Art attack manifestos

Saturday, February 26, 2011

100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists
Selected by Alex Danchev

THE issuing of manifestos, once a popular way of announcing radical new directions in art, literature or politics, has fallen sadly into abeyance.

This is perhaps because most of the things that can be said in manifestos, have been said. Back in 1848, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels kick-started the genre with their Communist Manifesto, a document that many successors and imitators struggled, and failed, to emulate: “A spectre is haunting Europe” trumpeted these revolutionaries, “the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.”

Pronouncements like this, it must be admitted, are thin on the ground today. The tracts issued by artists at the beginning of the 20th century were every bit as dramatic, and sounded a clarion call for new movements in painting and sculpture. Futurism, in particular, is associated with the manifesto of that name, written by the artist Filippo Marinetti and published in Le Figaro in 1909.

Futurism was an art movement for the age of the motorcar and aeroplane — both new inventions — and Marinetti extolled ‘life at the double’, praising high speed, danger, courage and rebellion, while not forgetting the electric light bulb. His tract was followed quickly by Umberto Boccioni’s Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, which rose to even greater heights of intoxicated prose: “We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything that is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time.”

Boccioni called for the destruction of “the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism”. Art critics were to be regarded as “useless and dangerous” and the field of art was to be swept clean of all themes and subjects which had been used in the past.

La Serenissima, the pearl of the Adriatic, came in for particular abuse: “We reject the Venice of foreigners, this marketplace of fake antique dealers, this magnet for universal snobbism and imbecility, this bed worn out by endless droves of lovers, this bath adorned with jewels for cosmopolitan whores, this immense sewer of traditionalism.” Although entertaining, this was very unkind, as was Marinetti’s description of gondolas as “rocking chairs for cretins”.

According to Leon Trotsky, Futurism was a protest “against the art of petty realists who sponged on life”, and in 1938, Trotsky, along with André Breton and Diego Rivera published Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art. Exiled by Stalin, Trotsky then was living in Mexico City, where he looked after pet rabbits, had an affair with Freida Kahlo and dreaded the arrival of Stalin’s assassins, who when they did arrive, were not long about killing him.

The Second Manifesto of Surrealism, written by Breton in 1929, was not a patch on the original of five years earlier, nor indeed on Salvador Dali’s magnificent Yellow Manifesto of 1928, in which the Spanish Surrealist denounced all art he did not like, not omitting “painters of crooked trees”. The first decades of the 20th century were littered with such manifestos, penned by Apollonaire, Mayakovsky, Huelsenback, Tzara and others. Mina Loy wrote her Feminist Manifesto in 1914, and Kasimir Malevich his Suprematist Manifesto two years later.

These early manifestos, gathered together in a new compilation, 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, are a reminder of days when artists had fire in their veins and led, rather than followed, fashion. The best of the more recent manifestos are marked by an artistic and poetic vision, although some, unfortunately, can only be described as peevish utterances of suburban intellectuals.

A recent example, issued in 2009 by “the Other Muswell Hill Stuckists”, illustrates the redundancy of the form. Published on the centenary of Marinetti’s manisfesto, the activists of Muswell Hill manage little more than a tired denounciation of the Groucho Club, the Turner Prize and Tracey Emin. At least their manifesto is short.

Less witty, and much too long, is the 2008 Manifesto Towards a New Humanism in Architecture, which does have a point in highlighting the stranglehold placed on new architecture in the UK, and no less in Ireland, by planning authorities and developers, a point echoed in Coop Himmelb(l)au’s 1980 Architecture Must Blaze, and Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York published two years earlier.

Some manifestos are works of literature, almost poetry. The painter RB Kitaj celebrated his Jewish heritage in a free-wheeling 2007 Second Diasporist Manifesto, while Takashi Murakami’s The Super Flat Manifesto decried the loss of authentic Japanese cultural identity after decades of Western influence, while also celebrating the fusion between cultures made possible by modern technology.

The film director Werner Herzog’s 1999 Lessons of Darkness is a typically brilliant, rambling, semi-coherent paean in praise of ‘poetic, ecstatic truth’.

These 100 manifestoes, selected and edited by Danchev, Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham, provide an insight not only into the great art movements of the 20th century, but also into the relationship between culture and politics.

Danchev is to be praised for including in his compilation a range of South and Central American writers and artists, and the publishers, Penguin Modern Classics, are to be praised for the ring-binding, that both makes the book easy to read, while also evoking a vanished era of Roneographs and pamphlets fluttering from windows down into crowded streets.

* Peter Murray is director of the Crawford Gallery.

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