Derridas Manifesto

Dubbed The Postmodern Manifesto, found among the papers of Jacques Derrida on his death in 2004 and, as yet, unpublished.

Derrida (1930-2004), a philosopher, was one of the three wise French-men who, as it were, spawned Postmodernism, defined, embellished and obscured it; his peers in the matter were the long dominant literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and Michel Foucault (1926-1984), another philosopher.

From this it must be evident that Postmodernism was a French intellectual movement with a literary-cum-philosophical origin rather than one engendered by artists and the visual arts - indeed, painting, sculpture and architecture (its most prominent, familiar and international form) were Johnnies-come-lately to the Postmodernist French novel, French philosophy, French cinema and the more international manifestations of Postmodernism in the music of Beria, Cage and Schnittke.

My student friend kindly permits me to publish the Barthes-Derrida-­Foucault document, all of whose names it bears as well as signatures of assent from Jean-François Lyotard and Giovanni Papini, as it provides for visitors to the exhibition an unvarnished introduction. For infelicities of translation and clarification of the many neologisms (new words even more obscure in French than English), I alone am responsible. The document is headed Manifeste and is as follows:

1. The art of the past is past. What was true of art yesterday is false today.

2. The Postmodern art of today is defined and determined, not by artists, but by a new generation of curators, philosophers and intellectuals ignorant of the past and able to ignore it.

3. Postmodernism is a political undertaking, Marxist and Freudian.

4. Postmodernism is a new cultural condition.

5. Postmodernism is democratic and allied to popular culture.

6. Postmodernism denies the possibility of High Art.

7. Postmodernism deconstructs works of High Art to undermine them.

8. Postmodernism is subversive, seditiously resembling the precedents it mimics.

9. Postmodern art is pastiche, parody, irony, ironic conflict and paradox.

10. Postmodern art is self-consciously shallow, stylistically hybrid, ambiguous, provocative and endlessly repeatable.

11. Postmodern art is anti-elitist, but must protect its own elitism.

12. To the Postmodernist every work of art is a text, even if it employs no words and has no title, to be

curatorially interpreted. Art cannot exist before it is interpreted.

13. Postmodernist interpretation depends on coining new words unknown and unknowable to the masses, on developing a critical jargon of impenetrable profundity, and on a quagmire of theory with which to reinforce endowed significance. Vive le Néologisme!