The manifestos collected in this book originally took many forms: not only straightforward essays or conventional articles in periodicals, but also posters, flyers, pamphlets, personal manuscripts, samizdat typescripts, postcards, poems and performances. Others – for example Rasheed Araeen’s ‘Preliminary Notes for a BLACK MANIFESTO’ (M59) or Adam Pendleton’s ‘Black Dada’ (M96) – were conceived by their creators as artworks in their own right. Some of the manifestos appearing here have been translated into English for the first time; in other cases the authors opted not to use their first languages, but wrote in English themselves. With a couple of exceptions (duly noted at the appropriate point), all manifestos are reprinted in their entirety.
As mentioned in the Introduction, the manifestos are arranged chronologically. Because many were not formally published in print until long after the time of their composition (for example, those produced in places of totalitarian censorship), the manifestos are ordered as far as possible according to their time of composition or initial informal dissemination, rather than necessarily their first publication. Where manifestos cannot be dated any more specifically than to a particular year, they are placed after those where a more specific date within the same year has been established.
One of the pleasures of reading these manifestos is encountering the distinctive, often unique, forms of expression employed by their authors in order to give voice to their artistic ideas. Therefore, other than the silent correction of obvious typographical errors, and the occasional minor emendation arising from consultation with the respective authors, editorial interference within the texts has been kept to an absolute minimum in order to preserve the individual style of each manifesto.
Because many of the individuals and groups responsible for the manifestos may not be familiar to every reader, each text is preceded by a short introduction which provides some information about the author(s), a brief outline of the context in which the manifesto was written and, where necessary, explanations of significant allusions or references within the texts. All footnotes, however, are original to the manifestos, rather than editorially supplied. In addition, further information about the manifestos and the artists associated with them can be obtained from the works cited in the section on Sources and Further Reading and from the List of Artist Groups towards the end of this book.