Essays
Manifesto: A Century of Isms
Jeffery Beam
This book has gone on my shelf alongside Rothenberg and Joris' groundbreaking two volume Poems for the Millennium as an accompanying and replete sourcebook for understanding twentieth century radical literary and artistic aesthetics. Caws, a distinguished scholar and translator in the field of Surrealism, explains that a manifesto "at its most endearing . . . has a madness about it. It is peculiar and angry, quirky, or downright crazed. Always opposed to something, particular or general, it has not only to be striking but to stand up straight." Manifestos define a perpetual newness. They are an act of excessive reason in which madness, aesthetics, and purpose express the hope, expectation, and fruition of principles of belief and action against a presumed or actual static condition. Caws reminds us that manifestos are a "loud genre" "often noisy in appearance, like a typographical alarm or an implicit rebel yell." They define new moments and are essentially Modernist as opposed to Post-Modernist in intent—for they take themselves seriously, as true revolutions always do.
Caws' over 200 selections begin roughly with the Symbolist movement of the late 1880s and 90s and continue up through the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement of the 1970s and Compactism of 1995. The selections are eclectic, familiar, obscure, sudden, and lengthy. Caws occasionally deliberately mixes time frames, including Whitman, for example, with the "Individualism and Personism" of Marsden Hartley (1916) and William Carlos Williams (1974). However, these mix-ups ring true—Whitman's work spoke to the aesthetics of Hartley and Williams as if he were a co-conspirator in a revolution. Again Caws stretches the meaning of "Ism" by coining her own terms to define moments—whether short or extended (like the Whitman-Williams line)—that form central aesthetic principles guiding artists with similar outlooks and methods.
Included in these pages are texts from well-known movements—Imagism, Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Vorticism—and relatively unknown ones—Rayonism and Oulipo. Caws offers literary texts such as Wilde's preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray and Eudora Welty's "Place in Fiction," and poems such as Mallarm&233;'s "A Throw of Dice" and John Cage's "Bang Fist." She submits Whistler's infamous "The Ten O'clock," Morea's "The Symbolist Manifesto," Artaud's "All Writing is Pigshit," Kandinsky and Marc's "Preface to Der Blaue Reiter," Schwitters' "Cow Manifesto" ("First. I find it very unnatural to milk different cows into a single pail. You should milk different cows into different pails. Even like that it isn't really ideal . . ."), and writings by Appollinaire, Cendrars, Mandelstam, Munch, de Kooning, Duchamp, Tzara, Arp, Mina Loy, Pound, Tatlin, Dali, and Huidobro. The list goes on and includes such works as W.E.B. Dubois' "The Souls of Black Folk," and writings by H&233;l&232;ne Cixous, Charles Bernstein, and Edmond Jab&232;s.
Some of these works, as obsessive theoretical writing tends to be, makes for hard reading, but most not only entertain by their excessive urge to argue and convince but also by the imaginative verbal, philosophical, and artistic rifts employed to make their point. For example, here's an excerpt from Umberto Boccioni's "Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto": "On the 18th of March, 1910, in the limelight of the Chiarella Theatre of Turin, we launched our first manifesto to a public of three thousand people—artists, men of letters, students and others; it was a violent and cynical cry which displayed our sense of rebellion, our deep-rooted disgust, our haughty contempt for vulgarity, for academic and pedantic mediocrity, for the fanatical worship of all that is old and worm-eaten." These works frequently take spiritual flight—no matter what art form, country, or time supports their origin. Again, "Futurist Painting" is not unlike many when it states: "Thousands of miles divide us from the sun; yet the house in front of us fits into the solar disk."
A Century of Isms fascinates and inspires. Where are such voices now? Do they speak and yet the bigness (and thus collapsed smallness) of the world prevents us from hearing? What shockwaves many of these artists created in our time; it's almost impossible to have the same effect now. Shame! These works, for all their inventiveness in art and thought, resonated particularly for me in a comment by Williams Butler Yeats from "Anima Hominis": "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." It's true these rebels yelled at the "others" around them, but one finally gets the feeling that the argument was with themselves. Thus, instead of pure rhetoric each created pure poetry. It's great fun to listen in on a century's worth of these principled verbal battles—even more fun to try to figure out where you yourself stand in relation. From "Futurist Manifesto of Women's Fashion" by Volt (Vincenzo Fani):
A dress that is ingeniously conceived and carried well has the same value as a fresco by Michelangelo or a Titian Madonna.
Women's fashion can never be extravagant enough. And here too we will begin by abolishing symmetry.
In woman we can idealize the most fascinating conquests of modern life. And so we will have the machine-gun woman . . . the airplane woman, the submarine woman . . . We will transform the elegant lady into a real, living, three-dimensional complex.
The reign of silk in the history of female fashion must come to an end . . . We fling open wide the doors of the fashion ateliers to paper, cardboard, glass, tinfoil, aluminum, ceramic, rubber, fish skin, burlap, oakum, hemp, gas, growing plants, and living animals. Every woman will be a walking synthesis of the universe.
If you read the recent New Yorker, which extracted excerpts from the letters and office memos of Diana Vreeland, one wonders . . . was she Volt reborn?