became fascinated by while I was in India. So that all lasted from 1968 to 1980 or ‘81, when I went to Southeast Asia. I also went to Indonesia for a short, but very influential, trip. And after 1970 I lived in Iran, where I wrote criticism for the Shiraz Festival of the Arts. That’s how I got to meet Peter Brook and Robert Wilson and all the people that I later worked with or was influenced by. I also met an Indonesian artist named Sardono Kusumo, who I later found again in Jakarta when I was traveling in Southeast Asia. He gave me the names and addresses of all these uncles everywhere in Java who were all involved in dance, puppetry, or mysticism; a fantastic family. So I traveled around Java from uncle to uncle, and performance to performance. And they have a special kind of mysticism there called Kebatinan, which is kind of like Sufism but not quite. It’s different, and it would take a long time to explain why.
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HUO: Or Sweden in the 1960s when Pontus Hultén was head of Moderna Museet. Around ‘68, ‘69, and ’70, basically everything happened at the Moderna Museet, to the point where if there was nothing happening late at night, the guards would begin to wonder whether something had gone wrong. It wasn’t the other way around.
HB: We can find examples in Scandinavia during that brief decade or two of social democracy. It would be hard to find other examples—I certainly don’t think we’re going to find any in modern capitalist America or England. But now, you have an advantage. You can tell people you’re a curator and that what you’re doing is an art exhibition. And then they understand it in a certain way, say, as a temporary project. But if you told people that you’re founding an institution, then their reactions are going to be very different, right?
HUO: Exactly, and the other question is whether the establishment of institutions runs counter to the notions of autonomy—even if they’re your own institutions.
HB: That’s right. So you can use this notion of a permanent revolution—I mean, I did work for many years at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado. It was founded by Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa. At a certain point, it looked to me like they were headed for that moment when the institution begins to change, to stiffen up. And I told them that that was the moment they should have a revolution—get rid of all these buildings, fire all the bureaucrats, split off from the other departments, go up into the mountains, live in tents, do something weird. But of course they couldn’t do it. They were already getting old enough to worry about their health insurance and retirement pensions. And when that kind of thinking starts, forget it. It’s over.
HUO: How do you see the future? Do you think civilization will survive the next century?
HB: I don’t have a very good record with the crystal ball, and I don’t know what to predict exactly. Obviously one of the worst predictions you can make is that things continue as they are, only becoming more and more intensified, like a J. G. Ballard-type future where the whole universe is one big shopping mall. That would be the worst. Any catastrophe might be a relief compared to that. But on the other hand, catastrophes are bad for you and me, and we don’t want to get caught in one. It might be good for history, but would be awful for individuals, especially artists, who never had that much going for them in the first place. I’m not one of these people waiting for the big ecological catastrophe. I don’t want to see it happen. I’m still hopeful. And in the end, what else can you do? You have to have, as Ernst Bloch said, revolutionary hope.
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