MANIFESTO

We back up and try to diagnose a larger cultural malaise.  It is a sweet sickness less virulent than the plagues of all previous centuries.  Its symptoms are as broad as they are pretty, and it is largely self-inflicted — not so much insidious as it is gladly worn.  We are festooned with it.  We’ve been rotting from the inside for three generations now. 

Groups have warned us.  Their vision was prophetic.  Dada and the Situationist Internationale.  Culture jammers and sloganeering graffiti artists.  May 68 and the Summer of Love.  They saw the coming of a megalithic monoculture that would eventually sweep up all art movements and parcel all radical creeds into t-shirts and genteel art galleries.   

The stitch and tape between the days of our idle toil is entertainment.    It’s well known the big broadcast has become a weapon of mass distraction with profound political, socio-economic and psychological consequences, but it has done something else:  it has made us turn on ourselves.  We regard each other as fellow audience members, who dare not offer up anything beyond our breathless reviews. 

We denigrate each other to hobbyists, with, at best, quaint passion projects.  Photography, woodwork, horticulture, poetry and mix tapes.  These are crafts and impositions.  It is deigned permissible and cute to have something, but nothing shall compete with global art. 

We’ve done it, Dada and Guy Debord.  We’ve made ourselves irrelevant, and we’ve been cratering from the inside since 1954.  If there’s anything essential to the human psyche, it lies in daring to challenge, rework, or parody the work of gods.  We are driven to comprehend, to reinterpret, but mostly to make. 

Everywhere every person has collapsed to a data point and been subsumed by the audience. Every place has at least flattened to an advertisement, or in vain become a cathedral to the global broadcast, with aisles, lanes and cordons.   The days and nights of a permanent audience have been segmented and outsourced, entirely dependent on the next installment or scrolling feed for a sublet extension of self. 

We seek to reengage with place. To induce situations (Situ) that generate new source material, more alive, more real, and more immediate than the optical phenomena of airy figures and bodiless ideas anticipated by the dark romantics centuries ago. If all stories have been written, we hasten the erosion of pretense, status and taste, and see what this marvelously crumbling universe reveals behind the old facades. We disengage from the daily correspondence of links, dumps, and screenshots and the upkeep of our inveterate anxiety by throwing watch parties to the same cataclysmic events. 

Instead, we go local. We create the spectacle. We play again. 

The material is all around us. 

We set the table for the human feast.