Inexpressionist Manifesto
The foolish art of those who have not understood the new paths of expression; of those who, out of naivety, still see in practice and in artistic-artisanal making a possible way. Fools seduced by the deceased modern portrait of those who “await the miracles the world seems to owe them, feel purple blood running in their veins and cast a long, sorrow-laden gaze at the sunlight and at the shadows of the great parks”. Senseless ones surrendered to the immediacy of visual pleasure.
We prefer the comfortable path of “creative labor”. We renounce the elevated tracing of ideas, out of incomprehension rather than spite. We are not versed in the particularities of contemporary language; we find no place inside the fascinating circle of gallery performances, of electrifying video installations, nor are we any of the four stomachs still ruminating Duchamp and Beuys, the eternal novelties. No — of that cow we are merely the little bell tied around the neck, feebly ringing out our almost complete lack of resourcefulness before the art of our time. How much happier we would be if we could, by means of artistic discourse, transform the glass of water into an oak! But our temporally displaced perception only allows us to see the glass of water — and, not without a certain shame, to admit that we like it.
We recognize, however, the immeasurable distance separating our outdated formal compositions from the advanced concepts that have set art in motion in our days. We do not wish, though, for this distance to become a motive for schisms and heated debates: we accept without reservation the role of retrogrades. We are still attached to certain qualities which, at great cost, were transmuted into what today is known as artistic erudition.
Deprived of the characteristics that today make an artist, of that art which only the reason of our time could produce, we prudently abstain. There is no crisis, there are no proposals, only the maintenance of what has already been done: instead of building our works with ideas and delivering ready-made thoughts, we will keep building images — so that from them our obsolete admirers and observers may extract their own thoughts and ideas. We thereby transfer the arduous task of thinking, idealizing and conceptualizing to the public.
The avant-garde artists of a hundred years ago proclaimed that art belonged to artists, that the work of art resided in the idea, that the artist is a kind of Midas who, by mental touch, transforms the lead of the banal everyday into the gold of art. The artists of the following decades liked this idea very much, and it persists without major distortions. We, humble inexpressionists, owing to some deficiency whose explanation escapes us, see such a task as too arduous and grandiloquent. Through the refusal of contemporary artistic expression, we return art to the mind of the general public. In this refusal burns the inexpressionist flame.