Mary-festo from Natasha

My world seems full of problems, and calmness is more acceptance than strength.
Growing myself as I read and write and plan to create.
Searching empty bowls for meaning and links.
Mulling over how to grow in strength Spiritually through Art Practice, not journeying without but within.
To transform skin into Armour.
To exist with what I have and to transform my objects and memories into works and words.
To believe in success and voice even if it may not be the status quo of the time.
Spontaneously sad and humorous and wildly deep. Passionate in action with the energy of many lifetimes lived in One.
Believing in the Universe and in Spirits and Nature.
Living dreams,memories, stories of feeling over news and facts.
Creating, Caring and writing till it is all over.
Click here

from Faridah...

Art is the inheritor of the sacred. Perplexity is both the ancestor and the descendant of enlightenment. To put away childish things is to eschew the systems that order, that determine, that assess, that approve, that disapprove, that permit, that disallow, that require, that compare, that validate, that exclude, that critique, that label, that define, that provide criteria.

I reject external criteria: I have faith in my own ability to think.

I avoid the conditioned air of the arts bureaucracy: I mix my breath with the inhalations and exhalations of my fellow creatures, unconditioned, and unconditionally. I breathe the wide air of place and being.

I do not hold out a begging bowl to be filled with governmental leavings: I fill my bowl with earth from which all things grow. I drink from the stream of consciousness: it cannot be contained; it flows through us and around us; it exists for all.

An artist must work with the integrity of being. There is no replacement for this, and no disguise. Art is not an industry. I give myself up, not to the forces of commerce but to the life force which drives forward the evolution of human thought; not to economic survival but to the survival of the principle of sanctity.

Art is intent.

Perplexity is both the ancestor and the descendant of enlightenment. Art is the inheritor of the sacred.

Karen sent in this gem....bless her cotton pick'n soxs

1 don't buy clothes share them

2 play with others more

3 laugh at patriarchs

4 rewrite propaganda and make it ours

5 make vulnerability a skill

6 exploit tech but stay earthed

7 be proud and loud

8 believe in the humanity of diversion

9 acknowledge that knowledge is a

currency

10 dialog is action

11 intimacy is recognition not sex

12 climb higher but not alone

13 laugh at those muscles

14 question the noise and glide through it

15 observe, consider then walk around it

16 enjoy the lust but not if it is possessed

17 wrestle with love and then live with it

18 see nuns as friends future liberators

19 unearth what was once invisible

20 don't climb mountains respect them

21 share and share and share

22 shoplift culture, reclaim our goods

23 remember that we are changing

24 our freedoms are not an object

25 speak when not spoken to

26 let the shallowness of power be noticed

27 treat ideology like a cup of tea, sip it and then try another blend

28 be a secret agent

29 leave messages for others to find, everywhere

Twin Poetry Collectice....MARYfesto from Larissa

...."Here is our manifesto for the TWiN Poetry Collective, now, as usual, transmogrifying from (but still honoring) its guerrilla (not Rupert Murdoch's cuppa) myspace origins...fire at will.

Warmly,

Larissa

girrls look up...out, across, on a Saturday arvo

Been thinking about multiple-maryfesto's all week. This is partly inspired by reading through the list of recommendations for the Ada Lovelace list of women distinguished in technologies that is been posted on netbehavior, its now very very long and rich as. What were these women thinking I wonder, what was their frame of inspiration, how broad was their maryfesto? and how close or far from achieving it was their work as we now know it. Is what we take to be their work ....'THE' work. Women's achievements in the arts is a marginalized & subversive force. (how exciting) ... but am wondering what others think about re-visiting the manifesto as a testing-ground for ideas, applying some of the best from theirs and others maryfesto's to their own 'means' of making creative mischief.

I've recently re-read a manifesto of Allan S Weiss
Ten Theses to Subvert a Work (A Manifesto)
Theatre Journal - Volume 58, Number 3, October 2006, pp. 393-394...that has generous play spaces, that are focused on 'open-ness' for creative work. Many that I realize I play out in my own work, I'll outline it here, so as to compare it with last Saturdays maryfesto...always a work in progress.

1) Multiply origins
2) Neutralise techniques
3) Accept interferences
4) Confuse genres
5) Valorize polyphonies
6) Exacabate paradoxes
7) Excavate voids
8) Condense givens
9) Love mannerisms
10) Dissociate significations

fair bit of potential frame shifting and making mischief in that sack of tools...

Mina Loy wrote one, a maryfesto, that she was unable to show to others except Mabel Dodge...a great outline of it and her project are here at hatstruck snarl
I'll quote a tiny bit of a good read from that blog here...
"Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” dated November 1914 by Roger L. Conover, was not published until after her death, and, indeed, it appears that during Loy’s lifetime the sole copy of this radical text was read only by Loy’s friend and ally Mabel Dodge, to whom Loy sent her manifesto that same year. Loy’s reluctance to circulate her manifesto is often considered in relation to her anxiety about the clash between her own feminist ideology and that of her culture. As Carolyn Burke notes of Loy’s own reaction to her writing of this time, particularly the scandal surrounding her sexually-explicit Love Songs, “Mina worried about her literary reputation, as if replaying the psychic tangle of her student days—when her teachers’ notice meant her parents’ disapproval. Although writing about the sex war was bound to be controversial, it was one thing to be provocative and another to learn that some considered her writing ‘pure pornography.’” (“Becoming” 191) Loy’s unrest concerning the relationship between her brand of feminism and that of the outside world is further revealed in a letter, to her agent Carl Van Vechten, dated soon after her drafting of the manifesto, “‘What I feel now are feminine politics,’ she told Carl, ‘but in a cosmic way that may not fit in anywhere.’” (qtd. in Burke “Becoming” 187)."

Donna Haraways Cyborg manifesto, click here
1995 ed. is a good read. Long though. I like an essentialized list, just my preference, hers is very long. I guess lists leave a lot of room for interpretation and slipping between ideas, that's always good moves for a maryfesto creative. Take Allen's list playing with the creative spaces that a 9), 7) and 4) strategy for instance offer up...makes my creative juices bubble.

Where are others? The Mad Manifesto by Cynthia Kitchen was a real find!!
we will not go mad!
we will not eat cows!
we will not support the golden arches!
we will not ordain ourselves burgher kings!
we will not excrete the brainwashed masses!
we will not stake our future on beefed up charges!
we will not kow-tow to the meat industry!

instead:

we will become vegetables!
we will juice ourselves!
we will stick to our celery roots!
we will reek our garlic breaths into the onion-skinned mouths of our lovers!
we will pepper our thoughts with salty kisses!
we will lose ourselves in the Garden of Eden!!!

Cynthia's plotted plan has a particular green and luscious spin.

Jenny Holzer's list of 'Truisms' is another that also has a delicious ring of maryfestos about it, I like the long long listing, lulling lubricating effect they have on my creative genius.

'you must have one grand passion...'

is a great one.. so are these

'you must know where you stop and the world begins

you can understand someone of your sex only

you owe the world not the other way around

you should study as much as possible

your actions are pointless if no one notices...'

I'm revisiting the famous VNS MATRIX maryfesto this week, for a look to see how it reads now, more about that next Saturday arvo...