First Fruits of the New and Improved Neoist Manifesto on View
The Neoist Society has commissioned collage artist Cecil Touchon to
design a special trans-lingual Neoist Manifesto for the 21st Century.
This manifesto will be composed of an, as yet, undetermined number of
images created from bits and pieces of lettering that are composed into
purely visual compositions.
The idea is to create an open art manifesto as Neoism has created an
open pop star (Monty Cantsin). With this manifesto artists from all
over the world will be able to express their own ideas and claim that
they are interpreting the Neoist Manifesto.
This Neoist Society project is a device to undermine the attempt by art
historians to limit artistic ideas to the particular historical moment
and local where they first cropped up. The Neoist Society sees this as
a conspiracy for
creating an undue level of importance for works of art that have fallen
into the hands of collectors and art museums who seek to ever increase
the value and importance of their collections.
Artistic creativity and ideas are like fire. They is not dependent on
anything other than the conditions that allow them to arise. Those
conditions crop up constantly all over the globe and are therefore not
specific but general in nature.
According to the author...
"What I am doing is creating a
carte
blanche for artists everywhere to explore the New and use the
manifesto as a kind of oracle to come up with their own commentary.
That commentary need not have anything to do with any previous
commentaries by other artists or by Monty Cantsin. I envision the
possibility that there will be an unending dialog created by this
manifesto since it stands outside of time or place. I think we have
come up with something quite spectacular and of unending benefit for
those who determine how to make use of it."
The initial works that first inspired this project were made from
distressed street posters. The first one, in fact, of this type was
created from a protest poster found on the streets of Paris after a
2002 May Day demonstration which said "STOP" in large white letters
followed in smaller, yellow letters by "the violence". All of the works
for the Neoist Manifesto are made with similar papers in a 9x6 inch
format. These will serve as studies for a group of paintings that will
be in the 6x4 feet range.
