The Magnifesto of the New Movment

So, it's been over 2 years now and I feel myself with the time, disappointment, creativity, and slight motivation to see if I can revive this thing again. And what better way than to publish the rough draft of the manifesto I recently penned for the Art Movement/Art Collective I'm trying to found. So, if anyone anywhere still cares, have a look at what's been scratched out so far by myself, with an appendix of notation from a fellow literast...

THE MAGNIFESTO OF THE NEW MOVEMENT

PREAMBLE

IN THE NORTHLANDS, the prophet sat, shimmering in the shade when the people approached him. They implored him in the name of the sun, sky, earth, and sea to save them.

"Our children sit in laxness waiting for something they will never know... They wonder at shadows and pierce the vagueness with the sharpness of plastic safety scissors... They form nothing that hasn't been formed and have forgotten the alchemist's ways..."

The wise sage looked out upon them with eyes that had seen the geniuses rise and give gifts, but had, of late, watched gruesome plagiaristic "art." He looked upon them for a while and then bade himself speak...

"It is with unrivaled heaviness that I must tell you these things. Your children have faltered because they have seized upon the accidents of souls rather than the essences that drive them. You have allowed them to see only colors and representations, when the wonderment lay only scanty minutes away! They see Van Gogh's sunflowers and wheat and see only 'impressive use of yellow and gold.' They have no feeling put into them at the level of soul. Even the strains of great musicians past inspire them to recreate the accidental noise rather than channel the ever available spirits that inspired them."

"But how shall we remedy this bereaving soul-stripping?"

"Well, I propose you birth them into a new conciousness... Take them from the uncertainty that veils the truth from them and appeal to the inner wonder of things. Bid them sit in darkness and listen to absurd cyclic rhythms. Then, when the first crack of light invades the room, they shall be ideally filled with the wonder the father and the mother felt at the first sunrise! Bid them look at all things anew, with a desire to see the beauty in all, but, most especially, themselves."

---

The human experience writ large across time and space with all of its beautiful failings and triumphs is our ethic.

There is almost a veil or facade of duality in our human nature that has so often fooled poets, philosophers, priests, and kings... One of our purposes (for there are both many and few) is to draw together as some sort of magickal stitching and blending the highs and lows of humanness... As if the moans of suffering and the strains of elation intertwine in a celestial melody that truly raises us above the mundane music of nature and into the level of that Divine Harmony which exists above all...

For these reasons, our work may be both disturbing and beautiful and offensive and sacred in one glance... Like the Venus de Milo with a hairy moustache... There is an imagism that permeates it all, along with expressionism and a fauvist sensibility... For we seek to represent things clearly, but the entire concept of the thing... Not merely its physical attributes, but its spiritual, philosophical, and psychological accidents... For example, when I see a book, it can merely be a musty, thick, slightly authoritative looking text, but it really carries more with it... Without knowing its contents, my previous dispositions come in to play and that book becomes an enemy and a friend... A foe that needs to be conquered in order to become an asset to me... In this, again, we see a perceived duality... But is there really such a duality in this tree offal? Is it really both of these?

The world has a new friend that dresses in furs and laughs at death while contemplating his/her own precarious dramatized existence... On his shoulders he/she carries the shame and glory of his/her race... Nothing less will do and she's worthy of nothing more... Hands that enslaved and hands that freed... Eyes that glared and eyes that softened... Hearts that opened with sweet nectar notes of love and snapped shut with oh so many growls of hatred...

Do we mean any harm? Well that depends on whose flag you cower under for safety... Have you been mindemancipated yet? Do you think with a mind that knows the light and indulges the dark? Prance like a rhythmic gymnast in nomansland? Then you belong to the bullforce of men and women creating from the ashes of decency and pretension a Temple of Obscene Revelations...a Palace of Profane Sanctity... But there is no malice intended towards our sheepened brethren and sistren... They will be part of the newness and exposition that will engulf our world of newness.

May it never be corrupted by the hands of man and never manipulated in such a way that it shall become perverse, misused, and profane... All is sacred but not to an illegitimate flagrant extension of sanctity... No, all things are sacred in that they are parts of our extra-mental reality, a reality populated by tools and schemes and patterns, and beauty... There is only that ugliness which we create with our minds... A fish is a fish until he/she is poisoned by man's laziness... A wonderment to all until the few corrupt the experience of the many... Our movement shall concern itself with preserving the beauty of creation through extensive use of recycled things and stuffs for our artworks... A small move, but one to be sure that has already been implemented with much success by the likes of Tyree Guyton... A glorywork this is not, but merely an attempt to glorify the grander gloryact of recycling...

