Teraźniejszość manifestów. Strategie i obszary działania

Abstract

The article is an attempt to trace and comment on the recent turn toward the manifesto as a genre that continues to be effective for emancipatory and artistic gestures. The author, drawing on Julian Hanna’s „The Manifesto Handbook” (2019), briefly reconstructs the origins of the manifesto: first, as a political form of authoritarian speech that was subversively abandoned during the 19th-century rise of democratic ideas in France; second, as an artistic tool, pioneered by Filippo Marinetti, for proclaiming art’s contemporary desires for social transformation. Inspired by Hanna’s periodization of the three waves of manifesto existence, the author of the article considers 2008 as the moment of renewed interest in the meaning of manifestos. The essential analysis develops around selected examples of manifestos of the 21st century, both artistic and scholarly (from the field of humanities). Key-words: artistic manifesto, performative statements, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Artur Żmijewski, Rita Felski