Jessica Lack. Why Are We 'Artists'? 100 World Art Manifestos. Part One

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Jessica Lack
Why Are We 'Artists'? 100 World Art Manifestos
London, Penguin Modern Classics, 2017, 502 pages

Review by Francesco Mazzaferro. Part One

Fig. 1) The cover page of the anthology by Jessica Lack, published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2017

Every good anthology requires courage and consistency in the selection of texts, as its editor aims to provide the reader with a profoundly different view depending on the parameters used. This by Jessica Lack, an independent scholar with a past at the Tate Gallery and the British daily The Guardian, is an excellent anthology of art literature [1], centred on the analysis of one hundred manifestos by artists or groups of artists of the XX century. In the title, the word ‘artists’ is written between quotation marks, in my opinion with a twofold meaning: first, the anthology is not just about painters and sculptors, but also about other kinds of artists, like those using performance and direct action; moreover, being artist is indeed the theme of the manifestos. None or almost none of them - it is good to say right away - falls into the 'traditional' canons of Western art history as we know it. 

In its catalogue the publisher Penguin Modern Classics had since 2011 another title dedicated to the ‘mainstream’ art manifestos of the XX century. This is "100 Artists' Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists” [2], edited by Alex Danchev (1955-2016), famous professor of geopolitics, international relations and military history who, in parallel, dedicated himself to the history of art (writing essays on Braque and Cézanne) and to art literature (translating in English the letters of Cezanne). None of the manifestos selected by Danchev appeared in Ms Lack's anthology of 2016. Both authors, however, provided a political interpretation of XX century art. In an article appeared before his recent death, Danchev wrote: “Contrary to popular belief, it is given to artists, not politicians, to create a new world order” [3]. We will see how, in many ways, Ms Lack followed the same path: “What unites them – the editor wrote in the introduction, referring to the one hundred manifestos she selected – if anything, is a belief in art as a vital and empowering force” [4].

Let me further discuss, albeit briefly, the volume's title, which displays the question: "Why are we 'artists'?" In the history of art criticism, the question of what moves art creation has become central with Alois Riegl (1858-1905), exponent of the Vienna School of the late twentieth century and scholar imbued with Nietzschean culture. Riegl dwelled on how to explain the moments of breaking up in the continuity of the history of art, and, in particular, on those phases that were considered at his time as moments of decadence, but which in his opinion revealed instead a particular innovative capacity. This was the case, for example, of Late Roman and Baroque art, in which - in the first case - the formal models of Greek-Roman art were violated and - in the second case - those aspects of fantasy already existing in the 16th century iconography were particularly accentuated. For Riegl all this was explained by the artists' will (the German term is Kunstwollen) to represent - especially in spiritual terms - the novelties of their time. With Riegl arose the idea that artists cannot but transform the art of the past, being always interpreters of their present. Perhaps the authoress would disagree (many of the manifestos she collected opposed a 'heroic' and individualistic interpretation of art), but her book is, at least in my opinion, an anthological proof of how the Kunstwollen continued to manifest itself in the XX century.

A “World Art” anthology

The anthology is, as the title says, a collection of one hundred manifestos of World Art. The authoress' world, however, is very different from what we would expect. In vain the reader would look for the manifestos of the Futurists and the Surrealists, those of well-known post-war groups (like COBRA), or the writings that marked the birth of pop art or conceptual art. The world of Lack (contrary to the one already mentioned of Danchev) totally excludes the countries of the ‘Western culture’. In fact, the authoress proposed a critical and radical reinterpretation of being an artist in the twentieth century world. And in my opinion, in this review, she followed a teleological criterion. In this regard, I would like to point out some paradigms that, although not explicitly declared by the authoress, seem to underpin her selection of texts. First: art must serve to change the world: therefore all the manifestos linked in some way to the idea of ​​art for art are excluded. Second: art has the task of pursuing a process of redemption of the whole world, understood as global humanity: the anthology, therefore, presents the English translation of texts from every continent. Third: since the history of art is - as a whole – predominantly linked to Western (i.e. European and North American) conceptual criteria, the only way to ensure the achievement of a global vision of art is to completely ignore the art streams of the Western world and set up an anthology that intentionally disregards the prevailing culture in the field of aesthetics and art criticism. Only in this way one can really free the World Art from its Western "centrality".

