1
All that
is solid melts into air.
To put out a manifesto,
you must want A, B,
C to fulminate against 1, 2, 3.
To fly into a rage,
and sharpen your wings
to conquer and disseminate
little A, B, C's and big A,
B, C's, To sign, shout, swear.
To prove you're nonplus ultra.
To organize prose into
a form of absolute
and irrefutable evidence.
I'm against action.
I'm for continuous
contradiction,
for affirmation,.
Too I am neither
for nor against.
And I do not explain
because I hate common sense.
I'm writing a manifesto
because I have nothing to say.
I speak only of myself since
I do not wish to convince.
I have no right to drag
others into my river.
I oblige no one to follow me.
And everyone practices
his art in his own way,
if he knows the joy
that rises like arrows
to the astral layers,
or that other joy
that goes down into
the minds of corpse
flowers and fertile spasms.
Does anyone think he
has found a psychic base
common to all mankind?
How can one expect to
put order into the chaos
that constitutes that infinite
and shapeless variation...
Man?
Want to do it again?
Do it again.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
This is so much fun.
An old world is dying.
A new one is being born.
Capitalist civilization,
which has dominated
the economic, political, and
cultural life of continents,
is in the process of decay.
It is now breeding new
and devastating wars.
The prevailing economic crisis
is placing greater and greater
burdens upon the mass of
the world's population,
upon those who work
with hand or brain.
The present crisis has
stripped capitalism naked.
It stands more
revealed than ever
as a system of robbery
and fraud, unemployment
and terror, starvation and war.
The general crisis of capitalism
is reflected in its culture.
The economic and political
machinery of the bourgeoisie
is in decay.
Its philosophy, its literature,
and its art are bankrupt.
In this period of change,
the role of the artist
can only be that of
the revolutionary.
It is his duty to
destroy the last remnants
of an empty, irksome
aesthetic, arousing
the creative instinct
still slumbering
unconscious in the human mind.
Our art is the art of
a revolutionary period,
simultaneously the reaction
of a world going under,
and the herald of a new era.
We glorify the revolution aloud
as the only engine of life.
We glorify the vibrations
of the inventors.
Young and strong,
they carry the flaming
torch of the revolution.
This is the place
where the virtuous
of spirits, the and the..
Ah, be off with ya'.
My friends
and I stayed up all night
debating at the utmost
boundaries of logic
and filling up masses of paper
with our frenetic writings.
At long last, all the myths and
mystical ideas are behind us.
We believe that this Wonderful
world has been further
enriched by a new beauty...
The beauty of speed.
We want to sing about
the love of danger,
about the use of
energy and recklessness
as common daily practice.
We intend to glorify
aggressive action...
Life at the double, the
slap, and the punching fist.
We wish to glorify war
and beautiful ideas
worth dying for.
The suffering of a man is
of the same interest to us
as the suffering of
an electric lamp.
We will destroy the cult
of the past, the obsession
with the ancients and
academic formalism.
We want our country free
from the endless number
of museums that everywhere cover
her like countless graveyards.
Shit to Florence,
Montmartre, Munich.
Shit to dictionaries, good
tastisms, orientalism,
academicism.
Shit to Dante, Shakespeare,
Tolstoy, Goethe,
beshitted dilettantisms.
Shit to Montagna,
Wagner, Beethoven,
Whitnam and Baudelaire.
Look at us.
We're not exhausted yet.
Our hearts feel no weariness,
for they feed on fire,
on hatred, and on speed.
Let the reign of a divine
electric light begin at last.
Make room for youth, for
violence, for daring.
How day will eventually break...
Who knows'?
But we can feel the morning.
We are no longer moonstruck
Wanderers roaming dreamily
in the pale light of history.
A cool, early morning
wind is blowing around us.
He who doesn't want to
shiver must stride out.
And we, and all of
those striding with us,
see, in the distance, the early
light of the awakening morning.
Glassy and bright, a new world
shines out in the early light.
It's sending out its first
rays, the first gleam
of jubilant dawn.
Decades, generations,
and the great sum of art
will begin its
victorious course.
Today, more than
ever, we believe
in our will, which creates
for us the only life value.
And that value is
ever lasting change.
Time to get up, love.
Se ya', love.
See ya', Mom.
We fight without respite
against traditionalist
cowardice.
