MANIFESTO, or a commentary on the government’s draft bill on social security for artists and the discussion surrounding this issue.

[Versión en Español]
[Wersja Polska]

The role of artists in society is to make spectacular failures, to miss the mark, to create absurd visions and unimaginable figures, to generate incomprehensible messages, to stage uncomfortable situations, to make suspect performances, strange images, music that is hard to listen to. The role of artists is to question the established order, conventions, and accepted rules, and to reinterpret traditions. The task of artists is not to meet expectations, but to take risks and go astray, because that is how development and progress happen.

Innovation stands right next to error. Progress is failure's closest neighbor. Revolution and progress gaze with shining eyes into the festering eyes of defeats and duds. One does not exist without the other. There is no moving forward without falls, crawling, foolish steps, agonal convulsions, absurd moves, and pitiful stumbles.

We artists test ideas this way — ideas that haven't yet been assigned a place in everyday life. We create visions that do not fit what we know, what has already been understood. In her essay collection "The Bear's Moment," Olga Tokarczuk writes that "along with knowledge, the realm of ignorance constantly grows." "More knowledge by no means signifies that we know more, which is both paradoxical and logical." Artists – remaining open and receptive – intuitively explore these foggy realms of ignorance. Through their art, they file reports from visits to these folds of spacetime, folds created by the expansion of knowledge and ignorance.

Artists venture into those places where the rhizome of repressed content swarms, of undigested paradoxes — the scraps and waste used for growth, excreted in the process of transformation and nourishment. There they gather junk data, most often on their own, without the support of corporate or military infrastructure, molding from that noise, by hand, astonishing and surprising hallucinations.

This painstaking work – seemingly senseless and useless, impractical and unprofitable – is so very necessary for humanity to grow, to flourish, to expand consciousness and evolve spiritually. And aesthetically. Work often paid for with the material and psychological discomfort of the person touched by the spectrum of artistry, but also one that burdens others with that discomfort by the very act of exposing people to the products of their imagination, which so often offend order, traditions, and good taste — and even spoil that taste in their own tastelessness. No one of so-called sound mind, standing firmly on the flat of the earth, would want to expose themselves to such a risk of ridicule and condemnation. To grow, we need these sad clowns, the heretics contesting aesthetic dogmas, the deranged wanderers, the weirdos and renegades. There is no way around it.

And since without this creative neo-plasmus everything stands still — even regresses, withers, and wilts — these crazy social cells ought to be embraced, and supported by universal basic social and healthcare for all citizens, as the name suggests. Even if this work seems like nonsense, tomfoolery, a crime and a harm. It is work like any other, requiring devotion of one's health and time. Though it may seem otherwise, because after all it is harder to calculate its productivity using the same tables in which one counts the number of slaughtered pigs, parcels shipped, the area of mined terrain, or the amount of barbed wire strung through the forest, or the hours spent teaching minors.

Of course, there are artistic activities subject to relative measurability. Art is, after all, probably the most expansive of human domains — a land nearly impossible to capture within unambiguous frames. There are artistic activities that flicker at the borders of, let us say, entertainment, where it can be translated into the language of viewership, the number of ad impressions, clicks, tickets sold, or a rise in the bars of general satisfaction. That is beautiful too, and necessary too. Let us stay open to the widest possible spectrum of creative activity. And let us remember, like the society of ancient Greece, that the happy face always comes accompanied by the sad mask. Ecstasy and despair, the spiral of growth and the slippery slope.

It is very good that the government is considering taking all these artistic freaks, buffoons, vagrants and wanderers, clowns, rascals and scoundrels, and losers — celebrities included — under universal health insurance and providing them with social protection. Let it be so! At last! Maybe thanks to this, somewhat better conditions will arise to nourish these neglected tissues, surround them with care, integrate them – instead of negating them and pushing them out of society, rejecting them, thereby nurturing conflict and reinforcing imbalance, making universal growth and development impossible. Admittedly, there is some risk in this trick too.

One should not forget that the state gives nothing for free, and when the right moment comes, it will demand ultimate power over your life and body, sending them to the front or issuing other orders, depending on its needs — as those who give birth and those who do not wish to give birth already know perfectly well. The state is above all a military structure, subordinating natural and human resources and using them according to its own, of course, overriding needs.

For now, these awkward visions of heterotopia, of an anarchizing society cultivating mutual care, or of alternative social systems celebrating life and trans-species relationships based on empathetic understanding and cooperation – along with all the other hallucinations produced by these buffoons and renegades, heretics, and prophesying madwomen and madmen – the state tosses into a bin labeled "art," trying to spread a "protective" umbrella over them, keeping that revolutionary potential in sight, able to watch them closely. So be it, for now. Personally, I can agree to this, because I know that true art and authentic development no state gesture will ever fully tame, no "caring" eye will ever see through. And art – like water – will find its way and nourish every drought.