In conclusion, Why are we ‘artists’? is a contemporary art anthology without the West or even against the West. The large part of the selected texts, in fact, was not written by European or American artists. An exception are, on the one hand, the writings of artists or groups of artists living in the West but belonging to ethnic minorities who associate themselves with postcolonial culture (also claiming the need to overcome the fundamental theses of the prevailing aesthetics, and in particular the need to swep "white" art and aesthetics) and, on the other hand, the manifestos of artists close to radical feminism (against male dominance in the art world). Consequently, the traditional issues that are the subject of debate within Western art are no longer perceived as fundamental in the anthology: all the manifestations referring to it (whether linked to the most extreme avant-garde or to the recovery of classicism, are they the aesthetic expression of a thought rooted in communism or on the contrary consonant with the art world in market economies) are systematically excluded. The radical distinction to be accepted in the World Art is no longer freedom or social equality, but the recognition or not of the cultural and aesthetic independence of post-colonial peoples. This is why the first anthology was written by Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), philosopher and art historian of Sri Lanka. In 1909, e.g. in the same year when Marinetti published the manifesto of Futurism on Le Figaro to refute traditional art, Coomaraswamy advocated the refusal of English art, under the inspiration of the paintings of Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), representative of the Swadeshi movement and nephew of the famous poet and Nobel prize for literature Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).

Under the impulse of the Swadeshi movement, the Indian province of Bengal had pursued for four years, in the first five years of the twentieth century, a radical policy of boycotting imports of British goods. Coomaraswamy adhered to this policy. Indeed, he complained that modern and anglicised India was no longer capable of producing beauty, abandoning traditional design; and yet he also observed how the Swadeshi autonomist movement, in the attempt to locally produce furnishings and mass consumer goods to replace imports, was at risk of forgetting the necessity of beauty [5]. According to the philosopher, even a politically and economically independent India, but unable to think and act according to its own spiritual tradition, would have been insufficient to win its people's hearts [6].

“Has it never occurred to you – Coomaraswamy wrote – that it is as much your duty to make your lives and your environment beautiful as to make them moral, in fact that without beauty there can be no true morality, without morality no true beauty?” [7] The philosopher spoke of prostitution of Indian art [8], of servile imitation of the Western way of dressing [9], of lack of true love for India and of foolish lust for the lifestyle of the green outskirts of English cities [10]. “The truth is that without artistic understanding, Indian manufacture cannot be effectively restored. It is suicidal to compete with Europe on a basis of cheapness. Competition should be upon a basis of quality” [11].

The last manifesto, in chronological sense, to be present in the anthology of Jessica Lack is the text read by a militant for the rights of migrants, the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (1968-), specialized in artistic creations through performance and video. In front of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, in 2012, Bruguera stated: “Art is not a luxury. Art is a basic social need to which everyone has a right. Art is a way of building thought, of being aware of oneself and of the others at the same time. It is a methodology in constant transformation for the search of a here and now. Art is an invitation to questioning; it is the social place of doubt, of wanting to understand and wanting to change reality. Art is not a statement of the present, it is also a call for a different future, a better one. Therefore, it is a right not only to enjoy art, but to be able to create it. Art is a common good that does not have to be entirely understood in the moment one finds it. Art is a space of vulnerability from which what is social is deconstructed to construct what is human. Artists not only have the right to dissent, but the duty to do so. Artists have the right to dissent not only from affective, moral, philosophical, or cultural aspects, but also from economic and political ones. Artists have the right to disagree with power, with the status quo. Artists have the right to be respected and protected when they dissent” [12].

The manifestos that Jessica Lack offered us in the framework of World Art are therefore all linked to the theme of how Asian, African and Latin American artists can create a freer world, recovering the autonomy of their artistic tradition and educating, in their areas, the respective public opinions to emancipate from the aesthetic categories of Europe or northern American. A very special situation is that of the political manifestos of the former Warsaw Block countries (the only ones where the European presence is very wide). Here the authoress did not select the official regime texts, which obviously supported the anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist critique, but those of the dissidents who tried to boycott the official aesthetic system. “For artists in communist Eastern Europe, however, the influence of Marxism was far more ambivalent. By the late 1950s, many found themselves facing an increasingly stark choice: to forgo creative experimentation and self-expression in order to extol the joys of communism in state-approved Social Realist art, or be driven underground. The result – as many artists chose the latter course, was a prolific era of art ephemera, or performances and happenings, and of art manifestos, many of which took Dadaist forms or were metaphysical in theme” [13].

In short, the reading of the anthology offers a substantially univocal and coherent answer to the theme posed since its title. Art is seen as a political expression of a radical will for change, so as to transcend all the classic themes of the European political struggle in the last century and announce those of the new century for the whole planet: the clash between those who support the reasons for a globalized world, sustained by a cosmopolitan public opinion, and those who want the affirmation of their own ethnic reality, as the sole expression of their cultural individuality. Jessica Lack resolutely ranks with the second group. Since this is an anthology of political manifestos, one cannot help but notice that the authoress identified - during the entire past century - some of the ideological premises of the most recent events: the birth of an affirmative and anti-European 'Souverainism', not only in Europe, but in many areas of the world, blending itself many times with the anti-globalization movement. In fact, in their effort to free themselves from the previous conceptual schemes, many of the manifestos in the anthology did not try to influence Western art, but to evolve without it, theorizing nationalism as a program of emancipation. The artists who were their authors did not aim at conquering the world market, biennials, art magazines, global criticism, but to take root in their territory. They did not try to confront themselves on a par with the thinkers of Western aesthetics, but they removed their perspective.

