Around last year’s Superbowl, Dockers issued a “Man-ifesto” to promote its khaki line. “It’s time to answer the call of manhood,” Dockers insisted. “It’s time to wear the pants.” With safety razors seemingly having cornered the market on “revolution” in the west nowadays, perhaps it’s no surprise that the most radical thing a middle-class man can do is buy a pair of beige trousers.
However, the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) would like to have us believe that the manifesto in its radical, political sense is not dead. Last week, the gallery opened We: Vancouver — 12 Manifestos for the City. Structuring the exhibition on 12 verbs — speak, see, listen, consume, among others — senior curator Bruce Grenville reminds us that the manifesto remains one of the most active of literary genres. “Each page ought to explode,” writes Tristan Tzara in his Dadaist Manifesto of 1918. “Here is a tottering world fleeing.”
The first stop in the exhibition, We: See, acknowledges that the manifesto, as its etymology suggests, is above all about making visible, about making public. Digital Natives broadcasts 140-character Twitter messages from Vancouver artists, writers and residents, native and non-native alike, on a digital billboard in Squamish territory at the southwestern end of the Burrard Street Bridge. The new media project, which nicely honours the epigrammatic tradition of the manifesto, tries to navigate the complex political realities of a modern western city occupying unceded Coast Salish land. One Tweet summed up this negotiation of settler and native histories and cultures best: “First Nations Relationship Status: It’s Complicated.”
But manifestos are not just about negotiation; they are also about history and rupture. When Marx and Engels published the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848, they famously announced that “a spectre was haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.” By the end of the preamble, they want to make this spectre, this fictitious “nursery tale” of the scaremongering ruling class, real — to meet it with “a Manifesto of the party itself.” This manifesto does not only describe a break in history, it seeks to enact that break through its own intervention.
Fitting, then, that in the We: Remember section of the VAG exhibition, we find Robert Kleyn’s Kingsway which centres around Vancouver’s mutinous thoroughfare which openly flouts the city’s strict governing grid system, slicing through streets and avenues on its diagonal journey from False Creek to New Westminster.
Under Kleyn’s interpretive eye, Kingsway both reveals and interrupts Vancouver’s conservative street mapping. It retells the history of the city through its early days as a Coast Salish trail and military route cleared by the Royal Engineers and simultaneously suggests a new mode of urban design. Here, Kingsway seems to whisper. Here is how you can think the city differently.
Not all of the projects capture the nowness, the breathless pace of the manifesto. It’s difficult, for example, to see the historical engagement so vital to the form in SOLEFood, an exhibit on urban farming. Similar is Nathalie Purshwitz’s We: Choose performance art piece, in which she exclusively wears clothing designed and made by her — including shoes, undergarments and outerwear.
While admirable and impressive, and much more engaging than other projects which seemed satisfied simply with encouraging Vancouverites to cycle more, it’s hard to see Purshwitz’s project as more than a sophisticated and skillful homage to maker-culture. Manifestos aren’t prescriptions for a better world: the Communist Manifesto doesn’t tell you how to implement a communist society, it simply convinces you one is urgently needed. The manifesto conjures up change so desperate, so relentless, as to appear inevitable.
It’s what makes the manifesto form so decidedly modern. Most successful in this respect is Althea Thauberger’s Carrall Street, a decentralized and collaborative performance that invaded the eponymous boulevard on the edge of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and the gentrified Gastown. Dressed up like a film set shot at night, Carrall’s 200-block tossed oblivious passersby in with confederate actors and artists in a playful constellation of interactions, some choreographed, some improvised.
Thauberger’s highly intricate project blurs distinctions between spectator and artist, fiction and reality, and transforms our city into a theatrical stage. Using one of Vancouver’s most fraught and conflicted streets as a metonym for the city itself, Thauberger’s piece bears witness to the fissures caused by inequality and gentrification, even as it seeks to imagine ways we can repair these gaps and reknit social relations — all in the coy voice of a trickster poet.
Carrall Street recalls the dramatic, hybridized energy of Filippo Marenetti’s 1909 Futurist manifesto: “We stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts.”
Perhaps what a manifesto announces above anything else is itself. “Look at me! Things are not what they seem. Change is possible if the will is there.” Docker khakis don’t quite stack up to this challenge.
WE:Vancouver runs at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 12 February – 1 May 2011.
Michael Stewart is a moderator on babble and a doctoral candidate in the department of English at the University of British Columbia. His work focuses on utopia, excess and modernity. He grew up in an Ontario suburb and lives in downtown Vancouver.
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