Artist Manifesto

A compilation of manifestos specific to artistic movements of the 20th century was recently released, edited by Alex Danchev entitled 100 Artists' Manifestos. Manifestos are a delight to read, so I often do. I often talk about them to my friends. Sometimes I even talk about them at conferences.

This compilation claims to go "from the Futurists to the Stuckists" and specifically only looks at manifestos relevant to art. The compilation edited by Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms, is still unsurpassed, but that remains due to its broader coverage. It does, however, end before including the Stuckists, whose rhetoric is well worth reading if you enjoy, as I do, the audacity that permits referring to Sartre as a 'toss-pot'. If you wish to focus on what artists had to say about their medium, the Danchev book might be the one for you–though you would miss out on lots of other deliciously juicy manifestos from fiends and friends of art.

Not that you would necessarily understand any of that from Terry Eagleton's review in the March 25th Times Literary Supplement. He assumes that the title of the compilation says it all, which granted largely it does, and promptly moves on to his own issues and problems with the fall out of the revolutionary avant-garde–as it is called, as if the avant-garde were ever not revolutionary...but that is for another discussion. I rather like it when reviewers decide to riff on the topic of the book, or use it to expound their own ideas, largely because such an attitude forces them to be more polemical than they might be inclined towards if their intention were to produce a straightforward report on the text.

At any rate, after much discussion of the ultra-leftism of most manifestos, their performative value, he reminds his readers that the avant-garde art between the two wars was not a simple group of clowns but a real threat to the state regimes run by two of the worst ideologues of that century: Stalin and Hitler. He concludes eloquently. These art movements have progresses and been incorporated into our daily lives to a point that was not at all what these original revolutionaries had in mind:

Post-modern culture is, among other things, a sick joke at the expense of the tradition recorded in this collection. Art has indeed been integrated with every day life; but this has happened in the form of advertising, public relations, the media, political speculators, the catwalk and the commodity, which is not quite what the Futurists and Surrealists had in mind.