PaRDeS

Published as a leaflet by Direzione del Movimento Futurista (Milan) January 11, 1913 (a reply to press comment on lectures given by the writer at the 1912 Futurist exhibition in Brussels and Paris)

A reply to those dishonest journalists who twist phrases to make the Idea seem ridiculous;
to those women who only think what I have dared to say;
to those for whom Lust is still nothing but a sin;
to all those who in Lust can only see Vice, just as in Pride they see only vanity.

Lust, when viewed without moral preconceptions and as an essential part of life’s dynamism, is a force.
     Lust is not, any more than pride, a mortal sin for the race that is strong. Lust, like pride, is a virtue that urges one on, a powerful source of energy.
     Lust is the expression of a being projected beyond itself. It is the painful joy of wounded flesh, the joyous pain of a flowering. And whatever secrets unite these beings, it is a union of flesh. It is the sensory and sensual synthesis that leads to the greatest liberation of spirit. It is the communion of a particle of humanity with all the sensuality of the earth.
     LUST IS THE QUEST OF THE FLESH FOR THE UNKNOWN, just as Celebration is the spirit’s quest for the unknown. Lust is the act of creating, it is Creation.
     Flesh creates in the way that the spirit creates. In the eyes of the Universe their creation is equal. One is not superior to the other and creation of the spirit depends on that of the flesh.
     We possess body and spirit. To curb one and develop the other shows weakness and is wrong. A strong man must realize his full carnal and spiritual potentiality. The satisfaction of their lust is the conquerors’ due. After a battle in which men have died, IT IS NORMAL FOR THE VICTORS, PROVEN IN WAR, TO TURN TO RAPE IN THE CONQUERED LAND, SO THAT LIFE MAY BE RE-CREATED.
     When they have fought their battles, soldiers seek sensual pleasures, in which their constantly battling energies can be unwound and renewed. The modern hero, the hero in any field, experiences the same desire and the same pleasure. The artist, that great universal medium, has the same need. And the exaltation of the initiates of those religions still sufficiently new to contain a tempting element of the unknown, is no more than sensuality diverted spiritually towards a sacred female image.