First attempt of a critical analysis

Besides being interested in art and artistic literature, I feel profoundly European and at the same time a citizen of the world. What should be my approach to this unilateral reading of contemporary art, which essentially distinguishes and separates these two dimensions of my identity? How to react to an anthology of aesthetic nationalism across the world? First of all, although that is not my belief at all, with interest and respect. These are writings and artistic orientations that I did not know, and certainly I have learned a lot from reading them. One cannot fully understand the world, if not recognizing that many of the recent events, some of which may seem sudden and unexpected, are actually the result of tectonic movements that have been developing for decades. Following the line of political interpretation of the anthology, the hundred manifestos preceded and somehow culturally created the premises for many of the events of the last ten years, which have seen, for example, the governments and public opinions of some parts of the world (for example the so-called BRICS - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - created in 2008) take increasingly affirmative positions in claiming an identity different from that of the West. Those events were therefore not only the result of political and economic interests, but claims of cultural independence. I do not believe at all the world would be better off if we went into of aggressive multipolarism with episodes of cold and warm wars between blocks, but we must understand that it is not just a matter of passing trends.

I have also reflected in three directions. First of all, I have asked myself what the philosophical and ideological foundations of this anti-Western aesthetic movements are. To this end, I have tried to analyse some of the texts that seemed to me particularly rich in motivation. I will talk about this in this first part of my essay. I then asked myself whether a different reading of the World Art is possible: are the one hundred manifestos only as an expression of a political antagonism towards the West, or are they not, in truth, also the dawn of a new aesthetic cosmopolitanism, extended to the whole planet? I have tried this alternative reading by comparing the Latin American manifestos included in Why Are We ‘Artists’? with the catalogue of the recent exhibition A Tale of Two Worlds, held this year in Frankfurt am Main and Buenos Aires with the diverse aim (almost orthogonally different from that of Ms Lack) to identify a dialectic relationship between what happened in Latin America, in Europe and in the United States between the forties and eighties of the last century (this will be the focus of the second part of the post). And finally, I have reflected on what lessons a European internationalist can still derive from the anthology of Jessica Lack, focusing on political manifestos from the Arab world (third and last part). All this, obviously without abandoning the field of art literature.

The cultural foundations of an art without the West

Among the one hundred manifestos of the anthology, three seem to me more interesting to understand how the idea of artistic independence by Western aesthetic categories has been elaborated and justified. The first is the work of Barbara Jones-Hogu (1938-2017), a recently deceased Afro-American artist and co-founder of the AFRI-COBRA movement. This is “The History, Philosophy and Aesthetics of AFRI-COBRA”, a text from 1973. It was drafted in Chicago, and brought together a group of local black artists who first found inspiration in the struggle for civil rights in the United States and then in the claim of a cultural unity among all the black populations in Africa and in the world. The second manifesto was written by the Malaysian artists Sulaiman Esa (1941-) and Rezda Piyadasa (1939-2007) and was titled “Towards a Mystical Reality”: the two theorised an Asian art metaphysically untied from the European one. The third manifesto was “Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto” of 1975-1976. Its author is Rasheed Araeen (1935-), a Pakistani conceptual artist who moved to London in 1974 and still resides in the British capital. The text was linked to a radical version of the Third World thought, in which all the decolonized peoples were seen as part of a cohesive political community united against the Western world, and allied with the immigrant communities in the West (defined as black communities, regardless of the colour of their skin, so an Asian living in London - like Araeen himself - would be named, by the author, a 'black') [14].

Before analysing the three texts, it is necessary to recall that these theses have not only remained an albeit perhaps today aged, historical evidence of a Marxist Third Worldism from the Seventies; in fact, they have converged into new conceptions today represented in the cultural climate of various continents of the world, and much more present than what can be believed in Europe. It may be useful to read Provincialising Europe, an essay published in 2000 by the historian and philosopher Dipesh Chakrabaty (1949-) and published in several languages. He theorised a reduction of Europe (understood here in the conceptual sense of European culture) to the state of province, thereby excluding and preventing European thought from having universal value as a reference system for the whole world. The Chicago-based Indian scholar rejected the concept - born with the French revolution and confirmed by the nineteenth century philosophy from Kant to Hegel - that there may be a single "spirit of the world" through which events and desires of humanity can be interpreted in a unitary way. The object of his protest were all the concepts of "political modernity" (to use the words of Chakrabaty), to which he denied universal value and explanatory power of history: “Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear the burden of European thought and history” [15]. As a scholar belonging to the current of post-colonial thought, the historian could not but recognize himself as part of political modernity, and thus admitted the inevitability of the lexical use of these notions every time he wrote on social issues. Nevertheless, he proposed to create a new narrative, which would no longer fit in a European perspective. To write the history of South Asia, he decided, therefore, to underline all the elements of continuity with the Indian tradition (written down, according to the centuries, in Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic) prevalent for several centuries before the arrival of the colonizers, instead of applying the concepts of liberal or socialist universalism to that world. Chakrabaty therefore set himself the task of transforming generally forgotten elements of South Asian culture into a living and alternative theory of society, with the power to explain the present. In his opinion, the study of political science must evolve by strengthening the study of the national dimension of thought (by theorising a new nationalism in politics), disintermediating that global system of values ​​that he considered in reality the abusive expansion of a European narrative.

