Manifest 7; FAILURE

The 7th edition of the non-digital non-annual artists’ ‘zine Manifesto is soon going to print and is looking for submissions of new artwork. Please feel free to contribute.

This issue will explore concepts of failure and it’s various guises, whether that be dissatisfaction, disillusionment, difference, doubt, error, embarrassment, experiment, expectation, irony, idealism, ignorance, incompetence, incompletion, progress, repetition, rejection, regression, resistance, resignation, or tragedy. Failure is a state which is avoided with the utmost effort, despite the fact that it is unavoidable and ever present. We think failure as a negative, an opposite to success, yet when failure occurs it instigates far more thought, reflection and investigation of its causes, than does success. When we encounter failure, we should not stifle it or ignore it, but revel in it, and understand its motifs. Through an investigation of failure, we can open up possibilities for questioning and understanding the assumptions, structures and limits that shape the world.

Requirements of work: Size A5, non-digital work, preferably black and white print or photocopy. Work should deal with the concept of failure, on any level, in any walk of life. Other than this, do what you want.

Deadline for Submissions: Monday 22nd of August

Please send all submission to:

Michael Davis

Flat 2/1

49 Thornwood Avenue

Glasgow

G11 7PU

Mainfesto is produced as a photocopied, folded and stapled A4 booklet (Portrait) - each page/side is A5 and will normally be printed in black and white. Keep this in mind when sending work. We would prefer one page/side for each person’s work, but spreads across two sides might be accepted if the work really demands it.

Original works of art will not be returned, so unless you don’t want them back please send photocopies or duplicates.

Don’t forget to include your name, contact details and ideally SAE envelope for your copy of Manifesto 7 (You can sign date and title your work if you really want too.)

If you would like to see the back catalogue of Manifesto magazine please visit http://sam-smith.org.uk and find it under 'ZINE

Further Reading:

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Samuel Becket (1983) Worstward Ho

.....

Failure, by definition, takes us beyond assumptions and what we think we know. Artists have long turned their attention to the unrealizability of the quest for perfection, or the open-endedness of experiment, using both dissatisfaction and error as a means to rethink our place in the world. The inevitable gap between the intention and realization of an artwork makes failure impossible to avoid. [...]  Who has the right to claim the wrongness of an image? What does it matter if a tree sprouts out of a head? This is the turning away from the authority of what is deemed to be right. Assumptions are where attention starts to waver: we can sometimes only become truly attentive when something is indeed wrong. [...] Embarrassment is a natural response to failure: you want to disappear when it happens, when the world looks at you and judges you for failing. What though, if being embarrassed is not so bad after all? We all embarrass ourselves frequently, yet it is fear of the judgement of our failures that endures.

Lisa Le Feuvre (2010) Failure; Documents of Contemporary Art

.....

In irony, since everything is shown as vanity, the subject becomes free. The more vain everything becomes, all the lighter, emptier, and volatilized the subject becomes. And while everything is in the process of becoming vanity, the ironic subject does not become vain in his own eyes but rescues his own vanity. For irony, everything becomes nothing, but nothing can be taken in several ways.

Soren Kierkegaard (1841) Concepts of Irony

.....

Rejecting completion in favour of a redeemed form of anti-climax or deferral, the endless ‘fail and repeat’ loop proposed within the myth of Sisyphus can be seen as a way to privilege the indeterminate or latent potential of being not-yet-there above the finality of closure. The rule or instruction can easily become the rules of the game, a generative device for creating infinitely repeatable permutations and rehearsals within a given structure of self-imposed situation, or the impetus through which to test or push the limits of a given situation in order that the rules might become malleable and redefined. In this context the Sisyphean notion of an unresolved, incomplete or endless action - or of a failed, thwarted or reiterated gesture - can be understood as a form of inexhaustible performance, a task without telos or destination which assuages the need to perform whilst deferring the arrival of any specific goal or outcome.

Emma Cocker (2010) Over and Over, Again and Again

.....

4.003   Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language.

(They belong to the same class as the question whether the good is more or less identical than the beautiful.)

And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1921) Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

.....

                  sPirit of

   him for onE

        corporaTions

                arE

             failuRe

                   Know-how of

                 aRe

                idOls will

         free rePublic

       each thrOugh

                   Them in

              maKe

                   I to me

                 aNarchism

John Cage (1988) Anarchy, Poem 1