ART AND WAR ARE THE GREAT MANIFESTATIONS OF SENSUALITY; LUST IS THEIR FLOWER. A people exclusively spiritual or a people exclusively carnal would be condemned to the same decadence—sterility.
     LUST EXCITES ENERGY AND RELEASES STRENGTH. Pitilessly it drove primitive man to victory, for the pride of bearing back a woman the spoils of the defeated. Today it drives the great men of business who run the banks, the press and international trade to increase their wealth by creating centers, harnessing energies and exalting the crowds, to worship and glorify with it the object of their lust. These men, tired but strong, find time for lust, the principal motive force of their action and of the reactions caused by their actions affecting multitudes and worlds.
     Even among the new peoples where sensuality has not yet been released or acknowledged, and who are neither primitive brutes nor the sophisticated representatives of the old civilizations, woman is equally the great galvanizing principle to which all is offered. The secret cult that man has for her is only the unconscious drive of a lust as yet barely woken. Amongst these peoples as amongst the peoples of the north, but for different reasons, lust is almost exclusively concerned with procreation. But lust, under whatever aspects it shows itself, whether they are considered normal or abnormal, is always the supreme spur.
     The animal life, the life of energy, the life of the spirit, sometimes demand a respite. And effort for effort’s sake calls inevitably for effort for pleasure’s sake. These efforts are not mutually harmful but complementary, and realize fully the total being.
     For heroes, for those who create with the spirit, for dominators of all fields, lust is the magnificent exaltation of their strength. For every being it is a motive to surpass oneself with the simple aim of self-selection, of being noticed, chosen, picked out.
     Christian morality alone, following on from pagan morality, was fatally drawn to consider lust as a weakness. Out of the healthy joy which is the flowering of the flesh in all its power it has made something shameful and to be hidden, a vice to be denied. It has covered it with hypocrisy, and this has made a sin of it.
     WE MUST STOP DESPISING DESIRE, this attraction at once delicate and brutal between two bodies, of whatever sex, two bodies that want each other, striving for unity. We must stop despising Desire, disguising it in the pitiful clothes of old and sterile sentimentality.
It is not lust that disunites, dissolves and annihilates. It is rather the mesmerizing complications of sentimentality, artificial jealousies, words that inebriate and deceive, the rhetoric of parting and eternal fidelities, literary nostalgia—all the histrionics of love.
     WE MUST GET RID OF THE ILL-OMENED DEBRIS OF ROMANTICISM, counting daisy petals, moonlight duets, heavy endearments, false hypocritical modesty. When beings are drawn together by a physical attraction, let them—instead of talking only of the fragility of their hearts—dare to express their desires, the inclinations of their bodies, and to anticipate the possibilities of joy and disappointment in their future carnal union.
     Physical modesty, which varies according to time and place, has only the ephemeral value of a social virtue.
     WE MUST FACE UP TO LUST IN FULL CONSCIOUSNESS. We must make of it what a sophisticated and intelligent being makes of himself and of his life; WE MUST MAKE LUST INTO A WORK OF ART. To allege unwariness or bewilderment in order to explain an act of love is hypocrisy, weakness and stupidity.
     We should desire a body consciously, like any other thing.
     Love at first sight, passion or failure to think, must not prompt us to be constantly giving ourselves, nor to take beings, as we are usually inclined to do so due to our inability to see into the future. We must choose intelligently. Directed by our intuition and will, we should compare the feelings and desires of the two partners and avoid uniting and satisfying any that are unable to complement and exalt each other.
Equally consciously and with the same guiding will, the joys of this coupling should lead to the climax, should develop its full potential, and should permit to flower all the seeds sown by the merging of two bodies. Lust should be made into a work of art, formed like every work of art, both instinctively and consciously.
     WE MUST STRIP LUST OF ALL THE SENTIMENTAL VEILS THAT DISFIGURE IT. These veils were thrown over it out of mere cowardice, because smug sentimentality is so satisfying. Sentimentality is comfortable and therefore demeaning.
     In one who is young and healthy, when lust clashes with sentimentality, lust is victorious. Sentiment is a creature of fashion, lust is eternal. Lust triumphs, because it is the joyous exaltation that drives one beyond oneself, the delight in possession and domination, the perpetual victory from which the perpetual battle is born anew, the headiest and surest intoxication of conquest. And as this certain conquest is temporary, it must be constantly won anew.
     Lust is a force, in that it refines the spirit by bringing to white heat the excitement of the flesh. The spirit burns bright and clear from a healthy, strong flesh, purified in the embrace. Only the weak and sick sink into the mire and are diminished. And lust is a force in that it kills the weak and exalts the strong, aiding natural selection.
Lust is a force, finally, in that it never leads to the insipidity of the definite and the secure, doled out by soothing sentimentality. Lust is the eternal battle, never finally won. After the fleeting triumph, even during the ephemeral triumph itself, reawakening dissatisfaction spurs a human being, driven by an orgiastic will, to expand and surpass himself.
    Lust is for the body what an ideal is for the spirit—the magnificent Chimaera, that one ever clutches at but never captures, and which the young and the avid, intoxicated with the vision, pursue without rest.
    LUST IS A FORCE.

This English-language translation COPYRIGHT ©1973 Thames and Hudson Ltd, London. All rights reserved.

Source for translation by J. H. Higgitt reproduced below:

Apollonio, Umbro, ed. Documents of 20th Century Art: Futurist Manifestos. Brain, Robert, R.W. Flint, J.C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall, trans. New York: Viking Press, 1973, 70-74.
Futurist Manifesto of Lust by Valentine de Saint-Point

Ernst Bloch, in his essay “The Principle of Hope,” presents a green light to dream, to put our foot on the gas, and go Utopia. 

