New Manifesto of Integral Naturalism
Thirty-five years after Pierre Restany's Integral Naturalism Manifesto, Frans Krajcberg and Claude Mollard launch the New Manifesto to assert the primacy of the art of seeing nature as a source of creation.
Faced with threatening globalization, they claim the right to diversity and the duty to respect the planet: fully and radically. They want to mobilize artists and citizens of the world and engage in a global movement of initiatives in the service of the most innovative and authentic artistic creation. They also want to sensitize public opinion to the crisis of the planet, obscured by a coalition of blind interests.
The Integral Naturalism Movement was born on January 1, 2013.
" In wanting to impose his law on nature, in wanting to create against nature, Man condemns himself .", Pierre Restany-1978
"By dint of accepting the barbaric practices of men against nature, contemporary man has today initiated the process of destruction of the planet which leads him to his own destruction." Frans Krajcberg et Claude Mollard – 2013
New Manifesto of Integral Naturalism,
Frans Krajcberg and Claude Mollard
January 1, 2013
The twenty-first century still has not paved the way to artistic creation resolutely committed
to the planet’s balance with its environment and its inhabitants.
We denounce this powerlessness.
Crushed by the globalization of cultures and economies, art loses its meaning, while the universal domination of finance generates shameless speculations and artificial bubbles.
We denounce the hold of the markets on art, its malpractice and deadlocks.
We are raising alarm so that art rediscovers the sense of nature, measure and harmony, and that it recovers its avant-garde position in the service of values of freedom, dignity, of respect.
We are publishing the “New Manifesto of Integral Naturalism” to lead a movement that mobilizes the expression of a global consciousness.
We acknowledge in nature an unlimited source of inspiration, concepts, research and forms.
We claim, in duty and law, the full diversity of expressions, uncompromising secularism, complete freedom of creation.
We address to artists and also citizens of the world who do not wish to remain passive spectators of the destruction of their planet.
More than ever, the artist must be at the heart of any vision civilization, both artist and citizen of the world, completely and radically. Pierre Restany ended the Rio Negro Manifesto with these words: "Original nature must be exalted as a hygiene of perception and mental oxygen ..."
1. The terms of Rio negro manifesto of 1978 must be reaffirmed and radicalized.
In 1978, ecology was stammering and the Rio negro manifesto was a first awareness of the great potential of nature in artistic expression. For Pierre Restany, it is therefore a matter of fighting much more against subjective pollution than against objective pollution, of the senses and the rain ... »
Nowadays, the global crisis has become an obvious reality calling for urgent responses.
The destruction of the Amazon rainforest is underway at the cost of the inevitable and unfortunately silent extinction of the Indian peoples. The melting of polar ice is accelerating, global warming continues apace. The growth of the world’s population sustains poverty, promotes wars and serves as a breeding ground for the development of religious and political fanaticism.
Human rights and secularism are increasingly violated. National and international political powers have abdicated to global finance.
The art crisis then denounced by Pierre Restany has amplified.
The increase in financial investments supposed to express a step forward in the democratization of the arts actually leads to the promotion of a large international entertainment company.
2. The commitment of the contemporary artist is the condition for the renewal of creation.
At a time when contemporary art is very much displayed, it is in fact more and more disconnected from social, economic and political reality. It focuses on the individual and its questions.
Art no longer announces, it illustrates. Art no longer anticipates, it accompanies. Art no longer denounces, it conceals.
Intellectual movements that connected artistic innovations and political and social commitments have disappeared. They became subjects of study or exhibitions.
Artistic practice is no longer a collective commitment but an individual career. Isolated, artists are less harmful. They no longer run the art scene; they try to profit from it. Art is nothing more than a listed commodity. It oscillates between intellectual speculation and market speculation. It becomes a strategy of power. It loses its critical reach.
We reaffirm the essential role of the artist, while he is more and more relegated to that of a simple decorator whose “masters of the world” expect him to disguise crises instead of denouncing them.
3. Integral Naturalism calls for an ethic of artistic creation
Integral Naturalism is not only an attitude of combat but also a stimulus of thought. It is fully opposed to the destructive exploitation of nature and of the transformation of the work of art into a disposable consumer object.
Integral Naturalism is conceived as a tool for sustainable artistic development. It even fits into the space-time of the cosmos.
Integral Naturalism connects the most contemporary cultures to the most ancestral ones. He appeals to the conscience of the “Magicians of the earth”.
It affirms the necessity of the spirit’s forces and seeks the conditions of their appearance since the living’s origins.
Integral Naturalism reconnects with the avant-garde who anticipated major technical and urban changes, conquests of citizen’s rights, the liberation and development of image.
Integral Naturalism calls for “the expression of a planetary consciousness”, capable of being indignant, of mobilizing and acting.
4. Integral Naturalism is committed to protecting nature, a catalyst and mobilizer of imaginations.
The ecological fight will vibrate the imaginative heart of society if it knows how to take into account the artistic and cultural dimension of the planet. The current dispersed creations of artists who have chosen to express themselves in, for, through, with and over nature, will benefit from being brought together and strengthened on a global scale, in a resolutely intercultural dialogue.
Integral Naturalism promotes the emergence of a global and diverse artistic movement around the unifying role of safeguarding the fundamental balances of the planet.
5. Integral Naturalism promotes the act of creation based on vision and the search for meaning.
The natural universe is an unlimited reservoir for animal and plant species and forms. The gaze on the object or the being of nature is an artistic act, because the art of seeing is in itself creative: it is learned, practiced, cultivated and transmitted.
Integral Naturalism adds a poetic dimension to scientific naturalism. It puts at its service contemporary technologies that amplify or detail the vision of the world, and thus exalts beauty in all its dimensions, from the infinitely s mall to the infinitely large.
Integral Naturalism gives meaning and coherence to the myriad of works of art with reference to nature, in all forms, created since the 1960s.
6. Integral naturalism invests without limits in creation, while favoring modest practices of art.
Integral Naturalism seeks to put into images and art forms the multiplicity of inventions of nature, to reveal them or to be inspired by them as models or energy engines.
For Integral Naturalism, art is not just a production, it is also a way of life in harmony with nature.
Integral Naturalism commits each generation to pass on to its children the part of planet Earth which it has inherited and received custody of. Each generation will take care to completely erase the attacks made to its integrity by the previous one.
“To practice (the) availability in relation to the natural order, is to admit the modesty of human perception and its own limits.” Pierre Restany.
7. Integral Naturalism is a response to globalization.
Integral Naturalism cultivates the art of seeing in order to renew the one of thinking and being.
Integral Naturalism strives to better understand the mysteries of nature. It is also a method that promotes cognitive science of the planet and the cosmos.
Integral Naturalism fully combats all human endeavors which lead to the disappearance of all diversity in a dangerous globalization by dint of denying or despising the reality of nature. On the contrary, it promotes dialogue and a meeting between cultures and genres.
It is up to the artist to draw from this method the strength to find an essential place in society, of which he must be, more than ever, the alpha and omega.