Notes for Discussion

Preliminary comments on manifestoes:

The manifesto, as a call-to-action, asddresses democractic ideals, utopian values, and sometimes anarchistic tendencies.

The manifestoes of the avant-garde echo the idealism and call for change of the founding fathers:

"...laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." – Thomas Jefferson

"Today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, arcaeolosgists, ciceroni and antiquarians." – F.T. Marinetti, Futurist

The manifesto marks the gap between democractic ideals and modern political practice. Its style is typcially inflammatory, exaggerated, theatrical, flamboyant. It is an effort to link one's voice to the collective expression of revolutionary zeal.

The historical avant-garde adopted the manifesto to signal a radical departure buorgeois artistic practice by linking their efforts to the political history of dissent, participating in an ideological critique of modernity.

In essence, the manifesto links artistic expression with political militancy, it states an ideological position, seeks to antagonize, and scorns conciliation. It is not tolerant.

"Dada is the international expression of our times, the great revellion of artistic movements." – Richard Huelsenbeck, DADA Manifesto, 1918

The manifesto "creates a simulacrum of rupture in the dominant political order."

"By contract, the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole Frnce, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moreal advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of medocritiy, hate , and dull conceit." – André Bréton, Surrealist Manifesto

The manifesto is a proposal that offers the possibility of something new: "Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be," (Bréton) a departure from the constraints real, embracing the power of the suspension of disbelief.

• F.T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” Documents of 20th Century Art, Viking Press, NY (1970)

The Futurists were quasi-terrorists who embraced war, speed, technology as the artistic reality of the 20th century. The wholly rejected any form of cultural production that did not embrace this ideal.

"The Futurist Cinema will thus cooperate in the general renewal, taking the place of the literary review (always pedantic) and the drama (always predictable) and killing the book (always tedious and oppresive." – The futurist cinema

F.T. Marinetti was the leader of the Futurists. Marinetti had lived in Paris from 1893 to 1896. At the cafes, salons, literary banquets and dance-halls frequented by eccentric artists, writers and poets, the 17 year old Marinetti was soon drawn into the circle around the literary magazine La Plume. they introduced Marinetti to the principles of ‘free verse’, which he immediately adopted in his own writing. (Jarry’s Ubu roi was performed on Dec. 11, 1896, the year Marinetti left Paris for Italy. The Manifesto is based jarry-style with its energy and bombastic ironies, firmly establishing Marinetti as the enfant-terrible of the Italian art world.

The Futurists attacked the book, its linearity, its stasis, its fixed quality, and its canonical rigidity. Replacing the book, the Futurists announced new genres: film, performance art, electronic music. “Filmed words-in-freedom in movement (synoptic tables of lyric values - dramas of humanized or animated letters - orthographic dramas - typographical dramas - geometric dramas - numeric sensibility, etc.) Painting + sculpture + plastic dynamism + words-in-freedom + composed noises (intonarumori) + architecture + synthetic theatre = Futurist cinema.” The futurists predicted the transformation from the canonical written word to the multi-sensory, anarchically-driven Gesamtkunstwerk. A more living, dynamic experience.

Futurist Manifesto - The history of Futurism begins on the 20th of February, 1909 in Paris with the publication of the first Futurist manifesto in the large-circulation daily, Le figaro. Its author, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, writing from his luxurious villa rosa in Milan, had selected the Parisian public as the target of his manifesto of ‘incendiary violence’. Such attacks on the establishment values of the painting and literary academies were not infrequent in a city enjoying its reputation as the ‘cultural capital of the world’.

After an opning narrative describing an exhilerating car wreck on an industrial road, Marinetti's manifesto offers eleven futurist resolves to embrace speed, war, machinery and danger. He also initiated a call to break free of the anachronistic tendencies of the 19th century, which only the recognition of the absurdities of this "pomposity" could resolve:

"Let's break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride=ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let's give ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation, but only to replenish the deep wells of the Absurd!"

Futurist Cinema - The Futurists embrace the new technologies of sound, typogrpaphy, and cinema. This scene from the film "Thais," made in 1916, reveals their interest in the new medium as "words-in-freedom," an integration of all media, images, sounds, poetry, into a new "total artwork."

