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URBI ET ORBI
DECLARATION OF THE ATHENS SURREALIST GROUP
“Headless Consciousness” (2002) Drawing by Sotiris
Liontos
What is surrealism? The question recurs, more
than eighty years after its original formulation, to render explicit what
should be by now self-evident, manifest, and, to a large extent, common to all
humankind, in its long process toward mental liberation and social
emancipation.
To
start with, it is essential to note that surrealism is not a mere literary and
artistic current of the avant-garde, complete with dates of birth and
death, as is claimed in encyclopedias, dictionaries and histories of art and
literature. Rather, it involves the bringing into consciousness, and tendency
toward the total expression, of a project, whose early sparks illumined
the nocturnal sky of the modern world, forming the monogram of a promise that,
even if destined to remain unfulfilled (but who is to say this before we speak
our final word?), the desire to approach its source, to harmonize with its
perspective, is no less keenly felt.
As
a human need, surrealism is neither confined within narrow spatial, social and
historical limits, nor timeless. If its roots go a long way back, if it
systematizes a network of signs that did seem to develop autonomously
and blindly, unconscious of their profound contiguity, and if its
manifestations continue to touch fleetingly those prevented from recognizing
and naming it, the decision of its founding was no less factual; nor was it
free of influences by those vibrations which traversed the intellectual and
social horizon of the time. And if it emerged from a climate involving a series
of “schools” or avant-garde currents, it harbored no illusions regarding
its convergence with them. The historical context of its early expression
furnished the conditions under which a potentiality becomes conscious,
whose validation could only ensue by means of its transmission into the whole
of human existence.
Surrealism thus lies within history, albeit not in the sense of a moment
within the overall development of those modes that determine the perception and
function of art. Which is to say that the movement’s “end” would not by any
means guarantee the survival of its presumed “legacy” in the supposedly broader
context of an indefinitely continuous avant-garde, given that this
latter, being unthinkable as a concept but for the conditions that produced it
and the limits entailed thereby, is also unable to guarantee its necessity in a
world that changes without stifling the desire that still kindles the
surrealist project. Besides, such an “end” cannot be regarded (as was once
suggested) as the inevitable completion of a circle in the overall course of an
“eternal” surrealism, for the sole possible destiny of a gesture that once
collected the existent vibrations into an unprecedented bunch of energies is to
scatter them once and for all upon its suspension, wholly indifferent to
eternity. There are but two choices: either surrealism remains as ready as it
has always been to recognize its end only in a more radical movement, one whose
range surpasses its own; or the choice is formed to reject surrealism’s very
perspectives as “historically irrelevant.” Yet the total resignation, the
immobility of ideas and sensations that would ensue from such a conviction,
would be an inconceivable choice for anyone who has experienced the unceasing
transformation of desire along a thread tracing the outlines of the most
intricate shapes, yet still answering to the same name.
Contrary to what we might believe, should we
trust a convenient (to some) commonplace, surrealism is not an attempt to evade
reality or escape from the everyday; it does not reduce everything to
absurdity, nor does it tend toward the dissolution or fragmentation of all
cognitive objects; it is not inclined to render its heterogeneous attributes
into a static condition of apparent uniformity. It is, on the other hand, a
consistent theory concerned with a fuller view and interpretation of the world.
It represents a particular manner of conceiving, comprehending and negotiating
life’s manifestations, with emphasis on a multitude of underrated or defamed
aspects of the human intellect, in an effort toward the re-composition of the
scattered and alienated human consciousness.
Surrealism is at once an integral way of contemplating and perceiving in
its entire spectrum the nature of what is called life, and a specific stance
toward the phenomena that comprise the world; its foremost aspirations being
the radical change of the viewpoint by which humans regard life and reality, as
well as the highlighting of their multidimensional substance. By demonstrating
an absolute trust in improvised momentary inspirations, in the irresistible
impulse of introspection as of the revocation (by the unconscious) of
suppressed thoughts, desires and emotions, in verbal automatism, linguistic
transport, mental spontaneity and abandonment to the unexpected discoveries of
chance, surrealism incites humans to liberate their intellect from moral
prejudices and social obligations, in order to widen the horizons of their
perceptivity, thereby transforming entirely their living conditions within
their direct social surroundings.
