A Manifesto for the XXI Century: Julian Rosefeld's Reenactment of a Modernist Genre.

Abstract

The master's thesis focuses on Julian Rosefeld’s thirteen-channel installation ‘Manifesto’ (2015). The installation is both a filmic re-enactment of manifestoes that remain independent of their original authors and a new kind of manifesto that extracts, collages, and recontextualizes existing material from manifestoes of the last three centuries. The manifestoes have been chosen from the realms of visual art, architecture, performance, and film and through the mash-up technique, Rosefeldt constructed twelve distinct manifestoes that were assembled through the montage into a single-channel, linear film piece in 2017. The thesis begins by examining the history and role of the manifesto genre in the political domain, focusing on Marx and Engels’s archetypical manifesto. This will be the basis to investigate and comprehend Julian Rosefeldt’s work of art since manifestoes are intended to shape reality concretely, the connection between speaking and acting in a manifesto is therefore analyzed both in terms of content and speech-act theory. Rosefeldt’s work of art reveals the performative and political component of the manifesto practice, utilizing the past to comment on the present day. Therefore, I will examine the correlation between the artist’s elaboration of the text and the choice of the moving images. In the last section, I will focus on Rosefeldt’s interdisciplinary practice of translating an installation into a single-channel linear movie, examining the different film techniques utilized and the different connotations bestowed on the public. The object of my study is to identify the artist’s intentions and message that he proposed to the current audience through its interdisciplinary practice, method, and thought.