Connecting Cultures w/ Cité Internationale des Arts' Exec. Director BÉNÉDICTE ALLIOT

Connecting Cultures w/ Cité Internationale des Arts' Exec. Director BÉNÉDICTE ALLIOT

Director General · Cité Internationale des Arts

The Cité Internationale des Arts was founded in 1965. It welcomes artists from all over the world, including France, and it's been doing that ever since, on a regular and growing basis since 1965. It hosts 326 artists, writers, curators, filmmakers, musicians, etc. 326 people at the same time on two sites.

Exploring Femininity & The Spirituality of Form with Artist PINAREE SANPITAK
Interdisciplinary Approaches in the Humanities with DAVID PALUMBO-LIU - Highlights

Interdisciplinary Approaches in the Humanities with DAVID PALUMBO-LIU - Highlights

Writer · Activist · Comparative Literature Professor

Students come in already knowing what they want to do. And so they've already excluded and taken out of consideration all sorts of options, which is exactly the opposite of what a university is supposed to do. It's supposed to give you a broad set of possible ways of thinking about life and training your mind and your talents. And so I like to open that up more for students.

Writing for Change: DAVID PALUMBO-LIU on Advocacy, Scholarship & the Role of the Public Intellectual
Understanding LEONARDO DA VINCI with Art Historian JACQUES FRANCK - Highlights

Understanding LEONARDO DA VINCI with Art Historian JACQUES FRANCK - Highlights

Painter and Art Historian for Louvre Museum & Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA
Interview Highlights

Well, I have always considered Leonardo as the perfect artist, and more or less like a father. The real master is a kind of a father figure. So, to help me understand better, improve myself, know more, make the proper efforts and listen to someone who is so knowledgeable that in listening to what he says you will make real progress. I was listening to Maria Callas some time ago, because when she came to Paris in 1968 she was in the Opéra Paris, and she was in a concert. Music was in her psychology. In Leonardo, art was in his psychology, as an expression of the mystery of life in him. The same in Callas. I'm always observing artists performing because it's very interesting to observe. She was living in another dimension. As if she were connected to an invisible source, and that invisible source suddenly gave her genius. On top of all she'd been learning technically, so she had the art, the architectural setting of the technique. So she couldn't fail, because of course what she was singing was very difficult, but also, suddenly, life came into it.

Leonardo at 500: A Conversation with Art Historian & Da Vinci Specialist JACQUES FRANCK

Leonardo at 500: A Conversation with Art Historian & Da Vinci Specialist JACQUES FRANCK

Painter and Art Historian for Louvre Museum & Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA

Da Vinci certainly must have been very well organized because you can't make so much work without a base in the organization of your life which is very strict. You can't go and penetrate such high intellectual spheres unless you're a man of good. Do you understand what I mean? To have some ideal of perfection, beauty, and humanity inside yourself…Art is art, and that's all. To me, art is the expression of beauty, and beauty is something like the sun, shall we say. An absolute.

Art as Protest: FX HARSONO on Identity & History

Art as Protest: FX HARSONO on Identity & History

FX Harsono, one of Indonesia’s most revered contemporary artists, has been a central figure of the Indonesian art scene for over 40 years. In 1975, he was among a group of young artists who founded Indonesia’s Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement), which emphasized an experimental, conceptual approach, the use of everyday materials, and engagement with social and political issues. Over the course of recent decades that have seen enormous transformations in Indonesia, Harsono has continuously explored the role of the artist in society, in particular his relationship to history. During Indonesia’s dictatorial Suharto regime (1967-98), his installation and performance works were powerfully eloquent acts of protest against an oppressive state apparatus. The fall of the regime in 1998, which triggered rioting and widespread violence, mainly against Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority, prompted an introspective turn in Harsono’s artistic practice. He embarked on an ongoing investigation of his own family history and the position of minorities in society, especially his own Chinese-Indonesian community. The recovery of buried or repressed histories, cultures, and identities – and the part that the artist can play in this process – have remained a significant preoccupation. Through looking into his own past, Harsono has touched on concerns that resonate globally, foregrounding fundamental issues that are central to the formation of group and personal identities in our rapidly changing world.