Surrealism aims at a total synthesis of the components and antinomies of
reality, on an equal basis and in a continuous dialectical interaction, through
the unceasing alternation of sovereign and passive roles in all the forms of
their manifestations, as well as through the exposure of obscure and neglected
sectors of the human imaginary and of their pure, undisguised projection upon
the surface of consciousness. As a process, it is a perpetual pursuit of
passages toward fresh mental analogies and unprecedented perspectives, toward a
systematization of the human psyche that would include its so-called irrational
components, without for all that giving rise to the establishment of a
specific “irrational” schema at the epicenter of all actions and outlooks.
Besides, the designation of these components in tandem with a certain so-called
“stabilizing” mechanism that would impose their annihilation or shadowy
survival implies an as-yet unresolved antithesis, that surrealism turns into
potentiality, without ever reducing it to neutral coexistence.
Surrealism urges us to take full advantage of our capacity for
overcoming our inherent contradictions, recognizing the magnetic affinity
of its distinct elements. It denounces our survival within an appearance of
life, as incomplete humans, powerless to face the world, deprived of our
potential for inventing new myths and unsuspecting of the pleasures we do not
dare experience, reluctant to release them from the innermost recesses of our
consciousness, for fear of letting them lead us to places unknown. And yet the
key which opens wide the doors of the surrealist fields lies within each
one of us, and its handling does not require a user’s manual.
Surrealism is not a literary or artistic style
that endeavors to be original or impressive, by virtue of stemming from the
bizarre and the unreal. If it is placed, suspiciously, on the plane of aesthetic
expression, this happens because it locates and reveals, at the very moment
of its birth, that imaginary potential which, outside surrealism, is cut
off from its relation to the psychic and social becoming and conducted into an
alienated and autonomous sector. Yet surrealism is the placement, upon a total
system of values, of the innate human need for the freest possible expression,
outside of social, moral and ideological principles, beyond the suffocating
contexts fixed by the dominant ideology of each given era, in order to impose,
for purely authoritarian reasons, the concept of specific “models” for both
thought and speech, with clearly delineated limits allowed to their expression.
Surrealism invests upon the liberating power of language; it estimates
that, from a particular use of the latter, there may occur a generalized
proposal for self-knowledge by means of the direct and unmasked recording of
impressions, excitements, impulses and desires of all kinds, origins and forms,
by whichever way these may emanate or be drawn into existence; to this end
surrealism utilizes, without exception, all the mental data and abilities
possessed by each person, and which, once traced and recorded, furnish direct
proofs of the existence of self-sufficient realities, wherefrom they have
occurred, or whose expressions they constitute, with no intervention from the
rational process of explication, interpretation, evaluation or justification of
their presence. By this course of self-knowledge, we are capable of reaching a
fresh understanding of the concept and content of human freedom, assigning to
it the most radical meaning possible, and considering it, not as some ideal
projected onto a distant future, but as a perpetual risk, a matter of the
utmost importance, directly felt amidst the signs of everyday experience,
always prepared to be claimed and capable of leading us to a redefinition of
human destiny.
Myth—a
fundamental constant in surrealism—appears here stripped of metaphysical
parameters, without for all that the conditions of the said parameters’
formulation being ignored. Surrealism is fully conscious of the fact that the
desire traversing it has the explosive quality of the permanent invocation of
those antitheses that are inherent in the human condition as it is experienced.
If the human being’s alienation from the world is reflected on the components
of its inner cosmography, surrealism activates revolutionary nostalgia,
the perpetual search for the lost keys that would restore balance, without
resorting to the alibi of expecting an otherworldly abolition of differences.
The surrealist myth is an open one, precisely because it develops, by means of
infinite orientations in the “forest of indices,” a course led by the
drunkenness of potentiality, by derision toward the straight route, and
whose outcome, being uncertain, prolongs the desire of its continuation. And if
the shadow of negativity lurks upon each turn, if the course is scattered with
a laughter whose outline is traced in blood, these are our guarantees that the
road we have selected is far from being the safest.
When, as individual entities, we reach the
point of accepting and correlating immediately and effortlessly the surrealist
manifestations of the perceived phenomena, introducing them in a natural manner
into our everyday lives; when we manage to recognize the value, both of the
unconscious functioning of our individual existence, and of the discoveries of
objective chance, those which kindle desire and conduct it into every single
sector of our activity; then surrealism, as a way of thought and action, may
become an indispensable human experience and carve itself into life, as one
indivisible, absolute and multidimensional reality.
