NEW SINCERITY
A draft of:
NEW SINCERITY
A MANIFESTO
We are neither the divine voice nor the audience - we are the interpreters - the Shamans.
At the heart of New Sincerity is the belief that nothing original can be created completely from without. The most unique thing the artist has to offer is himself, for he is inherently different from all other people. Therefore, in order to innovate he must produce an art the every facet of which is fundamentally and apparently filtered through the self. In order to do this the artist must draw from a third place, a place of mystic origin, of Fire. A place of Fire is a realm that exists in the air around us; it is the awesome feeling of history and culture and self amalgamated that turns the man into the artist. The Shaman is one who cannot escape the Fire, who constantly feels its heat, but who learns to take the light of the Fire and create with it a constellation in his own image and in which his audience sees themselves.
Needing a place to work the artist builds his own Orient. Rimbaud wrote, “You are a Western man, but quite free to live in your Orient, as old a one as you want… and to live in it as you like” It is the duty of the artist, the Shaman, to build this place in which he is able to see what he wants to make and make what he wants to see. In this way a New Sincerist is an Orientalist but in the stead of looking Eastward he must look directly into the Fire. From this vantage he is able to determine a form or a formlessness for the spark he has chosen from the Fire.
Why must the artist create an Orient? It is to be his escape and his refuge from disinginuety and irony. New Sincerity rejects irony completely. Irony is cowardice. It is weak to point at something one does not mean sincerely in order to point at that which he does. The art of a New Sincerist will signify straightforwardly that which he means to signify. A divorce from irony does not preclude the notion of play and of humor. The artist must say only what he means which may include any point in the spectrum of human experience.
The Three Phases of a New Sincerist Photograph
Conception:
The New Sincerist Photograph must be conceived organically. It is an act of wonder in a moment, a person, or the intangible. This does not have specific limitation; it can be a spontaneous moment or a considered act - whatever the form its conception must be immaculate. The camera allows for a specific extraction, a click of the shutter, in which the artist may say his image has been conceived.
Gestation:
The New Sincerist Photograph is raised through ritualistic actions. As he processes, dries, cuts, and prints his film the artist meditates on his creation. Understanding the conception of his work and his intention he must look at his work and consider how to form the constellation - this is the process of editing. He takes what he saw in the fire and using himself as a filter gives it language.
Birth:
The New Sincerist Photograph must now take its final form - must become its constellation. This is when the instant of the photograph’s inspiration and its meditative development merge to create the final and complete product - a thing which will posses the quality of a perpetual birth.
But what makes a New Sincerist Photograph sincere? It is essential for a New Sincerist photograph to be able to stand on its own, apart from its author. If the artist pours as much of himself into his creation as possible, he increases the possibility of another empathizing with it
. In contemporary society authoring and reading are very separate events, and life can be added to art on both ends. The more life a photographer breathes into his photograph, the more likely it is that the viewer of his photograph will breathe his own life into it. A photograph, when raw from the camera, is the product of a mechanical process - the cold and lifeless result of a science experiment. It is inherently objective, but must become subjective through being authored by the photographer. It is impossible to avoid adding subjectivity to photography, and therefore futile to attempt any sort of objective or documentary approach. Whether or not a photograph is interpreted based on the biography and biases of its author, it must be authored. Because of this necessary insertion of humanity into the mechanical process of photography, New Sincerity finds it only logical to insert as much humanity as possible in order to fight the naturally dead nature of the photograph.
We ask you to be sincere with abandon. We seek beauty, sense, and novelty. There is no seam between our lives and our art - they are the same.
We claim New Sincerists:
Oscar Wilde - for his dedication to beauty in life
Buñuel - for his sincere humor
Georges Méliès - for his sense of wonder
Allan Ginsberg - for frankness
Emma Goldman - for her love of flowers and revolution
Atget - for seeing mystery everywhere
Milan Kundera - for seeing the limitless beauty in humanity - even in our worst times Muhammed Ali - for floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee
Akira Kurosawa - for his understanding of the old and the new
Samuel Beckett - for contemplating contemplation
Weegee - for recklessly chasing photographs
Provoke - for looking at reality until it became surreal
Gustave Courbet - for his desperation in art making
Sir Charles Chapman - for his exploration of the human spirit
Peter Hujar - for his portraits in life and death
Felix Gonzales Torres - for holding the mirror to our mortality
Jack Kerouac - for transforming truck-beds into Titania’s cradle
Albert Einstein - for understanding his power and his fallacy
Henry Horenstein - for photographing what he loves, and for teaching people to do the same
Be at ease with this company. Be free to take from the Fire and create. We are eager to see a new series of constellations in sky. This is the moment to create a new universal language, one of empathy and sincerity.
Leifheit & Stern
4th May 2011
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