Unhinged Lyricism

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The Found Manifesto of Unhinged Lyricism~

~February, Two-thousand-and nine~

~Assembled from the Obscene Outbursts and Silent Epiphanies of Vagabond Geniuses, Wrapped in Steamed Banana Leaf and Smelted in the Fires of Our Ardor.

From these Forlorn Shores of the Forgotten Spanish Empire’s Northern Metropolis, we set sail the galleon of Unhinged Lyricism into the frigid waters of American art. The voyage perilous and the booty scant, we troll for the pure lyricality of word and image in a sea plagued by the parasitic overgrowths of cleverness and calculated effect.

With our gleaming canons, we sound the death knell of conceptual art— Crash and Down with your nihilism! Kaboom and away with your devastating irony! Kerplunk and curse your solipsism! The serpent has already swallowed its tail! Nothing remains but your vacuousness! With our cutlasses aimed at your quivering throats, we say ENOUGH! No longer will art dominated by those who despise it!

Barring intervention, who knows how long the public--that hideous eunuch parade of academics, critics, and their legion necrophiliac followers--—would have marched to your monotone fanfare? You have composed the score to the suicide of civilization, and were it not for the paralyzing cry of the Unhinged Lyricists, you would have merrily piped the rat-children of our civilization right off the abyss. We have come to restore melody to the music of art. Your 4 minutes and 33 seconds of echo-chamber idiocy and vindictive masturbation are over!

The penetrating gaze, the analytic probe, the theoretical lens--these are the torturer’s tools that you, inept apprentices, have stolen from the academic’s abattoir and smuggled into the studio. Your canvases are the essays of illiterates, your drawings the frustrated rhetorical scribbles of imbecile orators. You have made art the superfluous companion to the true embodiment of your animus-- the ponderous artist’s statement. Under your watch, art has become a third-rate form of art criticism.

Unhinged Lyricism seeks that primitive intoxication of word and image. Why do we make art? Our answer is the same as the child’s, the asylum mate’s, the cave dwelling scrawler of the Pleistocene’s--—because we want to see the image, to see the word, to hear their melodies. We want to feel them and become them-- to experience ourselves as the eternal reverberation of image and word.

Take heed of our tenets:

1. Unhinged lyricism sings with the universal “I”-- the “I” that dwells eternally in the ground of being. We condemn the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity as a grotesque fallacy of ego.
2. We proclaim the doodle as the essence of an art that is in good faith. Unthinking and spontaneous, the doodle makes no pretenses and no claims to sense.
3. Anyone who does not doodle impulsively, compulsively, joyously, should burn his or her portfolio and decamp to the nation’s humanities departments (alas, if only you could read!), where countless overeducated cripples are waiting with knives sharpened to teach you how to gut a work of art in the name of cultural critique. Or better yet, retreat to the convent, so aptly suited to your life-negating asceticism and sterile minds.
4. All artist’s statements should be ripped from the binders of galleries and shipped to the Unhinged Lyricist campgrounds, where they will contribute to the upkeep of our sparklingly clean anuses. The only thing worse than your art is your prose.
5. Unhinged Lyricism is aimless whistling on a wooded path, bicycling poultry in a sea of tears, wandering horsemen in the kingdom of time, ailing poets in the backwash of history, cascading children in the bellies of whales, half-eaten apples in the armpits of gods, besotted nymphs in the boots of Cossacks, and untimely prophets in the gutters of greatness. If they can’t resurrect those dead we call living, nothing can!