What is a Manifesto?
“To proclaim a manifesto you have to want: A.B.C., thunder against 1,2,3.” (Dada Manifesto, 1918, Tristan Tzara)
Manifestos are statements of purpose that define the aims and identity of an artistic or political movement. The manifesto is a product of an (often-utopian) desire or vision. It speaks a new artistic movement into being, usually against another artistic movement or a discarded past. It is a partisan of its movement, of its nation, of itself. It is reactionary. It provokes. It speaks in commands and aphorisms. It is uniquely modern.
Starting in the period directly before World War 1 (around 1890), Europe experienced a proliferation of new artistic movements, many of which wrote out their philosophies and aims in declarative documents called ‘manifestos’. In an acceleration which mimicked both the fast-growing industrialization and growing conflict on the continent, the first wave of the ‘manifesto boom’ occurred directly before and during World War 1 and continued into the mid-1920s. Manifesto production lessened, though did not cease, after the mid-20s. Additionally, this particular 1890s-1920s moment seems to be the time period that establishes the manifesto as a specifically modern genre, intimately related to the ever-revolving abundance of schools (‘isms) that define modern art.
While manifestos are often studied in conjunction with the art they inspired, this project will focus on the artistic manifesto itself as a unique textual genre worthy of consideration on its own. The genesis and subsequent explosion of the manifesto genre in years before and during World War I speaks to its interesting positionality between the world of art and that of political and public rhetoric. The manifesto is attached to the avant-garde, yet also often speaks directly or even coarsely, and often takes the visual form of a poster or public proclamation. The distinction between ‘high’ and low art, often discussed in modernist studies, collides with itself in the manifesto genre. Manifestos also confound distinctions between visual art and text, avant-garde elitism and nationalist populism, and between the manifestos themselves and the art they inspire.
Manifestos as a ‘bridge’ genre between literature and real events. Artists use manifestos to position their artwork in relation to momentous cultural change or major historical events. This takeaway opens up questions about the relationships between manifestos and other kinds of socially involved texts, such as religious creeds, political rhetoric and melodrama. Connecting manifestos to these other types of texts also opens up the overlooked continuities between manifestos and older genres, instead of only viewing manifestos as avant-garde acts of rebellion.
Manifestos as texts that stand between ‘high’ modernism and ‘low’ culture. Manifestos are often the moments where authors decode or explain their projects, usually in self-conscious strident, declarative, public-facing language (as opposed to the dense, allusive, and sometime inaccessible experimental forms of modernist literature)
Manifestos often contain grandiose or utopian language, meant to usher in a new age or new world. Mapping these manifestos provides a very concrete way to see the explosion of manifesto-writing, especially in the early 20th century, as a proliferation of utopias that are imagining new worlds and ways of making art within very specific temporal and historical contexts.
This map shows all the manifestos currently in the project database.
- Each point stands for one document. There are currently 103 documents in the database.
- Each point is placed according to the document's place of publication or writing, to the greatest specificity known.
- The points are color-coded by artistic schools. There are currently 13 artistic schools accounted for in the database.
- The map currently spans from 1836-1938.
You will see a pop-out box that contains metadata for that manifesto. Some important information you can gainf rom this box includes:
- the document's title
- the document's author
- the artistic school the document belongs to
- the original language of the document
- its country, city, and sometimes address of publication
- for most documents, a link to the full text of the document (links to an external site).
Some areas and addresses have a dense concentration of publications, especially in European metropolitan centers, like London and Paris.
- If there is more than one manifesto at a single address, they will share one point on the map.
- If this is the case, you will see "(1 of #)" in the upper left-hand corner of the pop-up box and arrows in the upper right hand corner. You can click through each document's information by clicking on these arrow.
- Finally, you can expand the information by clicking the screen icon in the upper right hand corner of the pop-up box.
Caws, Mary Ann. Manifesto : a Century of Isms. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
Puchner, Martin. Poetry of the Revolution : Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Pichler, Michalis. Publishing Manifestos : an International Anthology from Artists and Writers. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Berlin: The MIT Press; Miss Read, 2019.
Winkiel, Laura A. Modernism, Race and Manifestos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Vondeling, JE. “The Manifest Professional: Manifestos and Modernist Legitimation.” College Literature 27.2 (2000): 127–145.
Riggs, Thomas. The Manifesto in Literature. Detroit: St. James Press, 2013.
Ross, Shawna., and O'Sullivan, James. Reading Modernism with Machines : Digital Humanities and Modernist Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.