Be it by choice or instinct, I find myself on that road, working towards building some kind of better. Over the last few weeks I have been trying to navigate the funny and strange landscape of utopia in art of the twenty-first century, studying the topography of it, and discovering forks in the road - that is the different offshoots of the notion: Eutopia, Utopia, Hetrotopia, Dystopia, Utopistics, etc.  Through this exploration I am trying to understand my artistic vision and how I can impact the world through my art.

To assist with the navigation process, I singled out four fundamental utopian artists - perhaps reincarnations of the wise prophets who visit the pardes - and studied their utopian journeys. These men entered a sublime realm by practicing the transformation of society through art. They not only dreamed of an artistic form of salvation but answered hell, yes to the question Is it possible...? They  devoted their insight, energy, talent, and resources to creating their own utopias and bringing them to life, bearing both the sourness of failure, destruction, and insanity as well as the savory taste of  fulfillment.
 
Their characters, projects, and words are included below in historic order.  

A book titled UTOPIA has been an inspirational guide for this trip. Please feel free to add your suggestions for utopian landmarks by posting on the blog.  

“the concept of utopia has been both unduly restricted, namely confined to novels of an ideal state.....to limit the Utopian to the Thomas More variety, or simply to orientate it in that direction, would be like to reduce electricity to the amber from which it gets its Greek name and in which it was first noticed....the very profusion of human imagination, together with its correlate in the world (once imagination becomes informed and concrete) cannot possibly be explored and inventoried other than through Utopian function.”  Ernst Bloch

Four Who Entered: Artist / Utopian Projects / Words

 Hugo Ball / DADA - Cabaret Voltaire / 1916
 
An International word. Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. Quite terribly simple. To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also-poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m'dada, dada m'dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza. source

 Constant Nieuwenhuys / New Babylon / 1949

As a basic task we propose liberation of social life, which will open a way to the new world - a world where all cultural aspects of inner relationships of our ordinary lives will take on new meaning....any real creative activity - that is, cultural activity, in the twentieth century- must have its roots in revolution.  creation is above all the medium of knowledge, and therefor of freedom and revolution...today's individualist culture has replaced creation with artistic production which has produced nothing but signs of tragic impotency... creation has always been that which was still unknown, and the unknown frightens those who think they have something to defend.

 Joseph Beuys / SOCIAL SCULPTURE - THE GREEN PARTY  / 1973
 
Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the death line: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.... Art that can not shape society and therefore also can not penetrate the heart questions of society, and in the end influence the question of capital, is no art. 

 Rirkrit Tiravanija / The Land / 1998 - present

I think I like to work in a very hopeful way, so that is in a sense a discussion of utopic structure. That there is hope. I think hope is a kind of faith in the human race, to believe that humans are capable of more than just going to war in Iraq or something. source

 Keith Arnatt is a conceptual artist and photographer born in Whales in 1930.  "I am a real artist" is a humorous yet blunt provocation, that captures the essence of conceptual art, an art movement that began in the sixties that claimed that art can exist solely as a concept and not in the physical realm. It challenges the power of ideas over form or material, and  questions the basic notion of 'Artist'. Arnatt created "Self Burial" in 1969, which was shown on TV as a series of nine photographs depicting Arnatt gradually sinking into the ground. This was broadcasted without commentary. The radical juxtaposition of conceptual art into TV broadcasting, which is usually used for entertainment, created a surprising clash of cultures. This work can be seen as a pioneer work in the sense that it opened up the possibility of conceptual art to seep through the confined boundaries of the art world into the mainstream, even if just for a moment, and encounter the viewers on their couch, sitting in front of their TV screens in their living room. With this piece, Arnatt brought conceptual art home.  Arnatt: “It was originally made as a comment upon the notion of ‘the disappearance of the art object’. It seemed a logical corollary that the artist should also disappear.”

