multi-maryfesto

A Cyborg Manifesto

2010-06-13T18:53:00.000-07:00

WRT: Writer Response THeory and fictocriticism

2009-08-23T12:56:00.000-07:00

Interesting blog and podcast dedicated to discussing text art forms... has a brief article here on fictocriticism and a link to a WRT manifesto here.

I'm interested in one that covers the whole lot
trans criticism?
critical tranny?
engaged everything?
wrestle machine?....

say it with the sensitivity of say'n it...said

A MARY-FESTO by GUYS IN HEELS?

2009-07-30T18:59:00.000-07:00

First Manifesto of the Guerilla Plastique Fantastique: ‘On Baroque Practice’
1 Activate immanence. Turn away from transcendent modes and points of organisation, especially religion and art, but also fashion, the mass media and other telematic standardisations. Refuse the priests and the police; affirm bottom-up formations and traitor prophets. Celebrate the ‘isness’ of all things. We call for a turn to matter, and a tracking of the latter’s singularities and creative potentialities. Practice is the utilisation of that which already is (what else is there?) but in the production of new and specifically different combinations. Always affirm the eternal return.
2 Harness affect. Practice is the foregrounding of the world’s intensive and affective properties. We are subject to the ambient affect of fear generated by others. We turn this fear-affect-assemblage back on itself, mimicking and bastardising their languages and their techniques. Affects as that which constitute the objects of our practice (1) and affect as that which is ‘communicated’ through the work of the practice (2). (1) The practice will involve the production of novel constellations of affects, away from opinion, away from habit, away from the clichés of so-called culture (the affective assemblages offered to us on a daily basis). (2) The practice will operate as a rupture in our overly anxious, paranoid and stratified habits of being (the practice will affirm new kinds of joy, and new kinds of becoming). This is an aesthetics. We affirm the necessity of style in this harnessing of affect.
3 Build probe heads. The practice is an experimental device aimed at dismantling the strata that binds us and constitutes us as ‘human’ (our habitual states of being and responding). Probe heads against faciality (we curse the white man). In this practice both figuration and abstraction will be used (we will release the abstract from within the figurative). We offer access to the imperceptible from which the perceptible emerges and merges. We offer access to the unthought within thought, the nonsense within sense. And on the other side of the white wall? New territories, new polyvocalities.
4 Actualise the virtual. We locate the practice at that ‘seeping edge’ between the actual and the virtual. We turn away from the real and the possible as ontological co-ordinates for art (i.e. the clergy and their disciples). We attend to the ‘matrix of emergence’, the great screen that allows some things to pass, others to remain hidden (i.e. capitalism). And thus our practice is also one of deactualisation (the practice asks: how can we ‘escape’ the actual that surrounds us?) Our practice involves a switching of temporal registers, a speeding up, moving faster than any transcendent apparatus of capture, and also, a times, a slowing down, a remaining still. We open a gap between stimulus and reaction (i.e. creativity). We affirm speed, but also slowness and hesitancy. We are involved in mirror-travel and in the production of crystal objects.
5 Always stuttering, always stammering. Our practice is a collective enunciation, even when there is only one (we are always the group). Our practice is always linked to the larger political milieu (no oedipalisations and no nuclear families). Our practice as the general twisting, bending of a major language, a major tradition. The practice as centrifugal, reacting to, and attacking that which paradoxically produces the condition of possibility of the practice (parasitical function). The practice as centripetal, producing new forms and new modalities of being from within the same (germinal function). Always dissent and affirmation. Our practice is the precursor of that specifically immanent utopia to come, an exemplar of a new world that is already contained within this one. Our practice is a future fragment projected backwards in time. Stuttering and stammering we call forth the new clown-like people as the recipients of our practice. Take heed, for we are a sign, a warning.
6 Always folding. The inside as a fold of the outside (we howl with laughter at interiority and so-called ‘essence’). We hold that our practice is the production of new folds, new worlds arising from these folds, and new myths appropriate to these future worlds (we will use past forms and yesterday’s codes, but they will be made unrecognisable in their turn). The fold names our ontology, fractal and super-abundant (we believe in space and time travel conducted in the here and now). The fold names our processes of subjectivation, the relation we hold to ourselves, our capture of outside forces (everywhere we are subject to, but also subject producing). Our practice also affirms the ‘new’ folds of silicon with carbon, of the molecular, and of the secret fold at the heart of language – where language breaks free from meaning and cries like a wounded wolf.
Our practice is always one of ritual. We intend a performance that will allow those who dare participate to move from work time (utility) into sacred time (play). Our practice affirms transformation: we are concerned less with mundane consciousness than with cosmic consciousness. We believe in a baroque practice as the only appropriate response to these troubled and terror-stricken times.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis on pronouns and sleeping in the forest important Mary-festo advice