Courtesy of the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And then I think after the fall of Suharto in 1998, art historians and commentators have said that your body of works began to turn inward, and your portrait of yourself began to make an appearance in your works, for example, in My Body as a Field (2002) and Open Your Mouth (2001). What led to your turn inwards and your examining of your personal history as a Chinese minority in Indonesia? 

FX HARSONO

After 1998, the political situation changed totally. We called it Reformasi (reformation). The culture also changed. A lot of things changed. During the New Order of Suharto, we only had 4 TV stations. One was government-controlled, and the other three were controlled by Suharto and his sons and daughters. After 1998, suddenly a lot more TV stations were developed, so people had more freedom to speak, and to criticise the government. The media or news can do so. I made a work about the transition, called Open Your Mouth. Everyone can speak, why won’t you open your mouth, but I realised that even with the freedom to speak, and lots of people are criticising the government, but the talk and criticism is no good, it had no value. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Is that why all the mouths in the work are all white spaces? 

HARSONO

It means there is no content in the speech.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Maybe they don’t even know what to say?

HARSONO

Yes. Blank Spot on my TV (2003) is another work I made. Every evening when I came back from the office, I saw the news on TV. Very interesting, and everybody can criticise, so I documented what’s on TV with my camera. I selected some and presented it as an artwork. I placed the photograph of the TV as a white spot on the TV, so that it looked as if all the activists have disappeared.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It was also at this time that you came across some of the photographs your father took of the victims of...

HARSONO

That’s later. 2009. Before that, I started to question myself. What do I want to do now that the situation has changed so much that people have the freedom to criticise the government? 

During this time, I realised that I’m Chinese and a minority in Indonesia, and have experienced a lot of discrimination. I’ve been focussing so much on the government and its acts of suppression, but I’ve personally experienced a lot of discrimination, so I felt that I wanted to talk about being Chinese. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You have a Chinese name?

HARSONO

When I was 18 years old in 1996, I had to choose between being an Indonesian citizen or being a Chinese citizen. In Indonesia, a baby born Chinese isn’t automatically Indonesian. When he or she reaches 18, he or she has to choose. When I chose Indonesian citizenship, the new rule after 1965 was that you had to choose an Indonesian name. Prior to 1998, the school was prohibited from teaching Chinese as a language. Chinese people couldn’t practice Chinese rituals or culture. This changed completely in 1998. Schools could teach Mandarin. Chinese New Year became a holiday and Chinese people could celebrate it. They could go to the temple to pray. I realised I had a prior Chinese name. I started to learn again how to write my Chinese name and I made a performance using my Chinese name. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What is that name? 

HARSONO

Ho Fong Wen (in Mandarin).  Or Oh Hong Bun (in Hokkien). I changed it to Harsono. FX stands for Francis Xavier.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Do you know what your Chinese name means? 

HARSONO

Fong means harvest. Wen means literature. So it means harvest of arts, culture and literature. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So you were always meant to be in the arts. 

HARSONO

(laughing) Yes, it does look like I was born to be an artist. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Writing in the Rain (2012) then becomes a very powerful work, because there you are consistently continuously writing your name in Chinese using black ink. And then it all gets away by rain. What was in your mind when you were performing that work? 

HARSONO

I want to say I have a Chinese name, and I want to show that in the video performance. I write it again and again. But the rain comes and washes all the text away from the glass. It means for me that even though I have a Chinese name, for 32 years I used my new name. People know me as Harsono. I exist as Harsono. I’m thinking my Chinese name is unnecessary and not remembered.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What’s interesting for me experiencing watching the video of Writing in the Rain and then encountering a different work of yours Pilgrimage into History (2013) where you made rubbings of Chinese names from a mass gravesite. There’s a congruence between the two works. They echo each other, and it’s a troubling echo, a sad one. This rewriting of the names is something you keep coming back to. Different works you’ve produced have this aspect of the writing of the Chinese names. What draws you to this, that you keep coming back to it again and again?

