M11 Vladimír Boudník

Explosionalism Manifesto No. 2 (1949)

Explosionalism was a concept devised in the late 1940s by the pioneering Czech avant-garde artist Vladimír Boudník (1924–68) which he promoted in a series of manifestos sent out to radio stations, magazines and newspapers. The key notion at the heart of his theory was that human imagination had the capacity to ‘explode’ so that it was possible to find artistic forms in everyday life. To prove this, Boudník would perform street actions, inviting passers-by to mark out shapes on the bomb-damaged walls of post-war Prague, encouraging them to see patterns in the scuff marks, dirt and broken plaster. He carried out more than a hundred of these actions, which anticipate later land artists of the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1950s the communist authorities had declared Boudník’s art to be nonconformist, making it almost impossible for him to stage public exhibitions or events. He committed suicide in 1968, aged forty-four.

‘Explosionalism Manifesto No. 2’, dated 15 April 1949, was first published in the Czech periodical Tvář (Face). In a fiery polemic, Boudník castigates bourgeois artists for their lack of ambition and inability to engage with the public. Explosionalism, in its cosmic magnificence, meets the needs of the atomic age, as not just an artistic movement, but as a way of life.

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People! We stand at the threshold of the atomic age. Tens of thousands of factories, with an army of workers ten million strong, are experimenting, building and striving to enrich our planet with greater knowledge. The activities and contributions of past centuries have all but come to an end, and information about them is stored in books available to the public at large. Therefore the labourer with a pickaxe is justified in feeling as important as the machine designer. Now every literate person, with a little concentration, can utilize the knowledge that, just a few decades ago, was the exclusive property of scientists. The whole world is energized by the attempt for a new creative movement! And how are artists responding to these changes? It seems as if their ranks are filled with impotent, degenerative conservative fanatics. The Surrealists tried to meet the needs of the contemporary age; if only their successors, yearning for a strange superiority, had not sabotaged the efforts and condemned the artistic movement to the role of drawing crossword puzzles in children’s magazines. Only EXPLOSIONALISM is relevant to the present world order. It is a movement that elevates each member of the collective to the level of omnipotence, since his exploits are to the detriment of the universe and not the detriment of his fellow man. The Explosionalist’s mind will find fulfilment in the trillions and trillions of cubic metres of cosmic space. Each of you will be an artist if you cast off your prejudices and indifference. ANALYSIS + SYNTHESIS: with the imagination’s help most of you can make out various earthly forms in clouds, cliffs and molten lead. The same applies when you stare at a cracked wall or marble veins. You see faces, figures … Everything blends together and comes to life. These elements stir up old experiences stored in your mind in the form of memories. You see your own inner self transposed to two dimensions, to a surface. All you have to do is redraw or repaint the vision on paper. You seize hold of your inner world and thereby automatically render it comprehensible for the general public. One and the same cluster of spots will be able to remind people of a hundred different likenesses and combinations. Visions are governed by the intensity of mood and life experience of the observer. If a person has not seen some exotic flower or machine part, he will obviously not know how to draw either of them; and if he sees these things emerge from a cluster of spots, they will seem incomprehensible to him, while for another they will be clear. An inspired person can approach the spots with a certain purpose. Many paintings that convince you of the brilliance of their creators were made on this basis. If your life is richer than that of an artist who used to depress you, your artistic expression will also be richer. If you are a manual labourer, don’t use your feeble hand as an excuse. Today’s art requires the truth of life and not the superficial, school-taught elegance of a juggler!

A painting is not supposed to be a snapshot. That’s what photography is for. A painting must be a film strip of a myriad number of tensions and psychological explosions compressed into a static surface and presented in an infinitely short moment in conjunction with the viewer’s kinetic imagination.