Excerpts from "The Poetist Manifesto" (1924)
Artistic professionalism
cannot survive anymore. If it is new art and that which we call POETISM
(the art of life,the
art of being alive and living life), it must ultimately be as self-evident,
pleasurable and understandable as sport, love, wine and all other types
of delicacies. It cannot be a mere occupation, or trade, but rather
a common need. No individual life, if it is lived decently -- that is,
in laughter, happiness, love and contentment -- can be without it. Professional
art is a fallacy and, to a certain extent, an anomaly. For instance,
at the Paris Olympiad of 1924 professional clubs were not admitted.
Why, then, shouldn't we just as resolutely reject the professional fraternities
of the painting, writing, and sculpting businesses? The artistic work
cannot be a product for business speculation nor should it be an object
of dry, academic speculation. It is fundamentally a gift, or a game
without obligations or consequences.
This
new, brilliant and limitless beauty that we are describing is the progeny
of actual life. It wasn't born from esthetic speculation -- the romantic
sensibilities of the art studio -- but is the result both of the people's
tenacious, disciplined production and their life's activity in general.
It doesn't sit in cathedrals or galleries; it is outside in the streets,
in the architecture of the cities, in the refreshing green of the parks,
in the bustle of the harbors and the workings of industry, which sustain
us and our living environments. It doesn't prescribe any formulas: modern
creations and forms are the result of hard work, produced by the perfect
execution of the dictates and the goals of the economy. It includes
the engineer's calculation but completes it with a poetic vision. To
the science concerned with the construction of cities -- urbanism --
it supplies the captivating and the poetic; it maps out the ground-plan
of life, the prototype of the future, utopia, even the implementation
of a Red future. Its products are the implements of abundance and happiness.
...The world today is governed
by money, which is to say capitalism. Socialism means that the world
should be governed by reason, wisdom, and economics -- purposively
and practically. The method used to achieve this is constructivism.
But reason would stop being wise if, in ruling the world, it repressed
our sensibilities: instead of enriching, it would mean the impoverishing
of life. The only wealth which has value for our happiness is the
wealth of our senses and fullness of our sensibilities. And here intervenes
POETISM to protect and restore the sense of life, pleasure and fantasy.
Poetism was born with the collaboration of several authors from the Devetsil group. It was, above all, our reaction against the governing ideological poetics -- a protest against romantic aesthetics and traditionalism and our abandonment of the hitherto dominant precepts of "art." We sought out in films, the circus, sport, tourism, and in life itself the expressive possibilities which were not to be found in mere pictures and poems. And so is born the picture poem, poetic puzzles and anecdotes, lyrical films. The authors of this experiment: Nezval, Seifert, Voskovec and, if you please, Teige would like to include all the flowering manifestations of poetry -- quite detached from literature -- and by this we mean the poetry of Sunday afternoons, holiday outings, lively cafes, the intoxication of alcohol, lively tabloids and spa-town promenades and the poetry of quiet, night, calm and peace.