 
Garden I / Anat Litwin

will i be trapped in the dense jungle of fear, sunk in swamps of sorrow, chased by dark vulture doubts hovering above
or will i make myself a path, plant fruitful trees, nurture my imagination to blossom like a fantastic flower. 

will weeds take me over, racing mice, chatter, nibble on my brain
or shall i stick a scarecrow in the center, chase parasites off my land
siege the serpent by the thickness of its tail, look him curiously in the eye. 

i want green stains on my knees
birds bathing in my heart
the fresh smell of toiled soil rising from my thoughts 

i am the gardner of my mind. wherever i go, eden.

 In order to address the idea of artistic representations of new Edens, I revisited two iconic nature-based American art projects that integrate ecological themes with the distinctly American appetite for new frontiers;
 
Spiral Jetty (image below, left) an earthwork created by Robert Smithson in 1970, and Flood (image below, right) - a community based collaborative hydroponic garden built in a storefront on the north side of Chicago created by the HAHA collective in 1994 to help cure people with HIV.

While the Spiral Jetty is a one-man art piece which is set in a no-mans-land in the heart of a rural desert, Flood is planted in a vacant storefront in the city of Chicago. Spiral Jetty is a formal / poetic intervention in the land while Flood is a poetic functional manipulation of vegetation with the purpose of serving the ill. Their different aesthetic, functional and conceptual aspects bring to mind the differences between a zen, meditation garden and a holistic garden. In one the artist takes on the role of a meditative land designer / poet / pioneer, and in the other, the role of artist becomes that of a healer providing natural remedy for two severe contemporary problems: HIV and isolation.  

Despite the great differences between these two art projects both Spiral Jetty and Flood create new paradigms for how art and nature can be linked. Their juxtaposition reveals important shared values: In both cases nature is not merely "represented" by art, but rather nature becomes the actual means of art. Both projects face the fragile human condition with an active heroic approach through art which is in essence ephemeral; They both ask to reverse to some extent the harsh fate of being banned from Eden by taking on the act of creation and forming a new 'garden' - literally or metaphorically.

Opposed to the old Eden, these new Edens are bluntly aware of the presence of the serpent in the garden -  mans temporality on earth - in form (Spiral Jetty), or through the direct confrontation with illness and death (Flood). They exist as sober Edens in a broken world, and point to the fact that if there is any chance for human redemption it will take place through nature. They are desperate, hopeful frontiers, existential to the core;

More about the Art:

Spiral Jetty is considered to be the canonical work of American sculptor Robert Smithson. It is an earthwork sculpture (part of the Land Art Movement) constructed in 1970 out of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, far from the public eye. It forms a 1500-foot long, 15-foot wide counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake, and it is only visible when the level of the Great Salt Lake falls below an elevation of 4,197.8 feet. It was made in six days using a tractor and heavy machinery.

Since it's creation, extensive formalist and symbolic meanings have been given to this enigmatic art work, and numerous essays have been written to try and understand it's cultural importance. First, I see it's uniqueness in the fact that it is an extension of land as a purely aesthetic form for artistic reasons, literally creating a new physical frontier. Earth is both the means and the substance of this work. Other interpretations of this work discuss the spiral as a symbol of cosmic forces in nature of life and death, its association with the serpent in Eden, and as a variation on the metaphor of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere. The spiral jetty can bee seen as a new barren isolated Eden, a place at the end of the world where man, nature and god reunite. 

Flood is a hydroponic garden in a storefront on the north side of Chicago, created in 1994 as part of the "public interventions" project in Chicago by an artist collective called HAHA. In this project by HAHA, which was established in 1980, volunteer participants from the community collaborated to grow vegetables and therapeutic herbs for people with HIV. For several years Flood provided bi-weekly meals, educational activities, a meeting space, public events, and information on alternative therapies, HIV/AIDS services in Chicago, nutrition and horticulture. This work has become a profound example of urban community-based art, in which the "aesthetic" is found in the creating of a unique setting for human interaction, and a new meaning for art.

