M13 The Fighting Cock Art Group

The Nightingale’s Butcher Manifesto (1951)

In June 1951 a manifesto was printed on the back page of the Iranian radical modernist journal Fighting Cock (Khorous-e jangi), in which the authors presented a scathing attack on all major artistic trends in their country at the time. These included traditional Persian miniature painting and poetry, classical Western painting and Socialist Realism. The manifesto, which was signed by the anti-establishment poet and artist Hooshang Irani (1925–73), the musician and poet Gholam Hossein Gharib and the playwright and critic Hassan Shirvani, emerged at an optimistic time in Iranian politics. The prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, leader of the Iranian National Front, had just nationalized the oil industry, and for the first time secular leftists, Islamists and nationalists were all working towards economic independence from the West. Seizing the moment, the group promoted an extreme artistic radicalism, that embraced absurdism and chance.

‘The Nightingale’s Butcher Manifesto’ (‘Sallakh-e Bolbol’) was a forceful call to arms, which implored artists to rethink how art could be created in Iran. The word ‘nightingale’ in the manifesto’s title has a double meaning in Farsi. It can refer both to a popular pattern of flowers and birds in traditional Persian decorative art and to a boy’s genitals. The ‘nightingale’s butcher’ therefore is an allusion to castration. Like the Dadaists and the Futurists before them, the manifesto’s authors were violently rejecting tradition in favour of a new form of art.

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  1. The art of Fighting Cock is the art of those still alive. This cry will silence all voices mourning at the tomb of the art of the past.
  2. In the name of a new era in art, we wage our merciless attack on all art traditions and regulations of the past.
  3. New artists are children of their time and the right to live is exclusive to the avant-gardes.
  4. The first step in any new movement results in breaking old idols.
  5. We condemn to annihilation all the admirers of the past with all its artistic manifestations such as theatre, painting, the novel, music, and sculpture, and break the ancient idols and their scavenger followers.
  6. The new art considers sincerity to the inner self a gateway to artistic creation. It embodies all life forces and is inseparable from them.
  7. New art walks on the graves of idols and of their sinister imitators, toward the annihilation of the chains of tradition and establishment of freedom of emotional expression.
  8. New art cancels all conventions of the past and announces newness as the home for beauties.
  9. Art’s existence is in motion and progress. Only those artists are alive whose thought is based on new knowledge.
  10. New art is in contrast with all the claims of the proponents of art for society’s sake, art for art’s sake, art for whatever’s sake.
  11. In order for new art to progress, all old art associations should be destroyed.
  12. All creators of artworks! Be aware that the artists of the Fighting Cock group shall fight most strenuously with the distribution of old and vulgar artworks.
  13. Down with imbeciles.

FIGHTING COCK ART GROUP

Gharib, Shirvani, Irani