Malcolm McLaren: When you say NO CONTENT in that neon, I think that's interesting. It suggests the Next Big Thing. I want to know what happens after no content. Where does that go? Where does that lead me? I think it leads me to say 'no sex!', 'no show'. 'No logo'.

Stefan Brüggeman: Yes.

MM: “No sex, no show, no logo” is what I believe “no content” to mean. And what you call punk nihilism or punk conceptualism is a way of describing the punk aesthetic because punk as a movement was definitely an artistic movement. Very few people outside of the artistic world really understand punk from that perspective. Not that they have to. The greatest thing about punk was it was what you wanted it to be. Its popular nature meant it could be accessed by all. Everybody could bite into the cherry.

SB: It was accessible.

MM: Everybody could grab it and do with it what they wanted. Whatever. So it gave rise to a phenomenon. And it empowered, enabled, a new generation to take control. It's treated today as a cultural moment that gave hope to the young. I hate that thought. What it did, in my mind, was make you creative, removing all restrictions, allowing you to break all the rules. Once those rules were broken, culture changed. And with it, so did life. A new aesthetic was born.

SB: For instance, when you were talking about hope, the punk slogan NO FUTURE came to mind, it was there, all over the place, in the unconscious.

MM: Good point.

SB: So NO FUTURE makes you think that you think about the future. In a way.

MM: I agree with that.

SB: And right now, as a consequence of that, I don’t know if I can talk about a generation now. But I can talk about my feeling about those types of hopes. Now you don’t live with hopes. You only live with the idea of living in the future, living in the past, but always negating the present. So I don’t feel any present right now.

MM: There is possibly a reason for that.

SB: There’s always a nostalgic feeling that something is going to happen. But it’s not like a kick in the head, like when you feel it right now.

MM: That idea of not living in the present, about not believing in the present, about not touching the present, is because the present is very confused- because the present is about the future and about the past. If you discuss this in terms of countries, I would say America lives very much as a present-future. Its present is its future. If you live in France, its present is its past. If you live in England, its present is its future-past. England is far too arrogant to think otherwise. It has survived by being more culturally deceptive than any other country. England too, is a nation of liars, pirates, telling long, shaggy dog tales. They are world class in the culture of deception and so they live in the future-past in the present, because they feel they always have another game to play. They are so deceptive, they can never be straight.

SB: They can never decide.

MM: That’s why when they describe anything, it takes them forever because they have to go around this way then go around that way. They’re like the roads in London, you know, all higgledy piggledy.

SB: It’s not like New York.

MM: The architecture describes the people. So that for me is how I see the present. But what about the worldwide web, where there are no cultural barriers? No geographical barriers. No frontiers. Just one gigantic virtual space. A real global village. What do they think?

Well, my answer would be that by blurring the cultural barriers and frontiers, it gives rise to a new phenomenon driven in part by children’s culture. The worldwide web is getting younger and younger and younger. The young are computer-literate at a very early age. The intelligent eight-year-old is already well-informed because she or he can access most information. The web is the first global audio-visual culture. It is primarily driven by iconography and symbols. Before a kid learns to read, it understands what signs mean, like McDonalds. It knows that’s where you buy food. Therefore, it doesn’t necessarily need to read. I think the web is very much like that. And what we are seeing is a rise in children’s culture. A culture that adults care more and more about, to the extent that adults are trying to be children. And coming back to your idea of the present, because of that we’re now living in a world where the generations are beginning to dissolve. There’s no longer a gap. The edges are being blurred. Just as the edges with high art and low art. They’re all being blurred. We can now say art is fashion, as well as that fashion is art. Everything’s blurred.

SB: I think…

MM: But the age gap is being blurred. And that is important because when you blur the ages…

SB: That’s the “no” generation. The word generation disappears leaving only the word “no”.

MM: Disappears. If we look at it culturally, we can see the beginnings and birth of teen artists, or even younger ones.

SB: Or a mix.

MM: Today Los Angeles is a city that grows younger and younger. A city where middle-aged married women shave their pussies so they can go out on the same dating games as their teenaged daughters, and compete with them! Fathers and sons play videogames together. The interactive pop culture is finally resolved in the whole millennial nuclear family going to see the Rolling Stones. Once upon a time, this rock’n’roll outlaw culture divided generations. A new generation swept the old aside; but this ceases to exist, and because of that, the present is getting more and more confused because we are attached to the past and the future in the present at the same time. Contemporary culture is getting younger and younger. There’s a positive vanity within contemporary art. There has never been an era in my lifetime where contemporary art has been as popular. More popular than the classical art of previous eras and even the art of just fifty years ago. If the art that we make today is immediately accepted tomorrow, that means contemporary art has become mainstream. And with it, there is no longer an avant garde. All of its content is culturally accepted. It’s sold like salami!