We no longer feel ourselves to
be the men of the cathedrals,
the palaces, and the podiums.
We are the men of
the great hotels,
luminous arcades, straight roads
and beneficial demolitions.
Let us overturn monuments,
pavements, flights of steps.
Let us sink the
streets and squares.
Let us raze the
level of the city.
We must invent and rebuild
it, like an immense
and tumultuous shipyard...
Agile, mobile, dynamic
in every detail.
And our houses must be
like gigantic machines.
Above the
tempest of our week days,
across the ashes and
cinded homes of the past,
before the gates of the vacant
future, I proclaim today,
to you artists...
Painters, sculptors,
musicians, actors, poets-
to you people to whom art is no
mere ground for conversation,
but the source of
real exultation...
My word and deed.
I have transformed myself
in the zero of form,
and have fished myself
out of the rubbishy sloth
of academic art.
Objects have
vanished like smoke.
I have destroyed the
ring of the horizon,
and gone out of the
circle of objects...
This accursed horizon ring
that has imprisoned the artist,
and leads him away from
the game of destruction.
Forms move and are born.
And we are forever
making new discoveries.
What we discover must
not be concealed.
It is absurd to force our age
into the forms of a bygone age.
Life must be purified of
the clutter of the past
so that it can be brought
to its normal evolution.
Art should not advance towards
abbreviation or simplification,
but towards complexity.
The Venus de Milo is a
graphic example of decline.
It's not a real
woman, but a parody.
Angela's David is a defamation.
All the masters
of the Renaissance
achieved great
results in anatomy.
But they did not achieve
veracity in their impressions
of the body.
Those artists were officials
making an inventory
of nature's property.
The living was turned into
a motionless, dead state.
Come and find me.
Got you.
You're cheating.
Here, we
cast anchor in rich ground.
Ghosts, drunk on energy,
we dig the trident
into unsuspecting flesh.
We are a downpour of
maledictions, as tropically
abundant as
vertiginous vegetation.
Rubber and rain are our sweat.
We bleed and burn.
We thirst.
Our blood is vigor.
I say unto you, there
is no beginning.
And we do not tremble.
We are not sentimental.
We are furious wind, tearing
the dirty linen of clouds
and prayers, preparing the
spectacle of disaster, fire,
decomposition.
We will put an end to
mourning, and replace
tears by sirens screeching
from one continent to another.
Pavilions of intense
joy and widowers
with the sadness of poison.
To lick the penumbra and
float in the big mouth
filled with honey and excrement.
I spread demoralization
wherever I
go, and cast my hand
from heaven to hell,
my eyes from hell to heaven.
One dies as a hero or as an
idiot, which is the same thing.
The only word that is not
ephemeral is the word death.
You probably enjoy life, but
you've got some bad habits.
You're too fond of what you've
been taught to be fond of.
Cemeteries, melancholy,
the tragic lover,
Venetian gondolas.
You shout at the moon.
If you weren't so cowardly,
sinking under the weight of all
those lofty thoughts or
non-existent abstractions
you've been forced into,
all that nonsense dressed up
as dogman, you'd stand up
straight and play the massacre
game, just like we do.
But you're too scared
of no longer believing.
You don't understand that one
can be attached to nothing
and be happy-
We see everything.
We love nothing.
I am against systems.
The most acceptable system is,
in principle, to have none.
Abolition of logic, Dada.
Abolition of memory, Dada.
Abolition of archeology, Dada.
Abolition of the future, Dada.
Dada is still shit,
but from now on...
From now on we want to
shit in different colors,
to decorate the art zoo with
all of the consular flags.
Dada is neither madness,
nor wisdom, nor irony.
Dada means nothing.
And you are all idiots.
You know, you're all complete
idiots made from the alcohol
of purified sleep.
You're like your hopes, nothing.
Like your paradise, nothing.
Like your idols, nothing.
Like your political
men, nothing.
Like your heroes, nothing.
Like your artists, nothing.
Your religion, nothing.
No more painters.
No more writers.
No more musicians.
No more sculptors.
No more religions.
No more Republicans.
No more royalists.
No more imperialists.
No more anarchists.
No more socialists.
No more Bolsheviks.
No more politicians.
No more proletarians.
No more Democrats.
No more bourgeois.
No more aristocrats.
No more armies.
No more police.
No more fatherlands.
Enough of all
these imbecilities.
