JANUARY MANIFESTO

1. Whoever fails to see politics, government, church, industry, military, the political parties, and social organizations as a joke is not one of us.

2. Boycott all ruling systems and conventions by seeing them as nothing but a joke that went wrong.

3. Every true artist was born to change his environment.

4. Awards, scholarships, good reviews: everything is thrown at us. But one thing is for certain, they have no use for us.

5. Our highest goal is to be useless: joking around is unpopular folk art.

6. The whole world is the sphere in which the creative impulse that is reserved for fun alone can unfold.

7. Everything of use is not for people. Without the artist there would already be no more mankind.

8. We are opposed to Carnival celebrations, because they commercialize fun. The abuse of fun is the greatest crime.

9. Art for art’s sake is over, as is art for money and art for women. This marks the beginning of art for fun.

10. Being creative means: having fun with everything by constantly creating new things.

11. Being human means homo ludens and homo gaudens.

12. Fun has not been an integrating factor in culture since the rise of dialectic materialism and determinism. We demand its liberation from oppression by the ruling ideologies and rationalism.

13. The saying “Knowledge is power,” which ushered in the age of science, shall be followed by the saying “Fun is power,” ushering in the age of fun.

14. Just as Marx derived a revolution from science, we derive a revolution from fun.

15. The socialist revolution abused artists. The one-sidedness of these subversions was due to the separation of work and fun. A revolution without fun is no revolution.

16. There is no artistic freedom without the power of fun.

17. All discontented forces are gathering into an organization of anti-organizers, who will manifest themselves through a general revolution.

18. In all seriousness we are calling for fun. We demand urban fun, as well as unitary, total, real, imaginary, sexual, irrational, integral, military, political, psychological, philosophical … fun.

19. The implementation of Situationist Fun will solve all the problems in the world: the East-West conflict, the Algerian conflict, the Congolese conflict, rioting by young hooligans, blasphemy trials, and sexual repression.

20. We are engaging the entire world for our fun! January 1961

The “Gruppe Spur”
Sturm, Prem, Fischer, Kunzelmann, Zimmer