Time for a Manifesto?

I've noticed of late a little spike in things - books, ideas - being described as manifestos. This observation is entirely non-scientific, and I don't have any figures to back it up, but it seems as if the manifesto is having something of a mini-renaissance.

Firstly, there's David Shield's Reality Hunger, which seems to be causing quite the controversy a manifesto is supposed to, although it does appear to be a rather subdued controversy, mainly concerning the viewpoint that it's not-really-very-radical and thus not-really-a-manifesto. I am yet to read it, though rather itching to, as it will no doubt form quite a large part of my future studies, and more pressingly I gather there's a mention of cellphone novels in there somewhere that I have to dig out.

Secondly, there's this - You are Not a Gadget (: A Manifesto) in which the inventor of Virtual Reality Jaron Lanier decides the internet's rubbish now. I think Michael Agger may have it right in his review: "The Web hasn't lost flavor; you've lost flavor."

Thirdly - and this is what made me think there was something worth noting here - is Tony Judt's piece in the Guardian on Saturday, which in the paper version was called A Manifesto for a Brighter Future but on the net is called A Manifesto for a New Politics, which is strange, given that it's a manifesto for a traditional social democracy that realises that "radicalism has always been about conserving valuable pasts". Which may or may not be true - the piece is generally good, I think, even if it places a little too much faith in the idea of social democracy - but what is interesting is how it's called a "manifesto". Why? It isn't really, or if it is then a whole host of opinion pieces in newspapers around the world can be called manifestos. And the two books above seem to have added their colonic subtitles for reasons of provocation rather than a genuinely held belief that they are putting across something new. David Shields, perhaps, thinks he's doing that, but if some reviews are to go by, his something new is to say that non-fiction or the tinkering between it and fiction is the way forward, which isn't particularly new. And Lanier's book appears to be a collection of column articles. Which isn't new or even a coherent single piece!

And of course there's the altermodern, which had a manifesto, even if it did seem to be going through the motions somewhat.

So why manifestos? Times are rough/tough/uncertain etc, and in these sorts of times people are supposedly open to big ideas (although none so big as to actually make a difference: hence the use of the word "recovery" so often in relation to the economy), and big ideas need big statements to get them across and that means a manifesto. But it's a particularly postmodern idea of a manifesto that seems to be doing the rounds - call it a manifesto but actually aim to change very little.

Having said that, it would be exciting if we had a new age of manifestos by radical artists being published on the front page of the Daily Telegraph.

Alicia Martin - Streaming Books

This looks pretty cool...

Grand Folly

Term has started again, and I went to my first class of the year on Monday. It was the core course, which I did last year. It was on the manifestos of the modernists - futurists, cubists, constructivists, the Bauhaus, surrealists, feminists, vorticists, eccentrics.

We all had to pick one we liked and talk a little about it. Now, I love the futurist one because it's so ridiculous - "O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge" - but as far as actual ideas go, the one that I remembered the most was the section from Guillaume Apollinaire's The Cubist Painters, the bit entitled "On Painting".

These are the lines:
"Poets and artists plot the characteristics of their epoch, and the future docilely falls in with their desires."
"Those you mock the new painters are actually laughing at their own features, for people in the future will portray the men of today to be as they are represented in the most alive, which is to say, the newest art of our time."

These lines set off a whole chain of thoughts:
- I like that historians look to an age's avant-garde art for the real "epitome" of an age.
- I wonder what art from today future historians will look at to get the epitome of our age.
- Can you have an epitome of an age?
- Can an age be epitomised?
- Hasn't that notion been completely eradicated by postcolonialism, and the showing up of essentialism?
- But aren't there still trends in art?
- What do they mean?
- Maybe we could talk about an era's "preoccupations"...
- But then what is an era?
- How do you aportion one?

And so on and so forth.......

And then I began thinking, wasn't modernism, all of the art, literature, events, movements, wasn't it all just a huge folly? Their whole idea was to get to the root of things, to wipe away all history, everything that came before and start again. Surely that's the grandest of grand follies?! Is art still fighting this legacy, unrooting itself from modernism, and unrooting itself from rooting?

Rhizome 2010 Commissions

My Bloglines tells me that Rhizome's commissions for 2010 have just been announced. Pricking up as they do now at anything remotely altermodern, my ears and eyes settled on two in particular.

