Manifesto or Statement of Intent
. . .
Manifesto or Statement of Intent
. . . This is a short term occupation of vacant city-managed property.
The action is extra-legal — it illuminates no legal issues, calls for no ‘rights’. It is pre-emptive and insurrectionary.
The action is dedicated to Elizabeth Mangum, a middleaged Black American killed by police and marshals as she resisted eviction in Flatbush last year.
The intention of this action is to show that artists are willing and able to place themselves and their work squarely in a context which shows solidarity with oppressed people, a recognition that mercantile and institutional structures oppress and distort artists’ lives and works, and a recognition that artists, living and working in depressed communities, are compradors in the re-valuation of property and the ‘whitening’ of neighborhoods.
It is important to focus attention on the way artists get used as pawns by greedy white developers.
It is important for artists to express solidarity with Third World and oppressed peoples.
It is important to show that people are not helpless—they can express their resentment with things-as-they-are in a way that is constructive, exemplary and interesting.
It is important to try to bridge the gap between artists and working people by putting artwork on a boulevard level.
It is important to do something dramatic that is neither commercially oriented nor institutionally quarantined—a groundswell of human action and participation with each other that points up currents of feeling that are neither
for sale nor for morticing into the shape of an institution.
It is important to do something that people (particularly in the art community) cannot immediately identify unless they question themselves and examine their own actions for an answer.
It is important to have fun.
It is important to learn.
Committee for the Real Estate Show 1979