No more anything.
No more anything.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Before I come down
there among you,
to tear up your rotten
teeth, your scab-filled ears,
your canker-covered tongues...
Before I rip off your
ugly, incontinent, cheesy
little dick...
Before all of that,
we're gonna have
a great big bath in antiseptic.
And we're warning
you, it's us who
are the murderers of all
your little, newborn babies.
What we need IS
works of art that
are strong, straight,
precise, and forever
beyond understanding.
The best and most
extraordinary artists
will be those who,
every hour, snatch
the tatters of their bodies
out of the frenzies cataract
of life.
Who with bleeding
hands and head,
hold fast to the
intelligence of their time.
To sit in a chair for a single
moment is to risk one's life.
Children, lunch is on the table.
Darlin', lunch is ready.
Thank you, Alice.
Robert, could you
please feed Poppy?
Yes, Mama.
Children, lunch is ready.
Did you brush your hair?
Darlin'?
John?
Where's Daddy?
I don't know.
Well, we'll
just begin without him.
I am for
an art that is political,
erotical, mystical, that
does something other than sit
on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art
that grows up not
knowing if it is art at all.
I am for an art that embroils
itself with the everyday crap
and still comes out on top.
I am for an art that
imitates the human,
that is comic if
necessary, or violent,
or whatever is necessary.
I am for an art...
I am for an art that takes its
form from the lines of life
itself, that twists and extends,
and accumulates and spits,
and drips, and is heavy, and
coarse, and blunt, and sweet
and stupid as life itself.
I am for an art out
of a doggy's mouth
falling five stories
from the roof.
I am for an art that a kid licks
after peeling away the wrapper.
I'm for an art that is
smoked like a cigarette,
smells like a pair of shoes.
I'm for an art that is put on
and taken off like pants, which
develops holes like socks, which
is eaten like a piece of pie,
or abandoned with great
contempt like a piece of shit.
I say
to all: abandon love.
Abandon aestheticism.
Abandon the baggage of wisdom,
for in the new culture,
your wisdom is ridiculous
and insignificant.
Only dull and impotent artists
fail their work with sincerity.
Art requires truth,
not sincerity.
In the
distance shines our tomorrow.
Hurray for the
transparent, the clear.
Hurray for purity.
Hurray and hurray
again for crystal,
for the fluid, the graceful,
the angular, the sparkling,
the flashing, the light.
Hurray for
everlasting architect.
Architecture has to be
cavernous, fiery, smooth, hard,
angular, brutal, round,
delicate, colorful, obscene,
lustful, dreamy,
attracting, repelling,
throbbing, alive or dead.
If cold, then as cold
as a block of ice.
If hot, that as hot
as a blazing wind.
Architecture must blaze.
For the electric chair with..
Blue discharge of
car exhausts scented
with the dynamic
modernity has exactly
the same emotional value
as the beloved talents
of our exquisite modernists.
I mean, man is not a
systematically balanced
clockwork mechanism, is he?
I mean, ideas often
run off the rails.
They never follow on
continuously from one another.
But they're simultaneous,
and, you know, intermittent.
Because logic-
logic is a mistake.
And the right to wholeness
is a monstrous, fucking joke.
I mean, the whole world is
conducted like a fucking
amateur fucking band.
I mean, who raised the
question of sincerity?
Oh yeah.
Just a moment,
ladies and gentlemen,
while we shovel out more coal.
Who of is the most sincere?
Those of us who purify
and crystallize ourselves
through the filter
of personal emotions?
- Leave me be.
- Or what?
All of those artists
whose only concern is
to ingratiate themselves
with the amorphous
crowd and scanty audience.
Audience of fucking
retrograde, fucking idiots,
fucking fucking art dealers.
My madness
has not been reckoned with.
Truth never occurs
outside our own selves.
Life is but a system,
open to the rains
that fall at intervals.
Things have no conceivable
intrinsic value.
And the poetic parallels only
flourish in an inner dimension.
We seek truth, not in the
reality of appearances,
but in the reality of thought.
We must create.
Man no longer imitates.
He invents.
He adds to the
facts of the world.
Born in nature's breast, new
facts, born in his head...
A poem, a painting, a statue,
a steamer, a car, a plane...
We must create.
That's the sign of our times.
Impose aesthetic limits.
Create art from
one's own abilities.
