OUGD501 - Practical - Research - Art Manifestos

An art manifesto is a public declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of an artist or artistic movement. Manifestos are a standard feature of the various movements in the modernist avant-garde and are still written today.

Art manifestos are sometimes in their rhetoric intended for shock value, to achieve a revolutionary effect. They often address wider issues, such as the political system. Typical themes are the need for revolution, freedom (of expression) and the implied or overtly stated superiority of the writers over the status-quo. The manifesto gives a means of expressing, publicising and recording ideas for the artist or art group—even if only one or two people write the words, it is mostly still attributed to the group name.

I am going to propose a manifesto for a new movement within visual culture for my practical body of work for COP2. I see this as being the best way of creating synthesis between the issues raised in my essay and the quite dramatic conclusion that I came to. I concluded that visual culture has arrived at a crossroads in its timeline. We have created a sense of stagnancy in creative society because we continue to hopelessly and aimlessly recycle and regurgitate aesthetic surfaces from the past. I concluded that in order to move forward out of this state of stagnancy that we have put ourselves in, something big needs to happen. Visual culture needs to experience a re-birth in order to evolve and return to a state of pure authenticity, originality and inspiration.

Manifestos for movements such as Modernism, Futurism, Dadaism and Fluxus all existed to do just that; to push the contemporary visual culture of the specific time out of the state that they felt was unhealthy and idle. Many avant-garde creative people benefited from these manifestos for new movements, styles and aesthetics and I believe that my generation of creatives’ in particular would benefit highly from a new manifesto proposal. That is the driving force and reasoning behind my practical investigation for COP2.

There is a manifesto in particular which I am concerned with. It is known as the Fluxus manifesto and I believe it will provide me with a lot of inspiration for my practical work. It is a highly dramatic and shocking manifesto which had very strong views and opinions. I don’t necessarily want my manifesto to have such high shock value, if anything I want it to feel approachable and non-condescending.

Written by George Maciunas this short hand-printed document consists of three paragraphs interspersed with collage elements from dictionary definitions related to "flux". It is written in lower case, with upper case for certain key phrases, some underlined. Its first paragraph is:
Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, "intellectual", professional and commercialized culture, purge the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art, — purge the world of "Europanism"!

It advocates revolution, "living art, anti-art" and "non art reality to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals."

Synopsis

Beginnings:Fluxus was an avant-garde art movement that emerged in the late 1950s as a group of artists who had become disenchanted with the elitist attitude they perceived in the art world at the time. These artists looked to Futurists and Dadaists for inspiration, focusing especially on performance aspects of the movements. The Dadaist use of humor in art was also definitive in the formation of the Fluxus ethos. The two most dominant forces on Fluxus artists were Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, who championed the use of everyday objects and the element of chance in art, which became the fundamental attitude and practice of all Fluxus artists.

The early phase of Fluxus, often called Proto-Fluxus, began in 1959 when a group of artists who had met in Cage's class at The New School in New York banded together to form the New York Audio Visual Group. This group provided venues for experimental and performance art. Al Hansen, Dick Higgins and Jackson Mac Low were associated with this group, and would all be part of Fluxus. George Maciunas, often credited as the driving force behind what is otherwise a rather inchoate movement, would often be in the audience at the performance venues. Maciunas is credited with naming the group Fluxus, which means "to flow." The first Fluxus event was organized by Maciunas at the AG Gallery in New York in 1961, where he was co-owner. The event was called Bread & AG, and consisted of readings by poet Frank Kuenstler. That was the first in a series of performances that were staged that year at AG Gallery.

Concepts and Styles:George Maciunas had strong opinions he frequently and forcefully expressed, often leading to contention between himself and other Fluxus artists. Maciunas articulated his beliefs in Fluxus manifestos, one being that fine art, "at least its institutional forms," should be, "totally eliminated." Other Fluxus artists such as Jackson Mac Low did not agree, once writing, "...I would not want to eliminate museums (I like museums)."

Maciunas was a bit of a volatile leader; he would indiscriminately expel individuals from Fluxus according to his whims and had no qualms about dropping artists for the most petty of disagreements. In 1963, Maciunas removed Jackson Mac Low from the Fluxus group, and the following year, expelled Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, and Nam June Paik.

Essentially, while a group of artists who were all considered Fluxus existed, they did not all agree to the same ideals and each viewed Fluxus in a different way. As filmmaker George Brecht put it, "In Fluxus there has never been any attempt to agree on aims or methods; individuals with something unnameable in common have simply coalesced to publish and perform their work."
Fluxus events included audience participation as a way of involving the public in the making of art. Such was the 1970 Fluxfest Presentation of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, where Maciunas made paper masks of John Lennon and Yoko Ono for the audience to wear. With this act, Maciunas shifted the role of the viewer from observer to performer .The use of the audience as the focus of the piece was a logical extension of his idea that, "anything can substitute for art and anyone can do it...the value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, mass-produced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all."

Although Fluxus is mainly known for performances and organized events, Fluxus artists also created more plastic forms of art, such as boxes filled with various items (often called Fluxkits), prints, and Fluxus films. Sometimes these works were not signed, as per Maciunas' belief that the ego of the artist should be removed from the artwork, meaning all pieces should be signed as simply, "Fluxus."