Joan Miró - Solar Bird (1944 - 46)

Real communism consists in creating the conditions for human renewal: activities in which people can develop themselves as they produce, organizations in which the individual is valuable rather than functional. Accomplishing this requires a movement – to change the character of work itself. And redefining work as a creative activity can only happen as individuals emerge from stifled, emotionally blocked rhythms of constraint. It will take more than the will to change, in the current situation; to resist neutralization itself demands desire.

Felix Guattari and Toni Negri, Communists Like Us, 1988, trans. Michael Ryan, 1990

Italy. Latium. Bomarzo. Sacro Bosco. Mostro in the garden of Pier Francesco Orsini. 1952.

Photo by Herbert List.

L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961) dir. Alain Resnais

Gregor Schneider, Total Isolation, Dead Space, (1989-1991)

“Whether I am insulating myself from the world, or whether it’s a breakthrough–I don’t really know.”

— Gregor Schneider

Issyk-Kul,
Kyrgyzstan
1970

Westerners who see themselves as the pinnacle of human evolution typically view hunter-gatherers and other stateless peoples as relics of the past, even if they are alive in the present. In doing so, they are presuming that history is an inevitable progression from less to more complex, and that Western civilization is more complex than other cultures. If history is organized into the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial Age, Information Age, and so on, someone who does not use metal tools must still be living in the Stone Age, right? But it is eurocentric, to say the least, to assume that a hunter-gatherer who knows the uses of a thousand different plants is less sophisticated than an operator at a nuclear power plant who knows how to push a thousand different buttons but doesn’t know where his food comes from.

Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works