Don't reincorporate old
values, but create anew.
The past, we are leaving
behind us as carrion.
The future, we leave
to the fortunetellers.
We take the present day.
No more retrospection.
No more futurism.
Everyone's silent open
mouths miraculously
illuminated by the vertiginous
light of the present.
Unique and
electronically sensitized
to the upwardly moving eye.
Forever renewed, yet
forever the same.
Let us honor the avant garde.
Let us love our
unparallelled century.
Our egotism is now supreme,
our confidence unswerving.
Swabbing In my
glorious isolation,
lam illuminated by the marvelous
incandescence of my
electrically charged nerves.
A great era has
begun, the spiritual awakening.
The increasing tendency
to regain lost balance.
The inevitable necessity
of spiritual plantings.
We are standing at the threshold
of one of the greatest epochs
that mankind has
ever experienced.
The epoch of great spirituality.
Art, literature, even exact
science are in various stages
of change in this new era.
They will all be overcome by it.
We are freeing ourselves
of the impediments
of memory, association,
nostalgia, legend, and myth.
We are creating images whose
reality is self-evident,
both sublime and beautiful.
Instead of making cathedrals
out of Christ, man, or life,
we are making them
out of ourselves,
out of our own feelings.
The sublime is now now
picturesque or amusing
for the sentimentalist,
or the romantic.
And the rich are boors,
without exception.
Oh yes, yes.
Good point.
I think it's time.
Ladies and gentlemen, long
live the great art vortex.
Thank you, Darling.
Our vortex is not
afraid of the past.
Well, in fact, it's
forgotten its existence.
With our vortex, the present
is the only active thing.
Life is the past and the future,
but the present is ought.
We stand for the
reality of the present.
Not for the sentimental future,
or for the past.
Now in their gush over
machines and airplanes,
et cetera, the
futurists, for instance,
are, at present, the most
romantic and sentimental
of the so-called moderns.
Now we don't want to go
about making a big hullabaloo
over, you know, motorcars,
any more than knives and forks
or elephants or gas pipes.
I mean, elephants are
very big, and cars
go very fast, but so what?
We want to leave
nature and man alone.
We need the unconsciousness
of humanity,
their stupidity,
their animalism,
and of course, their dreams.
The art instinct is
permanently primitive.
So, thank you all
so very, very much.
Raise your glass.
Yes.
Thank you for all
your support, Darling.
I really appreciate it.
Back from Hanover?
Or was it Lisbon'?
Oh, Darling.
So lovely to see you.
Oh.
Oh, Darling.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm for an art, for a pocket
from deep channels of the ear,
from the edge of the
knife, from the corners
of the mouth, stuck in the
eye, or worn on the wrist.
I'm for an art that you can kiss
like a pet dog, which expands
and squeaks like an accordion,
which you can spill your dinner
on like an old tablecloth.
I'm for the white art
of refrigerators and the
muscular openings and closings.
I am for the art of hearts,
funeral hearts, and sweetheart
hearts, full of nougat.
I'm for the art of
teddy bears and guns,
exploding umbrellas,
burning trees, fire
cracker ends, chicken
bones, and boxes
with men sleeping in them.
No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations of
magic and make-believe.
No the blunder and
transendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of
performer or spectator.
No to style.
I swear that bitch loses
a hundred sequins a night.
Mm hmm.
I've been getting blisters
putting those things back on.
Yeah.
Did you see Jessie's top?
No.
You mean the pink one'?
No to camp.
No.
Not on this side.
Check the wardrobe on the left.
OK.
No to seduction of spectator
by the wiles of the performer.
I cannot wait for
this season to be over.
- I tell you.
- Why's that?
No to eccentricity.
It is working deep down..
Julian, in line.
Fall in line.
No to moving or being moved.
And lift.
Is on the beat, on the beat.
And lift, lift.
No, they're too slow.
On the beat.
Lift together on the beat.
Flat hands.
Flat hands.
No, this is too slow.
That's too slow.
OK.
Life is an artwork
and the artwork is life.
The more we know, the less we
understand, the better it is.
I welcome whatever happens next.
Fluxus is a way of doing things
and a way of life and death.
Fluxus is inside you.
It is part of how you are.
Fluxus is bigger than you.
Fluxus has made an art of
nothing and vice versa.
No, he's in the wrong position.
Again, in the wrong position.