HARSONO

The work you mention Pilgrimage to History is a textile rubbing from Chinese characters engraved on tombstones. The work started from my research into the massacre of Chinese people during the 1960s. I started this research because of my father’s photographs. He started to make documentation about the killings of the Chinese people in my hometown. I also visited some mass graves in other places, and when I saw them, there were tombstones which had Chinese names of the people who were buried in these mass graves. I thought about how I could make a work from this. I could take a photograph, but somehow it’s just a photograph. I wanted something that was part of this mass grave. It then occurred to me I could make a textile rubbing, it would be a trace of the original, and it would be part of the gravestone. When I started making the rubbings, I realised it was also my pilgrimage. It’s the way I make a pilgrimage to the victims. So I made a documentation of my performance and also as part of my journey of pilgrimage. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So, the writing of your personal name becomes part of the collective identity of being Chinese Indonesian, and in the larger fabric of Indonesia, it’s very much tied to this erasure by the Indonesian Government of the Chinese identity.

HARSONO

Yes. If someone has a baby and gives it a name, it’s not just a name, it’s a hope and a prayer from the parent to the baby. A name is a prayer – the parent is saying I hope that you will become a good person, or a rich person, or a wise person. So when the government forces a person to change his or her name, it’s erasing this hope and prayer of the parents, and replacing it with a new hope and prayer. A hope from the government, not the parent. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I like that. A beautiful way to say it. That your name is a prayer. So how does it feel then to have your work shown in Times Square NY on a major digital billboard where you’re writing your name in front of all these New York lights and glamour?

HARSONO

I was fairly shocked at the time. It’s amazing. Suddenly my video wasn’t showing on just one LED panel, but on sixteen panels. The feeling was amazing, very heavy for me. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What has been the reaction, or the reception, that’s filtered back to you?

HARSONO

On social media, lots of people have said it’s amazing. 

Voice of America, in my interview with them, also said I’m the only Indonesian artist who has shown this work on Times Square. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I want to recircle back to our theme of education, since this is an educational initiative at The Creative Process. I want to talk about the role of art in education. I understand that you’re a teacher as well. How do you see the future of art in education? How can we incorporate art in education, in a way that isn’t stratified or top down?

HARSONO

If someone understands art, the effect is not just concerning the art, it’s a feeling. The mental and the ethical aspects become more cultured, and more socially aware. Art as education provides a way to help us respect others, respect their culture, their humanity. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It connects us to the human condition, doesn’t it? It’s a universal thing and it’s democratic.

HARSONO

Yes. Indonesia is very diverse, and it’s very important that people understand it’s not a monoculture but a multi culture. We meet and interact with a lot of the other ethnicities and we know that they have a different language and culture. We must respect this. Art is very important for educating, not how to become an artist, but how to understand and learn about others. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Thank you so much, Pak FX, for your time and your body of work as a witness to multiple decades of Indonesian history. Your work is a monument to not forgetting the sacrifices of people and victims in the past. 

HARSONO

My pleasure. 

Photo courtesy of Sullivan + Strumpf and the artist

Community, Arts Leadership & the Human Condition with KATE MUETH

Community, Arts Leadership & the Human Condition with KATE MUETH

Actress, Choreographer, Artistic Director - Neo-Political Cowgirls

I care very deeply about the arts, theater arts. So I had a choice to make, either leave entirely or be the change, as they say. So I started Neo-Political Cowgirls to embrace women in their story, in our story.

HELEN HARRISON - Director Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center

HELEN HARRISON - Director Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center

Director · Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center

Jackson Pollock said it himself. “It's energy and motion made visible.” So these are things that come spontaneously from his own feelings, but they're based on, first of all, observation, the natural world around him, all the forces of nature that were so influential. And then, processing that and figuring out how to create a visual language that expresses those feelings. And some of those feelings can be very complicated.

The technique, the means of expression is dictated by what those feelings are. It's not the other way around. People think – Oh, he used the liquid material and then he sort of danced around and that kind of gave him ideas. – No.

Understanding JACKSON POLLOCK's Life, Process & Creative Expression w/ HELEN HARRISON - Highlights

Understanding JACKSON POLLOCK's Life, Process & Creative Expression w/ HELEN HARRISON - Highlights

Interview Highlights
Director · Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center

Well, a lot of graduate students in art history I don't think they really relate that well to the artists, on a personal level. They often don't really know the techniques from having done them. I think it's wonderful when graduate students also take studio art so that they can get a sense of what's involved in actually making something. It's not that easy.

The Storyteller of Marrakesh w/ Novelist Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya - Highlights

The Storyteller of Marrakesh w/ Novelist Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya - Highlights

Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya was educated in politics and philosophy at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Pennsylvania. His novels The Gabriel Club and The Storyteller of Marrakesh have been published in fourteen languages. He lives in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. 

