(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
When the Occupy International Assembly published its GlobalMay Manifesto in The Guardian in May 2012, the reactions inside the movement were partly vigorous. The manifesto sought to list what Occupy stood for, with free health care and education, reduced working hours and tax on financial transactions among the claims. Furthermore, human rights had to be updated and new, radically democratic versions of global organizations that the UN had to establish. The critics of the GlobalMay Manifesto believed that the design of this document was a bankruptcy statement. Gathering Occupy under one agenda would mean undermining the move, it was thought. The strength of Occupy was precisely that it did not make specific demands, and all the movement could agree on was the re-evaluation of the values of global capitalism. The only thing Occupy claimed was space.
If one were to outline a political statement in line with Occupy's true ethos, it would probably resemble the manifestations of the 1900's artistic avant-garde. Here, the main function of the text is to institute a movement and a platform, and thus take up public space.
Manifest-montages. The German artist Julian Rosefeldts film installation The Manifest addresses some of the many paradoxes that stick to the manifest genre, both in its political and artistic endeavors. In this work, which is currently on display at the Hamburger Bahnhof Art Museum in Berlin, Cate Blanchett plays 13 different characters – school teacher, homeless, stockbroker, factory-working single mom et cetera – while reciting stanzas drawn from 53 historical manifestos. These are predominantly artistic manifestations, from Tristan Tzara to Werner Herzog, from Situationist International to Dogme 95. The few exceptions are political manifestos which The Communist Manifesto, and John Reed Clubs Draft Manifesto. But perhaps the manifesto is precisely the genre in which artistic and political are largely overlapping.
Each of Blanchett's monologues is montages composed of excerpts from different original texts, but all the films are played simultaneously and blend into one another in a polyphonic mass of voices. If it is not for the publicity that Rosefeldt has chosen to let Blanchett play all these roles, it is perhaps to say that the story's many manifestations consist of one and the same message disguised in different guises.
The manifesto is perhaps the genre in which the artistic and the political are largely overlapping.
Pathos and parody. Blanchett's burlesque role interpretations in The Manifest tradition is faith, for the theatrical is one of the distinctive features of the manifesto genre. From the 1600th century until the turn of the last century, the manifesto was tantamount to a political statement, but with the Italian poet and playwright Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's "Futurism's Basis and Manifesto", which was printed on the front page of the Le Figaro newspaper in 1909, the manifesto is transformed from politics to lyrical theater, as the literary researcher Marjorie Perloff has noted. Marinetti and his roaring futuristic buddies also had the habit of reciting their innumerable manifestations from the stage. But Perloff also recalls that already in the Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto of 1848, with the famous estimate "A ghost goes over Europe – the ghost of communism", the poetic and theatrical tone that characterizes the manifesto genre is echoed.
Marinetti begins his manifesto by describing a night when he and his friends get up from a ditch after a violent car crash. Here is Marinetti in Espen Grønlie's translation: «… with his face covered in good factory mud… we declared, ashamed, with our arms tied, but fearless, our intentions for all the live people on earth… ». Then comes the revolutionary declaration: "We will destroy museums, libraries, academies of all kinds."
At Marinetti, that death's serious program statement is baked into a narrative that resembles a caricature. Not even in Rosefeldts The Manifest, when Cate Blanchett proclaims manifesto punishments in the role of funeral or news anchor, it is good to know whether it is a tribute or a peal. But from the beginning of its recent history, the manifesto genre then alternates between revolutionary pathos and self-reflexive parody.
A goat against the present. One of the texts quoted by Blanchett is Tristan Tzaras Manifesto Dada from 1918. It begins as follows: «To launch a manifesto, one would have to ABC thunder against 1.2.3. "Sign, shout, swear." Tzara's manifesto is at the same time an introduction to and a harselas with the manifesto as it had developed among the avant-garde movements in the first decades of the 1900th century. Tzara's text is also remarkable in breaking with its own principles: Manifesto Dada will neither A., B. nor C., and to emphasize this, it declares the abolition of the future!
But this, too, is a typical feature of the manifesto, and one of the genre's most striking paradoxes: Rhetorically, the manifesto appears as a means subject to a political or artistic goal, but in reality the manifesto is the goal and means in one. The avant-garde uses the manifestos to invoke a new painting, a new poetry and a new film, but it is the manifest itself that is avant-garde's finest art form. For either the manifesto invokes or abolishes the future, its foremost function is not to set specific requirements or to fulfill specific goals, but to be a literary ramboy who breaks open a space – a scene, a platform – in the present.
See also related article Five scenes from Berlin about this exhibition.