Heba Amin's work, Fragmented City, will "research and locate abandoned buildings in Cairo and then populate Google Earth with sketch-up models of these structures to “counteract the skewed understanding of the city’s experience online where only models of historic monuments exist.”" This will be followed by setting up a "tourism bureau in Cairo in order to give tours of these forgotten areas to provide a new view of the city." You can read her essay on Fragmented City on her website.

This layering of city landscapes is familiar through psychogeography. Personally, this sort of project is always likely to excite my interest, proposing as it does a subversion of the experience of a city. Michel de Certeau talks about these sorts of battles between a dominant city mapped out by planners, architects and institutions and inhabitants; he calls them strategies and tactics. The Wikipedia entry on de Certeau has this definition: "Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power, while "tactics" are utilized by individuals to create space for themselves in environments defined by strategies."

Amin's work is interesting from an altermodern point of view because it drags the past, the present and the future into contact with one another, creating sparks like those of conflicting ideas in a debate. Google Earth skews the viewer's understanding of Cairo by presenting only certain monuments. Will Amin's work result in a welcome evening out of this authoritarian impulse, or will be another instance of it? There are many criterias for choosing the buildings - how, where, why - are how these are regulated will be interesting to see. What access does she have? What knowledge?

The second work that caught my eye was Red76's YouTube School For Social Politics. As Rhizome write: "scattered throughout YouTube lie countless points of view, scattered moments of histories, both personal and collective. By arranging these video segments - documentaries, personal missives and old family films, newsreels, music videos - new light can be shed on the sociopolitical landscape of history past, and history present. The YouTube School for Social Politics (YTSSP) invites guest historians, artists, and theorists to construct passages of historical inquiry through the assemblage of clips found on YouTube."

The Wikipedia page on Red76 is small but gives a starting point: "Red76 is a multi-artist collective started in Portland, Oregon ... Red 76's work centers around the practice of grassroots publishing (both zines, small newspapers and online), conversation, and alternative economies which center around a larger theme of the American Revolution and a general revolutionary spirit.

Projects like Ghosttown and Taking Place sought to charge space and create an atmosphere wherein the public may become highly aware of their immediate surroundings, and their day to day activities, is an often recurring element within many of the groups activities."

Red76, then, are also interested in space, with a communal twist. This Youtube project appears primarily to be concerned with the space of public record, public memory. In shedding "new light [...] on the sociopolitical landscape of history past, and history present" Red76 are performing an altermodern process, spreading their practice into all aspects of history (past and present, and, missed by Rhizome's description but surely implicit - future) and collating it in the present. As Bourriaud described back in his exhibition catalogue, they are "tracing lines in all directions of time and space".

Two - no Three! - Exhibitions

London is playing host to two - no three! - exhibitions at the moment that seem set to be great for me:

Bristolian land artist Richard Long at Tate Britain.

"Long's work comes from his love of nature and through the experience of making solitary walks. These take him through rural and remote areas in Britain, or as far afield as the plains of Canada, Mongolia and Bolivia. Long never makes significant alterations to the landscapes he passes through. Instead he marks the ground or adjusts the natural features of a place by up-ending stones for example, or making simple traces. He usually works in the landscape but sometimes uses natural materials in the gallery. His work explores relationships between time, distance, geography, measurement and movement."

The Futurists at Tate Britain. Always worth a laugh, the Futurists.

"This exhibition both showcases the work of key Futurists such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini and explores art movements reacting to Futurism. Highlights include Boccioni's dynamic bronze Unique Forms of Continuity in Space 1913 and Picasso's Head of a Woman (Fernande) 1909 as well as major works by artists such as Braque, Malevich and Duchamp."

And this new one at the Barbican, heard about this on Front Row tonight - Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009.

"The beauty and wonder of nature have provided inspiration for artists and architects for centuries. Since the 1960s, the increasingly evident degradation of the natural world and the effects of climate change have brought a new urgency to their responses. Radical Nature is the first exhibition to bring together key figures across different generations who have created utopian works and inspiring solutions for our ever-changing planet."

The programme also talks about Richard Long. It does have Janet Street-Porter on it, but it's interesting.

