Everyday Manifesto ~ with Fritz Haeg and others
~ Fall 2006 ~ occasional mornings
We will read the great manifestos by activists, artists, architects, performers and writers of the 20th century. We will see if their later work lives up to this declaration. We will write and recite our own manifestos every class. ~
~
Why an everyday manifesto? “Because,” Fritz told us, “there’s this idea that a manifesto has to be permanent, carved into stone.” This is not true. “What we believe in and what we do with our work—this is all allowed to change radically from one day to the next.”
Manifestos are public declarations about what we believe in. Here are some samples.
manifesto one, by Qusai
work from ;
-the understandings that people and places are a continuum
-the value of work is related to how it makes you feel in itself (like jumping into cold water or dancing) rather than its place in an intellectual or theoretical context (that is only relevant in the act of reflection).
First Manifesto, by Pablo (Note: before reading, Pablo explained that he’s still exploring art to create as big a basis as possible with the intention of later going into a more precise niche with what he wants his art to do. This could be compared to the building of a pyramid, he said, with the bigger the basis, the further the top of the pyramid will be.)
In the technological era that we're going through, people get
connected through computer and wires. Human interactions are now
encoded in binary data, and most of the interaction that we have in
the real world are indirect.
In Los Angeles for example, people see each other mostly through the
glass of their car.
Art should create new forms of interactions between people, and deal
with both the virtual and real contexts we live into.
Manifesto
10/17/06, by Sarah
Will the world change if you tell it to? Is there a subtler way of going about it? Media and political institutions take neutral frameworks, insert opinions into the framework, and still call it neutral. Art practices need to do this. Tools to be used are listening, openness, cleverness. An unbiased place that allows all opinions to drift in, swirl around, settle down and from there, form into action. Art that comes from too strong of a position gets either shut down or taken up by the masses that swallow it whole while never considering what it is that they’re swallowing. An alternative is figure out how to allow the ever changing present to exist as the artist platform. Invoking too much of the past with this multiple and conflicting histories is too tricky. Looking ahead provokes questions of how far ahead and who’s defining what is ahead. But examining the here and now, what currently surrounds us, invokes a spirit of common ground (while also showing where the ground is uneven). The many base levels of agreement that exist in the present must be named and examined. Then interacting with each other becomes less painful.
Sarah wrote the she remembers Fritz saying something about how it can be disconcerting to be around young people that don’t have opinions. “That thought stuck with me,” she said later. “I think this is something I have worked on in this class. Because I do have lots of opinions but they have been buried by work, by doubt, by the routine of not paying attention to them. And I didn’t allow myself to hide in this class, and I really had to force myself to offer opinions like was working out at a gym and building up my muscle to do it.”