New York — Our public life having now descended into a “swamp” of vileness, it’s a relief to discover something sublime in moments of genuine art. At the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall (643 Park Avenue), Julian Rosefeldt, a German artist, has set up an immense video installation called “Manifesto,” which runs from Dec. 7, 2016 to Jan. 8, 2017. It consists of 13 screens, with an inventive range of complex images, camera angles, and settings — some that edge on narrative. They include a Norman Rockwell-like family Thanksgiving table; a schoolroom and schoolyard; a huge office of seeming stock brokers observed like ants from a high angle bird’s eye shot; a statuesque blonde choreographer leading a platform of dancers who look like the old Busby Berkeley “42nd St.” routines crossed with alien creatures from another planet; and a grizzled, bearded homeless man wandering past abandoned lots, and graffiti-ridden factory ruins, angrily screaming protest at the world: “Fight against the imprisonment of revolutionary writers and artists.”
Each narrative has at its center the Australian Oscar-winning Cate Blanchett, who magically transforms herself, chameleon-like, into one character after another. She fluidly shifts accents and physical bearing: For example, she wears tattoos as a stoned, declaiming punk musician, and puts on false teeth as a worker with bad skin running a fork lift that shifts debris — turning herself into someone unrecognizable in each scene. In Blanchett’s words: “Acting is an empathetic connection. It’s about the joy of living many, many different lives.”
And in one part of each sequence she speaks the words of various manifestos (sounding like poetic monologues) from major artistic movements of the past 100 years — Futurism, Dadaism, Situationism, Surrealism, and Minimalism. The manifestos contain the words of artists, filmmakers, revolutionaries, who with gloriously youthful passion and energy denounce the habitual and stupid, the conformist, the bourgeois, the traditional, and eloquently call for a new beginning — “a war on all past icons.”
The cavernous space of the Drill Hall, the heart of the beautiful 1880 refurbished Park Avenue Armory, allows these echoing collective voices to envelop you as you sit on a bench in front of a given screen, mesmerized for the most part by what you see and hear. What on the page might sometimes seem merely the foolishness and callowness (but never vulgarity and dimness) of arrogant rebellious youth seems joyfully winged here and the whole artistic experience feels exhilarating. (The images often having equal significance with the words.)
The quasi-narratives can sometimes be humorous, as in the Norman Rockwell scene. There Cate Blanchett, looking like a most conservative American mother, presides over Thanksgiving dinner with her family (really HER family), delivering in a prim quiet voice as all are bowed in prayer, an affirmation of life in all its profane and mundane multiplicity by the sculptor Claus Oldenberg: “I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.”
Elsewhere, Blanchett’s sensibly dressed schoolteacher tries to convey to her pupils what the artistic process is by quoting Jean-Luc Godard who said to forget about originality, “It is not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to.” On another screen Blanchett fixes a puppet, surrounded by many other puppets (e.g., Hitler, Stalin) that are uncannily lifelike — but this one, you gradually see, is a replica of herself, eerie and powerful in different ways.
The prologue to the whole event confronts one on the first screen that you see as you enter the Hall. It is a view of flames out of darkness, accompanied by Blanchett’s voice offering striking words — a mixture of political manifestos including Marx’s Communist Manifesto — and finally the images explode into white light and then total darkness again. It seemed like a metaphor for the inflammatory, eloquent, absurd calls to throw off the constraints of the past and Make It New, gestures that passionately flared and then inevitably burned out.
Attending Manifesto was a uniquely stirring experience, a chance to sit for a time in a room where the aesthetic imagination ruled. It made it difficult afterwards for us to walk out and face a crass and avaricious world where Trump reigns.