2009-07-26T16:42:00.000-07:00

From Silliman's Blog

Recent Drafts

“Draft 78: Buzz Track.” Interval(le)s II.2-III.3 (Fall 2008/Winter 2009)

“Draft 81: Gap.” BlackBox Manifold (Summer 2009).¹

“Draft 84: Juncture” Salt Magazine 2 (March 2009).

“Draft 91: Proverbs.” 17 seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (Fall 2008).

“Draft 94: Mail Art.” Jacket Magazine 37 (March 2009).

“Draft 97: Rubrics.” BlackBox Manifold (Summer 2009).¹

A Periodicity of 19

The “Line of 15” from Drafts. All poems to date (2009) from this thread, which is “the little.” Other Voices Anthology, ed. Roger Humes. (Journal sponsored by UNESCO)

Six Vispo Works

Drunken Boat 10 (July 2009).

Stein's anti manifesto "Marry-Nettie" and the FUTURISTS

2009-07-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

“The First Futurist Manifesto Revisited”

By Marjorie Perloff

Published in Rett Kopi: Manifesto issue: Dokumenterer Fremtiden (2007): 152-56.

click here

“The First Futurist Manifesto Revisited”

By Marjorie Perloff

Published in Rett Kopi: Manifesto issue: Dokumenterer Fremtiden (2007): 152-56.

quoting Margory...'As a rhetorical feat, the First Manifesto is thus remarkable. But rhetoric and poetic are not necessarily equivalent, as no one understood better than one of Marinetti’s most discerning critics, Gertrude Stein. In her subtle and devastating portrait, Marry Nettie[4], written during her sojourn, with Alice B. Toklas, in Mallorca during the war that was to be the “hygiene of the people,” Stein replaces Marinetti’s bombast, his pithy pronouncement, and reliance on onomatopoeic sound effects with a subtle word play and dislocation of syntax that may be said to constitute a kind of anti-manifesto of her own. The “Principle calling” and aggression (“artillery is very important in war”) Stein attributes to Marinetti give way to a calculated withdrawal into the private sphere where two women try to live their day-to-day life as best they can in the context of the chaos around them.

In the middle of her fractured narrative, Stein remarks, “We took a fan out of a man’s hand.” The fan is, of course, a traditional emblem of femininity, but here, the fan, carefully removed from male control, morphs comically into an electric fan. “We will also get a fan,” the narrator has already declared to her companion. “We will have an electric one.” Electricity, claimed by the Futurist cenacle as its domain, thus becomes, by a sleight of hand, a female property—a property that has its peacetime uses. Or so Marry Nettie implies.

Does Stein’s oblique and brilliant anti-manifesto thus present a credible challenge to Marinetti’s own? Yes and no. Yes, in that her implicit critique of Marinettian violence is certainly preferable to the call for “war” as the “hygiene of the people.” But what about audience? Almost a century after it was written, Stein’s brilliant but difficult Marry Nettie remains an obscure poetic composition, rarely reprinted and unknown even to some of the poet’s enthusiastic readers. For sheer audience impact, Marinetti’s manifesto retains its aura, however distasteful its extractable ideas. It offers “solutions” whereas Stein’s text dramatizes the need for quietude, daily routine, and individual fulfillment. How, in her scheme of things, is the “war” Marinetti advocates to be avoided? Stein has no answer. But “Without contraries is no progression” (Blake): we need both Marinetti and Marry Nettie if we are to understand the aporias of Modernism'.

oh aaaaarg....

2009-07-26T13:31:00.001-07:00

YESTERDAY"Manifesta 6: Notes For An Art School"
by Mani! festa 6
http://a.aaaarg.org/text/3478/manifesta-6-notes-art-school
PDF compilation