SB: Like hotcakes!

MM: If it’s sold like salami what does that make us? When I look at the culture on the web I see people trying to be younger and younger. That is a kind of vanity. A positive vanity. It means that objective beauty, part of the old traditional classical world, is not important. We don’t have those references. You can’t put a Titian there and put a Paul McCarthy there and actually cross-reference them. It’s impossible because this is coming from a different world. You cannot talk about contemporary art in the same context as the classical world. It’s very different. The classical world wasn’t really sold like salami! The classical world had different criteria.

SB: Another thing I’m interested in: when we talk about these boundaries, a problem for me -and I’m talking about people from my generation, and it’s a “no” generation- ­ there’s not a common ideology to follow. The idea of ideology is lost. So then there’s a very critical or maybe strange relationship with the old and the past, with the future and the new, that you start connecting. So in those terms, we have the idea of hedonism.

MM: Of hedonism?

SB: Yes.

MM: Since 1950 the world has moved from a culture of necessity ­ -in other words, buying things we genuinely need to survive- ­ to a culture of desire. A culture where we can buy anything simply because we desire it, not because we need it. It is a very different world and it began shortly after the Second World War. It began in the United States because they set about dominating the planet with their culture. And to do that, they needed to develop a culture of desire. To understand how this came about, you need to appreciate how the Nazis understood the media. The media was never truly understood before. How you disseminate information and control a crowd, how you fake the truth. How could you do that? How this gave rise to the birth of the advertising industry. There was a man, in the US, who singlehandedly created the words, “Public Relations”.

SB: PR.

MM: His name was Edward Bernays. Back in the 30s, Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda for the Nazi Party, prayed at this man’s altar. Bernays was his mentor. Bernays was invited to the Berlin 1936 Olympics. He was flown in as a special guest from the United States. Goebbels had studied everything Bernays had written. So, after the war, Edward Bernays was employed by a covert intelligence organization set up within the American government and called the CIA. This organization’s mandate was to sell their culture of desire, their cultural propaganda. Edward Bernays was a shadowy figure. He was rarely ever photographed. After the war, he sold this desire to be sexy. He sold the idea of smoking to women for and on behalf of Phillip Morris tobacco. The US government couldn¹t take over the world with tanks and guns, but they could take over the world with Coca Cola, blue denim, Marilyn Monroe, and perversely, rock and roll.

SB: But Coca Cola is black. I’m very intrigued by the fact that Coca Cola is black liquid.

MM: Truly.





SB: But it’s like… it’s totally the color you don’t want to drink but you want to wear.

MM: That may be so, but nevertheless, I simply say this as an example of American products. You don’t need Coca Cola to survive. You don’t need Levi jeans or Marilyn Monroe or, in truth, rock’n’roll.

However, rock’n’roll was the only part of American culture that they couldn’t control. This outlawed culture started out as a culture of liberated sex. A culture that celebrated the spirit of the outlaw. It also originated in a part of America that was difficult to control: the segregated South. Nevertheless, society, its establishment, eventually managed to control pop culture and sell it to the rest of the world.To cut a long story short, Edward Bernays succeeded. His job was to turn on the world to a culture of desire and in doing so, the US would become the most powerful country in the world.

The CIA decided they should also sell contemporary art. Edward Bernays set up a way to try and do that. After all, this was an American product too. Art bigger than a house! Abstract Expressionism.

SB: The first American movement.

MM: Edward Bernays was its PR consultant. Jackson Pollock became a catch-phrase. “Hey­, take your brush out and paint your walls with drip paint”. “Paint this!” “Paint that!”

SB: And also he was the only American American, ­the first American artist.

MM: Today, we are complete victims drugged by such PR exercises. We believe in, pray at, eat, sell, this culture of desire. Our contemporary art. We don’t even see it anymore. It is part of our chemical make-up.

SB: You think it still operates that same way?

MM: Yeah, it’s endemic now. We don’t even see it anymore. It’s in our skin.

SB: It’s in our system? There’s no choice?

