PIGDOGANDMONKEYFESTOS 2

Shaun Doyle and Mally Mallinson invited me to contribute a manifesto for the second edition of their newspaper/curated paper artwork 'Pigdogandmonkeyfesto.' The first edition was launched from Banner Repeater, London a while back and had some great artists in it, so I was really pleased to be asked.
The newspaper will be a collection of 24 manifestos by artists, and the brief was like this: PIGDOGANDMONKEYFESTOS

"Racing around a fireball is a blob of filth on which ladies stockings are sold and Gauguins prized, truly a most deplorable business..." Walter Serner 1918


PIGDOGANDMONKEYFESTOS has been conceived as a collection of contemporary artists manifestos. Celebrating the stupidity of declaring your intentions to the world with the hope of changing it, PIGDOGANDMONKEYFESTOS will be a tragi-comedy of baroque minimalist clownery, grandiose and ill conceived in extreme.


Like an over stuffed letterbox at election time, PIGDOGANDMONKEYFESTOS embraces all the half-baked ideas, dead ends and prejudiced rants that make artists' manifestos wondrous artworks in thenselves. Accepting the paucity of the written word, images made in the spirit of the manifesto will also be included in this landfill of a publication.


24 artists are each to be given a single page.'

I didn't have time to do the manifesto before I came to Japan, but thought I would do it here. I had a few ideas: one was to use the images from the Modes of  Practice Manifesto workshop we did to make a 'how to manifest' manual sheet (this would have been quite a straight take on the theme) the second was to take the first 10 manifestos to appear on google images, and take one point from each - so the first point from the first, second point from the second etc. If I had have done that I would have ended up with this:

Then on the first night at Headspace, Okata-San the local farmer came around and demonstrated how to use leftover rice bran (the brown bit on rice) to improve the nutritional value of cucumbers. There seems to be an unwritten manifesto on the mountain, where villagers all share resources: every day more cucumbers arrive, or someone brings aubergines, and Jamie and Aiko help Okata-San at harvest time, and he then provides them with rice for the rest of the year. Land and space is also shared, exchanges taking place are natural. Another villager arrived the other night with a ladder - saying he noticed that Jamie and Aiko were not picking their plums, (they don't have a long enough ladder) so he offered to pick them, in exchange for a share of them. They can be used to make plum sho-chu. So, this mountain village is all about recognising and sharing resources, helping each other out, supporting each other - a bit like some of the things we agreed in the 'Modes of Practice' manifesto workshop.

I decided to use the photos of the cucumber treatment for my manifesto manual, and I am quite pleased that something made in the mountains of Nara, Japan, will be distributed around London. I am looking forward to seeing the finished publication.