Interview with Momus, Part I
Nick Currie waxes philosophic on culture, politics, and The American Night
Two weeks ago, Thessaly and I had the privilege of interviewing our favorite blogger, Nick Currie (or Momus), between his rounds as an “unreliable tour guide” at the Whitney Biennial. Although we love him for his blogging, Currie is also a musician, artist, and journalist with a following throughout Europe, the US, and Japan. After being introduced to Currie’s blog Click Opera a few years ago by my friend Ezra, both Thessaly and I have been regular readers and were thrilled that Currie was leaving his home in Berlin to do the Biennial in New York.
On Wednesday morning, anticipating a line, Thessaly and I set out for the Whitney at the early hour of 10am. Forgetting that as “members” (i.e. Columbia students) we didn’t have to wait in line, we had plenty of time to circle through the Whitney before meeting our interviewee. Thessaly had emailed Currie the night before to arrange a time to meet, but as it turned out, he had stopped for a snack and arrived later than we had expected, giving us time to pick up (or perhaps the reverse is more accurate) a new friend along the way. We sat in the lobby chatting with our new friend, Matias, for a few minutes before we spotted Momus who, looking like a dashing uncle in a Gatsby hat and gold-buttoned blazer, graciously took us on a “tour” before the interview.
The theme of this year's Biennial is "Day For Night," which is borrowed from the American title of Francois Truffaut's 1973 film, La Nuit Americaine. The title refers to the cinematic technique of shooting night scenes during the day using high contrast and a blue filter to create the illusion of night. At this year's Biennial, the phrase becomes a metaphor for the state of contemporary American culture and art. Curator Chrissie Iles described the theme as follows, "'Day for Night' explores the artifice of American culture in what could be described as a pre-Enlightenment moment, in which culture is preoccupied with the irrational, the religious, the dark, the erotic, and the violent, filtered through a sense of flawed beauty." Indeed, the exhibit, as well as Currie's commentary, was filled with subtle (and not-so-subtle) criticism of Western culture. From the fake obituaries of personalities like Nicole Kidman, Jeff Koons, and Bill Clinton, to the giant black and white portrait of what looked to me like an aging mafia Don lost in contemplation, the show seemed keen to expose the darker underbelly of mainstream American culture.
Currie’s technique was to surreptitiously glide through the gallery, darting out “like a white rabbit” to deliver philosophic witticisms through a muted bullhorn, then slip around the corner before his presence in the room could solidify. His commentary ranged from the playfully humorous, (“I went to the doctor and said, ‘doctor, I have this disease where everyone can hear my thoughts.’ He told me, ‘that’s not a disease, that’s a bullhorn’”) to the politically trenchant (“There are too many people talking at you through bullhorns, so I’m going to leave this room now”). In the elevators, he informed people about the possibility of hopping from biennial to biennial all over the world, “It would take exactly two years. Then you could start at the beginning again.” Reactions generally fell somewhere between amusement and confusion, but perhaps the most positive responses were from the security guards who seemed very appreciative of the entertainment.
After the tour we went down to the café for a cup of tea and an interview. Currie was very eloquent and graciously tolerated our slightly haphazard interviewing technique. Despite his mildly objectifying description of us as "blog babes" on Click Opera the next day, we found him on the whole quite likeable and were especially charmed by his lovely accent. Because the interview was quite long (and even this version is abridged considerably), Thessaly suggested that we divide it into two posts. So here is Part I:
Thessaly La Force: What have you thought of the Whitney Biennial so far?
Nick Currie: Well that’s a touchy question. That’s probably the toughest question to ask. In a way, it would be the ideal situation if I didn’t like it too much because I have to criticize it. I have to be a little bit sarcastic and use it as raw material. If I was really in awe of how wonderful everything was I would probably be a bit toothless; I wouldn’t have the critical distance that I need.
TL: Are most of the artists American?
NC: Yeah, this is the first year they opened it up to Europeans as well. I’m a European artist, but I only ever show in New York. I don’t have any art reputation in Europe at all. I’m kind of almost an American artist.
TL: Do you think a European audience would respond differently to your bullhorn technique?
NC: I don’t know. But I do think, especially in the last five years, America has become a place where everybody has a lot of keys dangling from their belts; they’ve got bullhorns and they’ve got guns, there’s a certain kind of authoritarianism that’s crept in. People are used to being shouted at. There is this kind of paranoia with which bullhorns fit in quite well. And I’m kind of playing on that.
TL: You mentioned how America has changed. We were curious, having lived in New York for pretty much four years straight, but also having come from other parts of the country previously, how have you seen New York change in the past half decade or so?