The History, Philosophy and Aesthetics of AFRI-COBRA (1973)

  

But let's go back to the artistic literature with Barbara Jones-Hugo and her manifesto on “The History, Philosophy and Aesthetics of AFRI-COBRA” of 1973. COBRA, to tell the truth, was already the acronym used in the post-war period by a group of abstract European expressionists (the acronym was for Copenhagen Brussels Amsterdam). In the context of the Chicago Afro-American world of the seventies, COBRA meant, instead, “Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists” and AFRI-COBRA represented its semantic evolution into: “African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists”. Assuming the name AFRI-COBRA, the group decided to leave the mere perspective of an American ethnic minority and to set itself the international goal of uniting all black populations under a single ethnic aesthetic, wherever they may be in the world.

The manifesto narrates the birth and evolution of the new iconographic parameters, distinguishing between the first 'national' phase (COBRA) and the following ‘international’ period (AFRI-COBRA). The artists originally met in Chicago in 1968 – as Jessica Lack wrote -, where they “were involved in the civil rights movement, were in contact with artists and poets of the Chicago Surrealist Group, and had worked previously on the community mural Wall of Respect (1967) in Bronzeville, Chicago, which depicted black heroes. It was through projects like the Bronzeville mural (which was razed in 1971) that these artists had hoped to unite the disparate African-American communities, yet they came to realize the conventional heroic representations were not enough” [16]. There was a need for new aesthetic parameters, that is - and this is an expression of Ms Jones-Hogu - to valorise the “innate and intrinsic creative components which are characteristic of our ethnic group” [17].

At the first meeting of the COBRA group in 1968 – composed, besides Barbara Jones-Hogu, also by Jeff Donaldson (1932-2004), Jae Jarrell (1935-), Wadsworth Jarrell (1929-) and Gerald Williams (1941-) – the artists identified the constituent elements of their aesthetics: “bright colours, the human figure, lost and found line, lettering, and images which identified the social, economical and political conditions of our ethnic group” [18]. The members of the group immediately decided to assume a political function: “It was not fantasy or art for art’s sake, it was specific and functional by expressing statements about our existence as Black People” [19].

For this reason COBRA started from “functionalism”, representing “a statement of truth, of action, of education, of conditions and a state of being of our people” [20], which had to be expressed in some precise iconographic stylistic elements.

“A. The visual statement must be humanistic with the figure frontal and direct to stress strength, straight forwardness, profoundness, and proudness.

B. The subject matter must be completely understood by the viewer, therefore lettering would be used to extend and clarify the visual statement. The lettering was to be incorporated into the composition as part of the visual statement and not as a headline.
C. The visual statement must identify our problems and offer a solution, a pattern of behaviour or attitude.

D. The visual statement must educate, it must speak of our past, present, or future” [21].  

If we think that, in those years, American art was characterized by pop art or by conceptualism, it is evident how the centrality of the human figure, the clarity of the subject matters (also thanks to techniques like for example adopting a frontal vision), and the educational purpose were instead specific characteristics of this ethnic movement (in some respects, I would think of the cycles of medieval mural painting, which coped with the problem of educating a largely illiterate population, or the counter-reformed painting advocated by the Church after the Council of Trent).

New members joined: Sherman Beck (1942-), Carolyn Lawrence (1940-), Napoleon Henderson (1943-), Omar Lama and Nelson Stevens (1938-), until the group changed its name to "AFRI-COBRA" , with this motivation: “All Black people regardless of their land base have the same problems, the control of land and economics by Europeans or Euro-Americans” [22]. With the enlargement to a global dimension, the guiding principles became more elaborate, and were distinguished into “Philosophical Concepts” and “Aesthetic Principles” [23]. The philosophical concepts were described as follows:

“A – IMAGES, a commitment to humanism, inspired by African people and their experience, IMAGES which perform some function which African people can relate to directly and experience. Art for the people, the people reflect the art, and the art is the people, not for the critics.
B – IDENTIFICATION, to define and clarify our commitment as a people to the struggles of African people who are waging war for survival and liberation.
C – PROGRAMMATIC, art which deals with concepts that offer positive and feasible solutions to our individual, local, national, and international problems.
D – MODES OF EXPRESSION, that lend themselves to economical mass production techniques such as ‘Poster Art’ so that everyone that wants one can have one.
E – EXPRESSIVE AWESOMENESS, that does not appeal to serenity but is concerned with the eternally sublime, rather than ephemeral beauty, Art which moves the emotions and appeals to the senses” [24]. 