 

 Background : a brief overview  of the notion of 'site' in modern and contemporary art from the white cube gallery to land art, to community based and contextual art

Within the tradition of Modern art, the notion of site came from the examination of an object within the art institution, i.e. the white cube gallery or museum. Site-specific art refused to collaborate with the commodity system inherent to the institutional placement of art and demanded that site be considered as an integral part of the artwork. The outcome was a shift of attention away from the art as a self -standing entity to the piece of art as a part and product of its surroundings, integrating the environment as part of the context of the art work.

The result of this new perception was the use of urban and natural landscape as a terrain for artistic experiments. Without the confined institutional walls and architectural boundaries, artists were able to explore new artistic horizons which included a return to nature and to the land, engaging with ancient and native traditions based on process and ritual. The Land Art Movement, an art movement that emerged in the United States in the 1970's led by Robert Smithson, saw the landscape and work of art inextricably linked. For Smithson and his followers, the land functioned as the means of the creation and not as a background or setting.

In 1978 art critic Rosalind E Krauss used the term the “expanded field” (Rosalind E Krauss “Sculpture and the expanded Field” 1978) to distinguished between practices of postmodern art relating to landscape and architecture. In the 1980’s with the rise of extensive studies of post-colianizm, Feminism and cultural studies, and the integration of Psychoanalitical writing (Focoult) led to the notion of the expanded site in witch mobility, transition, transformation, phsycological, socio-economic and ethnic realities are intertwined .Art was seen as   contextual i.e bringing forward the idea of art being connected to the world. This notion was manifested through community based art, the rise of activism in art, and the ecological art movement. 

 

  "I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation. The parks that surround some museums isolate art into objects of formal delectation. Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art . A park carries the values of the final, the absolute, and sacred. Dialectics have nothing to do with such things. I am talking about a dialectic of nature that interacts with the physical contradictions inherent in natural forces as they are - nature as both sunny and stormy. Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal. Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development. Nature is never finished. 

When a finished work of 20thcentury sculpture is placed in an 18th-century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us. Many parks and gardens are re-creations of the lost paradise or Eden, and not the dialectical sites of the present. Parks and gardens are pictorial in their origin - landscapes created with natural materials rather than paint. The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.

Apart from the ideal gardens of the past, and their modern counterparts - national and large urban parks, there are the more infernal regions - slag heaps, strip mines, and polluted rivers. Because of the great tendency toward idealism, both pure and abstract, society is confused as to what to do with such places. Nobody wants to go on a vacation to a garbage dump. Our land ethic, especially in that never-never land called the "art world" has become clouded with abstractions and concepts."

Click here to read full essay. Click here for an additional recommended essay on this subject of Robert Smithson and the American Vision of Land.

Robert Smithson is regarded as one of the founders of the art movement known as Earthworks or Land Art which took place in the US in the 60’s and 70’s.  Embodied in all of Smithson’s endeavors as an artists and writer was his interest in entropy, mapping, paradox, language, landscape, popular culture, anthropology, and natural history. Robert Smithson was born in Passaic, new Jersey on January 2, 1938. From his earliest years he displayed an extraordinary interest in natural history and art, frequently visiting the Museum of Natural History. As a child he collected stones and crystals and acquired a large collection of live reptiles, snakes, preserved specimens, and fossils. After a short period of serving the army as “artist in resident”, Smithson traveled extensively around the US and Mexico. He grew out of the beat generation and in many ways presents those American ideals; he personally new author Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsburg and was influenced by their work. He shared a similar lifestyle to some of the heroes of Kerouac's book and spend a good amount of time hitchhiking the road west, traveling the American landscape,  in search of sites and “non-sites” for his art work.  he was committed to the notion of process over product, ecological consciousness and respect for land and indigenous people and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac’s slogan from On the Road: "The earth is an Indian thing". Smithson began exhibiting abstract works in New York city in 1959, and began creating earthworks in 1966. Between 1970 Smithson accomplished several of his works among them the world famous Spiral Jetty in Great Salt lake. Smithson found his death in an airplane crash while attempting to photograph one of his earth pieces from aerial view. Quickly after his death he became a myth and is known today as one of the most influential original artist in the 20th century.