NC: I feel like it’s changed faster than anywhere I’ve ever been. The first time, coming here in 1996 after living in Paris, the whole thing – reading Wired magazine, being interested in the digital culture thing – was the future of humanity, as far as we could see in the nineties. And globalization of course, as well. Those two things: the Internet and globalization. Huge budget surpluses and all the rest of it, the richest country the world had ever produced with the biggest profits. And then, suddenly it plunges into huge deficits, war, Bush, corruption, a kind of fascism-lite. So I feel profoundly uncomfortable here now.
TL: You don’t really seem to have very much of a strong national identity. You live in different parts of the world and you don’t seem to identify with the nation-state. In our education we hear a lot about how things like globalization are eroding the nation-state; but at the same time, I think the nation state is still a very pervasive and real factor – they’re what build the roads for people, they’re what provide schools for people. We were just wondering what you thought of that debate.
NC: I do feel quite Scottish. I mean I don’t feel particularly British, but I do have a micro-national identity, which is that Britain is made up of Scotland, and Wales, etc. But I could also say that I identify with Celtic culture which could be Scottish or Irish or it could even be north French- the Celts went all over. Or else you could say I have an elective affinity with Japanese culture, so that’s my culture of destination.
I think when you leave your country you can pick and choose the things you want to remember, but you can also selectively replace your culture with elements of someone else’s culture. So I now feel like I’ve Japan-ized myself - selectively. I’m just building a synthetic supra-national identity. But, that does depend, paradoxically, on there being fixed national identities that don’t change very much. So in a way it’s a privilege: 10%, maybe 20% of people can do that, but we do rely on the 80% of people who don’t do that to stay at home and keep an identity which is national. It’s a difficult balance you know, if it was just a huge melting pot you would lose national identity, you would lose national cuisines for instance.
I keep coming back to this idea of essentialism; I’m quite positive about essentialism. I like the idea that you can say something about Jewish people, Scottish people, Japanese people and it would kind of be true. Although, of course, for any given Japanese person it might not be true. In a way, every culture aspires to being easily stereotyped. And there is a lot of reaction against stereotypes. A lot of people think that you can be whatever you want to be as an individual, and that we’re all the same as humans. Those two levels, the level of the universal ‘everybody,’ and the level of the particular, are fine. But anything between those two levels, people are very nervous about and start to use this word “essentialism”.
In the early days of identity politics the whole point was to say, ‘we are a group, here’s our flag, here’s our movement, here’s our agenda, we are gay people, we are black people, we are whatever.’ That was identity politics. But then the second stage of that was to say, ‘lets not talk about our differences.’ And that threw away the bad difference, it threw away some of the stigma which was attached to those movements, but it also threw away the idea of the good difference.
I’m really interested in this idea of the ‘good difference’ and how it operates on a group level. I think it’s a danger that we throw away this idea of there being groups which are good because they’re different. And that sometimes gets described as exoticism or orie
ntalism, depending on who you apply it to, because it’s a romantic idea that there are groups who are different and from whom we can learn. The idea that we can learn from other people, from their culture which they have arrived at collectively, is unfashionable –well it’s unfashionable in the US. I guess the American experience has been that culture is synthetic and there are all these different groups which lose their group identity slowly, over time. I think the Europeans have a different idea of there being recognizable cultures that keep their identity over time. Anyway that’s one of my pet subjects.
(Photos: Jeff Goldberg, Libby Rosof, Eremi Amabebe, Promotional Cover, Libby Rosof)
Two weeks ago, Thessaly and I had the privilege of interviewing our favorite blogger, Nick Currie (or Momus), between his rounds as an “unreliable tour guide” at the Whitney Biennial. Although we love him for his blogging, Currie is also a musician, artist, and journalist with a following throughout Europe, the US, and Japan. After being introduced to Currie’s blog Click Opera a few years ago by my friend Ezra, both Thessaly and I have been regular readers and were thrilled that Currie was leaving his home in Berlin to do the Biennial in New York.On Wednesday morning, anticipating a line, Thessaly and I set out for the Whitney at the early hour of 10am. Forgetting that as “members” (i.e. Columbia students) we didn’t have to wait in line, we had plenty of time to circle through the Whitney before meeting our interviewee. Thessaly had emailed Currie the night before to arrange a time to meet, but as it turned out, he had stopped for a snack and arrived later than we had expected, giving us time to pick up (or perhaps the reverse is more accurate) a new friend along the way. We sat in the lobby chatting with our new friend, Matias, for a few minutes before we spotted Momus who, looking like a dashing uncle in a Gatsby hat and gold-buttoned blazer, graciously took us on a “tour” before the interview.