heres a good one raging the outrage

2009-06-17T14:47:00.000-07:00

The Outrage Against Words (1978)
Bernard Nöel

/ubu editions : Bernard Nöel

Source: www.ubu.com

Bernard Noël's pamphlet The Outrage Against Words (as it's translated in 1978) has seen a multiplicity of afterlives. Originally written in 1975 following the infamous attempted censorship of his spectacular Le Château de Cène, the manifesto asks: How can one turn their language against them when one finds oneself censored by one's own language? First appearing in Paul Buck's remarkable Curtains magazine before being picked up by the parallel political effort in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal, the work was appended to the Atlas Press translation of The Castle of Communion in 1993, and most recently surfaced in Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery's UbuWeb-like tome Imagining Language (2001)—each reading changes it, according, of course, to the immediate state of the reader and his social context, but equally according to the relationship of these components with those which exist at the moment of the book's composition. In every instance, the writing opens paradoxically: Screams. They begin again. I hear them. Yet I hear nothing. A meditation on the politics of erasure and potential of expression introduced through the impossible figure of the written cry. Perhaps one writes to erase? Noël struggles against bourgeois silencing—the encyclopedic 'outrage against words' that acts both through words and against them. The police are even in our mouths. A penetrating defense of polysemia, The Outrage Against Words is essential reading for the state of language and the politics of play.

My own take of what a feminist poet sounds like at Delirius Hem

2009-05-31T17:26:00.000-07:00

I submitted a piece to Delirius Hem, - the movie seems to work better there today at least, focusing more of what 'she' sounds like...another sorta mary-festo ...click here.

hatstuck snarls comments on Mina Loys 'mary-festo'

2009-05-31T17:13:00.000-07:00

Mina Loy sitting on the lap of Djuana Barnes.

Hatstuck Snarls has a great long article about Mina Loy and her mary-festo (manifesto)
quote a bit here, but its very worth a read... "This lack of an “I” is an important feature of the “Feminist Manifesto.” Current scholarship surrounding the manifesto takes the presence of the manifesto’s narrator for granted, without discussing the absence of an “I” (or a “we”) or without attempting to discuss the position of the narrator herself. This is perhaps understandable in light of the narrator’s forceful tone, which itself seems to mark the speaker as a figure of authority, but, it remains important to note that the authority of this speaker comes into being simultaneously with the utterance of her many demands. This factor might be rooted in part in the fact that Loy’s narrator does not appear to be creating a social movement and thereby has no scaffolding or context, or other persons, backing her. But even this point is debatable, as the last lines of the manifesto reference the possibility of “an incalculable & wider social regeneration,” thus marking the manifesto as a revolutionary discourse meant to bring about social change through the reformation of consciousness. But just as this notion of regeneration marks the potential of reformulating consciousness as the narrator outlines, the limits of the narrator’s claims, which could also be read as evidence of their seeming visionary status, are reflected by the last lines of the manifesto, in which Loy orders women to detach themselves from the assumed impurity of sex, “Another great illusion that woman must use all her introspective clear-sightedness & unbiased bravery to destroy—for the sake of her self respect is the impurity of sex[.]” But after making this command, Loy’s narrator once again rejects her audience by rejecting their ability to follow through on her demands, “the realization in defiance of superstition that there is nothing impure in sex—except the mental attitude to it—will constitute an incalculable & wider social regeneration than it is possible for our generation to acquire” (Lost 156). While presumably Loy’s narrator turns her back on the audience once again because has managed to grasp the notion that “there is nothing impure in sex,” this sense of the narrator’s superiority is not able to maintain a stable presence throughout the manifesto.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, as will be further discussed, examines the “Feminist Manifesto,” in relation to Loy’s Love Songs, in order to argue that “feminine consciousness is a specter haunting the poem” (“Seismic” 52)."

Post Modernism is finally dead Manifesto

2009-05-31T17:08:00.001-07:00

click here

Quoting Nicolas Bourriaud's E-Fluxes article on the April show at the Tate Modern to see what we think ... what do we think?

"ALTERMODERN MANIFESTO - POSTMODERNISM IS DEAD
Travel, cultural exchanges and examination of history are not merely fashionable themes, but markers of a profound evolution in our vision of the world and our way of inhabiting it.

More generally, our globalised perception calls for new types of representation: our daily lives are played out against a more enormous backdrop than ever before, and depend now on trans-national entities, short or long-distance journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe.

Many signs suggest that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end: multiculturalism and the discourse of identity is being overtaken by a planetary movement of creolisation; cultural relativism and deconstruction, substituted for modernist universalism, give us no weapons against the twofold threat of uniformity and mass culture and traditionalist, far-right, withdrawal.

The times seem propitious for the recomposition of a modernity in the present, reconfigured according to the specific context within which we live – crucially in the age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodernity.