Futurist typography - In Richard Lanham's the Electronic Word, he describes the Futurist deconstruction of language, text and typography:
" The book is seen as static, inelastically linear, sluggish; the new cinematographic form as dynamic, interactive, simultaneous, swift. This war on the book chose as its immediate target typographical convention, with results like SCRABrrRrraaNNG. here we see the book and all it represents in the act of deconstructing itself– all unawares the little children played, even as early as 1919– esplosione at its center literally shattering typographical convention into distended fragments.
It is to this stage that Marinetti– and electronic text – would return us. He seeks to make us aware of the enormous act of simplification than an ordinary printed text represents; he wants to make us self-conscious about a register of expressivity that as literate people we have abjured.

Futurist sound - "Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men." – Luigi Russolo, the art of noise

Luigi Russolo was a painter determined to open our ears to the noise of the modern age. His musical vision embraced "the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jilting of a tram on its rails" – the symphonic blending of sounds that defined life in the urban metropolis of the early 1900s.

Russolo wrote his manifesto in 1913 entitled "The Art of Noise," a bold treatise declaiming the end of conventional Western music, and the dawning of a new music based on the grinding, exploding, crackling and buzzing of mechanical instruments.

"Risveglio di una Citta" by Luigi Russolo
 
" Every manifestation of life is accompanied by noise. Noise is therefore familiar to our ears and has the power to remind us immediately of life itself. Musical sound, a thing extraneous to life and independent of it... has become to our ears what a too familiar face is to our eyes" – Luigi Russolo

Futurist painting - This painting of the "Dynamism of a Cyclist" 1913 by Umberto Boccioni
demonstrates the Futurist interest in film. Borrowing from Cubism, the Futurists were interested in the dynamics of speed and the simultanaeity of the image in motion. Boccioni also created sculputures which attempted to free the object from its tranditional statis, creating instead, a fluid medium infused by technology and raw energy.

• Richard Huelsenbeck, “Dadaist Manifesto,” (1918) Dada Art and Anti-art, Hans Richter, Thames and Hudson, London, England (1964)

The word DADA symbolizes the most primitive relation to the reality of the environment; with Dadaism a new reality comes into its own. Life apperas in a simultaneous muddle of noises, colours and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified into Dadaist art, with all the sensational screams and fevers of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality.

Richard Huelsenbeck was born on 23 April 1892 in Frankenau, Hessen, Germany, died 1974. Late in his life he lived in New York under the name of Charles R. Hulbeck and practised Jungian psycho-analysis. Huelsenbeck took a prominent part in the foundation of the Zürich and Berlin dada movements. He had been an expressionist poet and writer. He came to Zürich in February 1916 and immediately came into contact with the "Cabaret Voltaire." He returned to Berlin in January, 1917, initiating the Dada group there. Huelsenbeck edited the "Dada Almanac" in Berlin in 1920 and wrote "En Avant Dada," a history of dadaism. in the same year. The author of numerous other dada publications. He claimed throughout his life that "dada is still existing," thus placing himself in direct opposition to the other founders of dadaism.

"Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artosts are creatures of their epoch." The artist is a barometer of his time and the Dadaists embraced this critique. They rejected German expressionism as too stylized and felt that the artist should be an unfiltered instrument for articulating the contemporary social and political condition.

Club Dada was founded in Berlin (1918 - 1923) where the movement became increasingly politicized. In 1917 Richard Huelsenbeck moved from Zürich to Berlin and met there Franz Jung, Wieland Herzfelde and his brother John Heartfield. Additional 'Club Dada' members were Johannes Baader, George Grosz, Hannah Hoech, Walter Mehring and Raoul Hausmann. The Berlin group provoked the society with magazines as 'Club Dada', 'Der Dada' and 'Dada Almanach' containing photomontages, manifestos and Grosz's anti-bourgeois caricatures.

As stated in Huelsenbeck's manifesto, Dadaist poetry embraced three primary concerns: 1. Bruitist poem - the embrace of noise, like the Futurists, in which all sounds could enter into the expression of text. 2. Simultaneist poem - juxtaposition and collage creating unusual and sometimes jarring juxtapositions. 3. Static poem - the fragmentation and desintegration of elements that render the original unrecognizable.

Johannes Baader, claiming himself as "Oberdada" or Superdada and "Dada Prophet", was the self-appointed President of the Republic of Germany, know for such antics as passing out leaflets entitled "The Green Corpse" at the Weimar National Assembly. On that day the assembly had passed an article of the constitution guaranteeing "Every German the right to give free expressin to his opionions in word or print or any other form."