The theme of this year's Biennial is "Day For Night," which is borrowed from the American title of Francois Truffaut's 1973 film, La Nuit Americaine. The title refers to the cinematic technique of shooting night scenes during the day using high contrast and a blue filter to create the illusion of night. At this year's Biennial, the phrase becomes a metaphor for the state of contemporary American culture and art. Curator Chrissie Iles described the theme as follows, "'Day for Night' explores the artifice of American culture in what could be described as a pre-Enlightenment moment, in which culture is preoccupied with the irrational, the religious, the dark, the erotic, and the violent, filtered through a sense of flawed beauty." Indeed, the exhibit, as well as Currie's commentary, was filled with subtle (and not-so-subtle) criticism of Western culture. From the fake obituaries of personalities like Nicole Kidman, Jeff Koons, and Bill Clinton, to the giant black and white portrait of what looked to me like an aging mafia Don lost in contemplation, the show seemed keen to expose the darker underbelly of mainstream American culture.
Currie’s technique was to surreptitiously glide through the gallery, darting out “like a white rabbit” to deliver philosophic witticisms through a muted bullhorn, then slip around the corner before his presence in the room could solidify. His commentary ranged from the playfully humorous, (“I went to the doctor and said, ‘doctor, I have this disease where everyone can hear my thoughts.’ He told me, ‘that’s not a disease, that’s a bullhorn’”) to the politically trenchant (“There are too many people talking at you through bullhorns, so I’m going to leave this room now”). In the elevators, he informed people about the possibility of hopping from biennial to biennial all over the world, “It would take exactly two years. Then you could start at the beginning again.” Reactions generally fell somewhere between amusement and confusion, but perhaps the most positive responses were from the security guards who seemed very appreciative of the entertainment.
After the tour we went down to the café for a cup of tea and an interview. Currie was very eloquent and graciously tolerated our slightly haphazard interviewing technique. Despite his mildly objectifying description of us as "blog babes" on Click Opera the next day, we found him on the whole quite likeable and were especially charmed by his lovely accent. Because the interview was quite long (and even this version is abridged considerably), Thessaly suggested that we divide it into two posts. So here is Part I:Thessaly La Force: What have you thought of the Whitney Biennial so far?
Nick Currie: Well that’s a touchy question. That’s probably the toughest question to ask. In a way, it would be the ideal situation if I didn’t like it too much because I have to criticize it. I have to be a little bit sarcastic and use it as raw material. If I was really in awe of how wonderful everything was I would probably be a bit toothless; I wouldn’t have the critical distance that I need.
TL: Are most of the artists American?
NC: Yeah, this is the first year they opened it up to Europeans as well. I’m a European artist, but I only ever show in New York. I don’t have any art reputation in Europe at all. I’m kind of almost an American artist.
TL: Do you think a European audience would respond differently to your bullhorn technique?
NC: I don’t know. But I do think, especially in the last five years, America has become a place where everybody has a lot of keys dangling from their belts; they’ve got bullhorns and they’ve got guns, there’s a certain kind of authoritarianism that’s crept in. People are used to being shouted at. There is this kind of paranoia with which bullhorns fit in quite well. And I’m kind of playing on that.
TL: You mentioned how America has changed. We were curious, having lived in New York for pretty much four years straight, but also having come from other parts of the country previously, how have you seen New York change in the past half decade or so?
NC: I feel like it’s changed faster than anywhere I’ve ever been. The first time, coming here in 1996 after living in Paris, the whole thing – reading Wired magazine, being interested in the digital culture thing – was the future of humanity, as far as we could see in the nineties. And globalization of course, as well. Those two things: the Internet and globalization. Huge budget surpluses and all the rest of it, the richest country the world had ever produced with the biggest profits. And then, suddenly it plunges into huge deficits, war, Bush, corruption, a kind of fascism-lite. So I feel profoundly uncomfortable here now.
TL: You don’t really seem to have very much of a strong national identity. You live in different parts of the world and you don’t seem to identify with the nation-state. In our education we hear a lot about how things like globalization are eroding the nation-state; but at the same time, I think the nation state is still a very pervasive and real factor – they’re what build the roads for people, they’re what provide schools for people. We were just wondering what you thought of that debate.NC: I do feel quite Scottish. I mean I don’t feel particularly British, but I do have a micro-national identity, which is that Britain is made up of Scotland, and Wales, etc. But I could also say that I identify with Celtic culture which could be Scottish or Irish or it could even be north French- the Celts went all over. Or else you could say I have an elective affinity with Japanese culture, so that’s my culture of destination.