The
study and analysis of dream phenomena, along with the visionary flashes of the
impious imagination, which broaden the perspectives and multiply the
probabilities regarding the practical application of our most profound
desires—but also the inter-subjective communication of lovers, maintained at a
state of pure spontaneity while, in each manifestation of its evolutionary
process, continuing to pursue the marvelous—abolish the boundaries
between distinct beings, as well as between the conceivable and the livable
world, dream and wakefulness, thereby comprising all forms of human thought and
behavior within a unique concept of the world upon its very becoming, whose
every element may at any given moment be transformed into its opposite, die and
be reborn.
Surrealism thus identifies itself with the
ideal function of poetry, which is none other than the human mind’s ability,
when in the state of the maximum possible freedom, to compose a series of
particular or complementary realities, thereby creating, within a single and
indissoluble whole, a total surreality. The condition of surreality is a
feasible possibility of the human substance, one which may be attained when the
mind, liberated from all external constraints, moral obstacles and acquired
prejudices, proceeds to accomplish a synthesis between lived experience and
imaginary invention, between a mythicized past and a future open to the nods of
possibility; between, on the one hand, the non-negotiable individual freedom
and the deepest human desires, and, on the other hand, the society in which one
has been obliged to live—a society founded upon the manipulation of humans and
the restriction of their rights.
Being potential poets, humans are endowed with
the privilege, not only to conceive, but also to conquer the “surreal,” thereby
touching upon a poetic mode of living and creating palpable poetry; one not
limited to the writing of poetic texts, but which, stemming as it does from the
indomitable creative force of the revolted subjectivity, from the individual
will’s unquenchable desire for a life free of bounds, may expand over the space
of a broader spectrum of activities, comprising unconscious impulses, latent
wishes, the investigation of the dream world, the highlighting of the role played
by instincts, the recollection of flights of fancy, the employment of black
humor, the study of erotic passions, the extension of carnal pleasures and the
necessity of practical action toward the transformation of everyday life.
Under the present conditions, surrealism may not necessarily be
understood as a faithful attachment to the letter of whichever historic theses
or declarations of the past; nor is it perceived as the dogmatic employment of
certain “rules” or as the adoption of “behaviors” favored by some of its
representatives, any more than it is a mere reproduction of the methods or
defining characteristics manifested by its representatives at any given time.
It is, rather, an outlook (as uncontrolled by the rationalist brake as
possible) of rupture with the surrounding social conventions and the prevalent
mental conservatism, and of a simultaneous revelation, by every means
available, of our inner world’s obscure aspects, whose degree of uncensored
disclosure is proportionate to our completion as human beings, as they lead us
to the widest attainable mental and thereby social liberation.
Poetry, as a motive power of our aspirations, constitutes a process of
mental feedback, which stems from our inmost individual needs and mirrors each
aspect of our emotional world, thereby violating the limits of the
communicative function of language, transforming the semantics of words and
overcoming the collective stereotypes and social ideologemes of each given era.
Surrealist creators, exercised in mental wakefulness and extended sensory
receptivity, replace the aesthetic criteria of reception and evaluation of
their products with a high degree of self-knowledge, which permits at once the
outward flow, as liberated and uncensored as possible, of their poetic
expressions at any given time, and their immediate recording, free of
restrictions, prohibitions and exclusions. The investigation of all that is
mysterious, apparently paradoxical, ambiguous and enigmatic, defying moral
prejudices and metaphysical pretexts; the search for analogies and
correspondences between the inner facts of the mind and the outer phenomena of
life; these contribute to the exhaustive exploration of all the aspects of our
consciousness, to the abolition of its boundaries and to the struggle against
the obstacles erected by the force of habit.
When facing the prevalent view with respect to the role of art,
whichever form this may assume, we as surrealists avoid all one-dimensional
interpretations of the world; we do not negotiate its phenomena by means of
rationalism; we are radically opposed to the concepts of talent as “gift” and
of inspiration as “god-sent”; we are not after originality and publicity; we
avoid stereotypes and commonplaces, without for all that entertaining delusions
of innovation or pretending to fight amongst the ranks of an avant-garde now
devoid of content; we discourage self-complacency and egocentrism; we do not
wish to cultivate a certain eccentricity of an ornamental type; we do not favor
sensationalism; we do not resort to affectation; we do not allow ourselves to
succumb to mannerism; we are not lenient to ourselves; we do not wish to produce works of art; we are not interested
in literary activity; we do not indulge in the reproduction of cultural palimpsests;
while we feel nothing but contempt for ideologized locality and the
ethnocentric idealizations of the cultural layers pertinent to this or any
other country. We are thus radically opposed to the concept (favored by today’s
establishment) of postmodernism, whereby, in the total absence of subversive
concepts, everything is mingled with everything else, in an abstract fashion,
resisting all assessment and shying away from the merest shadow of a movement
along the direction of human liberation.
