Lesson 2

Lesson 2:  Poetics: the manifesto as an artwork

In this lesson, we are going to look at a range of women artists’ work where either:

1) the work’s content has circulated as a “manifesto” or
2) a “manifesto” has become the work’s content.

This contrast is immediately apparent by comparing how two manifestos appear in artworks by Ewa Partum and Agnes Denes.

The first is composed of words spoken during a performance.
The second of words carved as text in a sculptural installation.

These manifestos contain oblique and, at the same time, important links to a basic feminist idea of the personal as political. (for more on this, see Lesson 3, part 3 in 10-lesson course)

Ewa Partum

Ewa Partum made a performance in 1979 (Galeria Art Forum, Lodz) called ‘Change, My problem is a Problem of a Woman’. In this performance she asked make-up artists to transform half of her body into that of an older woman. The 1979 performance was a 16mm Film transfered to VHS and DVD, colour, sound, duration: 7’15”. The video of this performance is available from the Museum of Modern Art,Warsaw’s archive online. Unfortunately, there is no sound on this video. Images of her face already made up are hung on the wall.

Several times the text of the manifesto has been used to create a soundtrack for the performance. Comments by her peers and fellow performance artists Valie Export, Ulrike Rosenbach and Lucy Lippard were also read out by the artist during the performance (but they are not part of the manifesto). Another element is a caption “On the floor I have written: a male artist has no biography. However, a female artist has one. It is important if she is young or old.”

In this conversation with Ana Janevski, for CMAP/MoMA, Ewa Partum discusses Change (Adres Gallery, first performance in 1974 and Lodz, 1979).

Having declared herself as a work of art, Ewa Partum then made the decision to perform naked in her future performances. This decision was not to “parade” her body or her personality, but to represent and critique the impossible position for a woman, as a woman artist, that she was only seen as a body and not as a subject.

Here is a video of Ewa Partum talking about her work in the 1970s. It’s a Tate short called ‘It’s an obligation for every woman to be a feminist’.

A short film by Janina Motylińska Emancipationist from Poland (1980) [Polish soundtrack] also gives a quick insight into her practice in the 1970s.
https://artmuseum.pl/en/filmoteka/praca/partum-ewa-emancypantka-z-polski-real-janina-motylinska

Ewa Majewska makes the following comment about Ewa Partum’s strategy. She identifies her work as part of an alternative ‘avantgarde of the weak’ and as the counterpart to the dominant representation of the avantgarde as both masculine and heroic:-

Ewa Partum’s work overcomes the status quo by offering the weak power of universalization. She shares a specific experience of exclusion – as a woman, as a female artist – and finds ways of expressing it as a common oppression. The weak avant-garde presents itself in this example as a strategy of universalization, but also as a way to use the artistic form of production to transform exclusive political agency into a type involving ordinary resistance, the common. The weak avant-garde as a concept for feminist agency helps to situate the ephemeral and uncertain on the map of art history, suggesting that masculine hegemony has already been challenged by non-heroic, weak models of resistance.

Ewa Majewska ‘Feminist Art of Failure, Ewa Partum and the Avant-garde of the Weak’
Widok. Teorie i praktyki kultury wizualnej 16, 2017

How does Ewa Partum’s strategy work in presenting herself, her body, and her process of ageing, as a “type” of woman signifying all women’s oppression through her age?
Is the identification of what may happen to her as a woman (since she offers herself as an example), a way of understanding the fate of all women, as they grow older?
If so, is this strategy, essentialising, since all women are seen to share the same oppression?
Or is it Eurocentric, if different cultures have different attitudes to how they respect or understand the value of older women?

Add your comments to the forum for Lesson 2

Agnes Denes

Agnes Denes ‘Manifesto’ (1970) is reproduced in the ebook. It is also reproduced in The human argument : the writings of Agnes Denes / edited and with an introduction by Klaus Ottmann. (Putnam, Conn. : Spring Publications, c. 2008) and on the artist’s website:-
http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com/works15.html
and
http://www.fraclorraine.org/media/pdf/ManifestoDenes.pdf

This is one editor’s view of how the text relates to Agnes Denes’ artwork as a whole:

This brief work is a statement of purpose from the beginning of Denes’s career, laying out the goals to which she intended to dedicate her art. They have guided her artistic and literary efforts ever since—they are the node points of the life of her mind.

Mark Daniel Cohen, introduction to Agnes Denes
‘Manifesto, Mathematics in My Work & Other Essays’
Hyperion—Volume II, issue 1, February 2007

In the same article, Agnes Denes writes:-

I believe that the new role of the artist is to create an art that questions the status quo and the direction life has taken, the endless contradictions we accept and approve, offering intelligent alternatives.My work ranges between individual creation and social consciousness. It addresses the challenges of global survival and is often monumental in scale.