The aesthetic principles, Ms Jones-Hogu wrote, “were not only drawn from the work of the artists in the group but were also drawn from our inheritable art forms as an African people” [25]. They were also defined in five categories.
“A - FREE SYMMETRY, the use of syncopated rhythmic repetition which constantly changes colour, texture, shapes, form, pattern, movement, feature, etc.
B – MIMESIS AT MID-POINT, design which marks the spot where the real and the unreal, the objective and the non-objective, the plus and the minus meet. A point exactly between absolute abstractions and absolute naturalism.
C – VISIBILITY, clarity of form and line based on the interesting irregularity one senses in a freely drawn circle or organic object, the feeling for movement, growth, changes and human touch.
D – LUMINOSITY, ‘Shine’, literal and figurative, as seen in the dress and personal grooming of shoes, hair (process or Afro), laminated furniture, knees or skin.
E – COLOR, Cool-ade colour, bright colour with sensibility and harmony” [26].  

In the summer of 1970, AFRI-COBRA walked out the Chicago area and held an exhibition entitled “Ten in search of a nation”, first at the Studio Museum in Harlem (https://www.studiomuseum.org/) and then at the NCAAA in Boston (Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists http://ncaaa.org/). The success comforted the artists, who then set themselves the goal of finding production tools that would reduce the cost of their works and allow the dissemination of images within the black community, traditionally poorer than the white one. The serial production of silk-screened posters was therefore adopted (a technique that also American pop artists of those years widely used). One of the unexpected consequences of the success was that five members received offers from academic institutions and fine arts centres in California and other places far removed from Chicago. The community of the ten artists who, until then, had lived in symbiosis with each other (they had met every two weeks for years to discuss themes and images) was therefore at risk. Ms Jones-Hogu wrote the manifesto in 1973 to propose new directions to the remaining five Chicago members: the fundamental role of the individual and the family, the obligation to support with pictures the educational needs and the cultural growth of people, the testimony of economic and social needs, the role of politics and religion. If you think that 'alternative' art advocated the use of hallucinogens to produce art in those years in the United States, the manifesto of AFRI-COBRA was, in reality, a text of great moral conservation.

So Barbara Jones-Hogu concluded the manifesto: “In fact, AFRI-COBRA can move toward stating and restating repeatedly the needs for organization, purpose, and goals of our people for a stronger cohesive body and the need for racial nationalism. AFRI-COBRA will not only state our problems and solutions but also state our emotions, our joys, our love, our attitude, our character, our total emotional and intellectual responses and feelings. Art can be a liberating force – a positive approach concerning the plight and the direction of our people. Visual imagery should bring us together and uplift us as a people into a common – a common unit, moving toward a common destination and a common destiny. WE IN AFRI-COBRA SHALL HELP BRING THIS ABOUT” [27].

  

Towards a Mystical Reality (1974)

With the manifesto “Towards a Mystical Reality” we are moving back to Asia. The catalogue of the homonymous exhibition, held in Kuala Lumpur in 1974, is available online (https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/105176). The two authors of the manifesto were Sulaman Esa (1941-) and Redza Piyadasa (1939-2007). After years of living in London, since the end of the Sixties the two belonged to the so-called "New Scene" of Kuala Lumpur, a constellation of young artists exploring the transition between painting and sculpture inspired by constructivist motifs, in the sense of a valorisation of the material nature of artworks (see Piyadasa's Marakesh Series).

While in 1972 the two artists still testified, albeit for the last time, their participation in formal experiments of western taste (with the exhibition "Dokumentasi 1972"), in 1974 they instead offered a new reading of an intrinsically Asian contemporary art with “Towards a Mystical Reality”. It was an extremely exciting exhibition, where they exhibited jointly realised and co-signed sculptures-installations. Jessica Lack explained that at the exhibition the two presented an art which “consisted of remnants from everyday life, including a coat found in a rubbish tip, an empty bird-cage after the occupant had been released, a pot plant cared for by the artists over several months and a discarded silkscreen that had been used to make beautiful prints. Through these mundane objects they illustrated their belief that the artist was both a maker of art and the maker of ideas. Responses to the exhibition were both celebratory and visceral, with the writer Salleh Ben Joned [1941-] urinating on a copy of the manifesto that Esa e Piyadasa had written in English for their catalogue” [28].

Jessica Lack immediately clarifies that Esa and Piyadasa did not make "art for art":  “Esa and Piyadasa had been profoundly affected by the racial violence [against Chinese minorities] in Kuala Lumpur in 1969 that had led to an extended period of emergency rule, and they believed art had a role to play in forging a unified national identity out of Malaysia’s fractured post-colonial society [see Just about 13th May by Redza Piyadasa, an artwork of 1970]. The duo also declared that an entirely new, more intellectually vigorous, visual reality needed to be created in Asia in order to counteract prevailing Western artistic thought. As they strove to define the precise nature of their alternative vision, the two artists wrote about the metaphysical essence possessed by every artwork, arguing that while Western art was focused on outward form, Asian artists have always endeavoured to emphasize the innate spirit within their work” [29].