Susceptible to an availability based on the
unhindered articulation of desires, employing plastic or written expression
merely as the most suitable media for transmitting the surrealist messages, we
consider our involvement in collective organization, and the consequent
manifestation of our presence as an autonomous surrealist initiative, to be
imperatively essential in clarifying our oppositional stance vis-à-vis
the existing social and cultural environment, while seeking to renegotiate on a
new basis our situation in a world that ignores our deepest needs, thwarts our
inmost desires and suppresses every attempt toward their free expression.
In
the present status quo of mental enervation, social decay and cultural
stagnation, we estimate that the experience of common action and participation
in the surrealist adventure will at the very least fulfill our elementary
aspirations, thereby creating the essential preconditions for a fertile
collective osmosis; one that will permit us to oppose the self-powered
satisfaction of our most profound wishes to the notions of profit and
authority, adopting a series of sensory practices capable of liberating
passions, feeding our will for actual life and capturing the secret pulse of
things, revealing the unnamable and attempting a radical reversal of
perspectives, in order to evade alienation and the lowering of our resistances.
Without denying the value of individual affirmation and the products of
solitary creation, we are well aware that a collective enterprise in the
exercise of surrealist activity, whose unanimous operation is inspired by
confidence in the justness of its aims, may achieve what a single individual,
being prey to assimilation, ignorance and failure, is more or less condemned to
abandon. Our foremost motive regarding the necessity of common action is our
desire to participate in the surrealist experience, risking much more than what
is promised by a sheltered life founded on compromises and disguised
insecurities. By both creating a fertile interpersonal environment, rich in
challenges and incitements, and taking full advantage of the merits entailed by
a vigilant collective intelligence, we may reach a wider-encompassing mental
level allowing us to perceive the world via the most complete possible
synthesis of its components.
Our decision to employ in practice a number of
collective methods to the end of approaching the surrealist ideal constitutes a
conscious attempt to liberate ourselves entirely from the mechanisms of the cultural
establishment and of the institutionalized directions followed by the latter’s
manifestations, imposed and validated either by attachment to tradition and
submission to some sort of mental appeasement, or by the whims of fashion, via
the shameless promotion of trivialities under the guise of masterworks and the
conversion of commonplace, formally facile and ideologically anodyne cultural
products into significant aesthetic artifacts. Thus, in the current
social-mental context, bound by inertia and stagnancy, we perceive ourselves as
cultural/conscientious agitators rather than artists, maintaining our
indefeasible rights of self-definition and self-determination; at the same time
we declare our incompatibility with any “innovative” or so-called modernizing
tendency of some “enlightened” avant-garde appealing to its own
authority in order to persuade of its nonexistent radicalism those unsuspecting
and ignorant, whilst being riddled with evident tendencies of elitism,
pretentiousness and haughty intellectualism.
To
those who, evidently envious and openly hostile, dismiss our overall attitude
and endeavor to depreciate the significance of our undertaking, demanding from
us certificates of authenticity and confirmations of legitimacy, we state boldly
that their opinion leaves us completely indifferent, to the extent that their
discourse is by now devoid of all revolutionary significance, having lost a
long time ago any validity it may once have had. Besides, the importance and
range of our enterprise may be assessed mostly on the basis of the clarity and
precision of our intentions, and validated according to the adequacy of our
arguments.
Instigators of aggressive energy, converts to a mysterious alchemy of
the word and the image, possessors of a disturbing ability to propagate
magic, we develop fully the limpidity of sensual delirium and derive our
inspiration from the sensitive intelligence of children, from the imprudent
madness manifested by the subjects of erotic passions and from the primitiveness
of sexuality revealed in puns, in the metaphorical uses of words, in the
audacious linguistic inventions and the undermining employment of images, which
sow confusion over the geometry of power, without ever ceasing to transmit
simultaneously the contradictory messages of life and of death.
May 2005
Yannis
Alexandropoulos, Makis Chrysostomidis, Dimitris Dimitriadis,
Diamantis
Karavolas, Lena Konstantelou, Tasos Lizos, Sotiris Liontos,
Elias
Melios, Nikos Stabakis, Yorgos Yannopoulos
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