SPUR/Sturm, Prem, Fischer, Kunzelmann, Zimmer, Larsson, Jorn, Nash, Lindell, Wyckaert
1. The avant-garde of today that does not reiterate accepted mystifications is nevertheless socially repressed. The movement society desires is the one that it can buy up - it is the pseudo-avant-garde.
2. To those who create new values, the life of today appears to be an illusion, a fragment. If the avant-garde puts into question the meaning of life and wishes to put to practical use its conclusions, it finds itself cut-off from all possibilities and sealed-off from society.
3. The aesthetic debris of the avant-garde (pictures, film, poetry, etc.) have become both desirable and ineffectual. What is undesirable is the complete reorganization of the conditions of life such that the basis of society is altered.
4. Once the products of the avant-garde have been neutralized aesthetically and brought upon the market, its issues - directed as always at realization through all of life - must be split up, talked to death and side-tracked. We protest in the name of the avant-garde past and present, and in the names of all the isolated and dissatisfied artists, against this cultural necrophilia; we call on all creative powers to boycott such discussions.
5. Modern culture has no substance, possesses no strength capable of mounting a real resistance to the resolutions of the avant-garde.
6. We, the creators of new values, are no longer shouted down by the protectors of culture, but are assigned designations in specialised fields, and our demands are thus made to appear ridiculous.
7. In this society, artists are expected to take over the role of the Court Fools of the past, expected to take payment for providing society with the delusion that there is a special kind of cultural freedom.
8. Social snobbery would prescribe for the avant-garde a particular place, which it can't leave without giving up its respectability.
9. The very life of the artist is the leavening agent in the rising of a new society from our withering European culture. This is not a process that should be stopped; it should be sped up!
10. European culture is a sick, pregnant, old hag who is going to die. Should we try to save the mother or the child? Some would try to rescue the mother, even if it meant killing the child. The avant-garde has decided: the mother must die so that the child may live!
11. Yesterday's avant-garde is old hat. The problem with the artistic, political left today is one of truth: "A Truth only lives to be ten years old" (Ibsen).
12. Artists and intellectuals! Support the Situationist movement, for it chases after no Utopias. It is the only movement that will relieve the condition of contemporary culture.
13. The duty of the avant-garde consists solely and utterly in enforcing its recognition before its discipline and its program have become watered down - and this is precisely what the Situationist International intends to do.
Originally appeared as a leaflet to accompany the intervention at Munchener Kammerspiele (January 1961). Translator unknown but perhaps sourced from Klaus Schrenk (ed) Upheavels, Manifestos, Manifestations: Conceptions in the Arts at the Beginning of the 60s: Berlin, Dusseldorf, Munich.
above copied from: http://www.infopool.org.uk/6101.html
Showing posts with label spur. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spur. Show all posts
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Spur Manifesto
1. Today there is a promising Artistic Rearmament in contrast to Moral Rearmament. Europe is facing a great revolution, a unique cultural putsch.
2. Art is the last domain of freedom, and will defend it with every resource.
3. We are daring to raise our voice against the monstrous colossus the technological machine. We oppose the logical way of mind which has led to cultural devastation. The automatic, functional attitude has led to stubborn mindlessness, to academicism, to the atom bomb.
4. The renewal of the world beyond democracy and communism will only come about through a restoration of individualism, not through the collective will.
5. In order to be created, culture must be destroyed.
6. Such terms as culture, truth, eternity, do not interest us artists. We have to be able to survive. The material and spiritual position of art is so desperate that a painter should not be expected to be obliging when he paints. Let the established do the obligatory.
7. Basic research is purely scholarly and practical research purely technical. Artistic research is free and has nothing to do with the scholastic nor with the technical. We oppose the present trend to turn art into a pseudo-science, an instrument of technological stupefication. Art draws from an instinct, from the elemental creative forces. These wild, unharnessed forces urge ever on to the creation of new, unexpected forms - much to the annoyance of all intellectual spectators.
8. Art is a resounding stroke of the gong, its lingering sound the raised voices of the imitators fading into thin air. Its transference into the technical deadens artistic strength.
9. Art has nothing to do with truth. Truth lies between entities. To want to be objective is one-sided. To be one-sided is pedantic and boring.
10. We are all-embracing.
11. It is all over, the tired generation, the angry one... Now is the turn of the kitsch generation. WE DEMAND KITSCH, DIRT, PRIMEVAL SLIME, THE DESERT. Art is the dung heap upon which kitsch grows. Kitsch is the daughter of art. The daughter is young and smells good, the mother is an ancient stinking hag. We just want one thing - to disseminate kitsch.
12. We demand ERROR. The Constructivists and the Communists have eliminated error and live in eternal truth. We are against truth, against happiness, against satisfaction, against the free conscience, against the fat stomach, against HARMONY. Error is the most glorious accomplishment of mankind! What is man here for? To add new error to errors of the past, no longer meet for him.
13. Instead of abstract idealism we call for honest nihilism. The greatest crimes of man are committed in the names of Truth, Honesty, Progress, for a better future.
14. Abstract painting has become empty aestheticism, a playground for the lazy minded who seek an easy pretext for the chewing-over once again of long outdated truths.
15. Abstract painting is a HUNDREDFOLD MASTICATED PIECE OF CHEWING GUM stuck underneath the edge of the table. Today the Constructivists and the structuralist painters are trying to lick off this long dried up piece of chewing gum once again.
