a manifesto
...in response to the likes of Marina Abramovic-esque manifestos
It’s taken a while to say studying Fine Art at university was a mistake for me.
A long while.
And even now I want to backtrack and say, it was a slight miss, not a complete mistake. I don’t hate art. I don’t hate seeing it, I don’t hate fine artists, and I certainly don’t hate making art. I haven’t painted or “conceptualised” any piece of art in a long time but I’m not now diametrically opposed to that sort of thing.
“Conceptualised.”
In that word, is the crux of my problem, and antidote.
It was baffling, and depressive almost, to find myself miserable in a study programme that should’ve been perfect for someone like me. As a 20-year-old (in my second year, where it felt like I had gone far enough into the programme to see what it would entail mostly) it was shocking to be so betrayed by the whole thing.
Or blind-sided rather.
Like, “…wait, you Fine Art Degree programme were supposed to be something else…”
I don’t know what but not this.
It was more language, not necessarily words, although initially, I thought I could put it into that, like “…oh it’s just people using words in a visually stimulating or distracting sense.” That was innocent and desperate. I love reading, but I don’t love it for the words on the page.
It’s the story. It’s what the words are saying.
I thought I could just make “word-art” in Fine Art, but I was actually being asked to engage with stories. Lots of them.
I didn’t have a choice.
No one who studies Fine Art after the conceptual turn of Art in the 1960s in the United States of America will ever not have to engage with “Story” when making art.
It’s unfortunate.
So in my third year, I wrote this little frantic ditty after I somehow came across what was (and perhaps still is) Marina Abramovic’s “artist’s manifesto.” It’s basically a thing that the internet told me she penned to stake out the parameters of her practice or “conceptualise” her work as an “ultra-conceptual artist.”
I decided to write my own version. Not as a conceptual artist though, but the opposite. Or at least every other kind of artist but the one who weaves some elaborate intellectual discussion into their work.
I think there was another page of it, but the only scan in my Google Drive is this page, so I guess this is all that remains of it.
You may have seen the movie “The Menu” (2022). I just saw it this morning.
The conversation around anything that purports to be art, will eventually, undoubtedly, destroy it.
It (the conversation around art) is insatiable and it is endless.
People who don’t make art talking, people who think they make better art talking, people who invest in art and therefore feel that their money entitles them to a respected opinion, and then everyone else in between talking…
What it is, what it means, what it should be, where it’s going, what it’s worth...
I won’t bother explaining how it doesn’t matter in Art school how well you draw, sculpt or paint or whatever these days, save for how you use those elements to point to some concept tethered to some philosophical theory.
Or how the perception of the thing you made trumps your intention (unless you’re a real smart-mouth who can tie any loose ends to make everything in your art seem intentional and related to whatever concept anyone bothers to throw on it).
That I learned in the first month of my first year.
What took longer to sink in was the reality that art-making was largely about the conversation that would be had about that art.
And that that conversation was painstakingly desperate to sound elevated, enlightened beyond all other conversations, and relevant to whatever social supposed dilemma it wanted to be relevant to for example, climate change, poverty, privilege, gender, nationalism, upbringing and trauma, self-esteem, self-expression, self, self, self and on and on…
It was incredibly painful to not be interested in constructing conversation around your art or conversing about other people’s art. To be so exhausted by it and have to pretend you were intellectually plugged in lest you looked like a person who chose to study Fine Art because you didn’t have enough points to get into another, serious, programme.
It was always, always an intellectual (offensive-word-for-urinating) contest.
And if you weren’t into it, like me, it was like this adage I like which I don’t think is actually an adage: being the only sober one in the room while everyone else is reeling on something.
I’m not one to just disengage so I did try. And I tried well. I graduated with flying colours.
And carried on the facade for another two years.
Then I was just too tired. I decided to let what I truly like to do find me.
It’s still finding me.
I make visual art sporadically, and easily. I’ve intentionally decided to not work too hard at it. Not look for consistency; not try to “say” anything.
Is that even possible?
I see what you’re trying to do there, andizi1.
No questions, no discussion.
No, thank you.
Slang. A Xhosa word for “I am not coming.” It is often used to tell someone that you are not interested so they should not include you.