The paradox in creativity that she explores in the ‘Manifesto’ rests in the line: ‘seeing reality and still being able to dream’
This is what she means about questioning contradictions in the status quo.

In 2000, Agnes Denes included her ‘Manifesto’ amongst many other quotes from philosophers in Poetry Walk (2000), a series of carved granite pieces, placed in the grounds of the University of Virginia Art Museum.

In doing so, a manifesto which was an ephemeral statement and widely reproduced, was “memorialised” – 30 years after it was written – into granite paving slabs to create one of the text passages of poetry to consider while walking in the gardens of the art museum.

While the attempt to “engrave” and “present” this manifesto in an artwork, next to a collection of quotations by other philosophers which have interested or inspired her, may seem like a literal presentation of the idea, the manifesto was written at a very productive and interesting time in her artistic practice where the larger tension she explores in it between individual creation and social consciousness was more evident.

Is this an oblique way of transforming the personal into the political?
How does the message of one artist become important to many?

Add your comments on this manifesto to Lesson 2 Forum

As an aside, the words themselves have inspired other artists to make a hommage to this manifesto, e.g. in this embroidery of it by Anne Birtchnell.
http://annebirtchnell.blogspot.com/2014/01/inspiration-stitching-manifesto-homage.html

Agnes Denes is an artist who wrote about her ideas and practice consistently since the late 1960s.  There are many books and artist’s interviews and writings to explore.

The geometrical/ philosophical drawings she realised at the time of writing the manifesto include: Matrix of Knowledge (1970, in New York MoMA’s collection); Study for Thought Complex (1970, in Metropolitan Museum, New York) or Dialectic Triangulation: A Visual Philosophy, series #3
(Whitney Museum, 1970). These are drawings as thought processes: part-map, part-mind palaces and part-schematic diagrams, using forms to explain philosophical concepts in spatial terms.

For a quick introduction to other features of Agnes Denes work, you could read the following interview with her in Studio International (2014): https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/agnes-denes-interview-a-visionary-artist

This article begins by looking briefly at her 1982 work Wheatfield – A Confrontation where she planted a crop of wheat in a plot of land near Wall Street on Manhattan (Battery Park City) and uses this quote from the artist’s writings.

“Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept. It represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns. It was an intrusion into the citadel, a confrontation of high civilisation. Then again, it was also Shangri-la, a small paradise, one’s childhood, a hot summer afternoon in the country, peace, forgotten values, simple pleasures.”

There are good quality photos of the work in 1982 in Manhattan:
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wheatfield-manhattan-1982/
The aerial view shows the Modernist square imposed on the landscape by the work and its location next to the Hudson Bay and river.

This work was restaged in London (2009) and in Milan (2015).

Agnes Denes_Wheatfield_Fondazione Nicola Trussardi_interview_Milano 2015 from Fondazione Nicola Trussardi on Vimeo.
Anges Denes is standing in front of one of her many large scale drawings of geometric forms, only some of which were drawings for installations or eco-art projects.

Further Reading

Agnes Denes ‘Notes on Eco-Logic: Environmental Artwork, Visual Philosophy and Global Perspective’ Leonardo Vol. 26, No. 5, Art and Social Consciousness: Special Issue (1993), pp. 387-395

Lucy Lippard had also included Agnes Denes’ work in c.7,500 (May 1973-Feb. 1974) (see Lesson 1, part 3 on Mierle Ukeles) at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, and five other locations in the USA.

This exhibition of women artists whose work was identified with conceptual art was recently the subject of a major revisionist exhibition: Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art. Lucy R. Lippard’s groundbreaking 1973 book Six Years and the notes on c.7,500 were presented. In 1975, Lucy Lippard published From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art.

Continue Lesson 2 in Part 2

Continue the lesson here:

Part 2,  Part 3

Summary
The summary page offers a digest of the lesson.
You can also ask questions and leave comments there.

In this lesson, we are going to look at:-

Part 1

Ewa Partum

Change, My Problem is a Problem of a Woman (1979)

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Agnes Denes

Manifesto (1970)

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Part 2

Lucia Tkacova and Aneta Mona Chisa

80:20 (2011)

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Dora García

100 Impossible Artworks (2001)

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Part 3

Lily Bea Moor (aka Senga Nengudi)

Lilies of the Valley, Unite! or NOT (1998)

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Rhani Lee Remedes

SCUB Manifesto (2002)

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Silvia Ziranek

Manifesta! (2013)

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Fabrika Nadyonii Odezhdii, FNO (The Factory of Found Clothes)
Natalya Pershina-Yakimanskaya and Olga Egorova, (Gluklya and Tsaplya)

Manifesto of Factory of Found Clothes (1995)