16. Abstraction has given us the commonplace of 4 dimensional space. The painting of the future is POLYDIMENSIONAL. Endless dimensions await us.
17. Art historians manufacture intellectual dinner conversations from every necessary spiritual revolution. WE SHALL SET AGAINST THIS OBJECTIVE NON-COMMITTALISM A MILITANT DICTATORSHIP OF THE SPIRIT.
18. It is not our fault that we can paint well. We even make efforts to do so. We are arrogant and eccentric. We scorn every definition.
19. WE ARE THE THIRD ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST WAVE. WE ARE THE THIRD DADA WAVE. WE ARE THE THIRD FUTURIST WAVE. WE ARE THE THIRD SURREALIST WAVE
20. WE ARE THE THIRD WAVE. We are a sea of waves (SITUATIONISM)
21. It is only through us that the world can be cleared of its debris. WE ARE THE PAINTERS OF THE FUTURE!
>SPUR 1958<
H.Prem H.P.Zimmer E.Eisch H.Sturm L.Fischer A.Jorn D.Rempt G.Britt G.Stadler
Originally appeared in Munich as a leaflet (1958). Taken from Break/Flow No.1, 1996. Translator unknown but perhaps sourced from Klaus Schrenk (ed) Upheavels, Manifestos, Manifestations: Conceptions in the Arts at the Beginning of the 60s: Berlin, Dusseldorf, Munich.
above copied from: http://www.infopool.org.uk/5804.html
2. Art is the last domain of freedom, and will defend it with every resource.
3. We are daring to raise our voice against the monstrous colossus the technological machine. We oppose the logical way of mind which has led to cultural devastation. The automatic, functional attitude has led to stubborn mindlessness, to academicism, to the atom bomb.
4. The renewal of the world beyond democracy and communism will only come about through a restoration of individualism, not through the collective will.
5. In order to be created, culture must be destroyed.
6. Such terms as culture, truth, eternity, do not interest us artists. We have to be able to survive. The material and spiritual position of art is so desperate that a painter should not be expected to be obliging when he paints. Let the established do the obligatory.
7. Basic research is purely scholarly and practical research purely technical. Artistic research is free and has nothing to do with the scholastic nor with the technical. We oppose the present trend to turn art into a pseudo-science, an instrument of technological stupefication. Art draws from an instinct, from the elemental creative forces. These wild, unharnessed forces urge ever on to the creation of new, unexpected forms - much to the annoyance of all intellectual spectators.
8. Art is a resounding stroke of the gong, its lingering sound the raised voices of the imitators fading into thin air. Its transference into the technical deadens artistic strength.
9. Art has nothing to do with truth. Truth lies between entities. To want to be objective is one-sided. To be one-sided is pedantic and boring.
10. We are all-embracing.
11. It is all over, the tired generation, the angry one... Now is the turn of the kitsch generation. WE DEMAND KITSCH, DIRT, PRIMEVAL SLIME, THE DESERT. Art is the dung heap upon which kitsch grows. Kitsch is the daughter of art. The daughter is young and smells good, the mother is an ancient stinking hag. We just want one thing - to disseminate kitsch.
12. We demand ERROR. The Constructivists and the Communists have eliminated error and live in eternal truth. We are against truth, against happiness, against satisfaction, against the free conscience, against the fat stomach, against HARMONY. Error is the most glorious accomplishment of mankind! What is man here for? To add new error to errors of the past, no longer meet for him.
13. Instead of abstract idealism we call for honest nihilism. The greatest crimes of man are committed in the names of Truth, Honesty, Progress, for a better future.
14. Abstract painting has become empty aestheticism, a playground for the lazy minded who seek an easy pretext for the chewing-over once again of long outdated truths.
15. Abstract painting is a HUNDREDFOLD MASTICATED PIECE OF CHEWING GUM stuck underneath the edge of the table. Today the Constructivists and the structuralist painters are trying to lick off this long dried up piece of chewing gum once again.
16. Abstraction has given us the commonplace of 4 dimensional space. The painting of the future is POLYDIMENSIONAL. Endless dimensions await us.
17. Art historians manufacture intellectual dinner conversations from every necessary spiritual revolution. WE SHALL SET AGAINST THIS OBJECTIVE NON-COMMITTALISM A MILITANT DICTATORSHIP OF THE SPIRIT.
18. It is not our fault that we can paint well. We even make efforts to do so. We are arrogant and eccentric. We scorn every definition.
19. WE ARE THE THIRD ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST WAVE. WE ARE THE THIRD DADA WAVE. WE ARE THE THIRD FUTURIST WAVE. WE ARE THE THIRD SURREALIST WAVE
20. WE ARE THE THIRD WAVE. We are a sea of waves (SITUATIONISM)
21. It is only through us that the world can be cleared of its debris. WE ARE THE PAINTERS OF THE FUTURE!
>SPUR 1958<
H.Prem H.P.Zimmer E.Eisch H.Sturm L.Fischer A.Jorn D.Rempt G.Britt G.Stadler
Originally appeared in Munich as a leaflet (1958). Taken from Break/Flow No.1, 1996. Translator unknown but perhaps sourced from Klaus Schrenk (ed) Upheavels, Manifestos, Manifestations: Conceptions in the Arts at the Beginning of the 60s: Berlin, Dusseldorf, Munich.
above copied from: http://www.infopool.org.uk/5804.html
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