The Serpentine Gallery Manifesto Marathon took place over 20 hours in Frank Gehry’s Serpentine Pavilion, continuing on from the previous two years of Marathon events. It featured Vivienne Westwood, Yoko Ono, Agnès Varda, Gilbert and George, Johnny Woo and Terence Koh among others. Themes included the global financial crisis, the future of architecture in the face of ecological meltdown and the very meaning of a manifesto in a pervading climate of doubt.

Saturday
Noon
The sun is out and Frank Gehry’s glass-covered, open-sided pavilion is packed. Over 200 people sit on foam mats on its wooden steps. Vivienne Westwood launches into her 22-page manifesto. ‘Dear friends. We all love art, and some of you claim to be artists…’ But, she wouldn’t have written the manifesto today, she says. “I wrote it a couple of years ago. A few months ago it hit me. We absolutely must save the rainforests. Have we really got time to be art lovers?”

The next manifesto of architect, Pier Vittorio Aureli lasts no more than 10 minutes. He argues for a dogma where ‘architecture refuses’. Spitting negatives like bullets, he demands: ‘No learning from Las Vegas, no mapping, no research, no non-standard architecture, no Guggenheims, no Biennale activism, no architects as artists, no architect as Biennale monkeys, no green grass on the roof, no originality, no nostalgia, no life-mirroring, no confusing architecture with everything that is not architecture, no confusing life with everything that is not life. Thanks.’ And walks off.


2pm
It’s the amazingly named Hilary Koob-Sassen now, in the form of his band The Errorists. His band turns out to be just him, part rapping, part performing beat poetry.

Coffee break. I spot Hilary Koob-Sassen in his white jeans and baseball cap and cordon him for a quick chat.


3pm
Alert! Activist artists, Platform are up. Explaining how they use art to disrupt RBS (or Oil Bank Of Scotland, as they call it) branches, they call for an immediate end to oil and environmentally unfriendly companies’ sponsorship of art institutions, such as Shell sponsoring plays at the National Theatre.

They also argue against the high-end travel companies that are sponsoring the Marathon. ‘There’s a change of tide coming very soon when our hosts the Serpentine Pavilion won’t feel comfortable taking sponsorship from the likes of Kuoni and Net Jets’, they say. Their passion is contagious.  It’s genuinely exciting to see that the event’s curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist lets artists criticise his event from the stage.

American photographer, Taryn Simon’s work is next, introduced by Hans Ulrich. There’s a break for everyone to investigate it. Taryn is showing a regular photo of herself next to another where her lips, and eyes have been flipped. They rotate at all times. When they’re both upside down, the one she has doctored looks almost normal and the other, alien. This reverses when they face the right way. I grabbed a few words with Taryn to learn more.


4pm
The crowds - including the BBC’s Evan Davies – flock in for the next act. Gilbert and George recite their well-known The Laws of Sculptors and 10 Commandments For Ourselves. When they repeat ‘ban religion’ four times, the woman to my right balls up her hand in a fist and salutes. They also read a music-hall song written by early 20th century performer, Fred Barnes before leaving, along with much of the crowd, who’d only popped in to see them.

5pm
The amazing Ben Vautier now. Like a street-performer, he wanders about the space reinterpreting ‘Fluxus’ art. He had wanted to play ‘drip music’ using water poured out from a teapot, but, health and safety rules banned water, so his assistant holds a mic against the spout and we all ‘listen’ to air ‘dripping’ into a bowl. A mighty applause ensues.

Halting the madness, novelist and general secretary of the International Necronautical Society, Tom McCarthy delivers a proper polemic in the form of his ‘declaration concerning the relationships between art and democracy’.  
I tracked him down afterwards for a chat.

6pm
Yoko Ono is here, and she’s handed everybody a little torch. On comes a video of her taking the torches to the Venice Film Festival and spreading her message of love using a new kind of morse code, which she calls ‘onochord’. It involves flashing your torch to reveal the message ‘I love You’ Flash once for I, two for love and three for you. Since its dark now, the flashing in the Pavilion looks awesome. And even if it is a bit cheesy when a house remix of Give Peace A Chance comes on and Yoko invites everyone for a dance, it is testament to the sheer breadth of this amazing marathon that we can have a disco in the same space that earlier Jonas Mekes cut a piece of tape with Ben Vautier, and Vivienne Westwood stood up for the rainforest.

7pm
Dinner break. A friend brings hot food, hot water bottle, extra socks and a jacket. It is freezing, but there’s so much more to see. Like, American abstract film-maker Henry Flynt who shows us his short, ‘The Shrine Of The Insect’. Black and white, it appears to be flicks and dots to a dead soundtrack. People clap, but it is awful.

Then Flynt says: “I have to ask you to disregard what you just saw because that was not my film. My film is not even in black and white. I’m starting to wonder if airport X-rays might have done that”. At first people laugh, but then it gets a bit sad - Flynt had trekked all this way for nothing. After that, he criticised experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage, someone booed and a man next to me said: “Jeez. Some people are just born boring.”


Next, Belgrade-born performance artist,   M a r i n a   A b r a m o v ic, with a group of women dressed in red strapless dresses and men in white suits, with lab-coat like blazers. These resemble a Chinese creation myth where a drop of menstrual blood and white sperm gave birth to the earth, says Marina. She conducts the red and white people, providing her own deadpan, but tongue-in-cheek, mantra as to how to be an artist. ‘An artist should not make themselves into an idol’ she instructs, holding up her arms crucifix style. The people chant: ‘An artists should suffer.’ ‘An artist should not commit suicide.’ ‘An artist should have more and more of less and less’. Huge applause.

Next, the women we’ve all been waiting for, French New Wave film-director, Agnès Varda. She’s dressed head-to-toe as a potato. Wobbling about, potato like, she doesn’t say anything, and instead plays a short documentary she’s made about Europe’s chronic waste of food (like potatoes). She also urges everyone to ride a bike and cease oil dependency and on that note, I hopped on my bike, head filled with ideas, and headed home to collapse.