M69 Andrzej Partum

Animal Manifesto (1980)

The Polish conceptual artist and cultural provocateur Andrzej Partum (1938–2002) was fascinated by the limitations of language and in particular the limitations that exist under totalitarianism. Working in the fields of Concrete poetry, performance art and conceptualism, he founded the deliberately bureaucratic sounding Biuro Poezji (Bureau of Poetry) in Warsaw in 1971. Here, together with other avant-garde artists and poets – such as Zbigniew Warpechowski, and his wife, the important feminist artist Ewa Partum – he illicitly published and distributed manifestos and poetry in a variety of languages, in which he would often play with grammar and style and subvert poetic conventions. An artist with an anarchic sensibility, he believed wholeheartedly in the spirit of opposition and rebellion, lampooning the absurdities of the communist regime. He was also less than enamoured with the Polish avant-garde that centred around Gallery Foksal, which he thought humourless and slow to embrace new ways of working.

In 1980 Partum composed the ‘Animal Manifesto’ (‘Manifest Zwierzȩcy’), in which he mocked the arguments that rational thought makes humans superior to animals, and that progress can be determined only by the technology humans create. Printed on the poster for the 18th International Meeting of Artists, Scientists and Art Theorists (Miȩdzynarodowe Spotkania Artystów, Naukowców i Teoretyków Sztuki), held in the Polish seaside village of Osieki in August 1980, the manifesto employs a variety of grammatical peculiarities that are characteristic of Partum’s work.

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the universe is only partially nature – where it exists without nature it contains concealed sense (movement opposing the human mind) which need not be guessed by humans.

evolution in nature is not progress, it is only a change directed to annihilation of its own matter – most likely beaming out into space.

progress – can only be applied to the development of human technology which, as pseudonature, can destroy or improve it, and without influencing the cosmos, will stay passive before the universe.

the emotional development of man is determined by technology. the screening of thoughts and emotions in total technology inside intimate creation becomes impossible – facing the monopoly of power, preset directives. anonymous technology kills creative subjectivity as it directs the hegemony of control. technological upsurge is always dogmatic. a man lost in the development of technology is worth less than an object produced by new technology. the benefits of production become more important than progress itself and the skill of the maker of products. on the one hand, progress grew out of darkness, coldness, and misery, as well as out of competition; on the other hand, the technocrats drove themselves crazy – because by means of progress they found themselves hampered by mediaeval laws. they sterilize one another in the hierarchy of power with an uncountable quantity of secrets – sacrifices in the name of progress, while the poor and the unskilled perish under the technocrats’ express satisfaction.

obedience in science is the aim of superstition.

if the universe in its being possesses conscious movement (?) then its matter is totally animal.

every animal is essence as ideal as you are.

the division of animals into species is artificial, necessary as a pretext for making deals (?) resulting for the animals only in demagogy – that we know something about them – building super – slaughterhouses for them in consumer societies.

the unraveling of nature’s mysteries is as great a nonsense as comprehending it.

your cachexy is the trump card of progress.

evolution is too slow: facing unrepeated, brief life – in order to catch the ‘truth of course’ consequently, the mind finds itself (always) in the condition of unenlightenment – the aim of the movement of the universe.

consciousness is found only in the feeling of death.

I exist only by recognizing each movement from outside to inside and vice versa across the frontier: contingency creates the postulate for the existence of thought. thus the view that man uses his thought better than the animals – based on the same evolutionary abyss as the animals, which do not need to be human, because man is becoming more and more like them.

in the new fourth dimensional universal geometry, the curved light beam confirms the action of a dilating universe: that the condition of matter at rest does not exist, though the thickness of galaxies is roughly the same explains why man can in the utopia of his own thinking correspond only to an animal with a tremendous thickness of bacteria – as theoretically astronomic black holes from which new galaxies blast out in order to come out from the unlimited boundaries of gravity emerged the chaos of evolution – back to the repeated fossils of ancestors and there to arise in the ideal view.

I derive happiness for you because you do not know me yet.

A. PARTUM