Fluxus
makes absolutely no sense.
Fluxus hasn't even
taken place yet.
Fluxus is a pain in art's ass.
Purge the world of
intellectual, professionalism
and commercialized culture.
Purge the world of dead art.
Imitation art.
Artificial art.
Abstract art.
Illusionistic art.
Mathematical art.
Promote non art reality to
be grasped by all peoples,
no, no, no, not
just the critics.
Dilettantes, professionals.
Promote a revolutionary
flood and tide in art.
Promote living art,
anti-art, anti-art.
The love and imagination.
What I most like in you
is your unsparing quality.
The mere word freedom is the
only one that still excites me.
Among all the many misfortunes
to which we are heir,
we are at least
allowed the greatest
degree of freedom of thought.
Imagination alone offers me
some intimation of what can be.
And this is enough to devote
myself to it without fear
of making a mistake.
We are still living
under the reign of logic.
The absolute rationalism
that is still in vogue
allows us to consider
only facts relating
directly to our experience.
Under the pretense of
civilization and progress,
we have managed to
banish from the mind
any kind of search for truth
which is not in conformance
with accepted practices.
From man's birth
until his death,
thought offers no
solution of continuity.
Yet a part of our mental world
has finally been brought back
to light, the dream.
An ordinary observer
attaches so much
more importance to waking
events than to those
occurring in dreams.
Thus the dream finds itself
reduced to a mere parenthesis,
as is the night.
When will we have
sleeping magicians,
sleeping philosophers?
I would like to sleep in
order to surrender myself
to the dreamers,
in order to stop
imposing, in this realm, the
conscious rhythm of my thought.
Can't the dream also
be used in solving
the fundamental
questions of life?
Is the dream any
less restrictive
or punitive than the rest'?
The mind of the man who dreams
is fully satisfied by what
happens to him.
Look at children.
They set off each day
without a worry in the world.
Everything is near at hand.
The Worst material
conditions are fine.
The woods are white or black.
One will never sleep.
Dashing down into the
street, pistol in hand,
firing blindly as
fast as you can.
Pull the trigger into the crowd.
Kill, fly faster.
Love to your heart's content.
Let yourself be carried along.
And if you should die, are you
not certain of re-awakening
among the dead'?
I believe in the future
resolution of these two states,
dream and reality, into a
kind of absolute reality,
a surreality.
Reason does not create.
In creating shapes,
it is subordinate
to the subconscious.
The subconscious... that
magnificent well of images
perceived by the mind...
Harbors the notion that
makes up man's nature.
The subconscious
shapes, composes
and transforms the individual.
I believe in the
pure joy of the man
who sets off from
whatever point he chooses,
along any other path...
Save a reasonable one...
And arrives wherever he can.
Farewell to absurd choices,
the dreams of the dark abyss,
to rivalries that
prolonged patience.
Farewell to the
flight of the seasons,
the artificial order of
ideas, to the ramp of danger,
to time for everything.
May you only take the
trouble to practice poetry.
This summer, the roses are blue.
The wood is of glass.
The earth, draped in
its verdant cloak,
makes as little impression
upon me as a ghost.
It is living, and
ceasing to live,
which are just
imaginary solutions.
Existence is elsewhere.
Maintenance is a drag, you know?
It takes all the fucking time.
Clean your desk.
Wash the dishes.
Clean the floor.
Wash your clothes.
Wash your toes.
Change the baby's diaper.
Finish the report.
Correct the typos.
Mend the fence.
Keep the customer happy.
Throw out the stinking garbage.
Watch out you don't put
things in your nose.
What shall I wear?
I have no socks.
Pay the bills.
Save the sting.
Wash your hair.
Change the sheets.
Go to the store.
Say it again.
Go to work.
Clear the table.
Call him again.
Flush the toilet.
Stay young-
Now, I will simply do these
maintenance, every day things,
and flush them up to
consciousness as art.
Everything I say is art, is art.
Everything I do is art, is art.
Everybody.
Everybody, please.
I demand the principle of
equal rights for all materials.
Equal rights for
able-bodied people.
Idiots, whistling, wire
netting, and thought pumps.
Take gigantic surfaces.
Cloak them in color and
shift them menacingly.
Bend the drilling part of
the void infinitely together.
Paste smoothing surfaces
over one another.
Make lines fight and caress one
another in generous tenderness.
