Germano Celant
from Printed Matter 1988 Catalog
At the beginning of the century, Europeans art saw the emergence of a series of communicative tools that came out of the tradition of painting and sculpture but were more closely aligned with the mass media. A proliferation of manifestos and magazines, books and postcards, posters, and alphabetical constructions invaded the territory of art, until then dominated by the silence of work in studios and exhibitions.
Artists'' publications fully exploited the printed media; while it is difficult to analyze all the forms these projects have taken, the manifesto and the magazine seem to have been particularly neglected. Because they integrated the visual and the textual, these publications signaled fundamental changes that effected all of the arts.
The manifesto is polemical in nature and can present the social and cultural coordinates of an entire community. Compared to the book and to poetry, made for private reading, the manifesto is directed toward a collective audience. An unusual format, the manifesto allows the circulation of synthesized ideological, ethical, and political values. The fact that the futurists and the dadaists adopted the manifesto from the Russian constructivists and surrealists as a means of intervention in the outside world demonstrated their interest in establishing their activities as socially responsible. (Within the span of seven years, from 1906 to 1916, the Italian futurists put out over fifty manifestos, one every two months.)
Tied to the incendiary programs of the French Revolution and to the scientific-political analysis of Marx, the manifesto was an iconoclastic document with respect to its own time. Presupposing a mass audience and functioning as propaganda in the streets (the city is the site of the historical avant-garde), the manifesto adopted the concise language associated with advertising. Circulated in leaflets distributed by the thousands, as well as in mass publications ranging from Le Figaro to Paris-Journal; from Der Strum to Lacerba; and from 291 to La Revolution Surrealiste, the manifesto engaged all fields of knowledge, including science and fashion. Its presuppositions were terse and irrevocable ("we proclaim," "we combat," "we want,"). Listed in numerical or alphabetical order, the decrees alternately incited readers by intimidating them or causing them to identify with the writers'' poetic will.
Yet the multiplication of declarations allowed the destruction of poetry in favor of the vertiginous movement of information, so that by mid-century the manifesto was less frequently resorted to as a communicative tool. The postwar avant-garde increasingly entrusted its "poetics" to the non-preemptory affirmations of art critics, from Greenberg to Alloway, from Restany to Celant, while the seventies saw the reemergence of the artist/apologist, form Sol LeWitt to Joseph Kosuth.
The manifesto was a vehicle for communicating the poetics of culture based on the velocity and dynamism of actions. The introduction of the manifesto into the avant-garde overturned its exclusive belief in formal deliberation, positing instead a new reliance on proliferating messages. Thus the manifesto rendered the static images prevalent since cubism, obsolete, reflecting circumstances that remain operative today: in an era increasingly dominated by communicative technologies, survival depends not only upon the quality of the cultural product, but upon the quantity of proclamations and images that circulate.
At the beginning of the century, the association of art with the mass media was extended as artists began to organize and produce their own magazines. The appearance of serialized novels in nineteenth-century newspapers fostered a need among writers and painters to produce not only "documentary" publications such as Studio in London, which reproduced works of art, but also poetic vehicles incorporating image and text. Attention was newly directed to the place where word and image interact - where the surface of the paper becomes a visual space. Partially due to the technical difficulties of reproducing images, early experiments such as Mallarmé''s were essentially typographical. With the passing decades, however, visuals were increasingly incorporated. Artists began creating text-images rather than merely "illustrating" texts; in many cases artists designed magazine pages, determining their contents and creating true editorial and graphic works. The poetic value of these experiments has yet to be properly studied. In the passage from Poetry to Plastic Values, from Der Aktion to Der Dada, from The Blind Man to Transition, to the postwar years and the arrival of Gesto and Azimuth to the recent Real Life and Parkett, the magazine has become the site of a new art language.
The magazine is the place where art takes on life, and speaks to the masses. It is not surprising that experimental magazines today utilize fashion or design themes on their covers. Rather than continuing the tradition of a "Gesamenkunstwerke," this acceptance of linguistic contamination allows art to move away from "specialized" discourse and to exist in the "everyday." The breaking down of boundaries (think of Artforum of recent years) entrusts the message to many, and enlarges the base of information. It hastens an "indiscriminate" extension of aesthetic values, while maintaining a "discrimination" of linguistic specifics.
The discourse on new language, which by the sixties and seventies had affected all artistic media, calls into question the very necessity of art criticism. This "sacrificial act," which cut off from the system of art the "negligible" function of traditional criticism, initiated on the one hand the positive phenomenon of the "artist''s book," and on the other hand, the negative element of a "creative criticism." While the latter soon revealed its limits and superfluities at the level of language, the "artist''s book" indebted to Mallarmé, to Marinetti, to Tzara, to Penrose, achieved a new vitality. Its entrance upon the scene was so forceful that it inspired artists to write, to create a vocabulary, and to discuss "method". Artists have created their own methods, establishing flexible relationships between "figures," allegories, metaphors, thoughts, reality, and fantasy, thus transgressing normative representational conventions. Kounellis, Baselitz, Merz, and Kiefer, "freeze" fragments of history and painting, creating temporal "vertigos" that subvert our sense of history and perception of these icons; while artists like Roth and Hamilton Finlay solidify the experience of "within" and "without," reinvesting ruins of both personal experience and the past. In all these projects, the "demon of unexpected combinations" reigns, creating books that are irredeemably fragmentary and turned towards history.
It is at his point that a space opens up for a new strategy for "seeing" through art. The osmosis of the theory and image, "body" and "spirit" makes all "passages" possible; for this reason, the magazine and the manifesto, along with artists'' books, are important vehicles for the voices and images of artists. Yet their presence is diminishing, manifestos are almost absent from the scene, and magazines made by artists have difficulty surviving, like AEIOU, or vanish into oblivion, like Citta di Riga. What does this mean? A cooling of interest in ideological and political, poetic and theoretical stances? If it is true, it is precisely the moment to study and to demonstrate the fundamental role of manifestos and magazines made by artists.