Note: This is the manifesto I wrote for my senior seminar course, the final assignment of the semester. I decided to post it after being demanded to by fellow Art History Society member and close friend, Adrienne Suzio. Instead of a manifesto, I aimed to contribute a piece of art while questioning the form of art and its creation, the artist, though I should mention it wrote itself in about an hour. I was exhausted, frustrated, existential -- and absolutely did not want to write a traditional manifesto as I had no trace of discipline that day. I did not enjoy reading it in class. Reactions encouraged.
Ellen
MANIFESTO
This is a manifesto, she says. She shifts the laptop over, tilting the screen inward, blocking the silver daylight, increasing the screen's illumination. I only had a few minutes … She trails off.
My tooth, it has been hurting.
Way back, on the left, I feel metal pulsing. I wish it would simply jump from my mouth, and leave me be!
Read it as an individual and as an everyone, she instructs.
This is a manifesto.
It is striking, the lighting of the day. The silver halos around the black trees shielding Mills Hall. The cold of December, a season without memory, because no one remembers winter. We hurriedly purchase our coats, our boots, our hats. We Californians had forgotten.
It is simple to create, she said. It is the act that perplexes us, not the outcome. The things we have cherished for so long as staggering monuments that have so far warded off the rising tides of history that will, surely, envelop everything someday, these things were made once, by real human hands. Just like yours and mine, you see them?
The bell tolls, it is 1:45 p.m. and I know that time is reeling. I can feel it beneath my boots. I can feel it building.
That poet you loved, remember the one? The Christian Bohemian-Austrian man, shrouded in dark coats, the heavy gaze, the flat face and the weak brow. But Ellen, you never read his poetry! Well, yeah. Just his letters. His letters reached to me, only there did the print levitate. His letters, addressed not to names and places, but to that inexorable human behavior. He knew about the meaning of history, time, image. He knew how to conjure power and truth, he knew the ingredients of meaning so well - he understood that creation is impossible when we don't think about a place we would rather be, even if it's just this one, but lain out on the fabric of time altogether, seen in perspective, seen as an action that is meaningfully for having occurred when nothing could have occurred at all, when something is when there could be something that is not… The golden cupolas of Russian towers, the hazy image of a pasture outside a train window, a walk in the garden with the eternal Tolstoy, the act of finding power in your memory of a home you will never return to, a home created, manifested solely in the mind, a place of reality as dreams, where even a blade of grass is as if painted into the air…
That manifesto, what were you getting at?
I was just trying to tell this computer about how easy it is to make things. All we have to do is recognize our power and implement it formally in a way that we can share. We can use ideas that matter to us, that have shaped us irrevocably, experiences that have hurt us and made us cold, we can warm them for the canvas, the camera, the screen, the paper, we can use them to express ourselves and our deepest truths and secrets, we can use it to correct the omission, to assert our observation. We can be heard, you know, it's not difficult.
I noticed on my walk down from my house this morning, that there were green shoots covering the entire hillside, where eucalyptus trees were steadily looming, because those trees pretend there isn't any cold. Against the shrill sunlight, these green shoots seemed taller than they were, neon blazes emitted from the earth.
I know that sward, because last week it was a dearth.
This is true of everything. When we go further, that is when art happens: when we have discipline and deliberation, when we recognize the metaphors inherent in the act of being, when we act on the connections that occur in a single day, when we bring them to the public's attention and insist that our view is important, that is art. When we engage discourse and we strive for the recognition of the art we feel the most toward, that is history.
I felt sad, this coming winter, this moment of solitude and writing, this pent-up sentiment, I was not ready for it, before I knew what had happened --
Winter was shot through by these green shoots…
It was unexpected, this manifestation, this turn against the forces of winter, this thing that seemed to defy the white burn of the distant sun, that seemed to make winter warmer, to make winter not a winter.
Their permanent collection, she mentioned, is wonderfully lit. Oh, but after! I was on my way downtown to buy a new jacket. A true reward for the art devotee - but instantly upon leaving the museum was caught in a terrible thunderstorm. Yes, I walked two whole miles that way. Those smooth sidewalks were entirely shrouded in water. It even felt romantic at moments -- I was so cold I felt nothing. But by the time I got to where I was going, I didn't want a jacket at all -- I just wanted to go underneath that horribly flat pavement to the train, and return to the surface in a little while, warmed again…