Baader's "insanity" was testified to on several occasions, such as in 1916 when in answer to his conscription letter to Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, advising him that he disapproved of his father's war and that the son should interceded.

On another occasion, he proclaimed himself as "President of the Globe,", dismissing the idea of elections, he stated "Let us not make our decision with the instinctive mechanical certainty of the unconscious masses... we shall blow Weimar sky-hgh. Berlin is the place .. da .. da .. Nobody and nothing will be spared. Turn out in masses! The Dadist Headquarters of World Revolution.

Dada Photomontage – Raoul Hausmann
Dada Cino (1920). Dada photomontage is made up of bits of photos and other images along with words and phrases from the media, not "things" but signifiers. This technique is a forerunner of post-modernist appropriation as seen in pop art and later in net art strategies that enable extensive linking, appropriation, remixing, and shredding information. These signifiers are recomposed into a new whole but point always to another "page" from which they were snipped.

Dada photomontages (and collages, for that matter) are made up of fragments of images and text from the popular culture. Not just words, but clipped bits of newspapers, posters, catalogs, tickets, letters, and fakes of the same. The development of halftone photogravure and offset printing had set loose what seemed an avalanche of photographs in newspapers and magazines, and already advertisers, first of all in America, had begun to combine photographs in one poster or advert. In 1919, Hannah Höch was working for one of the new illustrated magazines when she and Raoul Hausmann (among others) realized that this technique of mass culture could be turned against it with great force to disrupt its depictions of a normal social world and political order--to demonstrate, as Johanna Drucker puts it, "the social reality made in and through image production", or again, to pry signifying practices loose "from their conventional relations or easy recuperation as readily consumable modes." Benjamin H. D. Buchloh speaks in very similar fashion of Dada's "extreme procedures of juxtaposition and fragmentation by which the origins in advertising were inverted and where the constructed artificiality of the artifact destroyed the mythical nature of the commodity."

• André Bréton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924),” Ann Arbor Book, Michigan, 1970

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express–verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner–the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

The surrealists, headed up by André Bréton, grew out of the post World War I era by departing from the anarchic tendencies of Futurism and Dadaism, to embrace a more interior and psychological approach inspired by dream imagery and the theories of Sigmund Freud. The surrealists prized the imagination above all (which the Dadaists would have scorned), believing that the power of the imagination released from the constraints of rational thought would initiative aesthetic, social and political transformation.

In Bréton's first Surrealist manifesto from 1924, he states the "imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be." This is critical to the notion of the artist as a creator of models that project higher depictions of society, echoed in one of my speeches, "[the artist] has rejected the notion of the sole possibility of the things that “are,” replacing them with what “can be.” Drawing their inspiration from dreams and memory, The Surrealists attempted to transform reality through unusual juxtaposition (a technique borrowed from Dadaist photomontage). Their belief in the power of the dream and the unconscious imagination is here described, "When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers? I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers."

Ultimately the Surrealists sought to blur the line between reality and dream, which is where the term surrealism comes from, "the resolution of these two dates, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality."

The Surrealist Games functioned as a laboratory for conjuring up dream states, exploring juxtapositions drawn from the unconscious, in which texts and image would be constructed through the collective process: the systematic re-ording of the senses. Among Surrealist techniques exploiting the mystique of accident was a kind of collective collage of words or images called the cadaver exquis (exquisite corpse). Based on an old parlor game, it was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution. he technique got its name from results obtained in initial playing, "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau" (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine). The image here is by Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro and Max Morise, 1928.

Surrealist painting - Among the most well recognized of the Surrealist painters is Salvador Dali, whose "The Persistence of Memory" (1931) is an icon of the movement. The painting challenges the primacy of the rational mind, revealing the transformative nature of the unconscious, its effect on time, space, objects, etc. As Bréton stated in the manifesto, "We really live by our fantasies when we give free rein to them." Here the fantastic and the surreal engulf the real world, plunging our unconsciousness in the hallucinatory qualities of the dream state.

This technique as it plays out in the "real world," has great social and political effect, as Bréton claimed, "Perhaps the imagination is on the verge of recovering its rights," has overtones in the empowerment of the individual, every individual, to assert their irrational nature – "the way to these regions is clearly marked, and that to attain the true goal is now merely a matter of the travelers ability to endure."