It is easy to share the delusion in the West that the art manifesto has long outlived its finest hour. Those scabrous radicals the Futurists, with their ebullient and unreasonable demands, tattooed a template into our consciousness that no skin graft will repair: that the art manifesto is magical, verbose, provocative, absurd and untethered by the mania for creative destruction leading up to the First World War. So ingrained is this idea that it is characteristic to imagine that the art manifesto simultaneously began and ended – tabula rasa – in 1909, when F. T. Marinetti published his desire to abandon the past and embrace the future on the front page of Le Figaro.
Such a view of the art manifesto’s history casts a certain melancholia which is hard to ignore. And it exists as much in the declamations of an online technofeminist art collective as it does in the onionskin pages of a long-forgotten document rapped out on a typewriter where the ribbon runs dry. But to read the manifestos in this book with one eye on the past would be wrong, because it presupposes the art manifesto to be a Western phenomenon rather than a global one, and an irrelevance in the contemporary era. These manifestos, written between 1909 and 2012, come from all over the world, and were created for a myriad reasons. Some are personal, some are political, and others are written with aspirations to high cultural ideals. What unites them, if anything, is a belief in art as a vital and empowering force.
Some of these manifestos have not been published in English before, others simply deserve to be better known, but it is hoped that together they will expand our knowledge of the history of art. I have listed them chronologically, simply because to list them any other way felt curiously prescriptive. Certainly there are themes, ideologies and influences that bind and overlap; but the geographical expanses are too wide, the political circumstances too specific and the manifestos too idiosyncratic to be neatly categorized. And that is how it should be, for even the most directive art manifesto is a chimerical exercise.
The book begins with ‘Art and Swadeshi’, written by the Sri Lankan cultural theorist Ananda K. Coomaraswamy in 1909 (M1). At the very moment the Futurists were calling for cultural destruction, the Indian province of Bengal was in the grip of revolutionary nationalist fervour. For four years the region had adopted a policy of Swadeshi (self-sufficiency), refusing to buy British goods; as a result, local industries were beginning to thrive. It was amid this climate of revivalism that Coomaraswamy advanced his thesis that the possibilities of Swadeshi were not solely economic and political, but should be artistic, too.
Coomaraswamy’s frustration was directed at the way indigenous culture had been subjugated to a colonial one. This was a critical subject for all artists living under the rule of imperial masters. In the 1930s and 40s it permeated the passionate tirades of the visionary Afro-Caribbean Surrealists belonging to the Légitime Défense group (M4) and to the influential Négritude movement (M7), which sought to reclaim the value of blackness and African culture. As the philosophy of Négritude stretched out to span the Atlantic and encompass both Africa and the Caribbean, its creative force profoundly reshaped the cultural landscape of the African diaspora. Perhaps most significantly it underpinned the ideology of Pan-Africanism – the idea that all peoples of African descent shared a common cultural heritage, and that a collective black consciousness should be fostered in order to forge the bonds of solidarity necessary to overcome the legacies of slavery and colonialism.
As the Caribbean philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote in one of the essential texts for the black liberation movement, The Wretched of the Earth (1961): ‘Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.’ The distinguished cultural theorist Stuart Hall quoted this passage in his landmark essay ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation’ (1989) when discussing the problems faced by post-colonial societies. As artists were given the unique opportunity to define their newly independent country’s cultural identity, their manifestos each articulated the same fundamental paradox: a desire to resurrect traditional home-grown forms of artistic expression, while at the same time acknowledging the Présence Européenne. The Nigerian artist Uche Okeke summed up the dilemma in his ‘Natural Synthesis’ manifesto of 1960 (M18):
Our new society calls for a synthesis of old and new, of functional art and art for its own sake … It is equally futile copying our old art heritages, for they stand for our old order. Culture lives by change. Today’s social problems are different from yesterday’s, and we shall be doing grave disservice to Africa and mankind by living in our fathers’ achievements. For this is like living in an entirely alien cultural background.