Flaming lines, creeping
lines, surfacing lines.
Let points burst like
stars among them,
and dance the whirling round.
I demand the total
inclusion of all materials,
from double track welders
to 3/4 inch violins.
Even people can be used.
I demand the complete
mobilization of the forces
- to create a total work of art.
- Over.
You have five minutes.
Go.
GO, go! go! 90'.
None of them shine.
Go.
Go.
My directions of aquatic giants.
I'm for regular priced art.
Spend less art.
Eat better art.
Ham art.
Pork art.
Chicken an.
Tomato art.
Banana art.
Apple art.
Turkey art.
Cake art.
Cookie an.
I am for an art
that is come down,
and that is hung from each ear,
that is shaved from the legs,
that is brushed on the teeth,
that is fixed on the thighs,
and that has
slipped on the foot.
Square which becomes blobby.
Darling, could
you help me carve?
Thank you, Alice.
Robert, would you
serve the vegetables?
Well, the
weather's fine outside,
so I think you boys could
play ball after lunch.
Martin, can you east your
greens, please, Sweetheart?
Ideas can be works of art.
In conceptual art, the idea...
Or concept... is the most
important aspect of the work.
When an artist uses a
conceptual form of art,
it means that all of the
planning and decisions
are made beforehand,
and the execution
is a perfunctory affair.
The idea becomes a machine
that makes the art.
This kind of art
is not theoretical,
or illustrative of theories.
It is intuitive,
and is purposeless.
No matter what form the work
of art may finally have,
it must begin with an idea.
What it looks like
isn't so important.
It is the process of
conception and realization
with which the
artist is concerned.
Once given physical
reality by the artist,
the work is open
to the perception
of all, including the artist.
Remote unit,
are you guys out there?
Can you get on that?
Number 1, in please.
You don't think
I'm a little shiny?
Just a little.
A little bit to the right.
There's a little bit of
glare off-stage left.
Thanks, guys.
And we're in 20.
Cate, you ready news desk?
Yeah.
Here we go, guys.
Let's get our truth faces on.
And 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2.
Good evening,
ladies and gentlemen.
All current art is fake.
Not because it is copy,
appropriation, simulacra,
or imitation, but because
it lacks the crucial push
of power, guts, and passion.
All of man is fake.
All of man is false.
Not only because he cheats
and lies with charming ease,
and hates and kills
with determined speed,
but also because man's new
cyber form is man as god.
Speed is over time and place.
Speed is power.
Speed permits misinformation,
disorients time and place,
and is a fierce and
uncompromising ruler.
Our obsession with
high speed leaves
no time or place for return.
It is now already too late.
And today is yesterday with
its memory already lost.
Cate, how can we go forward
when action is to watch action?
When the eyes are
locked in a fixed gaze?
When knowledge
becomes information?
When words are stumbling
blocks and have
lost their representation?
When discourse is opinion?
When you don't have
to know anything,
and you think you
know everything?
When to reflect is
gazing in the mirror?
When to contemplate is, well,
thinking about yourself?
Cate?
Well, Cate, perhaps
this could all
be dealt with if man was
not facing a black hole,
the realization that
his absolute function,
his primary sense of being,
has been snatched from him.
Now, man was once the original.
He held and contained
a certain authenticity.
But now, all of that
is dead and finished.
So man is disposable
and dispensable.
And what about art?
I mean, can it hold
up these harsh blows?
Cate?
Well, certainly not, Cate.
For art is what surrounds you.
Now, art does not come from
nowhere, or, for that matter,
anywhere.
So creativity does
not pop into the head.
Now there are grounds...
Forces, powers... that
create and make art
a hazardous journey
of leaps, crevices,
errors, daring and courage.
Cate.
I see.
And what about conceptual art?
It is the objective of
the conceptual artist
to make his work mentally
interesting to the spectator.
And therefore,
usually, he would want
it to become emotionally dry.
Now, Cate, there's
no reason to suppose
however, that the
conceptual artist
is out to bore the viewer.
Cate, once it's out of his hand,
the artist has no control
over whether the viewer
will perceive the work.
Now, different people will
understand the same thing
in different ways.
For instance, art critics
use a secret language
when communicating
with each other
through the medium
of art magazines.
Primary structures, reductive,
ejective, pool or mini art.
Well, mini art
sounds interesting.
