Idiolab
IDIOLAB MANIFESTO
The continuation of global buffoonery by artistic means.
I CLICK YOU
We are writing about the present, not about yesterday or tomorrow. Trump & Co. have hijacked the world’s artistic direction. As the Pere Ubus of our time, they set about undermining norms, celebrating the absurd, and preaching contradictions. Their bullshit has now piled up into an altar. Political trolls are hovering like gods over algorithms, nudging us, nudging entire continents. With our like-thumbs up or down, for clips and memes, we keep endorsing their power by admiring or despising them, which, in the click economy, is essentially the same thing.
THE COUP
Nor more of that! Because these Silicon gods and trolls have stolen their methods from us artists. The radical exploration of the Self was our great achievement—perhaps the only one, if we are honest. In the modern era, we have twisted aesthetic egomania so narcissistically that it morphed into the most beautiful idiocy. Remember: “What we lack, what has some interest, what is rare because he has the anomalies of precious being, the freshness and liberty of the great antimen, is | THE IDIOT,” Tristan Tzara noted in 1921. The Dadaists, Ubu’s followers, were concerned with the rebirth of the idiot from the spirit of an incoherent society. That’s why Georges Bataille wrote in the first issue of Acéphale magazine in 1936: “The time of reason and culture is over now.” Headlessness as a program in the face of headless politics.
KICKING AGAINST THE DECENCY OF ART
But the sublime idiocy of the arts has been appropriated and distorted by today’s political gamblers. We artists, on the other hand, have grown into decent folk and withdrew into artistic research, organizing ourselves politically, and calling for ecological justice—important, worthy and charitable stuff that we haven’t the faintest clue about. Take the situationist Guy Debord: What was he about at the end of the 1950s? Being rowdy and boozing. Is what followed worth more than a footnote now?
IN LIEU OF UNDERMINING: UNDERPERFORMING
Since it is us, the artists, who hold the copyright to idiocy—and NOT the Trumps, Modis, Putins, Erdoğans, and other political XXLs in this world—IDIOLAB strongly opposes their idiopolitics without wanting to embrace rationalism as the liberal promise of global enlightenment. Deciding who is Clown and who is Derp Face is our privilege!
Being expelled from art’s paradise feels disgusting from the point of view of the IDIOLAB. Do we really want to continue as if the bowl, and not the cracks in the bowl, were our yardstick? Where are all the Useless Idiots™ in our brave new green world? A scientific life cannot be lived, and still everyone is trying to keep the optimizing machine running at full throttle, from YouTube workouts to productivity hacks and further. Which is why the probabilistic AI cloud seems to perfectly match the most probable of all possible worlds. Everything is procedural, percentual, relational.
ORGAN GROOMING
At this juncture in world history – which is always the present moment – the IDIOLAB proposes to bring forth the self-concept of thought, including its collateral imaginations, to endow theatre with a new multiple organ – modelled on the spleen, this “allrounder among organs” (ChatGPT). The desire for a new organ has always been and still remains the fundamental mission of theatre productions; and neither neoliberalism, nor careerism, neither trendsetting nor budget squeezes will change that so long as the concept of “theatre” has any significance at all. You may surgically remove a frog’s croaking ability and still claim it is a frog. That is correct. Yet if being correct is the only thing you are, then that is not enough. 90% of theatre productions are theatre no more. And like the slave whisperers of Roman emperors, it is IDIOLAB’s role to remind us what 100% actually means, and to tell how things are. The IDIOLAB is an autoimmune reaction, it is the plasticity of the body in cultural life.
ABOLISHING ALL APPS
The current crises in the East and in the West are embedded in the temporal foundations of thought, underpinned by the colossal challenge of nihilism, which has followed late capitalism like a faithful pooch. If, in modern times, meaning has been replaced by value, and if value is determined by political economy, then the ingenuity of emancipatory thinking does not extend further than to the next update of the utopia app. The theatre organism cannot allow itself to fall dependent on apps that feed into our dystopian present. Rather, it must spring into action in order to survive.
MIND HUNTING
Ultimately, the IDIOLAB considers itself to be a representative for the idiots of the world, ready to provide shelter for all art refugees rejected by their nation, by moral values or by scientism. Let’s team up to polish the farcical side of the coin of world history together! Unlike the film Idiocracy, we do not intend to deal out criticism. Idios in Greek means “own, personal, private, one’s own”, and “idiocracy” is hence the rule of one’s own, of the self. The point of departure is what Deleuze called the New Idiot, a timely conceptual figure who, in an effort to create absurdity, sacrifices truth, beauty and goodness on the altar of YouTube. In the belief that what is absurd is real, and what is real is absurd. Because flat-earthers, not round-earthers, are setting the performative standard these days. Because you can be a troll and an ideologue rolled into one, thereby immunizing yourself against challenges. And because the online pack has called out the battle of all against all.
“So what can we do?“, you ask. — Anything! Everything!
TLDNR:
We want to reclaim the global artistic directorship. Do want it too!