I think when you leave your country you can pick and choose the things you want to remember, but you can also selectively replace your culture with elements of someone else’s culture. So I now feel like I’ve Japan-ized myself - selectively. I’m just building a synthetic supra-national identity. But, that does depend, paradoxically, on there being fixed national identities that don’t change very much. So in a way it’s a privilege: 10%, maybe 20% of people can do that, but we do rely on the 80% of people who don’t do that to stay at home and keep an identity which is national. It’s a difficult balance you know, if it was just a huge melting pot you would lose national identity, you would lose national cuisines for instance.I keep coming back to this idea of essentialism; I’m quite positive about essentialism. I like the idea that you can say something about Jewish people, Scottish people, Japanese people and it would kind of be true. Although, of course, for any given Japanese person it might not be true. In a way, every culture aspires to being easily stereotyped. And there is a lot of reaction against stereotypes. A lot of people think that you can be whatever you want to be as an individual, and that we’re all the same as humans. Those two levels, the level of the universal ‘everybody,’ and the level of the particular, are fine. But anything between those two levels, people are very nervous about and start to use this word “essentialism”.
In the early days of identity politics the whole point was to say, ‘we are a group, here’s our flag, here’s our movement, here’s our agenda, we are gay people, we are black people, we are whatever.’ That was identity politics. But then the second stage of that was to say, ‘lets not talk about our differences.’ And that threw away the bad difference, it threw away some of the stigma which was attached to those movements, but it also threw away the idea of the good difference.
I’m really interested in this idea of the ‘good difference’ and how it operates on a group level. I think it’s a danger that we throw away this idea of there being groups which are good because they’re different. And that sometimes gets described as exoticism or orie
ntalism, depending on who you apply it to, because it’s a romantic idea that there are groups who are different and from whom we can learn. The idea that we can learn from other people, from their culture which they have arrived at collectively, is unfashionable –well it’s unfashionable in the US. I guess the American experience has been that culture is synthetic and there are all these different groups which lose their group identity slowly, over time. I think the Europeans have a different idea of there being recognizable cultures that keep their identity over time. Anyway that’s one of my pet subjects.(Photos: Jeff Goldberg, Libby Rosof, Eremi Amabebe, Promotional Cover, Libby Rosof)
posted by eremi | 2:58 PM
7 Comments:
perhaps this was unintentional, but i find it one of your sentences in this post very ironic. While we critique him for objectifying us as "blogbabes", we are "charmed" by the novelty of his accent.
Thanks for the interview! It reads well, I think.
And yes, how dare you like my accent! I'm so much more than a pretty voice, you know!
"Blogbabes" was a slightly ironic post-PC appellation, used with a (patched) wink to my readers. But I do believe Oscar Wilde had something when he said "It is only the superficial who do not judge by appearances." I feel it would have been an omission not to point out that you were both very pleasing to look at, although I suppose the photo did that work on its own.
To anyone who's at all aesthetically motivated, beauty has to be important, and has to be noted. It's also a manifestation of "the good difference" I talk so much about. Perhaps what disturbs us is that beauty is not equally shared out, and that even when it's present it's not the whole story. There's not much we can do about the unequal distribution of beauty (although plastic surgeons and cosmetic dentists battle the problem daily), but we can address the partiality of accounts which don't go beyond it.
For instance, I could add that you're also fabulous interviewers and interview-transcribers, but that sounds even more reductive! I mean, given the choice between being a beautiful woman and being a good interview transcriber, I know which I'd choose...
stop intellectualising! you were all flirting dammit!
Excuse me, but I followed that link and you're beautiful too! Is this some sort of conspiracy? Is something brilliant happening here?
I agree with you, momus, but I will say that I suspect (and I acknowledge this may be a bit unfair) men are perhaps a bit more comfortable being reduced to superficial attributes than women and other minorites. Considering that today discriminatory, PC, pseudo-PC, and post-PC attitudes exist side by side, I think we (myself included) are often a bit hasty in our embrace of "candid" speech.
That said, you are completely right that there is nothing wrong with appreciating people's superficial attributes. I just think a bit of careful wording can go a long way when you are on the receiving end.
Anyway, "blogbabes" has a certain 21st-century-meets-Reagan-era-pop-culture
appeal which is hard not to love on some level.
Well, it contains both "babes" and "blog", in other words both body and mind. I'm sure I'll come back here one day to find you've reappropriated the term and are using it instead of "2nd Law". And your ratings will be up. Way up.
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