The ROZZ-TOX Manifesto
(a 1980 artifact with end of the millenium resonances)
Gary Panter
Item 1:
The avant-garde is no corpus. It merely lies in shock after an unfortunate bout with its own petard. It feigns sleep but one eye glitters and an involuntary twitch in the corner of the mouth belies a suppressed snicker. The giggle of coming awake at one's own funeral dressed in atomic TV beatnik furniture. A mutant with a mission.
Item 2:
There are twenty years left in the twentieth century. Twenty years to reap the rewards and calamities that have been put in motion in this period. At this time a current of aesthetic function is emerging: the inevitable culmination of concepts and experiments pioneered and conducted in this century. We declare society an amusement park and one to be dead reckoned with.
Item 3:
A deadly texture and tone have taken the cereal Nirvana: a misanthrope born of capitol realities, tendencies, and inter-office memos. Sightless businessmen-posed-entertainers shovel up tons of soulless Saturday morning animation. Would that you could make cost effective the rubbery genius that was the Saturday morning of our youth.
Item 4:
We say enough to the instigators of game show design for we are sick and dizzy. Show us the backs of these monstrous facades, for even bare plywood is a healthier texture. Oh you seekers of the new who run terrified from history into the clutches of an eternal life where no electric shaver can be
built to last.
Item 5:
Close the bars! We require well lit media centers that serve soft drinks and milk. We require that top-40 radio stop it. And this for extant executive entertainers: We know when to laugh. Machines don't, and it is irritation to hear them laugh at the wrong time. They laugh at nothing and nothing isn't funny.
Item 6:
Find the evil doers, the merchant peddlers of Pavlovia who use our unmentionable parts against us. Will you hide behind a scrim of two-dimensional phosphorescence when Biology exacts its reward?
Item 7:
Profound faith in glamour is a surefire way to not see that you kill what you eat. We believe and worship a two-dimensional world. No god printers save us when we stand naked and brainless before an uncompromising and impartial physicality. We are sick now/get wise to the media. Join the art police. We call for posting of cow pictures in every fast food franchise. And for vegetarians, recordings of screaming vegetables at every salad bar.
Item 8:
Beautiful and effective communicative marketing and aesthetic media are not innately evil; merely seductive. However, seductive aesthetics and media are prone to undermine common sense and vision in a capitalistic culture. Our own creations have shamed us. Teaching us that the hand and opinion of the individual are not as legitimate as that of opinion transmuted
and inflated by broadcast ... especially when that opinion is on 80-pound coated stock, in full color ... or when that opinion steals invisibly and incomprehensibly into a box in our homes. Would that society reveled in certain varieties of vandalism and disarray. May we mow our lawns and remain civilized.
Item 9:
It is unfortunate and unacceptable what vile and lazy do-nothings are given unwarranted credence for mouthing such foul and mean clichis as "rip-off" and "sell-out." They have no understanding of our economy and the time it takes society to go. Confess and shut up! Capitalism good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim. Inspiration has always been born of recombination.
Item 10:
In a capitalistic society such as the in which we live, aesthetics as an endeavor flows thorough a body which is built of free enterprise and various illnesses. In boom times art may be supported by wildcat speculation or my excess funds in form of grants from the state or patronship as a tax write-off. Currently we are suffering from a lean economy. By necessity we must infiltrate popular mediums. We are building a business-based art
movement. This is not new. Admitting it is.
Item 11:
Business 1. To create a pseudo-avant-garde that is cost effective. 2. To create merchandising platforms on popular communications and entertainment media. 3. To extensively mine our recent and ancient past for icons worth remembering and permutating: recombo archaeology.
Item 12:
Waiting for art talent scouts? There are no art talent scouts. Face it, no one will seek you out. No one gives a shit.
Item 13:
Market saturation was reached in sixties - everyone knows that. Fine Elitist Art is of diminishing utility. There is not more reward for maintaining or joining an elite and sterile crew.
Item 14:
Elitist art cannot help the emergent complex through its painful and potentially stupidly dangerous adolescence. Start or support primitive industry, propaganda to no dogma, and environmental jarrs.
Item 15:
Law: If you want better media, go make it.
Item 16:
We are born capitalists and manufacturers of alternative goods and services. We are made propagandists and propose an antimedia to no dogma. We call for popular environmental manipulators, primitive industry, an avant-garde placed squarely in the entertainment field, for archaeologists and synthesizers.
Item 17:
A call for mutant intuition and wrestling is real. A current that synthesizes ideas and entertainment .. an antimedia that creates, participates, and services and broader-based lunatic fringe and one that is capable of finishing the century outright. An avant-garde that has no mean diversion and stocks the supermarket.
Item 18:
Our lack of popularity in high school was led us to think and thinking has lead us to this. No war is waged here; only a strain, a virus, a toxoid, a Rozz-Toxoid. The emergent complex asks for just twenty years of your time. Now, stand and sing ...
Final Note:
Capitalism for good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim, and stocks the supermarket.
I first met the Rozz-Tox when the Post Brothers fought it, and the Residents.
I always had the "Stocks the Supermarket" line going through my head at work.
I wonder if the "idea = virus" of Meme theory owes as much to Rozz-Tox as Burroughs.
via Warren Ellis' Whitechapel.
