Jens Jørgen Thorsen, Jørgen Nash, Hardy
Strid
1. The Renaissance is irrevocably over. And if we did not work on eradicating
it, one day it would eradicate itself.
2. With an enormous bang. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 ...
3. In European cultural tradition there is an insurmountable barrier
between performer and audience. This barrier is blocking the cultural
evolution and threatens to make all of us into twaddling fools in the
supermarket of the culture industry. To make us victims of repression
of undreamt scale.
4. We want to create new rituals. Rituals are human thinking shaped
in social patterns. Every cultural pattern is a ritual.
5. European cultural tradition is as one-eyed as the individualised
central perspective of the Renaissance. From here there is only one position
to view things from at a time: the position of the artist or the audience.
The cultural ritual created in this way by the Renaissance made the exhivbition
a confining trap, which Tinguely, Happenings, Fluxus and the Nouveau Realists
are still helplessly caught in.
6. Individualism is utopian. However it became the perspective in which
European cultural understanding was formed. This produced the divide between
the individual and the group, between the ideal and tha banal, between
art and anti-art, between the creator and the sheep. This produced Communism,
Cubism, Liberalism, Fascism. Now the utopian epoch is over. No more utopias
can be produced. Time has run out.
7. The perspective of the Renaissance became the leap of technology,
but at the same time became the pretext for doing nothing in cultural
life.
8. It is happening in the artist or the spectator, traditon tells us,
it is sublime or banal. We say: from our point of view art is happening
in the space between. In the space between people, in the space between
the sublime and the banal. It is the functioning of art we want to change.
It is here and now it is happening.
9. We are de-christianising the idea of the People's Colleges. We are
de-animising the African tradition. We are stealing and borrowing as we
feel like. We are using the heritage. Moreover, we allow ourselves to
play with it.
10. This is the first time it has been said to the audience: Come and
join us. Get down to it. Everybody has got right of appeal.
11. CO-RITUS is washing art shinning clean. It is the bomb under cultural
life. But we do not need to attempt assassination. The cultural life has
been at a standstill since 1850.