The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

supposed Pantha belong to the same segment / the ly aim of these manifestos is to exterminate
same, hand made civilisation." the traditional tenets of our cultural legacy. At
However, Mangelos is self-ironic and applies the the same time, his manifestos on photography
same theory to his own anti-art and to that of his herald the photographic medium as a phe-
friends from the Gorgona Group. In the Moscow nomenon of the new civilisation and new way
Manifesto, shortly before the opening of the of thinking.
Gorgona Group's retrospective exhibition in Zagreb Mangelos' manifestos are an expression of
in 1977, he addressed his friends the "Gorgonians" "functional thinking" and, therefore, grow
with the following text: increasingly functional in style. He reduces his
"We are getting ready for our posthumous exhibi- ideas to a minimum of information delivered
tion but ART IS DEAD / and so is the old nai/f artis- in the most succinct of forms. In his opinion.
tic way of thinking. / There are no profound "hefty books are a typical manifestation of a
thoughts only functional ones..." /"... Art lost its naive level of thinking" (from Manifesto on
social function with the arrival of machines, remain- Books), so he chooses to formulate his
ing on the level / of manually produced art accord- thought in "telegraphic" form. The manifestos
ing to Marx and contrary to Marx functions only as inscribed on globes are examples of this. The
a / historical prop, in museums..." "The world has globe: Manifeste stir la machine no.3 bears
changed and art is stuck at the beginning of the only the following text:
20th century despite its twofold effort to assert "La premiere machine etait / le premier model
itself in society as the avantgarde and to adapt / du penser fonctionnel."
to a mechanical civilisation. / The time of gor- Other globes refer to Hegel. culture, kitsch, and
gonising is over. As is the age of naive thinking energy ... but they are always short. There is no
/ a revolution of consciousness is now under- more elaboration, his thought is precise and clear -
way. Functional consciousness." "super-Wittgensteinean". He is never bereft of
"For a painting to be neither prehistoric nor humour, so among the tablets with texts such as:
historic, but contemporary". writes Mangelos "Intuition is a matter of instinct" and "A higher log-
in his notes, "it must be constructed with an ical order is not possible", one comes across a
unambiguous symbol, that is. with thought": tablet bearing the text:
"gomi" and "fumis", terms the artist made up to "There are no two logics / Hegel thinks, as
wittily combine the notions of speech and thought does his cobbler."
and functional thought ("gomi" -govor, eng.speech Mangelos. work, a unique fusion of writing and
+ miljenje, eng. thought and "fume - funkcionalno, painting, always engaged in a dialogue with
eng. functional + miSljenje, eng. thought). In these various figures and dealt with a vast array of
evolutionary changes where art is extinct, the subjects: from history, art. philosophy and aes-
notions of genius, truth and intuition grow outdat- thetics to psychology, physics and biology...
ed... Mangelos wrote numerous manifestos about This was an art of continual observation and
how genius does not exist, how intuition is a con- reading, an art intrigued by various events,
struct of thought, how from a twenty-first century poetics and theories. His work was full of
point of view the society may remain visible, but questions and challenges. ironic and resolute
not the art....Although quelled by his wit, the dead- conclusions. In his text pieces, Mangelos corn-
35 I
THE MISFITS