Anne Frank’s house Louwrien Wijers at the Maine College of Art BY CHRIS THOMPSON
	Louwrien Wijers A public lecture as part of the Maine College of Art MFA Program on Monday, June 27 | 6:30 pm | followed by the opening reception of the MFA Faculty Exhibition | call 207.775.3052

The first time I met Dutch artist and writer Louwrien Wijers was at her home in Amsterdam in January of 1998. I had gone there to talk with her about her work in organizing the 1982 meeting between German artist Joseph Beuys and His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama of Tibet, and her 1990 and 1996 "Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy" conferences that evolved out of it.

Moments after I arrived at her home, she explained that she wanted to run an errand before we began our discussions, so that we would not need to interrupt ourselves later. As we walked alongside the canal, to make conversation in the way one does when one is a visitor to a new place, I asked Wijers whether she lived near Anne Frank’s house. She smiled and said, "Yes, it is very near."

Had she ever been to see it? I inquired. "No. No, in fact I have never been inside there." She was quiet for several steps. Then she smiled and told me that, really, the whole of Amsterdam was Anne Frank’s house.

During the week of June 27, Wijers will visit the Maine College of Art MFA Program as one of its visiting faculty, and will give a public lecture about her work on June 27. The Phoenix caught up with her to talk a bit about her current thinking about art, politics, and economics:

Phoenix: What would it mean today for someone who is actually in a position of power to prepare for peace? How would they do it? Could those who are in power do it, or does it have to be those who are not?

Wijers: Of course, people in power should do exactly the same as us: They should not lie, not kill, not steal. But you know, what I find difficult is that the idea of security, just like the idea of terrorism, is more a word than a reality. You can try to make this word known to everyone, and you can work with it in a conceptual way; that doesn’t mean a thing. I would much rather that people use words that are real, that belong to you and me in our lives, in the day to day, face to face. Politics, I think, is finding a word and then playing with it. Also the word "state" is the same. Why did we need states at a certain point? Just to make capitalism happen.

Q: Raimundo Panikkar talks about this in your "Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy" conference: The Adam Smith model of capitalism is this idea that you have a consumer and you have a seller and they meet in the market, but they both meet with equal power and with equal information. And you imagine, if capitalism were practiced in that way, what a different place it would be.

A: We abuse Adam Smith very much. It’s terrible how we have misused his ideas. In this "Compassionate Economy" project that we brought together in India in 2002, we talked a lot about Adam Smith, because he introduced a moral system, too. He said that the market cannot go without the moral. So he actually says that there are people who cannot function in the market economy. Like artists. So you have to divert money that is in the stream to those who are not taking part in the market economy. Whereas now we are trying to make everybody part of the market economy, Adam Smith never thought of it that way. He was thinking that, yes, there is a consumer society, market economy, but there are people who don’t fit in that because they don’t have a product. Like artists don’t really have a marketable product. We can try to do it, and that is what we are doing, we’re trying to make the artist’s work work in the market, but it doesn’t. It’s the wrong approach.

Q: Noam Chomsky talks about how Gandhi was once asked what he thought about Western civilization and said that he thought maybe it would be a good idea. Chomsky says the same thing about capitalism: Maybe it would be a good idea, but we’ve never seen it, so we don’t know.

A: Absolutely. In the moment of introduction you get the wrong interpretation. And actually a whole lifetime spent on thinking a good thing goes to waste. And we’re doing it over and over again. Whoever puts a new example, model, or idea that could work out well, we just take a part and we don’t apply the whole thing. So we have to talk again and again to each other.

Q: More committee meetings.

A: And the simple thing, the real wisdom that is behind these ideas, we never get to it. Why is that?

Chris Thompson teaches at the Maine College of Art. He can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com