Manifesto Marathon, Sunday 19th October

SpRoUt - 'Manifesto for Mulitplicity'


Nick Laessing - 'The place of the material world in the universe is that of an exquisitely beautiful precipitate or varied cloud-work in the universal ether'


Tino Sehgal & Hans Ulrich Obrist


Claude Parent - 'Paris noyee, Londres au fond de la Tamise, quelle architecture?'

The text on the back of the program states that 'This futurological congress presents manifestos for the 21st century. This event is urgent' and in spite of this and other such statements as 'This is a declaration of artistic will and new-found optimism' such fervor seemed misplaced. The event in its own right held host to some insightful talks by the likes of K8 Hardy, Rem Koolhaas, Fritz Haeg and Stephen Willats yet with the parameter being monitored by a troupe of hefty looking security guards and the use of red ropes to section the event off like a film premier, the sense of exclusivity created by the separation between those that had bought tickets and those that stood, ticket-less outside the periphery seemed too much in contradiction to the ethos of the event. The highlight of the event was however, when K8 Hardy pointed out this massive contradiction; that an event which makes reference to the 'avant-gardes of the early 20th century and the neo avant-gardes in the 60's and 70's' should end up reeking of an exclusivity that such movements aimed to put an end to. Hardy illustrated this point well pointing out that she "would not have been able to have come to this event unless she was invited"; she wouldn't have been able to afford the ticket cost for the event that she was speaking at at which point she proceeded to take down the red ropes lining the perimeter and invited those without tickets to come in (interestingly enough you could hear what was going outside the Pavilion just as well as if you were inside).
I turned up as Manifesto Club were coming to the end of their talk about alternative models for art education. What the speaker had to say was interesting but as someone within that system, for me the points he made seemed somewhat obvious and quite general; that career centered teaching ought to be rejected in favour of an open experimental approach, embracing risk taking "without the sense of possible failure". Nevertheless the most valuable point was made about the incompatibility of the art school environment with that of the art world beyond this; that the way in which works of art produced within the system of an 'art market' is very different to the risk taking and plurality of meaning and medium that an ideal art school would embody.

There were many other manifestos, probably better described as performances. Fritz Haeg employed some bizarre voice manipulation for his London: A Manifesto for your Animals in which he became the mouth piece for the animals of London, animating the lives of Hedghogs, Foxes and Herons and how they might experience city life. Stewart Home opted to repeat the web address where his offering for the Marathon could be found with the use of his ventriloquist puppet, "Mr Dog", ("http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/art/shit.htm....http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/art/shit.htm..."and so on and so on) the two of them threatened to on for twenty minutes, which they thankfully did not. Tino Sehgal and Hans Ulrich Obrist had a chat about something at some point, this was then 'opened up' to the audience, I didn't understand a point he'd made earlier so I asked him to explain this to me...he explained his point but I still didn't understand. Jimmie Durham's with his offering No More Silly Hats made some valuable points about the way in which the categorization of 'Art' serves as a convenient yet artificial definition for particular human activities and went on to state how encouraging it was to see that 'Art' is now coming to be seen as this 'false category'.