Before analysing the 1974 manifesto it must be said that, in the following years, Piyadasa and Esa moved away from those views, which incited artists to abandon the production of pictorial images to embrace sculptures inspired by a mystical conceptualism of Asian origin. In fact, the two ceased to produce artworks together and co-sign them. After having further experimented alternative compositions, Redza Piyadasa returned to figurative painting and, in the last decades of life, dedicated himself to pictorial portraits of Malaysian families (the Malay series); Sulaiman Esa - while remaining in the ambit of a mystical art - embraced themes inspired by Islamic art, devoting himself more and more to textile art.

The manifesto opens with the statement that the problem of modern artist in Malaysia is common to that of all Asian colleagues in the last fifty years: they have “to employ idioms and styles which are not altogether indigenous to their own cultural traditions” [30]. The result is a dilemma, for every serious contemporary artist in Asia, between the interest in modern Western art manifestations and techniques and the cultural identity of the artifices, a dilemma that, all in all, was the unfortunate result of the long colonial domination.

As the two wrote, they rejected all the previous Malay art streams that had referred to either abstract expressionism or the constructivism of the New Scene [31]; they affirmed, moreover, that they did not either want to refer to traditional forms of ethnic art (they wanted to remain exponents of the avant-garde). Using block letters to underline the emphasis of the statement, Esa and Piyadase stated: “we are however attempting to work outside the western-centric attitude towards form. what we are trying to do is to sow the seeds for a thinking process which might someday liberate malaysian artists from their dependence on western influences” [32]. 

The challenge for modern Malaysian painters was, in fact, to overcome the temptation to act simply to create paintings - without then having to justify their meaning - and to understand instead that their being artists consisted not only in producing an image but also elaborating a concept, placing themselves both in the history of art and in that of ideas [33]. One of the mistakes to avoid was, in particular, that of adopting the nineteenth-century romantic theory of the "uniqueness" of the artist and his works, and the vision of the sacredness of art as a form of priesthood [34].

  

The source of inspiration for the modern Malaysian artist had instead to be the way of making art that had prevailed in Asia for many centuries. “Some interesting observations may be made when we begin to look at the art forms which appeared in the Asian past. If in the past, Asian artists had produced works which reflected the underlying philosophical and religious attitudes within which they lived and functioned there is today and almost total absence of such commitment. (…) The modern Asian have by and large opted for a scientific and rationalistic attitude and ignored the mystical and religious considerations which helped produce the great artistic traditions of Asia in the past” [35]. And here I can only point out a contradiction: while the Western mysticism of the 'priesthood of art' was considered inappropriate, that of Eastern religious origin was seen as a precious source of inspiration. The affirmation of the manifesto that logic must be replaced with feeling and intuition [36] would actually have been signed by all the European romantics of the second half of the XIX century.

Using again block letters to underline their views, the two authors stated: “IT IS OUR CONVICTION that there are alternative ways of approaching reality and the western empyrical and humanistic viewpoints are not the only valid ones there are. as such, the tendency amongst modern malaysian artists to have succumbed to a western-oriented viewpoint of reality which began in the european renaissance (really Greece) seems indicative of an easy capitulation to a scientific viewpoint of reality” [37].

What are the two pillars on which an intrinsically Asian art should be based? Firstly, what matters is not 'seeing the art', but 'conceiving it' [38]. Art must therefore become "dialectical and conceptual” [39] and be able to cope with “pure ideas” [40]. The mystical works co-produced by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa for the 1974 exhibition should therefore not be interpreted as objects that are the result of physical manipulation, but as ideas that allow the public to rediscover the profound meaning of life [41] through a spiritual communion [42]. Art must therefore allow the public to make - without having to use drugs - those same experiences that are sought in the West through hallucinogens [43]. Secondly, one should suppress the idea of the artist as an individual creator (ingeniously reproducing reality through art), and replace it with that of an indeterminate subject (nonentity) capable of entering into mystical contact with reality [44].

The two authors also noted that the transition of global art from a West-centred to an East-centred model was already underway: many of the anti-formal experimentations in Japan (they mentioned Yoko Ono), but also in the West (from Dadaists to Yves Klein, from Piero Manzoni to John Cage) were actually inspired by oriental spirituality [45]. Also in the field of criticism, they detected a new awareness: they quoted the thesis of the book "Art in East and West - An Introduction through Comparisons" by the American scholar Benjamin Rowland, (1904-1972), according to which Wu-Daozi's ability (he was a legendary painter of the seventh century after Christ) to grasp the flow of things would be superior to the Titanismus of Michelangelo in the Sixtine Chapel [46].