MM: We have no choice. I was born just after the war. I grew up in the 1950s. I lived in a culture of necessity and saw it slowly replaced by a culture of desire. Much much later, after punk, this culture began to crumble. Art would no longer be necessary, would no longer be something to acquire self-knowledge, to be humbled by, as once was the role of the church. Just something to desire. To consume. I was a student at art school during those winds of change. Many of my generation were confused. We had entered art school and had been taught an old-world philosophy. The practice of failure. Our professors would teach us how the art of failure was a noble one, an everlasting journey, a quest that would never end, a struggle to enjoy an impossible job but one that, as that professor would say, helps take the pillow off your head in the morning, allows you to get up, roll up your sleeves, muck in, do the job. The messy process of creativity. “Don’t just think you can fail,” he said, “Learn how to fail magnificently!”

SB: Exactly.

MM: You’ve got to learn how to be the most brilliant failure because it’s better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success. That’s the point. This was the philosophy.

SB: Who taught you?

MM: Oh, those old art professors were part of a 19th-century Romantic legacy that began with William Morris and continued throughout the 20th century in Europe. These were the art professors. It was normal. Not unusual. It was particular to art.

SB: It was one person?

MM: Yeah. My lecturer was Clifford Frith, son of a Victorian painter, William Frith, whose famous painting called “Derby Day” hung in the Tate Gallery.

SB: And who was he?

MM: Nobody of any particular repute but he lived with this old-fashioned code of behavior, like all art professors of the period, corduroyed, bearded, sex-mad. He taught that an artist had a different role in life from ordinary folks. He managed to turn one’s upbringing and middle-class homestead, and all that that implied, upside down. Eventually, I couldn’t go back home as my life and understanding of life had changed so much.

SB: So he didn’t fail flamboyantly?

MM: I am not certain what he did but he was handing down the baton from those nobler than us. The Romantics and Symbolists of fin-de-siècle Europe. These artists were still regarded as the Gods in the art schools of post-war suburbia. You have to understand: art schools were not fashionable as they are today. They were not in touch with pop culture.

SB: So how do you think he failed?

MM: Well, failure for him was more like a condition of hope. If he were forever successful, as he said, he would never paint another picture. It was only the understanding that he failed that forced him to get up in the morning to try again. This was why he was talking about art and an artist’s life as a journey that never ends. Because you never get to where you’re trying to get to. It’s always trying to look at, criticize and move on. It made us realize that making art was not a career. It was a hand-me-down from 19th-century thinking, ­ art was not a career. It might be an adventure but it wasn’t a career. And if it was an adventure, it was an adventure that was going to be very tough and you needed to be prepared for it. So all they were going to do in art school was prepare us to deal with this quest for the rest of our lives.

Now, at the same time, fresh winds were blowing in from the United States. We were going along to see exhibitions by Robert Rauschenberg, those combines…

SB: He has a show right now in the Pompidou center, a few streets from where we are.

MM: Yeah, I know. I’ve seen them all before, 30, 35 years ago! And we see this guy Jackson Pollock, and we see this guy Mark Rothko, and then we see this guy Andy Warhol and Roy Litchtenstein. It was beginning to change our way of thinking. We had been taught that art was never for sale. Art was a state of mind that was not for sale. It may be a way to acquire certain knowledge, some sort of salvation like once upon a time you used to have when you went to a church, but it was never really for sale. You didn’t sell yourself. That would be considered a sin. Don’t even think such things. The very words “commercial”, “for sale”, “career”; these were taken out of your vocabulary. You were made to think something else. Art as something unique. Not easily manufactured. But then we were looking at Andy Warhol which was factory-made art, so to speak. Reproducible. It was art as salami! There was a different idea.

SB: A very different cultural expression.

MM: That changed our way of thinking. We didn’t understand. But the way it made sense to us was through its link to pop culture. To rock’n’roll. That’s the only way we could measure it. We couldn’t measure it­ -look at Andy Warhol then go back and look at what these guys were teaching us, whether it be Matisse, Pablo Picasso, German Expressionism-, ­ we couldn’t look at it like that. We didn’t even bother. We could connect to Duchamp, Dada, touch upon Surrealism. We loved the reproducible. We liked that art could be whatever you wanted it to be. But that wasn’t seemingly what Warhol was saying. Warhol was saying art is about being glamorous, being famous and it’s about being nothing too. And it’s about being good at business. It was different values.