In the optimistic atmosphere of many countries immediately after they had won independence, a classical art education – and even conventional art materials – were replaced with new forms of modernism, built upon the foundations of traditional indigenous art forms, styles and motifs. In North Africa and the Middle East in the 1940s and 50s, artists such as those of the Khartoum School in Sudan (see M66) and the Syrian painter Madiha Omar in Iraq (see M52) pioneered a form of modern art based on Arabic calligraphy. The Aouchem Group in 1960s Algeria took their name from the ancient Berber body art whose designs inspired their abstract paintings (M34). In West Africa in the 1970s and 80s, the Vohou-Vohou artists of Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) used tapa cloth (made from beaten tree bark), soil and clay in their paintings (M82).
Across entire regions, Pan-Africanism and the associated ideology of Pan-Arabism gained momentum as artists sought unifying cultural identities that spanned the new national divisions. In Iraq in 1969, the New Vision Group championed the idea of an Arab modernism united on ideological and cultural grounds rather than stylistically (M41). In Senegal in 1966, President Léopold Sédar Senghor staged the first World Festival of Black Arts in order to promote unity throughout the continent and across the African diaspora. This was followed by other Pan-African festivals and a cultural manifesto written in 1969 (M39). And in Malaysia in 1974, the artists Sulaiman Esa and Redza Piyadasa advanced the notion of ‘mystical reality’ in order to try and establish a clear division between Asian art and that created by Western artists (M55).
Another of the most powerful influences on art manifestos, especially in the inter-war and immediate post-war years, was Marxist ideology. For artists whose countries were oppressed by authoritarian rulers – whether their own or those of a foreign power – Marxism’s revolutionary idealism was often profoundly inspiring. In the manifesto he wrote for the Surrealist group Légitime Défense in 1932, the Martinican poet Étienne Léro proclaimed the group’s desire to ‘rise up here against all those who are not suffocated by this capitalist, Christian, bourgeois world to which, involuntarily, our protesting bodies belong’ (M4). In Argentina in 1947, the Constructivist group Arte Madí (M10) strove to create an abstract art for the people as the aesthetic expression of their dream for a classless utopian society. In Iran, the short-lived era of optimism that accompanied the socialist reforms of the new government in 1951 seemed to offer artists unprecedented creative possibilities; opportunities that were explored in the revolutionary ‘Nightingale’s Butcher Manifesto’ (M13). And, as late as 1987, the Indian artist and writer Anita Dube was arguing in her ‘Questions and Dialogue’ manifesto that art should be inspired by Marxism to challenge marginalization and oppression (M88).
For artists in communist Eastern Europe, however, the influence of Marxism was far more ambivalent. By the late 1950s, many found themselves facing an increasingly stark choice: to forgo creative experimentation and self-expression in order to extol the joys of communism in state-approved Socialist Realist art, or be driven underground. The result, as many artists chose the latter course, was a prolific era of art ephemera, of performances and happenings, and of art manifestos, many of which took Dadaist forms or were metaphysical in theme. This was partly to circumvent the serious threat of state censorship, but partly also to ridicule aspects of life under an authoritarian, socialist regime and reflect a sense of alienation. The Czech artist Vladimír Boudník, for example, directed people in 1949 to tap into the explosive creativity contained within themselves (M11); the Serbian group Gorgona introduced the Yugoslavian public to their idea of ‘anti-art’, which embraced absurdity, nihilism and irony, in 1961 (M20); while the conceptual artist Július Koller defied socialist conformity in 1960s Czechoslovakia by presenting the cosmos as a place of creative possibility and playing ping-pong (M30). In 1970s Poland, Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski sent out the ‘NET Manifesto’ to recipients all over the world, its deliberately bureaucratic style designed to get its message – a request for art-related information not accessible in Eastern Europe at the time – safely past the post-office censors (M47).