Also from the iconographic point of view, Esa e Piyadasa called for an end to the Western logic based on the central perspective, Euclidean geometry and the narration of episodes one after the other. All of this should be replaced by the Taoist logic of a “peripheral vision (…) which envisaged reality as a never-ending continuum of ‘events’. If in the west, the tendency had been to isolate aspects of reality and study them consciously, in the Far East the tendency had been to observe reality in its entirety” [47]. If Cézanne came to interpret reality by isolating geometric shapes (cubes, spheres, cylinders), if the western kinetic artists (Moholy Nagy, Calder, Tingely) needed to introduce movement in their works, the Asian painter cannot and should not distinguish between objects and actions, nature and universe, space and time [48]. The manifesto therefore proposed that every static work be at the same time conceived as kinetic, without the need to materialize movement (as a pure documentation of mental experiences) [49]. So the traditional aesthetic concepts of the West were dissolved: “beauty, harmony, structure, style, symbolism and technique” [50], all replaced by “the awareness of the forces, the energies and the ungraspable laws of reality within which the spectator himself exists and functions” [51].

The manifesto concluded by recalling that, in the Taoist logic, even the most banal objects possess a spirit and that their contemplation allows us to grasp the essence of the events. So there is no difference between what the public can perceive in the show and in everyday life: “It seems necessary to state finally that the view of reality that we advocate whilst dealing with phenomena is not so much phenomenological as mystical and spiritual. The experiences that we are forcing upon the spectator as such should not stop with this exhibition, but rather it should begin from this exhibition and continue with the spectator’s realisation that he constitutes yet another link in the whole chain of ‘processes’ that is the mystery of life itself. By choosing to contemplate on the most mundane of events, the spectator, we hope, will come face to face with the mystery of his own existence within an infinite and ever-evolving Universe!” [52]

Preliminary Notes for a BLACK MANIFESTO (1975-1976)

Rasheed Araeen’s manifesto had an eminently political nature. Jessica Lack explains that the artist was inspired by two different events, which occurred immediately after his move from Pakistan to London: first, the reading of the work Les damnés de la terre (1961) by Franz Fanon (1925-1961), philosopher and psychologist, theorist of the process of decolonialization and, second, a series of acts of violence by the police, perhaps inspired by a logic of repression of the struggles of ethnic minorities, which culminated in the killing of a young black man in Leeds. Araeen reacted by choosing the political commitment within the most radical anti-colonial movements. His manifesto was published in January 1978 in the first issue of the magazine Black Phoenix (so called because the black art must, in his opinion, be reborn, like the phoenix, resurrecting renewed from its white ashes [53]). It has already been said that, unlike the text of Barbara Jones-Hogu, which addressed specifically all black communities in the world, the concept of 'black' in this manifesto included all the ethnic groups present in the West following colonization, besides the inhabitants of all the countries of what was defined as "Third World". Among other things, in the manifesto we can read that between the new black and the white art (including that of avant-garde artists) there cannot and should not be any dialogue, until a new position of equality is acquired [54].

The themes on which the artist dwelled at the beginning of the manifesto were: How can third world countries try to claim their space in the modern era? Why is their voice not heard? And what are the alternatives that are available to them? [55] And finally, why, even in countries that intend to restore their original culture, the result in terms of art “often tends to conform to the standards created in the West?” [56] Part of the reason is political: the question of contemporary art in the third world - Araeen wrote - has no exclusively aesthetic and formal connotations, but derives from political equilibria and cultural contexts after a long colonization. In part, however, the responsibility lies also in the Third World, due to a lack of dialogue among its members, insufficient clarity on the ideological objectives and excessive dependence on the European experts of Asian and African art [57]. “And therefore Third World artists today are in general accepting the ‘supremacy’ of Western developments in the contemporary field whatever styles are developed or produced in the major art centres of the West” [58]. As written also in the previously commented texts, also for Araeen this dichotomy was a source of alienation that must be eliminated. For this reason, “It is essential not to fall into the pitfalls of the Western attitude that tends to disguise the truth. On the one hand, Western interpretation of human history is often extremely biased against non-European peoples and their achievements; and on the other, while ignoring the real dynamics of historical developments, it lays great emphasis on the individual achievements of Western men supposedly struggling against all odds” [59]. 

Araeen explained that - contrary to what was affirmed in the West (in the years in which still prevailed the view, in former colonial powers, that their empires were legitimised by the goal of 'spreading civilization') - the colonial period had been the most serious moment of abuse in the history of mankind.

Using block letters to increase the emphasis of his words, the artist added that “the establishment of european civilization as the mainstream is one of the most catastrophic developments that have taken place in human history, destroying or suppressing other cultures and civilizations. (…) This western perception of the world has reduced today the whole world into a ‘global village’ with a vulgarly affluent west at its centre surrounded by starving people with begging bowls in their hands” [60]. The priority for Third World artists must therefore be that of “freeing themselves from foreign domination before they can create their own contemporary art and culture” [61]. Part of this task consisted of making members of the bourgeoisie of the colonized countries aware that - in the face of their privileges – they practised a culture, even in the aesthetic field (not only in the fine arts, but also in the cinema, theatre, press), originating from the ancient colonizers and having the sole objective of prolonging dependency and consolidating the “cultural aggression” [62].

