Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The wild manifestos of modernism reveal the splendors and stupidities of the last moment when art mattered enough to hate.
May 16, 2001 | Between the years 1909 and 1924, the following demands and assertions were made:
-- That machinery and motors in cities be tuned like musical instruments, transforming every factory into "an intoxicating orchestra of noises"
-- That the art of "tactilism," which is particularly suited to "young poets, pianists, and stenographers," will enable anyone to recover the sensations of their past life "with freshness and complete surprise"
-- That the nude be totally suppressed in painting for 10 years
-- That flexible rubber tubes be connected to the udders of cows and connected to underground conduits leading to cities because "it is contrary to general human morale for different people to drink milk from the same pail"
-- That a "new race of men," inspired by the revolutionary language of the cinema, will rise up and crush palaces and prisons
-- That women must "become sublimely unjust once more, like all the forces of nature"
-- That "a racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes ... is more beautiful than the 'Victory of Samothrace'"
-- That the authors, by the act of painting their faces, "will bear man's multiple soul to the upper reaches of reality"
-- That the right angle alone expresses the "primordial relation" of the universe, the "opposition of two extremes"
-- That the right angle, "which we consider passionless," be rejected
-- That all "cosmic faculties" should be opposed to "this gonorrhea of a putrid sun coming out of the faculties of philosophic thought"
-- That "men or women who are intelligent" can become masters of their "facial destiny" through "Auto-Facial-Construction"
-- That "Francis Picabia is an imbecile, an idiot, a pickpocket!"
-- That "the Past and Future are the prostitutes Nature has provided"
-- That "if we were sheep to the point of forming a collective school, this would surely be 'Showoffism'"
-- That "a great poet or painter must take over the directorship of all the great women's fashion houses" to create "illusionistic, sarcastic, sonorous, loud, deadly and explosive attire"
These utterances (click here for sources) are not the ravings of lunatics, or jokes dreamed up by overeducated buffoons. They are founding statements by the legendary figures who helped create modernism. It's hard to imagine just how shocking they must have been: The volcano-like eruption of modernism seems almost as distant, now that the Revolution has become a TV show, as the Renaissance. Its doctrines are exhausted, its once nerve-wracking fragments ensconced in museums, and the whole thing made sleepily irrelevant by the rise of mass media. But it was the Biggest Bang in the last 500 years of our cultural history, and if you lean over its crater you can still hear and feel it, the molten craziness and hurtling euphoria of that uncanny moment when for the last time High Art still mattered enough to hate.
"Manifesto: A Century of Isms," edited by Mary Ann Caws, gathers together the glorious, the histrionic and the just plain nutty pronouncements made by various artists and loudmouths at the outbreak of modernism. It is at once a fascinating thread running into that visionary labyrinth, an inspiring reminder of one of the great, weird moments in human history, and a sobering monument to a future that never arrived.
Caws, who teaches at the graduate school of the City University of New York and who is an expert on surrealism, has gathered every aesthetic "ism" in the 20th century, from the familiar to the delightfully obscure. The collection opens with James Abbott McNeil Whistler's "The Ten O'Clock" (1885), a celebrated art-for-art's-sake lecture that started at its unorthodox hour to give his fashionable London audience a chance to dine first, and concludes with a 1984 meditation by the poet Edmond Jabes on the idea of The Book. In between, it covers such well-known movements and ideas as cubism, futurism, expressionism, the scuola metafisica, dada, vorticism, suprematism and surrealism, as well as lesser-known ones like ultraism, rayonism, nowism, thingism, hallucinism and verticalism, along with a number of catch-all categories like "Thresholds," "Individualism and Personism," "Miscellaneous Manifestos" and "Writing and the Book." The heart of the book, what Caws calls the Manifesto Moment, covers that "ten-year period of glorious madness" stretching from 1909 (when F.T. Marinetti issued his first Futurist Manifesto) to 1919, with much attention also paid to the Surrealist movement in its heyday, the 1920s and '30s.
In her lively introduction, Caws nails the dead-serious goofiness of the Manifesto Moment:
At its most endearing, a manifesto has a madness about it. It is peculiar and angry, quirky, or downright crazed. Always opposed to something, particular or general, it has not only to be striking but to stand up straight ... The manifest proclamation itself marks a moment, whose trace it leaves as a post-event commemoration. Often the event is exactly its own announcement and nothing more, in this Modernist/Postmodernist genre. What it announces is itself. At its height, it is the deictic genre par excellence. LOOK! It says. NOW! HERE! The manifesto is by nature a loud genre, unlike the essay ... The manifesto makes an art of excess. This is how it differs from the standard and sometimes self-congratulatory ars poetica, rational and measured. The manifesto is an act of démesure, going past what is thought of as proper, sane, and literary. Its outreach demands an extravagant self-assurance. At its peak of performance, its form creates its meaning.
What's unique about these manifestos, as the admittedly extreme list of assertions above makes clear, is their inextricable blend of wisdom and silliness. Like a loudmouth in love, they're foolish -- but enviably foolish. Much of their silliness, as Caws indicates, derives from their overblown tone, which even ironic self-awareness somehow cannot curb; but their more profound and intriguing ridiculousness results from the imbalance between their grandiose mission and the actual artistic means intended to achieve it.
