The Wallace Collection

Special Day Event: SOLD OUT! Vivienne Westwood's Art Manifesto: Active Resistance to Propaganda

Saturday 1st December, 2007

2:00pm - 3:30pm

“The most important thing about this manifesto is that it is a practice. If you follow it your life will change. In the pursuit of culture you will start to think. If you change your life, you change the world.” - Vivienne Westwood

Join Vivienne Westwood as she launches her manifesto at the Wallace Collection. Based on the premise that art gives culture and that culture is the antidote to propaganda, Vivienne and 25 other speakers will read aloud her manifesto and answer questions afterwards.

The manifesto sees 25 characters from literature, art and history, including Alice in Wonderland, Pinocchio, Aristotle and Whistler, meet. Through their dialogues the message of the manifesto becomes clear. Alice will be read by Georgia May Jagger, daughter of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, and Vivienne Westwood will direct proceedings, narrating as ‘Active Resistance’ herself. The other roles will be taken by members of the public.

Westwood defines Propaganda using Aldous Huxley’s words as ‘Nationalistic Idolatry, Non-Stop Distraction and Organised Lying.’ She urges us to escape these, particularly Non-Stop Distraction, go in search of art and become artistic freedom fighters. This involves making the choice to become more cultured, thus more human, and to understand the world. Our route should be to actively engage with art and use our ethical imagination to be objective and see things as they really are; in the process acquiring knowledge. This knowledge in turn will make us act differently and become better citizens of the world. In this way the Arts Manifesto is a keystone of Westwood’s wider pre-occupations with politics and justice.

Westwood argues that art must be representative; through representative human nature we gain an imaginative insight into the general nature of things. Westwood believes there is no progress in art and conceptual and abstract art is today’s Emperor’s New Clothes; nothing in it except what you invent; a subjective whim.

The Wallace Collection provides the perfect setting for the official launch of Active Resistance. Westwood is a huge fan of the collection particularly the 17th century Dutch paintings and 18th century French works which she views as the peak of artistic achievement. Key pieces in her fashion collections have been influenced by artworks in the Wallace Collection, including Boucher’s Madame de Pompadour, an 18th Century Boulle mirror and Watteau’s fête galantes.

By the end of her journey Alice concludes “Every time I read a book instead of looking at a magazine, go to the art gallery instead of watching TV, go to the theatre instead of the cinema, I fight for the active resistance to propaganda.” We urge you to join the debate, not forgetting you get out what you put in.