Must refer to very
small works of art,
or maybe the mini artist
is a very small person.
Thanks very much, Cate.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
So conceptual art is
one way of making art.
Other ways suit other artists.
Conceptual art is good
only when the idea is good.
Idea, form, context.
Idea, the existence...
Good.
Of an idea
is necessary and sufficient
for the existence of art.
For the existence of form
is necessary but not sufficient
for realizing an idea.
I said it.
We call upon all honest
intellectuals, all writers
and artists, to abandon the
size of the treacherous notion
that art can exist
for art's sake.
Art.
That the artist
can remain remote
from the historic conflicts in
which all men must take sides.
We call upon them to break with
the bourgeois ideals which seek
to conceal the violence and
fraud, the corruption and decay
of the capitalist society.
We urge them to
create a new art which
shall be a weapon and a
For a new and superior world.
Imagine an eye unruled by man
made laws of perspective.
An eye unprejudiced by
compositional logic.
An eye which must
know each object
encountered in life through
an adventure of perception.
How many colors are
there in a field
of grass to the crawling
baby unaware of green?
How many rainbows can light
create for the untutored eye?
How aware of variation in
heat waves can that eye be?
Imagine a world alive with
incomprehensible objects,
and shimmering with an
endless variety of movement
and innumerable
graduations of color.
Imagine a world, before
the beginning was the word.
Allow so-called
hallucinations to enter
the realm of perception.
Accept dream visions-day
dreams or night dreams.
There is no need
for the mind's eye
to be deadened after infancy.
OK.
Class, is everyone listening?
Now, nothing is original.
OK?
So you can steal from anywhere
that resonates with inspiration
and fuels your imagination.
OK?
OK.
And you can devour old
films, new films, music, books,
paintings, photographs, poems,
dreams, random conversations,
architecture, buildings,
bridges, you know, trees,
cloud formations, bodies
of water, you know,
even... even light and shadows.
Now, I want you to select only
those things to steal from that
speak directly to your soul.
All right?
Now if you do this, your
work... and your theft...
Will be authentic.
All right?
Now, authenticity is invaluable.
OK?
Now originality is non-existent.
So don't bother trying
to conceal your thievery.
You can celebrate it, you
know, if you feel like it.
But in any case, I want
you to remember what John
Luke Goddard said, all right'?
All right.
It's not where
you take things from,
it's where you take them to.
Mm hmm.
The shooting must be
done on location, OK?
Props and sets must
not be brought in.
No, no.
Music must not be
used unless it occurs
where the scene is being shot.
OK?
OK.
Mm hmm.
The camera must be hand-held.
And the film must be in color.
See?
And special lighting
is not acceptable.
Now optical filters
are forbidden.
All right?
Yes.
Oh, and also, the film must not
contain any superficial action.
OK?
OK.
No, genre movies
are not acceptable.
OK?
And the director
must not be credited.
All right?
It's very important.
I swear
to refrain from personal taste.
I am no longer an artist.
I swear to refrain
from creating a work,
as I regard the instant is
more important than the whole.
My supreme goal is to
force the truth out
of my characters and settings.
I swear to do so by all
the means available,
and at the cost of
any good taste and
any aesthetic considerations.
Fact creates
norms, and truth illumination.
OK, John?
Next time.
There are deeper
strata of truth in cinema.
And there is such a thing
as poetic, ecstatic truth.
It is mysterious
and elusive, and can
be reached only through
fabrication and imagination
and stylization.
I am at war with my
time, with history,
with all authorities that reside
in fixed and frightened forms.
I am one of millions who do
not fit in, who have no home,
no family, no doctrine, no
firm place to call my own,
no known beginning or end.
I declare war on all
icons and finalities.
On all histories that would
chain me with my own falseness,
my own pitiful fears.
I know only moments, and
lifetimes that are as moments,
and forms that appear
with infinite strength
then melt into air.
I am a constructor of
worlds, a sensualist who
worships the flesh, the melody.
A silhouette against
the darkening sky.
I cannot know your name,
nor can you know mine.
Tomorrow, We begin together
the construction of a city.
Intuitive forms should
arise out of nothing.
Such forms will not be
repetition of living things
in life, but will themselves...
To those who
don't understand us properly,
we say with an
irreducible scorn,
we of whom you believe
yourself to be the judges,
will one day judge you.