Afterword

Abstract

On 17 December 2016, I had the good fortune to see a video installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Written, directed, and produced by Julian Rosefeldt, largely in and around Berlin, Manifesto staged thirteen scenarios—simultaneously looped on massive screens in the cavernous armory—in which extracts from nearly seventy avant-garde manifestos were performed by Cate Blanchett, featured in thirteen strikingly different roles. Her virtuosity redeployed even the most emphatic manifesto rhetoric into monologues that seem spontaneously uttered in a series of vivid locales, ranging from a cemetery to a fertilizer factory, a film studio, a drab apartment block, a former Olympic village, a puppet workshop, a recycling facility, and more. Blanchett, in effect, perpetuates the spirit of Fernando Pessoa, as if she were embodying heteronyms, not playing roles. ...