Declaiming for Art’s Sake

Theo van Doesburg, "Base de la peinture concrète," Art Concret no. 1 (April 1930). Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. I started wondering a few months ago whether anyone was writing poetic and/or artistic manifestoes anymore. The last I could think of, before the brief Covid-era efflorescence of statements that accompanied Black Lives Matter, was the Dogme 95 movement associated with Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Thankfully, I came upon the treasure trove of twentieth-century manifestoes Mary Ann Caws put together, Manifesto: A Century of Isms. The book is pretty much confirming my suspicions: those clamoring demands of another era often boiled down to assertions of lone rightness from the mouths and/or pens, sometimes fists, of mostly young men assured that they were the sole possessors of truth, and that everyone else was absolutely, condemnably wrong. As Caws notes in her introduction, “the manifesto generally proclaims what it wants to oppose…. Its oppositional…