There is a large electric field which seems to taint everything that flies through it now... A sort of reliance on having things done for and to us rather than shaping our own destinies... No barrier exists except that which OUR CREATOR has erected eternal, and that which we prop up in our mind... Rather than using our mental scaffolds and wires to prop up ourselves and the PEOPLE around us, we have become far too oftenly familiar with supporting the "insurrmountable." If men can climb mountains for no other reason than their existence, how much more weight can we bring to assail those "forces" which we must destroy... For why do we allow Victorianism and Gnosticism and Communism to flourish in an age where we should know better? It is another principled purpose of this movement to empower the poor lost souls around us to exterminate swiftly and strongly the weltgeists that plague us oh so oftenly...

There are words the flow from everywhere and nowhere conclusively... Words that mean things and nothing at the same time... THe key element of this movement is a semblance of that reality... An equivocality that is as beautiful as criminal... A sexiness and repulsiveness standard and esoteric...

There is a grand magnificence to all things, a grand magnificnece to all things, a grand magnificance to all things!!!

---

ELUCIDATION FROM OUR BROTHER TO THE EAST

To the Modelskiality of the New Movement,

I sat in a high place, as is upright and virtuous, beneath the night sky and a ghastly gibbous moon, nestled in the soft, slippery folds between the City and the Trees, to ponder the meaning of the great Magnifesto and the tantalizing ichor of that fleet and kinky serenity, Art. Thought settled upon me, and through it Words, and so I stained my sheets: ink notes toward the pillars of this ancient and newborn Movement.

I have here transcribed faithfully these jottings. Some of the precepts here you have already noted, and I wrote them out for my own elucidation; others are nudgings of babbling Pythia. If I have correctly translated your thought, tell me; if I have traduced, say also. And dwell on those new precepts, and mull them, and stew them with some parsley, sage, rosemary, and paprika, yes stew them and eat them and expel them and study the remains like tea leaves, and let me know what you think. Together we shall chip away at the face beneath the stone, and resolve this Magnifesto to be the supreme articulation of the New Movement.

Yours in Art,

-B

HERE FOLLOWS THE NOTES:

-- Art is fundamentally communicable: no -isms, neo-s, or other obfuscative diphthongs. Even the spelling of diphthong shall be simplified to its archaic and magnanimously simple original form, dipthong.

-- Art is the natural activity of human being, like eating. Art, like eating, ought to be done each according to his own means and kind; the well-to-do can eat steak, and do. The well-to-do can sculpt in marble. The poor can eat Easy Mac, and do. The poor can use crayons. Steak and Easy Mac are both food. Both marble and crayon can be Art.

-- Authentic art comes from authentic experience comes from authentic being; the best art flows from a genuine-positive source.

-- Art is an essentially social activity. Emily Dickenson was an emotional quisling who got lucky.

-- NO MARKETERS. It is the Marketers and their foul Process that kill movements, social growth, and above all, they kill authenticity.

-- Art of the Movement is applicable to all forms of art. However, there is no place in the Movement for performance art as it is traditionally known. There is only life lived through the authentic artistic lens, and should that life produce an object or creation outside or apart from the person living, then it may be considered art of the movement. Art of the Movement is not life lived for show; it is life lived, and truly.

-- Egocentrism is improper to Art of the Movement. Art of the movement is intimate to the artist but selfless in expression.

-- Art of the Movement seeks Transcendence, but merely transcendence from the plastic, the store-bought, and the insincere.

-- Nazi art is the art of the Will to Power. Art of the Movement is the art of Adventure to Awesome.

-- Beauty is a recognized value within the Art of the Movement: the equal and helpmate of Truth. Ugliness too is a recognized value but is subordinate to both Beauty and Truth. Humor is essential to the Art of the Movement, as is the Art of the Pleasant, the Art of the Positive Shock, and the Art of the Selfless Weird.

-- Concepts contrary to the Art of the Movement and values opposed to the Art of the Movement may be criticized, attacked, assaulted, ridiculed, shat upon and relentlessly buggered by mutant sloats with nine-inch razor-cocks -- but never the artists who hold them. The person retains primacy over the concept.

-- Art of the Movement may be sold, but an artist may never put a price on his or her work. Only a buyer may name a price, and an Artist of the Movement may choose to sell or to not sell.

-- Communes and artists' retreats are encouraged, but no Artist of the Movement may take without giving and cannot stay in such a situation for more than a span of eleven months, save only in circumstances most extreme, and love doesn't count.

-- Sex is to be respected and treated as an art of the most holy and organically liturgical nature. Kink, that favorite of artists, must flow from the sensibilities of the Art of the Movement and must be imbued with the most scrupulous selflessness. Gender is recognized by the Movement as a subject of particular and necessarily distinct dignity, and may never be squandered for cheap (or expensive) tricks.

-- The use of drugs must never be confused with a lifestyle choice or artistic authenticity.

-- THERE IS A GRAND MAGNIFICENCE TO ALL THINGS!