Bruce Nauman @ Tramway

The Bruce Nauman works exhibited were a selection from his career in various media as part of the Artist Rooms series.

A few words that came to mind whilst wandering the small room: questioning images & texts, wordplay, puns, working through puzzles, chance, formulae, the process of work.

It was mostly about repetition - one work called Raw Material Washing Hands, Normal was formed from two videos of the artist continually washing his hands for an hour (the length of the video tape). Another, a collection of metal blocks arranged in various ways according to various mathematical systems entitled Enforced Perspective. The great booklet that came with the show described the mixing of systems as revealing "absurdities in the work" and making "logical systems gradually come apart".

"The Beckettian theme of repetition is a constant throughout his performative works and videos", says the booklet. Nauman's neon works, featuring selections of words turned over and over, recalibrated and rethought and rejigged are (literally) shining examples of this.



All these repetitions increasingly appear to question the object's (or idea's) inherent-ness. What makes a word a word? What is the meaning of it? How are the meaning and its objectiveness connected? Are they connected at all? Nauman's pieces in this tiny exhibition seem to teeter on that edge of chaos - how far can one push a word until it's no longer a word, how long can one wash one's hands until the act is meaningless and counter-productive?

We also visited GoMA, currently exhibiting works from their modern art collection, and on a wall they had positioned a quote from Bridget Riley, in which she talks of "nature [as] not landscape but the dynamism of visual forces" and this, which chimes quite well with Nauman:

"colour and form as ultimate identities, freeing them from all descriptive or functional roles".

Younger Than Jesus

Ambling through old Click Opera posts, I noticed one I'd missed. New York's New Museum, which I've come across before through its association with Rhizome, is currently mounting a show it calls The Generational: Younger Than Jesus.

The Generational is the name for the museum's new "signature Triennial", and this year it focusses on artists born since 1976. They're all younger than 33, which was when Jesus died. This intentionally attention-grabbing title is to draw attention to an exhibition that surveys a generation; my generation, in fact.

"Known to demographers, marketers, sociologists, and pundits variously as the Millennials, Generation Y, iGeneration, and Generation Me, this age group has yet to be described in any way beyond their habits of consumption. “Younger Than Jesus” will begin to examine the visual culture this generation has created to date", says the website.

Now, I have a bit of an interest in definitions of my generation. Whilst I feel a little uncomfortably partisan at times, as if I were cheering on a team, underneath is a real fascination with how narratives of generations are created.

Questions like: How does this generation contrast with previous ones? How much "better" is it? How much "worse"? How do we measure better or worse? Which is another way of asking what is important to us. And also, of course, what isn't. What do we want? How are we going about it? Who is doing it?

On the whole, I feel quite confident about us, the partisan-ness coming out in pride, even. I'm happy that homophobia and racism are increasingly things of the past, almost banal, I'm happy with an apparent growth in political engagement, I'm happy with our post-materialist aspirations. (Despite being portrayed, as the New Museum notes, as a generation that defines itself through consumption, I actually think this generation is aiming to define itself through ideas and actions, rather than purchases. Consumption - not just of material goods but of natural resources, is becoming ugly as well as unsustainable).

Of course this is my angle on my section of my generation. It's actually incredibly difficult to narratise a whole group of people, although big world events help. If the World Wars and May 68 were defining moments for previous generations, I'm pretty sure 9/11 will be seen as the moment that defined ours. That inevitability is rather depressing, eliciting a wry, resigned smile from those younger than Jesus.

So it will be interesting to see how the Younger Than Jesus exhibition tackles these slippery problems. How will it mediate its choices to its visitors? Will it step back and hope the art does its talking for it, or will it guide the viewer through the show with a heavy dose of "this is us" narratology? In the end, one exhibition -- no matter how much it is defined post-event as such -- can never define a generation, and the interesting part will be to pick out themes and preoccupations despite the exhibition's intentions.

Steve Roden @ Postopolis

Fascinating article by Dan Hill on his City of Sound blog about a talk by sound artist Steve Roden at the recent Postopolis event in Los Angeles.

Lyon Biennial

Came across this today, just in time to add into my essay. It looks like it'll be very interesting. Possibly the first "secondary" use of the "alter" prefix?