(Issued by: The Bureau of Saboteurial Investigation)
(In cooperation with the ICV Committee on Appropriations)
We're not here to answer cuntish questions.
The Institute practices: merciless criticism of everything in existence; resistance against the forces that aim to domesticate the spirit; the refloating of the rank and file marooned on the rocks of perdition; reticence from commercial or academic circles--despising them, and preferring a modest life to bountiful earnings acquired by selling art; striking while the iron is hot; joy.
With inexhaustible humor, the Institute lampoons all prevailing values; morality, aesthetics, culture, philosophy, the army, religion, everything honored in the pantheon of bourgeois ideology.
Arise! Comrades, Arise! Like lions after slumber, in unvanquished number. Now is the time of the attentäter!
« First Treatise on the Defense of Vandalism. »
(The Vandalist is international or not at all)
· · · · ·
To the young Vandals: You are already considered a public menace, and if you go on, you may be given a distinguished death. But console yourself; better people die on the gallows than in palaces.
The Institute for Comparative Vandalism detests resignation!
Vandalist Music intends to shock the listener to the extent that from the first note they should be aware that something different is about to happen.
The Vandalists have abandoned the secure, plagal chords of the church. They have abandoned theory and embraced discord. Their hymn is a new noise.
The cacophonous "Vandal Sound" stems from a perverse desire to hear music as it has never been heard before.
But a new musical language based on dissonance is silly. One must have quite a convincing reason for such eccentricities....
We pride ourselves on having made this recording out of whatever rubbish was at hand; and find it amusing that people will complain about it who have allowed their entire lives to be dominated by every kind of rubbish.
The Institute for Comparative Vandalism has become a master at finding the crazy particularly audible.
The Institute will destroy the prejudice for "well-made" music, and so destroying doctrinaire, academic and soporific values, declaring the phrase "let us return to the old masters" to be hateful, stupid and vile.
The Institute writes this communiqué and we want nothing, and in principle we are against communiqués, as we are against principles.
We distrust unity.
Our oeuvre is a gesture. Every word spoken, every note played, every collage assembled here says at least one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.
What we build is based on the innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.
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Radical critique through gesture. Avenge Makhno! Occasionally it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all! Avenge Milly Witkop! Lis tes ratures! We have scarcely begun to make you understand that we don't intend to play the game! Avenge Savio! Pay homage to those who have written works in the ink of action! Avenge Silkwood! Become your own historian! Run into the streets shouting, "REMEMBER VANZETTI!" |
... And thus we spoke, "Ever ready!"
La Salute è in voi!
--Institute for Comparative Vandalism Committee on Appropriations