If twentieth-century modernism was above all a western cultural phenomenon, altermodernity arises out of planetary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures. Stripped of a centre, it can only be polyglot. Altermodernity is characterised by translation, unlike the modernism of the twentieth century which spoke the abstract language of the colonial west, and postmodernism, which encloses artistic phenomena in origins and identities.

We are entering the era of universal subtitling, of generalised dubbing. Today's art explores the bonds that text and image weave between themselves. Artists traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs, creating new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.

The artist becomes 'homo viator', the prototype of the contemporary traveller whose passage through signs and formats refers to a contemporary experience of mobility, travel and transpassing. This evolution can be seen in the way works are made: a new type of form is appearing, the journey-form, made of lines drawn both in space and time, materialising trajectories rather than destinations. The form of the work expresses a course, a wandering, rather than a fixed space-time.

Altermodern art is thus read as a hypertext; artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history. This gives rise to practices which might be referred to as 'time-specific', in response to the 'site-specific' work of the 1960s. Flight-lines, translation programmes and chains of heterogeneous elements articulate each other. Our universe becomes a territory all dimensions of which may be travelled both in time and space.

The Tate Triennial 2009 presents itself as a collective discussion around this hypothesis of the end of postmodernism, and the emergence of a global altermodernity."

Nicolas Bourriaud

Pussipo, manifesto's mary-festos

2009-05-31T16:59:00.000-07:00

Pussipo is a high-octane collective of 160 women poets who view poetry as an act of skilled knife-throwing. As founder Anne Boyer notes, “Pussipo is SUPPOSED to wreck you.” Pussipo’s members hail from across the U.S. and Canada, and all over ...click here

These manifesto-mary-festos were so good I had to quote them
"Friday, October 13, 2006
pussinfesto

Once again men fight over her. The Colonel stands in a gray industrial landscape. A squad of soldiers is ever warm and fluffy, but pussipo is a form of aircraft graffiti, mainly embellished or extravagant in insignia, and also a new Greece or Rome.

Pussipo is cyclical in nature, so it's not surprising that just as women are often misperceived by the military gaze, pussipo is expected to act, look, and be strategic equipment. If the job of pussipo is to predict reality, it is getting easier and easier to produce and distribute her neon breath.

Pussipo is SUPPOSED to wreck you. She is only for a strong blue-point snowshoe siamese cat. Pussipo is valuable when used this way: a nemesis or free download.

What "real pussipo" is or is not is the misconception that pussipo is not everywhere: in a snatch dada or our favorite stolen astronaut. She is thieves they sue in fantasy stories. She is later the teachers who were the team leaders who knelt in a chair.

BUT there is a problem. It was really, really hard to choose, rooted in telling you with words and engaged in just this. And in some kind of “sting operation” by the pussipo squad we haven't bothered to schedule our weekend plans.

Far too often, the captains of rabidity have been suspicious, convinced that unless pussipo is about or related to men taking a few milligrams of Valium she is a "worldly call to the bomb squad,” or a "product that takes a lot of education, practice, and mastery far from the bridge.”

No, a guerilla pussipo squad forever unveils her full gallery. After all, pussipo is one of the most primal means she has left of expression. Pussipo is substantially the same, but also a cultural biography for the expected story.

Finally, I was stunned by the media frenzy instead of the fewest scruples. The general message indeed appears to be: “A work of pussi is the promise of vernacular homolinguistic transations of a single source poem."
Posted by odalisqued at 12:51 PM 1 comments
Minifesto

Pussipull

the blanket

off a line – the thing that breaks

in a conversation is the

icing. With a cool eye

feverishly toward.

Pussipo pushes it off

the cuff/thigh. What you say

to mean in the average

auditorium. Pussidom features

a laquered fail-

better. Pussipo done

so(me) good this time.

The gals/gulls/galls is

the sound you.

Here.

Rightright // Now

now-er.
Posted by D at 11:22 AM 0 comments
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Pussipo Manifesto
The bombs of empire are hived into my charred cinderella.

My cinderella is cathected onto a larval mass & icing drips into the mouth of Sir Squeals-a-lot, the piggie who fingers the levers of letters to his own advantage.

Milk pours out of the presses into the eager jaws of Sir Squeals-a-lot, and someone filters out the stringy ovaries lest they stick in his false teeth.

Let us examine the origins of our radical disease.

Pussipo says, A press is a cunt is a squeezebox full of letters. A hairy valentine, we eat social code and spit up a library.

Pussipo says, Convene in language attired in this century’s most stylish uterus. Let your mod ovaries dangle out of your eye-sockets to their fullest advantage.