What are Araeen's propositions in the field of art? He manifested a very strong hostility towards all the streams of the western avant-garde, from abstract expressionism with his action painters to Pop Art, which he all defined as a form of propaganda for American consumerism [63]. He also had hard words against Picasso [64], “like Midas turning everything into gold” [65] and the anxiety of avant-garde artists of “continuing development, often for change for the sake of change” [66]; in contrast to these attitudes, he praised Diego Riveira's ability to “return to his own people and commit himself to their reality” [67].

Also Araeen - like the authors of previous manifestos - denied Western art the right to call itself international, since it considered it exclusively transatlantic or, even better, imperialist [68]. “What international significance is there in the images of Coca-Cola, Marlylin Monroe, Pin-ups, the American Flag, Hamburgers, etc.? These images are, of course, the ethnic images of American culture and there is no reason why they should not play a role in the development of her art. But when these very images are universalised through an international projection, their function changes. They are no longer the ‘harmless’ images of the popular culture or the innocent ambassadors of American art and culture abroad. Their international function is to propagate American consumer culture, through its glorified celebration by Pop Art, in the ‘underdeveloped’ world, and thus to undermine the indigenous values and their contemporary developments in the Third World” [69].

The Pakistani artist explained, from London, the same dilemmas confronting Barbara Jones-Hogu in the United States and Esa and Piyadasa in Malaysia: “When young artists in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean were trying to emerge from the fog of colonialism, they found themselves in something of a dilemma. On the one hand, there was an awareness that their own traditional forms should play a fundamental role in contemporary developments, reflecting not only the spirit of the independent country but their time as well. On the other, they found themselves surrounded by Western forms which were becoming more and more intrusive in the post-independence period. And since most of them were alienated from the people and were actually aspiring to become part of the newly developing urban socio-cultural milieu in which Western values started to play a predominant role, the Western models non only offered them a more attractive alternative but also promised lucrative careers” [70]. The result was a form of mediocre imitation of Western avant-garde art that, in reality, in the opinion of the artist, was nothing but neo-colonial art [71].

There were, nevertheless, some real alternatives, which did not consist in an isolation in ethnic art or in the return to the past (Araeen rejected any ethnic or revival art), but recognized the technical progress of contemporary art, and innovatively benefitted from the spirituality of the countries (African sculpture, Islamic art) [72]. In this way, the art of the Third World should not try to carve out a space within the Western world, but to claim a global role [73], adopting new methods and new forms [74] that would not coincide with radical anti-art experiments [75] or with the adoption of the models of real socialism [76], and indeed would use all the tools available for artistic creation [77]. The manifesto concluded: “No recipe or prescriptions are being offered here. We must not believe in ready-made solutions. Art cannot be developed by a set of rules but only through an evolving life-process that generates new ideas at every stage of its transformation” [78].

End of Part One

Go to Part Two 

NOTES

[1] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? 100 World Art Manifestos, London, Penguin Modern Classics, 2017, 501 pages.

[2] Danchev, Alex - 100 artists' manifestos: from the futurists to the stuckists, London, Penguin Modern Classics, 2011, 453 pages.

[3] See: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/11/alex-danchev-biography.

[4] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. xiii.

[5] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 2.

[6] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 3.

[7] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 3.

[8] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 3.

[9] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 3.

[10] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 4.

[11] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 5.

[12] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 461-462.

[13] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. xvi-xvii.

[14] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 246.

[15] Chakrabarty, Dipesh - Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 301 pages. Quotation at page 4.

[16] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 188.

[17] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 189.

[18] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 189.

[19] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 190.

[20] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 190.

[21] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 190.

[22] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 191.

[23] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 191.

[24] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 191-192.

[25] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 192.

[26] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 192.

[27] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 199.

[28] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 203.

[29] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 203.

[30] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 204.

[31] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 208-209.

[32] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 205.

[33] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 207.

[34] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 207-208.

[35] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 209-210.

[36] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 221.

[37] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 210.

[38] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 214.

[39] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 214.

[40] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 215.

[41] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 220.

[42] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 221.

[43] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 220.

[44] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 216.

[45] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 212.

[46] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 216.

[47] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 224.

[48] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 226-227.

[49] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 227.

[50] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 228.

[51] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 229.

[52] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 232.

[53] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 282.

[54] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 282.

[55] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 247.

[56] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 247.

[57] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 247-248.

[58] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 248.

[59] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 248-249.

[60] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 250-251.

[61] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 252.

[62] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 254.

[63] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 263.

[64] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 268.

[65] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 268.

[66] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 265.

[67] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 263.

[68] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 264.

[69] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 263.

[70] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 259.

[71] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 260.

[72] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 261.

[73] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 262-263.

[74] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 281.

[75] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 281.

[76] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 282.

[77] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 278.

[78] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 283.