" The manifesto of a golden new age (or, how the bull conquered Europe) "

We are still reeling from the shock; it has fogged our minds. Only gradually does coherent thought start to form again, crystallising like a message from God in its exhilarating clarity. “Go forth and create a new world.” Recycling is the order of the day: stop destroying and start piecing together a supposedly better future from the wreckage of suffering. Or rather – take the best the past had to offer, understand it afresh and combine this with the (possibly better?) assets of the modern day. A sweet fruit of enchanting beauty will only be nurtured from a strong plant with an abundant variety of blossoms, rooted in the fertile soil of human history. The plant will need to be tended with the utmost care under the watchful, protective eye of a loving gardener. We can, of course, cultivate new varieties, but only from the carefully selected seeds of the tried and trusted. Many people of limited vision seem to believe that a handful of seeds scattered randomly will at least produce a couple of decent enough plants. What they fail to foresee is that the masses of weeds will overwhelm them. ■ But that’s enough botany; even symbolism has its limits. Let’s be more specific: “Today can only create tomorrow by making use of yesterday. The here and now must combine the traditional and the future wisely.” The art of the 20th century was deep and diverse. Despite this, a stale establishment has survived into the 21st century: the minimalists, the salon painters of a narrow-minded world, believe that reduction will secure a taste of security in the post-modern deluge. We should not seek to condemn the history of art at this point; instead, we must apply our subjective consideration and attempt to break meaningful new ground. At the same time, a redefinition of the term ‘avant-garde’ is needed. Our plant theory should start by noting, “That which is not yet self-evident cannot create that which is to come from that which produced nothing.” Suprematism and Mondrianist reduction can only approach a ‘zero point’ in spite of their undisputed quality. To reach deeper, navigable waters, we need to alter our course in good time; otherwise, we face a calamity of Titanic proportions in the polar seas of culture, scores of victims of imitators among the lost. Only the newborn – and the reborn – will witness the birth of a new, golden age. Arte Povera, conceptual art, land art, minimalist art and whatever other tags adhere to the subsections of stylised art of the past – all of these, within their confines, will be mere staging posts on the educational voyage into a boundless future. ‘Avant-garde’ – an impertinently military term in itself – is unable to make further inroads into hostile territory. In any case, there will be no more enemies in the new world: conquests will come about peacefully, intellectually. Nor will there be temporal, spatial or notional constrictions. The boundaries deriving from fearful self-interest obstruct the freedom of the future as surely as the ignorance of the ‘avant-gardists’ with their preposterous overestimation of an age rendered superficial by fashion and the media. The only possible antithesis is the infinite beauty of the universe, which holds not only a wealth of freedom, boundlessness and weightlessness but also the speed of light and the infinity of the planets; this is beauty endlessly shifting in its timelessness. All of these are examples of an active new cosmopolitan art form in the context of the overall artistic expression of merging disciplines. Throughout the development of European culture in particular, promising notions of an all-embracing ontology have been put forward from time to time. The search for an ideal as a bounteous source of ideas to promote what we hope will be a better world, should inspire modern-day mankind in similar fashion to the ideas of the Renaissance. Our frenzy of consumption – the product of a specifically Anglo-American mindset based on a craving for instant gratification, achieved by breathing life into a dead world of objects – can provide nothing more than superficial stimulation. Fashion is racing towards the point of collapse. Constant, repetitive self-satisfaction can even bring about the helplessness of schizophrenia. Ultimately, the arbitrary market of a virtual media world overflowing with information is incapable of forming the future. Successive waves of watery images break on the sturdy embankments of art that knows its time. As the cavalcade of culture continues on its journey of discovery, the rocky road that leads into a tenuous future has passed through deserts of inhumanity. Dictatorships and wars have almost completely annihilated the good side of human individuals. Unthinkable atrocities, perpetrated by a monstrous master race with a perverse hunger for power and a misconception of Nietzschean thought, savagely shut down all sources of light-giving energy. Just when the tunnel seems endless, however, light appears in the distance. It begins with a single point, which lengthens into a glowing horizon and then expands to form a vast chamber of light. New outlines slowly emerge, gradually taking shape. Nature, picked out in the greens of Rousseau, blooms again in our consciousness. The relentlessly rapid march of technology grinds to a halt, and the mesmeric beauty of impressionism highlights one credo: ‘ART FOR ART’S SAKE’. Occasionally, the scream of a futuristic racing car shatters the never-ending stillness of ancient statues. With each stop on the journey, the time tourist is afforded a brief moment to breathe as fresh styles emerge from the dynamics of new cultural landscapes. Then a new Duchamp-inspired cosmos is forged; Dadaist insights compete with the collage-like worldview of cubist simultaneity; art and life come together in the new cathedrals of a Bauhaus utopia, surrounded by depressing concrete blocks. Potemkin villages appear on a surreal horizon, catching the attention of new phenomena that materialise in the blur of fresh innovations streaking past. Like railway workers on the platform of time, we glimpse nouveau realists and pop artists; we can just make out the minimalists, still striving for reduction, floundering after contemporary fashion in a clip-style window sequence. With every informative stopover on the grand tour, the cosmopolitan travellers add nothing more than enduring recollections and experiences to their baggage. Each destination reached along the line of the present yields the essence of a new inventive spirit, born from the artistic promise of universes ready to unfold. The classical creative disciplines – painting, sculpture, architecture and so on – are entering a new, golden age. Having put down roots in the historic soil of European culture, they are ready to flourish in the multi-layered consciousness of a human race that has broadened its creative horizons.