Pussipo says, A poem is not a synecdoche for a pap smear. Or a cunt-riddled plush toy with an animatronic chatterbox.

Pusssipo says, Mind your falsies.

Look hard at the female of the species, at their cannibal wigs and zirconia-trimmed muzzleloaders, their coyless page of slits. You will now be page to their slits, a bag of meat with wings.

To the monkey in the pot de crème, welcome.

Press any tender button to continue.
Posted by Lara Glenum at 9:30 PM 1 comments
Pussifesto

Pussipo will see you in the Underworld where “poetry in [that] tradition, [has been] self-slain, murdered by its own past strength.”

Pussipo emulate that child who vomits up her own materials in order to rid herself entirely of tainted skins. Pussipo do not try to rescue or retain our own materials, but jar them loosely in fermented mare’s milk and gasoline.

Pussipo rejoice in Western art and literature’s ascription of the rank corpse. In these glossy hides, Pussipo gain access to the Underworld and begin.

Pussipo will see you in the Underworld.

Pussipo do not fondle the reified detritus of the phallus encrusting the common chat. Instead, Pussipo proceed directly to the genital, slice open its purse, and carry its mucoid jargon to the Underworld. Pussipo place a pin in every accomplished lip.

Pussipo splice together those brief crags with our own historical organs. Thus Pussipo create gold-toothed cyborgs; part poem, part biologue. Entirely analogue.

Pussipo will see you in the Underworld where Pussipo will remake you with your own discarded fat cells, where Pussipo will poke out your faux god-eye and insert the thousand-chambered fly-eyes of the pussilarva.

Take heart.
Posted by D at 7:46 PM 0 comments
Labels: glossy hide"

Mez Breeze's mary-festo takes the cake

2009-05-31T16:48:00.000-07:00

Mez offers ... "in terms of my own dispersed Multi-MARYfestos, try these links:

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/netwurker/cyblattrice.html
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/netwurker/netorbit.html
....both from 2001 + english translations at the bottom so scroll down:)

also an interview that encapsulates my personal wurk manifesto-like take from 2007:
http://cont3xt.net/blog/?p=251

more click here

Mary-festo from Natasha

2009-04-18T04:33:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-04-11T16:07:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-08T04:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-08T04:24:00.000-07:00

...."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

2009-04-04T21:20:00.000-07:00

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...

where are the maryfesto's hidden, a saturday arvo question

2009-03-28T18:00:00.001-07:00

arrrgh.... where are they, women's manifestos... better named maryfestos, beautiful gems, keys to unlock creative potentials, steer the ship home or away from home, anchor the enthusiasms, boy/or should I say girrrrling the drooping spirit? The wild wild enthusiasms of making squeezed into a few lines or a tome, etc etc

I've sort of been working with this one making experimental texts and sonic art plays in sound and sounded-language in particular. Its sort of a hodge podge from all over, and it keeps slipping into new ways of interpreting possibilities and the work I have already shape through this perspective.

I 'm wondering what other currently creating women use as forms for their practice? is the maryfesto still out there? on the back of envelopes? penciled in out diaries next to do the (...fill in blank with a chore)...

1 refuse to make statements
2 watch the shape of words
3 be trans...
4 resist propaganda
5 make culture
6 listen for the sound in / of things
7 make soapboxes
8 speak in other tongues
9 look for the vertical
10 refuse to abide by common sense
11 don't face facts
12 get used to vertigo
13 slur and mumble
14 act act act exuberant
15 privileged sound over grammar
16 listen to me and not to them
17 eat joy
18 learn to fly from the Sally Field, the flying nun series
19 connect with dead superheroines wherever possible intimately
20 promote contradictions-become world famous yesterday
21 be mischief
22 repeat myself, repeat myself
23 disrupt borders in department stores and in knowledge disciplines
24 steal shopping trolleys
25 act slowly... ha!
26 jump up and down, jump up and down
27 mark the edge, the center
28 use a lot of butter
29 overshoot the 'mark'

At times the jump up and down one has been hard to manage but I keep hopping along, even one leg seems to shape a particular perspective that leads to creative outcomes of unexpected delight.

What would be the maryfestos of Artemisha Gentileshi be? Did Bach's second wife write one? What was Ada Lovelaces? Gertrude Stein's maryfesto is embedded in her text, as are so many other writers and artists thoughts, muffled and invisible...I think I'll have a go at trying to find them, speculatively writing them up...they would be in multiples...multifaceted, multivoiced, polyphonic.