This interview took place in the Cemetary Montparnasse near the graves of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I am thinking about your background in philosophy. I'm wondering do you start from a character and find your way to a theme or work from the theme to character? 

JOYDEEP ROY-BHATTACHARYA

Five years ago I decided that because there is so much misunderstanding of the Muslim world and so much misinformation about the Muslim world that I needed as a writer to try to do something that one can do–in terms of  creative writing, in terms of fiction–that one cannot do in terms of journalism or in terms of polemic essays, which is to introduce the lay reader to a world that is significantly different from the Western world but also significantly similar in terms of fundamental human qualities. So I decided to write three novels with a more or less peaceful aspect, focusing on components that make the Muslim culture, culturally unique. And then three novels that dealt specifically with the last fourteen years of experience of war. So in terms of the set of three cultural novels, for the first one I wrote a novel based around a storyteller in Marrakesh. The title for that novel was The Desert of Lovebecause it grew on the Sufi theme of love, which means the abnegation of the self, which means complete surrender.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It had another title as well?

ROY-BHATTACHARYA

The Storyteller of Marrakesh. In the U.S. Publishers are very conservative when it comes to titles. I am working on a very large book now, which is book two in the trilogy which is not... you know they're each unique novels. This is set in Iran, and it deals with painting and calligraphy. And the final novel in the cultural set will be set in Abbasi, Baghdad in the 9th century and will deal with basically what you and I do, the world of books. Because so many institutions that are part of publishing in the West today started in Abbasi, Baghdad. Book readings, book cafes, paperbacks, libraries, patronage of writers by publishers. So those are the three novels that deal with cultural aspects and are set in different parts of the Muslim world. In terms of war and the last fourteen years, I began with Antigone because I've always been enormously attracted to both the character and the theme, and I always saw that set of three novels as a connected trilogy.

So I'm just about to finish and deliver the prequel to Une Antigone à Kandahar. The middle book, which is The Watch[Une Antigone à Kandahar] presents both in this case; the Afghan and American points of view, with my stepping out of the picture because all these three novels are novels in voices following the greek choral pattern. In other words, each chapter is in a different voice. The prequel is entirely from the Afghan point of view. It has six Pashtun women belonging to three different generations, and one of the women is the Antigone character in the book that has just come out. So it is she, her mother, her grandmother, her sisters, her sister in law and the impact forty years of war in that country has had on a very rich and yet, in terms of the impact of war and modernity, very fragile tribal culture.

The final book, the sequel to Antigone, book three in that set, is going to  be entirely from the American point of view. It’s based partly on the play Ajax and it addresses the question of what happens when these very young men, who have been sent into a foreign land to kill and be killed, come back home and are expected to seamlessly merge back into a very, very different civilian culture. So that is my project. In terms of a political point of view, I am being very deliberately objective in terms of the war trilogy because I want to let the voices speak for themselves. Therefore, it's important for me to give voice to every kind of expression in the political spectrum. So some of these voices will have opinions and ideas I do not agree with, but I let the reader decide on the basis of the story and on the basis of what they are being told by these voices where he or she stands. I believe we are in a period of perpetual war, that it is completely unnecessary, but that it is required for the economy of the West, especially in the United States, but also I notice in France. The defence industry is incredibly powerful and also probably the only industry that is actually making an old-fashioned capitalist profit.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Yes, but it is funded as well. So you wonder if it would still be making such a profit if it weren’t funded.

