INTENTION I-2

Art posthume manifesto

 

Don’t wait for anything

Await everything

 

According to the most common French dictionary, art is “the expression of an ideal beauty in the work of humans.” We refuse this definition which we find insufficient in its current state.

Art is an environment and a feeling, art is life. Your life, your environment, your feeling. Art gives form to the space that separates us.

Art is political.

Since Malevitch’s square, art is, and in front of it, there’s “a curious crowd of instant art critics who rush to cross the mirror.”

Art is thus the only domain that has reached its absolute, that is to say the domain of pure creation. The only domain where man can boast of being equal to god, and where he can create freely and without constraint.

However, man is nothing without the gaze of the other.

This other that judges, condemns, recognizes.

Only god judges.

And this is why we mock this an, sectarian and academic, that is yours. The one you call contemporary.

Its contemporary is only its depression.

On this brilliant day, we declare the death of “contemporary” art in terms of a movement, and the birth of art posthume. Art-life.

“You must be a living man and a posthumous artist.”

Because “after the end of art” can be neither modern, nor contemporary, but posthumous: “born after the death of his father.”

The posthumous artist does not decide, he proposes.

No, “god is not dethroned.”

Thus:

 

Like man, who can do nothing but express himself through his deepest contradictions, it is our pretensions that make us what we are.

Art posthume does not justify itself. It has nothing to prove.

We prefer to leave art to the artists that deserve it, and to live.

It’s better to live than to do art.

Art is a consequence, not a goal.

It is time to draw lessons from history, and to surpass these obsolete notions which are: talent, novelty, and genius. They slow us down.

If everything has already been said, done, and thought, we will not be ashamed to repeat, redo, and rethink that which has not been done enough.

To imitate our fathers so as to reach beyond them is only justice rendered.

Being multiple and acting in all domains allows us to imagine ourselves free.

Already we sharpen, it would seem, the knives that will kill us later.

Consciousness of the medium and attention to detail are as worthy as chronology and retrospect in the work of the social identification of the artist.

Our identity does not care about your fears.

The reality of our makings is our best justification.

We must think broadly and take on our own system of diffusion.

We dream of new spaces were models, journalists, and artists would go flick themselves.

Create spaces for life instead of spaces for art.

“I wander without aim and purpose because I am already, by the very power of my will.”

Nothing exists without faire-valoir, they say.

The model is the most beautiful worth-creator of our era, it’s a whore that we can’t fuck. We’re tired of these waif madonnas approving pedophiles.

It is not more important to declare art than to declare artist.

Interested means interesting.

Art posthume is the mirror of its time.

What you see is what you get.

Big Brother pleases us only in so much as it puts into practice Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame.

We piss on the face of success.

If “everyone can do it,” everyone should do it.

You must not do to be, you must be to be.

The courage to be nothing, no one ever has it.

If we must one day be known for and by our work, this assumes that we will read the latter in light of our lives, and therefore we must apply a strict ethic in one as in the other.

Our values are not artistic but human.

Integrity, humility, faithfulness and respect are to love, friendship and praise what liberty, equality and fraternity are to the French: but one more hypocrisy we would like to believe in.

Nothing is free, nor luck.

Our grudge has the right to be tenacious because forgiven, this is already superior.

Success is only a mask of society.

In love, we always choose pornography over eroticism, it is more real.

Pornography is what we do to things.

We are living and it is in living that we want to be loved.

Our laziness makes us prefer amateurism to the professionalism of nothing. There is a reason for this. “Laziness is the actual truth of man.”

Work is acceptable only in extreme, because to work is to withdraw from life.

The job is the savoir-faire of the artist who will work a cash-box in his head and a check in his pocket.

We accept the job only as the error that it represents, in particular as in general.

The act of love is more important than enjoyment, which is why, in our way of thinking, the woman will always count more than the work she inspired.

In museums, we prefer to look at the women than the paintings.

In art, as in life, we need truth, not sincerity.

Ethics slaps morality in the face the same as faith should vomit hope, they’re not compatible.

Your doubts are not ours.

We have only the certainty that you call egoism.

Egoism (as individualism, Dadaism, Situationism or any “ism”) is worthy only if it is shared.

We prefer the original to the imitation. It sells better!

Therefore, we prefer Coke to Pepsi, tattoos to body art, cheaters to liars, Elle to Art Press, and Hustler to Playboy, at least they don’t pretend.

Authenticity, no matter how bad the taste, always ends up paying.

We believe in the enduring bad taste of the public.

This alone has a chance of changing the world.

You must take responsibility for who you are before wanting to change the world.

This society of the spectacle that is yours interests us only in so much as it makes us waste our time.

“Wasting time today is the only way to be free.”

“We must give meanings to meaning.”

“Being invisible is the only alternative left for art posthume to fight against the society of the spectacle.”

We will be invisible only to better blind you.

“Art posthume is our anti-matter like matter makes contemporary art.”

Preaching to the choir is the priesthood of the weak.

“The only tyranny that exists is that of the strong over the weak.”

Next to your churches, we are building free brothels, this way people can choose.

We create by means of love for life, not fear of death.

From the minuscule Palais de Tokyo, we like only the architecture which is at least skatable, and thus useful.

Art posthume flicks relational esthetics, but which we give, in our infinite kindness, the right to existence.

We don’t believe more in the artists that paints for themselves in their basement, their pants covered in paint, than in the “contemporary” artist.

We prefer nonetheless to sell ourselves then to sell our work.

The posthumous artist is inevitably a great man, and so it’s for the great museums that we intend our work, our life.

The great museums alone seduce the public.

It’s for the museum to come to us, not for us to go to the museum.

Recognition is only worth its legitimizing capability.

Recognition is worth nothing.

Nobody can, in any case, boast about being the average spectator of his era.

The recognized artist poses only the problem of recognition as predecessors have only the luck of being born first.

Our only absolute is our fucking-off.

Because we are:

The sons of your whores, of your fags, of your bosses and of your gardeners.

The air of your air

The freedom of your freedom

The contempt of your contempt

Ourselves.

Art posthume fucks contemporary art.

Art is life.

Our life, like none other.

Take your place if you want it.

 

Volenti non fit injura. Gloria victis.

Artus for art posthume. AleksiAnnaArtusDanieleEdouard,

Paris-Ernée, 15-26 august 2004.

 

 

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