Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (review)

Abstract

If modernity is a permanent revolution--the ongoing political and aesthetic struggle to represent "our" time--then for the past three-hundred-plus years, the manifesto has been its script. The manifesto stages history as guerilla theater where, ideally, actors and spectators merge and the fourth wall is ruptured by the promise of universal subjectivity. Tracing modernity's broken covenants, Janet Lyon's Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern realizes Peter Bürger's vision of what the historical avant-garde could do and, through a patient dilation of his temporal scope, shows what contemporary political and artistic movements still can do. In Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), Bürger argued that the historical avant-garde successfully engineered a (one-time-only) merger of the aesthetic and the political via its attack on the bourgeois institution of autonomous art only to founder on the oxymoron of its own institutionalization. He thus perpetuated the crisis modality that he studied. In making her case for the manifesto "not as a paper tiger but as an intervention into the organization of cultural practices," Lyon reveals art as constitutively entwined with the praxis of life (80).