ROY-BHATTACHARYA

It gets obscene amounts funding, in America at least, but it also makes obscene amounts of money. So, for instance, all of the combatants in Syria and Iraq today are using American weapons. Whether these weapons are captured, whether these weapons were initially supplied to a set of rebels on the expectation that they would be the good guys but turned out to be the bad guys and so forth. It is a tragedy that is comparable to the years that led up to the first World War because leadership seems to be entirely lacking, especially if you look at how the whole refugee crisis is being handled by Europe. In terms of the cultural set of three novels, my intention is much more to be an educator, to basically expose your lay reader in Paris or, I don't know, Marseilles or Lyon or Texas, to aspects of Islamic culture that I can guarantee you they have no idea about. And it is an enormously rich culture which served as the bridge between classical cultures in India, for instance, or Greece and the Western Renaissance. I'm not Muslim, but I felt an obligation, a moral obligation to educate myself and realized how little I knew about the world because, of course, like most urban educated literary elite from the Third World, my education was fundamentally Western, and at a rather late middle age I am now discovering the culture of the world I come from. And it’s been an absolute revelation because I had no idea it was so rich. And to that extent, the last fifteen years have been enormously rewarding for me because it has entailed a lot of research and a lot of reading that I probably wouldn't have done under the circumstances. Because I was, you know, I did my graduate work in German philosophy. And I think it happens to all of us. I think what is going on now is we are being forced to recognize that this paradigmatic Western civilization, what we are part of, that we have been indoctrinated with, has fundamental flaws. And the most fundamental flaw is this automatic assumption that everything coming from the West always came from the West, had no other origins, whereas it’s almost the opposite. If you look at the three religions of the book, they all came from the fourth religion of the book, which no one knows much about, which was the Avesta religion, which became the Zorastrianism. But the concept of good and evil, the idea of a prophet, the idea of angels, even something as little as the Christmas tree...

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

–it was all cannibalized and repackaged. 

ROY-BHATTACHARYA

Absolutely, absolutely. And this is the kind of history that we are not made aware of because we are told a particular story. We are told a particular fiction. You know, there was Greece, there were the Dark Ages, there was the Renaissance, there was Enlightenment, and here we are–well, I guess at this point–postmodernity. While the dark ages in the West were actually not that dark because there was intense interaction with the Islamic world. And for the Islamic world during that period, that was the Golden Age.

With special thanks to Lethokuhle Msimang for editorial assistance.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.

JOYDEEP ROY-BHATTACHARYA on Philosophy & Storytelling Across Cultures

JOYDEEP ROY-BHATTACHARYA on Philosophy & Storytelling Across Cultures

Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya was educated in politics and philosophy at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Pennsylvania. His novels The Gabriel Club and The Storyteller of Marrakesh have been published in fourteen languages. He lives in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. 

This interview took place in the Cemetary Montparnasse near the graves of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I am thinking about your background in philosophy. I'm wondering do you start from a character and find your way to a theme or work from the theme to character? 

JOYDEEP ROY-BHATTACHARYA

Five years ago I decided that because there is so much misunderstanding of the Muslim world and so much misinformation about the Muslim world that I needed as a writer to try to do something that one can do–in terms of  creative writing, in terms of fiction–that one cannot do in terms of journalism or in terms of polemic essays, which is to introduce the lay reader to a world that is significantly different from the Western world but also significantly similar in terms of fundamental human qualities. So I decided to write three novels with a more or less peaceful aspect, focusing on components that make the Muslim culture, culturally unique. And then three novels that dealt specifically with the last fourteen years of experience of war. So in terms of the set of three cultural novels, for the first one I wrote a novel based around a storyteller in Marrakesh. The title for that novel was The Desert of Lovebecause it grew on the Sufi theme of love, which means the abnegation of the self, which means complete surrender.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It had another title as well?

ROY-BHATTACHARYA

The Storyteller of Marrakesh. In the U.S. Publishers are very conservative when it comes to titles. I am working on a very large book now, which is book two in the trilogy which is not... you know they're each unique novels. This is set in Iran, and it deals with painting and calligraphy. And the final novel in the cultural set will be set in Abbasi, Baghdad in the 9th century and will deal with basically what you and I do, the world of books. Because so many institutions that are part of publishing in the West today started in Abbasi, Baghdad. Book readings, book cafes, paperbacks, libraries, patronage of writers by publishers. So those are the three novels that deal with cultural aspects and are set in different parts of the Muslim world. In terms of war and the last fourteen years, I began with Antigone because I've always been enormously attracted to both the character and the theme, and I always saw that set of three novels as a connected trilogy.

So I'm just about to finish and deliver the prequel to Une Antigone à Kandahar. The middle book, which is The Watch[Une Antigone à Kandahar] presents both in this case; the Afghan and American points of view, with my stepping out of the picture because all these three novels are novels in voices following the greek choral pattern. In other words, each chapter is in a different voice. The prequel is entirely from the Afghan point of view. It has six Pashtun women belonging to three different generations, and one of the women is the Antigone character in the book that has just come out. So it is she, her mother, her grandmother, her sisters, her sister in law and the impact forty years of war in that country has had on a very rich and yet, in terms of the impact of war and modernity, very fragile tribal culture.

