Nature is an inert pile of resources

Nature, as defined by industry, or science, or profit, is an inert pile of resources to be rationalized and exploited at the will of something that stands above this pile, something absolutely superior, separate and independent of it. It is important to recognize that there is something fascinating about this capitalist conception of nature, and the intoxication of self-will that it engenders.

The nature I find most familiar is Art. Culture, the ecology of spiritual contact as enacted in human communication, is what I find myself so committed to. The marvel of intuition and inspiration; the mysteries of synchronicities and correspondences that spark the imagination; and the processes of resoluteness, of reinvigoration, of keeping traditions alive while "burying the ruler" (to summon Carl Beam)--these are the things that I identify so intimately as being in my nature.

I am stunned by how anti-life the art world is--how calcifying and conservative is its search of novelty, how professionalized are its channels of access, how closed and airless are its means of discourse, how discouraging to outsiders are its manners of socializing. This situation is what the dancer's frozen environment so frequently recalls in my mind.

AA: I sense in your work a coming to terms with a certain thread in anarchist art concerned with the dynamic interrelationship of the ecological and the social.

In Gramsci is Dead (Between the Lines, 2005), political theorist Richard Day argues against the Marxist project of striving for political, social and economic hegemony as a revolutionary strategy. (4) He counters that affinity can bind us together in a manner that does not tie us down to a hegemonic social program. Furthermore, the refusal of hegemony frees us up to evolve our society organically--it is the prerequisite for the anti-determinism that anarchism argues for. This organicism, this free flow of social experimentation, has an ethics that demands ends and means be complementary, ethics that carry over to our relationship to the world in all its diversity. In what sense, then, is your art ethical, metaphorically and experientially?

LJ: The peculiar thing is that, despite all my talk about universality in this interview, I vehemently believe in the value of the universal's other.

What is heretical is true, because it is heresy that propels the gears of Truth as an activity, rather than as substance. We judge the freedom of a society by its treatment of dissent, of difference, of poverty. The concept "freedom," like "democracy" becomes an empty signifier open to abuse unless it remains rooted in the experience of the dispossessed within society.

The cripple, the queer, the one at the margins, the minority, the one who is unintelligible, the one who lacks--these are the only beings who give the universal its content, and it is they who are most immediately and keenly impacted when the universal is instrumentalized as an excuse or disguise. There would be no universal without these beings, there would only be the cruel abstractions of universality.

Although the experience of dispossession ought not to be glamorized, I am convinced that there is a profound resource in the experience of alienation. Anarchists have long been suspicious of the hegemonic tendency in Marxism. The important anarchist concepts of affinity and mutual aid are intended to replace the substantive concept of class as the basis for the formation of collective identities. Anarchists need to be careful, however, that our "affinity groups" do not become a comforting excuse for relating only with those like ourselves, and thereby perpetuate already entrenched social divisions. At every level, how "we" relate to "them" is the ethical question that the discursive idea of the universal keeps open.

I'll avoid saying too much about myself at this point, because it is truly up to those who come in contact with my work to determine the extent to which that work contains an ethical dimension. I will, however, end by mentioning the work of another artist exhibiting in documenta 12, whom I have come to regard very highly: the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski.

Zmijewski's sound-art work titled Deaf Bach (2003) was included in the documenta audio guide (it can also be heard at www.radiodays.org/program.php). This was a recording of various Bach cantatas being sung in a church by a group of deaf or near-deaf people, as a choir, as duets, and sometimes accompanied by a trained singer.

Zmijewski's sound-work allows for an incredibly moving experience. Is its cacophony experienced as noise, or as music? Can this cacophony possibly configure itself for us who can hear, as anything resembling music and not noise? Are we able to hear the music emerge out of the noise, as a higher-order musicality produced by the noisy efforts of people transcending social and bodily limitations, and joining their voices in prayer?

From our own particular life-situations, are we open to experience a bare-life, human affinity with those whose experiences and even whose bodies appear as so fundamentally different to our own? What kind of spiritual or artistic or educational or transformative process is required to connect and convey from one life-situation to another: from me to you; from you to me ? Again, posing these questions is profoundly anarchist to begin with.

Allan Antliff, Canada Research Chair in Art History at the University of Victoria, is author of Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and editor of Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology. His reviews and essays on contemporary art have appeared in Fuse, C Magazine, Art Nexus, Canadian Art, Artichoke and Galleries West.