Wednesday, August 1, 2007

The Limitist Manifesto

[What follows is the full text of the Limitist Manifesto, written by John Thomas Mumm. In the future I hope to include other Limitist writings, when and if I can acquire them.]


The Limitist Manifesto

With the decline of religious unity, society has lost its closed system of cultural and spiritual symbols. Whereas art once straightforwardly served to present religious meaning aesthetically, it now suffers from a loss of identity. Years of emphasis on the expression of the artist and the value of originality for its own sake have reduced art in general to a mere laboratory for visual design. With the further devaluing of symbol brought about by mass culture, the artist, it seems, must simply accept the loss of spiritual art and focus on mere image-making. This disillusionment has given rise to several responses, in particular conceptual and so-called “post-conceptual” art, that have aimed to impose meaning on the work of art from without. However, they have simultaneously reduced the work itself to a mere means and, even worse, have ultimately transformed much of contemporary art into a degenerate form of essay-writing.

It is our aim to recover the cultural and spiritual role of the artist from a system of art that is largely dominated by arbitrary financial interests, post-everything pseudo-intellectualism, and the specter of irrelevance. The end of religious art leaves the construction of spiritual symbols as a task for the artist. Of course, symbol does not here indicate something like a cultural logo but rather the end of a complex aesthetic investigation guided by a faith, even if an irrational one, that art can somehow return to its place as a source for the aesthetic experience of meaning.

Axiom 1: Creativity is always accomplished within and against the constraints of convention and tradition—the first sense of “limit.”

Axiom 2: Meaning can never be “accomplished.” The construction of spiritual symbols is an ongoing process in which meaning is approached asymptotically, if at all—the second sense of “limit.”

Axiom 3: The construction of meaningful spiritual symbols is a cultural achievement. It is senseless to speak of the artist’s “own” symbols. Thus, it is only as a society that artists can gradually move toward the construction of shared spiritual symbols, and again only asymptotically—the third sense of “limit.”


The Gallery

The predominant site for “art” in our time is the gallery. We do not seek to abolish the gallery system (an unrealistic and ultimately harmful idea), but rather reveal its true function and meaning:

1. The gallery is a museum displaying works torn from their natural context like pottery from some ancient civilization.

2. The gallery is an advertising forum in which visitors, curators, and art collectors are informed about contemporary artists and their styles.

3. The gallery is a place of study for visual design and technique.

4. The gallery is a financial institution where art serves as a commodity.


The gallery is not a site for art, which always resists all of these factors:

1. Art is suffocated when removed from its natural context.

2. Art is devalued when viewed as a mere source of information.

3. Art functions instrumentally when analyzed in terms of design and technique.

4. As a commodity, art entirely ceases to function as art.


In the gallery, it would be better to refer to works of art as images or pictures, or, to be completely accurate, corpses.


Innovation and Limit

Unfettered freedom (in fact impossible, Axiom 1) as a guiding ideal for the creation of art leads, unsurprisingly, to art that is arbitrary, merely subjective, and ultimately meaningless. Our guiding ideal is a shared system of symbols, which implies that artistic freedom always occurs within a pre-existing tradition. However, we have already seen how the crisis of contemporary art is precisely the apparent lack of rich spiritual symbols. Thus, in practice, artists are left with an historical tradition of artworks more notable for innovation in technique, style, and approach than the exploration of meaning. Because it is necessary to start somewhere and because the current situation is unsatisfactory, we must begin with the arbitrary imposition of limit, just as analysis often begins with a relatively arbitrary division of the subject matter in order to orient itself. This imposition of limit, so as not to be entirely arbitrary, should be guided by a series of reactions to aspects of the current situation that we find unsatisfactory:

In response to mass culture’s devaluation of symbol, we must begin with smaller communities of artists, even if this requires the provisional rejection of the great traditions of art.

In response to the death of art in the galleries, we must re-evaluate the proper context for the experience of art. Our only option at the beginning is to make use of the spaces in which the artists and their circles live and work. In this way, art might take a first step toward reintegrating into life.

In response to the reduction of art to a mere laboratory for visual design resulting from an unhealthy emphasis on isms and their influences/consequences (e.g. “the artist took the spirit of Abstract Expressionism as a starting point to subvert Minimalist constructions in favor of a proto-conceptual return to primitivism”), we must begin from our immediate environment, seeking to emulate the aesthetic qualities of our surroundings (particularly insofar as they differ from the culture at large). This represents the first, difficult step in constructing a new aesthetic vocabulary that is at once tied to our everyday aesthetic experiences and oriented toward the ideal of a shared system of cultural and spiritual symbols.

In response to the prevailing ideal of personal expression, which is certainly viable as a form of therapy but ultimately lacking in any search for shared spiritual symbols, we must see ourselves as aesthetic experimenters, seeking through a quasi-scientific approach to ultimately arrive at artistic truth, even if this is impossible in principle (Axiom 2), and always as doing so within a community of such experimenters (Axiom 3).


The Community of Artists

It is not the place of this document to make specific aesthetic recommendations. These choices must always flow naturally from the contexts in which they are made. In time, small communities of artists guided by the limits outlined above will give birth to local networks of symbols, expressions of the experiences and aspirations of their communities. Eventually, these will come in contact with other communities having undertaken the same kinds of aesthetic investigations in different contexts. The meeting of different communities will lead, in turn, to a continuation of the process on a somewhat larger scale. These aggregates of local communities will then, ideally, come in contact with other such aggregates, etc.

The construction of shared spiritual symbols is an arduous and uncertain project. Contemporary artists lack the advantages of religious artists of the past who already had access to a closed system of belief. It is our hope to restore art to its traditional place as the source for the aesthetic experience of meaning. But this will only be possible, we believe, if we take account of the principles outlined above.

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