The final book, the sequel to Antigone, book three in that set, is going to  be entirely from the American point of view. It’s based partly on the play Ajax and it addresses the question of what happens when these very young men, who have been sent into a foreign land to kill and be killed, come back home and are expected to seamlessly merge back into a very, very different civilian culture. So that is my project. In terms of a political point of view, I am being very deliberately objective in terms of the war trilogy because I want to let the voices speak for themselves. Therefore, it's important for me to give voice to every kind of expression in the political spectrum. So some of these voices will have opinions and ideas I do not agree with, but I let the reader decide on the basis of the story and on the basis of what they are being told by these voices where he or she stands. I believe we are in a period of perpetual war, that it is completely unnecessary, but that it is required for the economy of the West, especially in the United States, but also I notice in France. The defence industry is incredibly powerful and also probably the only industry that is actually making an old-fashioned capitalist profit.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Yes, but it is funded as well. So you wonder if it would still be making such a profit if it weren’t funded.

ROY-BHATTACHARYA

It gets obscene amounts funding, in America at least, but it also makes obscene amounts of money. So, for instance, all of the combatants in Syria and Iraq today are using American weapons. Whether these weapons are captured, whether these weapons were initially supplied to a set of rebels on the expectation that they would be the good guys but turned out to be the bad guys and so forth. It is a tragedy that is comparable to the years that led up to the first World War because leadership seems to be entirely lacking, especially if you look at how the whole refugee crisis is being handled by Europe. In terms of the cultural set of three novels, my intention is much more to be an educator, to basically expose your lay reader in Paris or, I don't know, Marseilles or Lyon or Texas, to aspects of Islamic culture that I can guarantee you they have no idea about. And it is an enormously rich culture which served as the bridge between classical cultures in India, for instance, or Greece and the Western Renaissance. I'm not Muslim, but I felt an obligation, a moral obligation to educate myself and realized how little I knew about the world because, of course, like most urban educated literary elite from the Third World, my education was fundamentally Western, and at a rather late middle age I am now discovering the culture of the world I come from. And it’s been an absolute revelation because I had no idea it was so rich. And to that extent, the last fifteen years have been enormously rewarding for me because it has entailed a lot of research and a lot of reading that I probably wouldn't have done under the circumstances. Because I was, you know, I did my graduate work in German philosophy. And I think it happens to all of us. I think what is going on now is we are being forced to recognize that this paradigmatic Western civilization, what we are part of, that we have been indoctrinated with, has fundamental flaws. And the most fundamental flaw is this automatic assumption that everything coming from the West always came from the West, had no other origins, whereas it’s almost the opposite. If you look at the three religions of the book, they all came from the fourth religion of the book, which no one knows much about, which was the Avesta religion, which became the Zorastrianism. But the concept of good and evil, the idea of a prophet, the idea of angels, even something as little as the Christmas tree...

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

–it was all cannibalized and repackaged. 

ROY-BHATTACHARYA

Absolutely, absolutely. And this is the kind of history that we are not made aware of because we are told a particular story. We are told a particular fiction. You know, there was Greece, there were the Dark Ages, there was the Renaissance, there was Enlightenment, and here we are–well, I guess at this point–postmodernity. While the dark ages in the West were actually not that dark because there was intense interaction with the Islamic world. And for the Islamic world during that period, that was the Golden Age.

With special thanks to Lethokuhle Msimang for editorial assistance.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.

Remembering PAUL AUSTER - Writer, Director (1947-2024)

Remembering PAUL AUSTER - Writer, Director (1947-2024)

Writer · Director 1947-2024

What happens is a space is created. And maybe it’s the only space of its kind in the world in which two absolute strangers can meet each other on terms of absolute intimacy. I think this is what is at the heart of the experience and why once you become a reader that you want to repeat that experience, that very deep total communication with that invisible stranger who has written the book that you’re holding in your hands. And that’s why I think, in spite of everything, novels are not going to stop being written, no matter what the circumstances. We need stories. We’re all human beings, and it’s stories from the moment we’re able to talk.