10 - Mending the World: Artists’ Manifestos

Summary

Whoever shall set out to mend the world, and reform men's notions, as well as their manners, will certainly be the mark of much scandal and reproach.

Samuel Johnson

We are from the very heart and from the very first – accustomed to lying. Or, to express it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one realizes.

Friedrich Nietzsche

‘On or about December 1910,’ according to Virginia Woolf, ‘human character changed.’ Modernism took hold. Manifestoism can be dated a little more precisely. On or about 20 February 1909, when ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’ was splashed across the front page of Le Figaro, manifestoing began in earnest. That celebrated document not only announced a new movement but started a new trend, effectively a new genre, an adventure in artistic expression.

Once upon a time the manifesto was the province of kings and princes. In the seventeenth century it was hijacked by the Poor Oppressed People of England, also known as the Diggers and the Levellers, the radical dissenters of their day. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made it their own: The Communist Manifesto is the ur-manifesto of the modern period, ‘the archetype of a century of modernist manifestos and movements to come’. The Communist Manifesto was first and foremost a political manifesto – a call to arms in the service of the revolution. That was the point. Thus the famous peroration:

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Marx himself was deeply interested in ‘the poetry of the revolution’ – the forms and the phrases that would make it sing – so much so that the rhetorical strategy of The Communist Manifesto is as highly developed as the political analysis. As Marshall Berman underlined, ‘the Manifesto is remarkable for its imaginative power, its expression and grasp of the luminous and dreadful possibilities that pervade modern life. Along with everything else that it is, it is the first great modernist work of art.’