SB: That’s changed the whole direction, in that way the art was business too.

MM: This was a different value system to what I was being taught. We felt this old professor didn’t understand pop art. Pop culture. It wasn’t his world. It was my world. A world I knew, so I could measure everything against that. And that is how pop culture and with it, pop art became important to me. So, upon leaving art school, what did I want to do? Did I want to live in an attic and take on this cultural journey, this quest for failure that this professor described? It felt terribly lonely. I didn’t like this idea but I couldn’t leave it alone. No. So, I sought out a store. As a bridge between my artistic feelings back at school, and the street. Trying to be like Warhol in the marketplace. I felt I was right there on the King’s Road in Chelsea in 1970. I was in a shop, my shop, and I could make my shop my art. That’s what I will do. I’ll make anti-fashion.

SB: It can also be seen as a future of an artist’s studio; I’ve always questioned the idea of a traditional studio. My studio is my head, a company of hundreds of employees and my provocations, the studio could be set anywhere, anyhow, any format and it is constantly transforming, it’s a flexible structure.

MM: Maybe. But I didn’t think that far.

SB: Now you can see it.

MM: Then, I was just thinking, I don’t care if I don’t sell anything. I might even keep the shop permanently closed. I just want to feel I am in touch with what I built: a bridge between art school and the street. This is how I began. I made clothes best described today as anti-fashion. Uncommercial. Not for sale. Those clothes I made were my art. My way of working, or getting to know myself. Or as Robert Rauschenberg said, “getting along with myself”.

SB: And at that time was it rationalized or was it pure instinct?

MM: It was both. You couldn't be purely instinctive. The rationale from art school was too strong to dismiss. How do you take something new and make something old? In other words, how do you take something that is present, new, a t-shirt, and how do you make it old? I would dye, cut it up, destroy it, turn it inside out, throw things on it, paint all over it, make it as unattractive as possible. Like an old dirty rag and then I would lift it up and put it on a hanger. So I was suddenly making these things; they were looking less like clothes and more like objects, talismans, magical things; for me, I felt it was rock ‘n’ roll. But the ruins of that culture, ruins I cared about, ­my culture of necessity, as I thought at that time, something I felt was true. Not manufactured but made from the heart and soul. I was a Luddite. I had fulfilled what that professor had explained. I was making failures. Brilliant magnificent failures. And in doing so, I projected a certain authenticity that was an attack on a more manufactured and corporate world outside on that street. That’s the way I entered the world from art school, trying to turn fashion into art. It wasn’t very long after that, maybe one or two years maximum, before it led me to be able to do the same thing with music. I somehow managed to make music and fashion one. How do you take a group and make them become cool by not playing, not being able to play; how do you make them cool by promoting that attitude? Very simple, I realized, by making the fan the star.

How do you get fans to become more important than the band? How do you set that up? How did I? By arming a generation with all this self-importance and positive vanity, by dressing them as an army of disenfranchised youth, by making clothes to go to war with, and those thoughts, I believe, were inherited by students at art school in the 1980s. They couldn’t help but have that punk aesthetic all over them. They were injected with it, just as I was injected. They were infected with punk.

SB: For instance, the Sex Pistols t-shirts, how were they made?

MM: Like I told you,­ making new things old. A future past in the present.

SB: You cut letters from newspapers?

MM: Yeah, taking something old and making it new. It began by being lazy; ­it’s like, I can’t be bothered to buy manufactured lettering from a stationers, a Letraset. Just cut out letters from a newspaper and stick them together any old way. Jumbled.

SB: You dyed the t-shirts?

MM: Always! I tried to dye everything dirty grey.

SB: In my experience with those t-shirts, I remember in Mexico City when I was 13, it was like mid-80s, there was an underground flea market call El Chopo where they imitated those t-shirts.

MM: Imitation is everything. It is flattering. But more important than that, it was a proclamation of a DIY culture. I never set any copyrights at all. Quite the opposite. I felt people should copy as much as they like. Take the ideas, make them bigger.

SB: I remember I was fascinated by that idea.

MM: It was a do-it-yourself culture. That’s what people don’t understand. It made everyone feel fabulous because they could do it all themselves.

SB: Those t-shirts relate to a lot of my work.

MM: Great.

SB: And that really triggered me. Because it was put out of the context of London, of English language, translated to a big city like Mexico City. They’re related but for different reasons. But at the same time, it was like a wave that could join up, right?

