This evening(October 31, 2016) at 6 PM, my alter-ego, Alexander Graf, will be attending an event. It is billed as a DADAist Halloween Party In the true or false spirit of DADA I will attend in protest. I will be wearing a sandwich board bearing the words. “DADA is a toothless, ugly, vanquished old DOG”. I will further be disseminating the DADA manifesto of Alphonse Korb.
The DADA manifesto of Alphonse Korb was written during his brief stay in the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich in 1916. He would subsequently perish at Verdun. It was published by H. Graf in April 1951 or 2016 (depending on whose reality you exist in) as an addendum to war diary of H. Korb. I will now provide for you the manifesto.
MANIFESTO: As in war, so as in art. Destroy or liberate. Conquer or enslave in an ordered battle. Disturbance: the act against a gauntlet of past ages, the last act against past masters. The disturbed act against past masters to create only within your time, if your time be war, peace or subjugation. Against the rules of past masters, against the rules of duplication and representation, against time and reason: the singular moment without a past or present or future. Masters who beautify the ugly truths, glorify the base and justify slaughter have propped up our world. Mirrors lie, the camera lies, the brushstroke is a lie and words lie. Truth is birth and death, all else is life manipulated. If war is to destroy all, in total, everything that has passed so a new age can grow so too must Art also relinquish its stain. So too must us all.
Art is the view back from across the battlefield. The artist is the sentry overlooking from all sides the life of man, understanding the hatred and pathos. It attacks and must be repelled, the artist counters and is destroyed. What he previously believed; destroyed. To fight on he must release fear, and above all have courage. He must also be of genuine talent or he will surely perish, or prove a coward or a fraud. In the course of battle will show of which cloth is he.
The process of art does not survive the first stroke, it changes and evolves because it is alive and does not respond to rote. It does not withstand the variety but with faith it will reach a goal. If you have faith it will respond because you have faith. It will prove manifest of your soul if you have faith and if you trust in your vision.
If you proceed with faith the creation that exists in the air will reveal itself to you. If you breath unfiltered by bias and ignorance you will breath in the secrets of your age.
Creation is rare and unique, to create what has never existed before. Not grown from the earth from being sown, not dunes of sand shaped by wind, not even a sunrise designed by God. Creation that exists only in its time having never existed before and never to be recreated for as many years as there are stars. Let men of cruel standing build the armies that destroy, let them brutalize and pervert the work of the sculptor and painter and composer. Let God paint a flower. Let the artist build from alchemy, let the artist find the life in the air.
ALPHONSE KORB, 1916
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