Gallery Manifesto

You can imagine the thrill when only hours after finishing my talk on manifestos, I should be walking into the Vancouver Gallery of Art, into the Emily Carr gallery completely taken over by a show entitled We: Vancouver 12 Manifestos for the City. They commissioned several manifestos, which are available online, but the show is focused around twelve verbs, themselves identified as manifestos, for example:

SEE: We perceive. We experience. We witness. We survey and scrutinize.

DETOUR: We divert. We drift or swerve. We change direction. We take the long way around.

The show is massive and wildly entertaining. Multimedia is certainly its medium. The show takes manifestos in their performative quality and presents examples or illustrations of the 'event' that occurred, or would occur, in the city. It includes: recommending that an old, large tree be 'placed' in every roundabout, a video and a mixed audio sample of a June day in 2010 when a group of citizens went out into the city and made music by tapping with sticks and hands on the physical body of the city (trashcans, grates, lamp-posts, etc), the development of an aboriginal restaurant with a high flair, several environmentally conscious construction projects, a selection of books that six separate people offered as their definition of Vancouver, the clothing of the woman who decided to make anything she would wear for one year (from shoes to underwear to hairbands), the street art of Cameraman–among other things known for producing a Louis Vuitton dumpster in 2008–who was allowed to produce optical tricks all over the museum for the duration of the show, a reminder of the June 1976 world gathering Habitat: United Nations Conference on Human Settlements on the global problem of homelessness (a major issue in Vancouver), and more. It was overwhelming, indeed "overdose and overdrive" as Caws says a manifesto ought to be.

Is the show itself a manifesto? Well, yes. It is a collage work wherein each piece would fall apart without the vibrance of the manifesto concept that unites them. There are elements that are more interesting to me, and presumably to you, than others. But it certainly makes its point, that Vancouver isn't just a place surrounded by trees, water and sky. That it is also a city, one that has a lot to say and should not shy away from it, is a point made and made again. At the end of the show was a large piece of paper with one design of the show lightly on it to take home, to write on, to draw/write the word you want said, to keep, to give, but at any rate to manifest for yourself.

There was a lot else, but that at any rate blew my mind because you'd have to be dead not to get excited about manifestos.

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.

Revolutionary Independent Artist-some thoughts on the Manifesto

Breton alienated the communists and revoked the surreality of many artists because of their ties to communism, but believed in the revolution sufficiently to produce the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art in 1938. This document signed by Breton and Diego Rivera, was in fact a collaboration between Breton and Trotsky. In the document they are trying to address how artists can participate in the communist revolution without losing the independence necessary to being artists. Though Breton had alluded to the need for artists to express their own personal, inner vision, this document affirms that freedom while also stating the role artists play in society.

True art–art that does not merely produce variations on ready-made models but strives to express the inner needs of man and of mankind as they are today–cannot be anything other than revolutionary: it must aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society, if only to free intellectual creation from the chains that bind it and to allow all mankind to climb those heights that only isolated geniuses have reached in the past.

The freedom of intellectual creation that they advocate aligns itself with Breton’s stated aims for Surrealism. The artist must produce images that are not bound by the previous language of art but rather uncover, in those image or others, new visions. In order to alter the established landscape, each artist must be free to present an inner truth. The individual artist by expressing a truly personal vision touches on a more general human experience. In 1947, Breton would explain the rapport between the individual and general history in his remarks on Matta by suggesting that there is a connecting light “entre la causalité universelle et la finalité humaine”. The Hegelian influence of the world on the individual is clear but the individual artist remains central to the success of this endeavor to change the global.

Permitting art to be influenced by a political viewpoint or any aesthetic demands limits the possibilities of creation. Breton and Trotsky state that “art cannot, therefore, without demeaning itself, willingly submit to any outside directive and ensconce itself obediently within the limits that some people, with extremely shortsighted pragmatic ends in view, think they can set on its activities”. Despite their own revolutionary hopes, they recognize that art must be permitted to discuss issues beyond the desires of political or cultural ideologues. Art is a means of discovering knowledge and it can not be subsumed to the needs of those in power without being reduced to pre-conceived, formulaic aphorisms.

The revolution, they claimed, must "from the very beginning, when it comes to intellectual creativity, establish an anarchist system based on individual freedom". Of course Breton with Diego Rivera and Trotsky acknowledge that their ideas about the role of art at the moment, to help prepare and advocate for the revolution, must center on ensuring the revolution. The joy in the manifesto is its attempt to maintain an open door on behalf of art, in the belief that “fairly divergent aesthetic, philosophical, and political orientation [can] meet on this ground”. In order for the artist to present a unique vision, the artist must be permitted and recognized as truly independent. Or so they hoped...

Trotsky was murdered. The revolution wound up becoming an ideological dictatorship. Artists, whose freedom was curtailed under the communist regime of Eastern Europse, provided the dissension that helped destroy the communist tyranny. It is the artists today in Eastern Europe who seem to be producing a link between those who did not suffer the economic destruction of communism and those who did.

The artist should be able to respond to the political or social situation from any point of view, not only that which supports it, or that which acknowledges it. Is that independence? The best we can offer because the only one available.