Friday Night Manifesto

By Eric Hatheway

We tried to see when we did not know what we looked like.

We were longing for landscapes which had long been destroyed.

We saw ourselves as modern but we never respected the past.

We knew if we embraced all of our ideals we would become hopelessly absolute.

We only had visions of half-truths.

Lacking all conviction, even the best artists began to yield.

Rather than go against the grain, it was at this moment when we realized we could abandon those hopeless constraints and begin to create our own art.

That we would succeed in doing just that.

We chose to solve a problem placed upon us [as artists] that has been forced upon us throughout the history of art.

We create, for the first time, our art of a general and universal magnitude.

We took hold of the matter and made issue of the matter with a freedom we could get from nowhere but ourselves.

We will make art out of it.

Poetic, romantic, wise, tattered and poor.

This is what art is … this is who we are.