MM: Sure.

SB: So for me that was very interesting because they look modern and they look chaotic in the city also, but in a different way. And I think the misunderstanding is a positive, creative action and this point for me is important. So for me it really blew my mind. “Sex Pistols­, who are the Sex Pistols?” The t-shirts were very attractive but in the context of a different city, this was wrong. This is what makes it interesting.

And the other thing that is very interesting is that these t-shirts were worn by bands, but street bands, lower-class gangs who had big street battles with each other. The most famous gang was called Los Sex Panchitos; it reminded me a lot of Ford Coppola’s film Rumble Fish but in the context of the Mexico City outskirts, in what are called the ‘misery belts’ or ‘lost cities’.

MM: The idea stems from the imagination of an art-school hooligan. That’s who we were. In the dawn of the 70s, my friends and I were thrown out of art school onto the streets. We were treated as common refuse, rubbish. We were the dustbins of history. We were the disenfranchised looking at the real world and trying to figure out how we can become magnificent failures? How do we do that in the real world? We could see how we could do that a little whilst we were in art school but now we were on the streets in the real world and it was really difficult so, you know, making those clothes was our act.

The Sex Pistols were our ammunition. I always thought, we’ve got all these clothes and if we’re not careful, no one will ever see anything we’re doing. The only way people are going to see what we’re doing is if we get this group on the stage and have them photographed and have them understood and have their counterparts, their generation, join up and do likewise and create this scene. So we pushed the show onto the street and we tried to control it. It went completely uncontrolled. It was complete chaos but we actually enjoyed the chaos. That was ultimately what we did.

SB: Do you think you set up a kind of formula for contemporary music?

MM: How do you mean?

SB: Like what you were explaining just now, it’s very applied to what is happening right now. In bands, they look like they don’t play so well and it’s more the attitude. It’s more the lifestyle.

MM: Probably.

SB: But then it doesn’t have the same feeling as when you did it.

MM: I don’t think it is as powerful because as I told you, we live in a world where the avant-garde is mainstream. There is no avant-garde today. Not that there ever truly was but 50, 100 years ago, there was something called the avant-garde. There were people pushing the cultural barriers, pushing but remaining understood by only a few. Today you might as well say contemporary art is understood by millions. It is part of everyday shopping. Contemporary art stands bang in the centre of the zeitgeist. There’s pop music to the left and there’s fashion to the right. But out front, in the middle, there is this monster called contemporary art that has an enormous appetite. It’s just gobbling things up. It gobbles music up; it gobbles everything, design… It’s getting bigger and bigger. It’s like this huge, fat, horrible, ugly, nasty…

SB: Yeah, that’s true, isn’t it?

MM: When you think about it, it’s frightening!

SB: Yeah, it’s super frightening! It’s like cocaine, hyperconsumption, hypercommodity and a forbidden pleasure.

MM: Damien Hirst called me a few weeks ago. He was considering buying all these old clothes that I had made and he wanted me to look at them. He needed to know if they were authentic, if I had personally made them. He wasn’t exactly sure they were genuine. I said, what do you mean by genuine? He said, well, that they were real clothes from your shop, that they weren’t copies. Fair enough, but the idea was though, that they were made to copy and hopefully the copies would be as good as the originals. In any event, he emailed me pictures of all these different t-shirts and I eventually had to tell him they were mostly copies, by Vivienne Westwood, and our son, Joe Corré and possibly his friends. But I didn’t think that was what he was looking for.

SB: Another thing: you think art. I think your generation, or my generation, we become producers of nothing at the end of the day. Do you think that way? Do you feel that way?

MM: There’s no question we’re making lots more garbage than the world really knows how to deal with. We have a culture which is becoming more and more difficult for us to defend because it doesn’t do anything but tell people how to buy more and more and more. Edward Bernays started it all.

SB: It’s all his fault!

MM: And I don’t really know where that will end. In some countries, people still believe they are not for sale. There is still a place where people think that whatever they do or whoever they are, they are not for sale. But it is rare. In this culture of desire, everything on this planet is for sale. So, it is rare when somebody or something isn’t. When that happens en masse, then culture is seriously going to change. It is very difficult today to find something that is authentic. Everything appears to be karaoke. It is a karaoke culture where everybody can be an artist for 15 minutes and take no responsibility for their action or words from the moment their performance ends. Everyone is like a karaoke performer.