Declaiming for Art’s Sake
I started wondering a few months ago whether anyone was writing poetic and/or artistic manifestoes anymore. The last I could think of, before the brief Covid-era efflorescence of statements that accompanied Black Lives Matter, was the Dogme 95 movement associated with Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Thankfully, I came upon the treasure trove of twentieth-century manifestoes Mary Ann Caws put together, Manifesto: A Century of Isms.
The book is pretty much confirming my suspicions: those clamoring demands of another era often boiled down to assertions of lone rightness from the mouths and/or pens, sometimes fists, of mostly young men assured that they were the sole possessors of truth, and that everyone else was absolutely, condemnably wrong. As Caws notes in her introduction, “the manifesto generally proclaims what it wants to oppose…. Its oppositional tone is constructed of againstness and generally in a spirit of a one time only moment.”1 Not quite halfway through this doorstopper, I still haven’t gotten a sense of why all this aggression was thought necessary, desirable, whatever. Of course, youth will probably always assert what it sees as its unprecedented newness against everything it feels is holding it back. And sadly enough, we’ll probably always have that puzzling presence of misogyny that goes along with so much boyish rebellion—even though I can’t possibly fathom why women have ever been or are such a barrier to men who want to put their creations out into the world.
Contemporary bro influencers—podcasters rather than artists and poets—would probably justify themselves by referencing what was once called political correctness, some apparently society-wide effort to stamp out raw instinct, “honest talk,” etc. and etc. But the Italian Futurists, for example, shouting in everyone’s faces about the glory of war and violence, and their loudly declared “scorn for women,” at a time when most women didn’t even have the right to vote, or even write a check?2 Weird. And if the problem was supposedly being tied down by a marriage and kids, no one was forcing a guy into domesticity. All the anti-lady bluster just seems like casting about for someone other than yourself to blame for your frustrations.
I’m also continually curious about what made (or makes) artistic (as opposed to political) manifesto writers feel the need to declaim, instead of just getting down to the art. Why the obligation to impose one way of doing things upon the entirety of creation, instead of feeling the satisfaction of turning out a good piece of work? Art/poetry/writing/drama is not, and never has been, a zero-sum game, and trying to force a group of any size into the same sorts of enjoyment is a surefire route to ridiculous failure. There seems present in these statements a desire for everyone to love and understand what the issuers have on offer—and the assumption that getting enthused about other unrelated offerings as well is impossible or an unforgivable insult. But there’s no one and nothing the entirety of humanity will love, much less for the same reasons. Of course, money and influence have always come to those who don’t threaten or offend the powers-that-be, and that’s the way it will probably always be. But for 99% of all artists, poets, and writers, or anyone not willing to jump when a patron snaps their fingers, anything close to renown or full-blown fame, much less financial security, has never been in the cards. The best you can hope for is to find your people, and enjoy doing your thing together; why is that not enough? Why the need to declare everyone else wrong? Why couldn’t the Futurists just have their own fight club, and pump up within the space of their own four walls their bruised and bruising superiority?
These dudes’ demands are different, I think, than the provocations issued by the Guerrilla Girls in the nineties—or the writers and signers of letters affiliated with BLM almost thirty years later. Both were pointing out the problems of access, not issuing rules about style, taste, or method. The first, especially early on, made heavy use of statistics to point out gender- and sometimes race-based disparities in representation and wages within the institutional art world. They did do interviews and even press conferences, but their posters and what I’ll call protest objects usually made quick demands or calls, like the “pink erasers stenciled with ‘ERASE SEXISM AT MOMA’ [left] at various locations around the museum.”3 The latter made use of open letters and took part in and/or led larger protests against racist violence and exclusion.4 But neither (at least from what I can remember or find) was saying anything about the right way to make art or poetry—just pointing out that the institutional playing fields that hosted said art or poetry weren’t open to everyone in the same way, and that it was long past time to remedy the situation.
Where the ebb of artistic manifestoes is concerned, it could be that full-force globalization made evident the variety of tastes and channels of all sorts available to artists and audiences, and hence the recognition that one group of rabble-rousers wasn’t going to have the end-all-be-all answer to anything. And Caws says this sort of manifesto was a particularly Modernist phenomenon “rather than ironically Postmodernist. It takes itself and its own spoof seriously.”5 Contrast all that pained seriousness with the couldn’t-be-bothered hipsters who emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century and wouldn’t be caught dead looking as if they cared about anything. Plus (I shudder to type the phrase), “content creators” come a dime a dozen these days, and for every standard best-selling author, there’s a web-only scribbler who’s making a living thanks to fan support. The expanded ways we have these days of reaching our people won’t change the fact that there will always be stars who, worthy or not, get massive recognition and block the view of other and often “better” artists. And all those new channels mean it’s hard to hear one particular voice, even a loud and obnoxious one, over the crowded clamor. Artistic manifestoes will certainly continue to be issued, but I can’t imagine, in our pluralistic, polarized, hyper-distracted day and age, they could ever be drawn up with the same convicted faith possessed by the last century’s angry young men.
1. Mary Ann Caws, ed. Manifesto: A Century of Isms (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), xxiii. Emphasis in original.↩
2. Said scorn comes in point 9 of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism.” See Caws, 187. This crowd wasn’t alone, though; there was, for example, Giorgio de Chirico’s assertions about “The imbecilic man…. drawn towards the infinite, and in this they reveal their limited psyche enclosed as it is within the same sphere as the feminine and infantile psyche.” Caws, “On Metaphysical Art,” 285.↩
3. Elaine Blair, “The Masked Avengers,” The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2020, 27.↩
4. For example, there was the open letter sent to the Poetry Foundation over its weak-kneed response to BLM. See Jessie Gaynor, “Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and More Demand that the Poetry Foundation Do More to Support Black Poets,” Literary Hub, June 8, 2020, https://lithub.com/danez-smith-ocean-vuong-and-more-signed-an-open-letter-to-the-poetry-foundation-demanding-more-support-for-black-and-marginalized-artists/.↩
5. Caws, xxi.↩