1. Today there is an artistic rearmament, a bearer of the future, which opposes itself to moral rearmament. Europe is at the threshold of a great revolution, a unique cultural putsch.
2. Art constitutes the last domain of freedom and it will defend it by all means.
3. We mean to protest against the monstrous colossus of the technicized machine. We are opposed to the rationalism that has engendered a cultural desert. Automatically functioning thought has engenered the lack of ideas, academicism, the atomic bomb.
4. The renewal of the world, beyond democracy and communism, can only arrive through the renewal of individualism, not through collective thought.
5. S/he who wants to create culture must also destroy culture.
6. Concepts such as culture, truth, eternity, [and even] other artists do not interest us; we must save our own lives. The material and spiritual situation of art is so distressing that one can not ask artists to paint in an engaging fashion. Only the upstarts can paint this way.
7. Basic research is purely scientific and applied research is purely technical. Artistic research is free and has nothing to do with science or technique. We are opposed to current attempts to make art scientific, in order to make it an instrument of technical brutality. Art relies upon instinct, upon primary creative forces. To the great detriment of all intellectual speculators, these free, wild forces always push towards the appearance of new, unexpected forms.
8. Art is a stroke of the gong that resonates, its echo is the cry of the imitators, who are lost in empty space. The transposition into technique kills artistic power.
9. Art has nothing to do with truth. Truth resides between things. S/he who wants to be objective is unilateral; s/he who is unilateral is pedantic and boring.
10. We embrace everything.
11. The tired generation, the angry generation, are over. Now, it is the turn of the kitsch generation. WE INSIST UPON KITSCH, DIRT, THE ORIGINAL MUD, CHAOS. Art is the heap of dung in which kitsch grows. Kitsch is the daughter of art: the daughter is young and perfumed, the mother is an old woman who stinks. We only want one thing: to spread kitsch.
12. We want ERROR. Constructivists and Communists have abolished error and live in eternal truth. We are against truth, against happiness, against satisfaction, against good conscience, against fat stomaches, against HARMONY. Error is the most marvelous capacity of man! Why is man here? To add to the errors of the past, which no longer suit him.
13. Instead of abstract idealism, we want honest nihilism. The greatest crimes of humanity have been perpetrated in the names of truth, honesty, progress, a better future.
14. Abstract painting has become an empty aestheticism, a place where the lazy of spirit frolic, looking for a convenient pretext to harp on worn-out truths.
15. Abstract painting is CHEWING GUM THAT'S BEEN CHEWED A HUNDRED TIMES, and stuck underneath a table. Today, the constructivist and structuralist painters try to chew this totally dry piece of gum one more time.
16. With abstraction, four-dimensional space has become something in itself. The painting of the future will be POLYDIMENSIONAL. Infinite dimensions open up before us.
17. Art historians make each necessary spiritual revolution into dinner conversation for intellectuals. We will oppose A MILITANT DICTATORSHIP OF THE SPIRIT TO THE NON-ENGAGEMENT OF THE SPIRIT.
18. We can not paint with any talent. We even make efforts to be this way. We are arrogant and eccentric. We are indescribable.
19. WE ARE THE THIRD TACHIST WAVE.20. WE ARE THE THIRD WAVE. We are a sea of waves (SITUATIONISM).
21. Only we can rid the world of its ruins. WE ARE THE PAINTERS OF THE FUTURE.
Spur Group:(Written in German and published November 1958. Translated by NOT BORED! June 2005 from the French version published in Archives Situationnistes: Volume 1: Documents traduits 1958-1970.)