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100 Artists' Manifestos Alex Danchev

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February 14, 2011 5:29 am

Review by Jackie Wullschlager

1 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists , by Alex Danchev, Penguin Modern Classics,RRP£12.99, 496 pages

“Workers of the mind, unite!” announced the first futurist manifesto, mimicking Marx. Marinetti, Boccioni and co were deadly serious but still the artist’s manifesto is a paradox: an artist works alone, out of his imagination, notaccording to someone else’s diktat . Yet the writings of Marinetti, Mayakovsky and Tristan Tzara energised entirecultural milieus in Rome, Moscow and Zurich.

The artist’s manifesto was born in the early 20th century for two reasons. First, art had radically rejected traditionand needed to explain itself: Apollinaire became apologist for cubism, Theo van Doesburg for geometric abstractionand André Breton for surrealism.

This left Picasso, Mondrian and Miró free to paint. And although Alex Danchev’s book 100 Artists’ Manifestos makes a valiant attempt to persuade us that “art and thought are not incompatible after all”, few great painters havethe sort of minds that codify and analyse.

The second reason is that most early modernists – especially those in unstable regimes such as Italy and Russia – started out believingthat painting could change the world. “Standing tall on the roof of the world, we hurl our defiance at the stars”, was Marinetti’sconclusion to the 1909 futurist manifesto. Danchev traces Marinetti’s “adventure of artistic expression”, which shaped all subsequentartist manifestos, back to a “marinade” of 19th-century political, philosophical and aesthetic idealism – Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson,Zola’s J’accuse , Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, were all influences.

The Italian futurists, with their glorification of war – “sole cleanser of the world” – make hollow reading today. The Russians are moreinteresting: indeed from Kandinsky in 1912 (“We are standing at the threshold of one of the greatest epochs that mankind has everexperienced, the epoch of great spirituality”), through Larionov and Goncharova in 1913 (“Long live the beautiful East! ... We are

against the West, which is vulgarising our forms ... We march hand-in-hand with our ordinary house-painters”), to Malevich in 1916(“Abandon love, abandon aestheticism, abandon the baggage of wisdom, for in the new culture, your wisdom is ridiculous andinsignificant ... We, Suprematists, throw open the way to you. Hurry! For tomorrow you will not recognise us”), one can trace the risingpressure towards revolution, and how the Bolsheviks united vastly differing sensibilities.

The coda, Rodchenko’s 1922 “Manifesto of the Constructivist Group” – “We, artists yesterday,CONSTRUCTORS today, WE PROCESSED the human being” – is both moving as an expression of youthful hope, and chilling as it anticipates the artistic repression to come.

After 1922, there were no more Russian artist manifestos, and soon the political climate in westernEurope militated against utopianism too. Marinetti’s 1930 “Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine”, which ranted“above all, we believe it necessary to be rid of pasta, that idiotic gastronomic fetish”, is surely defeatistself-parody.

The postwar period, drenched in irony and individualism, was hardly the era of the manifesto, thoughBarnett Newman’s “The Sublime is Now” (1948), with its heady echo of Malevich, is an exception. And noone could fail to enjoy Gilbert and George’s tongue-in-cheek “The Laws of Sculptors” (1969): “The lord

chisels still, so don’t leave your bench for long.”

Danchev argues that “Marinetti’s antics resonate throughout the century”, but he kills his case by selecting Billy Childish and CharlesThomson of the reactionary Stuckists – some of the worst painters and silliest theorists who ever lived – to conclude his anthology.

The Stuckist mission against contemporary art is not only vapid – it actually contradicts the very spirit of the manifesto, which isforward-looking and rooted in a belief that art is nothing if not conceptual.

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100 Artists’ Manifestos

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That, ultimately, is what the history of ideas owes to Marinetti and Malevich, and why this volume matters.

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s visual arts critic

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