Before the advent of communism in China, a short-lived moment of fragile liberalism in the late 1920s and early 1930s had seen the beginnings of modernism in Chinese art. The charismatic artist Lin Fengmian had attempted to reconcile traditional Chinese art and innovative art practices in Europe (M3), while the Storm Society had sought a complete break with the past in favour of a revolutionary avant-garde (M5) – but such tender shoots of artistic experimentation soon withered away beneath the storm blasts of Maoist ideology, and any last remnants of originality were obliterated by the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. It was not until the late 1970s, following the death of Mao Zedong, that artists were able to exercise some creative freedom once again. The unofficial open-air exhibition staged by the Stars Group in Beijing in 1979 (M68) is often considered the forerunner of a nationwide cultural awakening in the 1980s. But this exhilarating era of artistic creativity and prolific manifesto writing (see M83, M84, M87) was abruptly ended by the reversal of liberalization following the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, and the exodus abroad of many artists escaping the new oppression.
South America also has a fertile history of revolutionary art manifestos. The Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s provocative declaration in 1928 that Brazil’s greatest strength was the cannibalizing of other cultures arguably set a precedent for extremist actions by South American artists. Many became activists, writing manifestos that sought to shock their societies out of complacency. As nascent democracies gave way to brutal military juntas and bloody guerrilla struggles, artists took to the streets, performing happenings and staging collective actions in order to drive forward their insurgent agendas. Their art was often as incendiary as the ideas they promoted in their manifestos. The Vanguard Artists’ Group in Argentina used the cover of an arts festival to expose the appalling treatment of workers in the province of Tucumán in 1968 (M35). The collective El Techo de la Ballena (The Roof of the Whale) in 1960s Venezuela and the artist Artur Barrio in 1970s Brazil both used rotting matter as a metaphor for the corruption of society (M19, M43). The Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (Collective for Art Actions) in Chile sought to mobilize popular opposition against General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in the 1970s–80s through high-profile cultural interventions (M73).
Similar approaches were also taken by black activist artists fighting for recognition in the 1960s–1980s. The members of AFRI-COBRA (M53), who were involved in the Civil Rights movement in the USA, took their cue from the Harlem Renaissance and the philosopher Alain Locke’s seminal study of the movement, The New Negro (1925), and articulated their aesthetic as ‘expressive awesomeness’ and ‘shine’. Other artists were empowered by the forceful rhetoric of works such as The Wretched of the Earth to begin challenging the white supremacy of the art establishment. Between 1975 and 1976 the British conceptual artist Rasheed Araeen wrote ‘Preliminary Notes for a BLACK MANIFESTO’ (M59), in which he castigated the endemic racism of the Western art world. His sentiments were echoed by the Turkish painter Bedri Baykam in 1984 in ‘The San Francisco Manifesto’ (M76) and by the British artist Chila Kumari Burman’s ‘There Have Always Been Great Blackwomen Artists’ in 1986 (M85). And, as cultural theorists called for the reconfiguration of the traditional centre–periphery relationship – in which Western cultural development is given primacy over the social and artistic developments of other regions – in favour of multiple centres of interconnectivity, art collectives like the Black Audio Film Collective (M74) were breaking cinematic convention by creating complex narratives that meditated on themes of migration and globalization.
These twin themes have continued to attract the energy of artists and find expression in myriad new ways – from the Slovenian conceptualist Marko Peljhan’s pioneering ‘Projekt Atol’ (M92), which since the early 1990s has used information technology to navigate the post-modern world, map new cultural connections and create initiatives beyond the confines of traditional art institutions, to the Syrian collective Abounaddara (M98), who operate their ‘emergency cinema’ in the ever-evolving online territories of today.
This introduction does not do justice to the breadth and scope of the art manifestos in this book. There is the joyful irony of VNS Matrix’s ‘Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century’, which seeks to infiltrate and disrupt the sexist swamp of early web technology (M91). There is Anita Steckel’s spirited defence of the penis in art (M51) and Carla Lonzi’s brilliant rebuke to the male creative ego (M45). There are manifestos written for new visual utopias that still radiate like phosphorescence on the horizon, while toxic politicking and market forces make their spirited reality an impossibility. Others seek to remind us that there are many different ways of looking at the world.
The book concludes with the ‘Manifesto of Artists’ Rights’ (M100), written in 2012 by the Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera: a universal plea for creative freedom for artists living and working in places of oppression. Its simple, direct message can stand for every manifesto in this selection.
‘Art is not a luxury. Art is a basic social need to which everyone has a right.’