Artist Unknown, from a special issue of Varietes, a Brussels-based magazine. entitled " Le Surrealisme en 1929"The Surrealists amused themselves by creating a map that puts imperialist powers in their place. For example: other than Alaska, the United States are invisible; mainland Britain is dwarfed by Ireland; Easter Island looms over a tiny Australia; and only two cities are marked, Paris and Constantinople, with the rest of France and Turkey missing.
This I guess was a map of the Surrealists cultural ideas. They gave great importance to the shattering of rational thought and bourgeois ideas and values, they aimed to free people from staid ideas and restrictive practices, cultures and structures, borrowing loosely from the ideologies of socialism and anarchism.
I too like the subversion of conventions, and draw on an internationalist world view as a source of inspiration and have also always been weary of nationalism and the waving of flags, though I do confess to having supported a few.
The legacy of their ideas lives on however, and today we live in a period of rising movements against borders. Facts are, all borders are manmade and all nations are based on fakery and vivid imagination and subsequently the logic of the world's order equals nonsense.
In 1925 Katherine Harman in a book called ' You are here ' an early surrealist manifesto wrote
"Even more than patriotism- which is a quite commonplace sort of hysteria, though emptier and shorter-lived than most- we are disgusted by the idea of belonging to a country at all, which is the most bestial and least philosopic of the concepts to which we are subjected...Wherever Western civilistion is dominant, all human contact has dissapeared, except contact from which money can be made - payment in hard cash."
Well I can safely say I agree with that, what do you think?
So destroy all borders, but having said that I still feel the need to shout Free Palestine. Call me a hypocrite .
heddwch/peace.
Click on Picture to enlarge.
No comments:
Post a Comment