We are not artists and have no interest in art markets or in the art-world career paths that are often, in their miserable conformism and conservatism, barely distinguishable from those of accountants, solicitors, managers, entrepreneurs, etc., and their self-promotional social networking, their competitiveness, their curricula vitae. Neither do we have any trust in so-called ‘politically engaged art’, nor its twin, ‘anti-art’ (sometimes masquerading as ‘post-art’), which, despite the pseudo-theoretical objections of its hapless practitioners, has no less a symbiotic relationship with the political and economic élite as its more openly capitalist counter-part.

However, individually and collectively, we create things (and situations) that sometimes very closely resemble ‘art works’ to the point that they converge and might even be considered as such. Indeed, taking into account the risk of mistaken identities, and accusations of flagrant self-contradiction, we are nonetheless prepared to make use of art galleries and exhibitions whenever it suits our purposes of communicating surrealist evidence. We remain indifferent as to whether what we produce (more often than not by-products of a surrealist activity or investigation) is considered as ‘art’ or not; this is really of no concern to us – philosophically, aesthetically, morally, or otherwise – and we feel no requirement to provide any justification, explanation or contextualisation.

LEEDS SURREALIST GROUP

Gareth Brown, Kenneth Cox, Jan Drabble, Bill Howe, Josie Malinowski, Sarah Metcalf, Peter Overton, Mike Peters, Martin Trippett

30^th April 2013

AN UPSURGE OF DREAMS IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE

How could we not be suddenly compelled to take to the streets, possessed by the spontaneity of the imagination’s most vital weapons, to gather with strangers against an outrage amongst many outrages, against the intermingling of blood and oil, against the murderers who would wear our faces?

How could we not become intoxicated by the forests of banners gathering in the twilight hour, the cherubim with megaphones, the noise, marionettes, humour, elation; blocking the crossroads of a life that many would prefer to go blindly on as if nothing had happened?

How could we not become addicted to dream’s certainty over the habitual apathy of spectating?

How could we not become part of a dream into which we were drawn from moral necessity, to leave our computer screens or let our pencils drop to the ground, wander freely from our open prisons, and walk out into the middle of the road, facing the oncoming traffic and lines of police horses, to partake in the imagination’s palpable insurgency?

How could we not participate in the making of a sudden breach, until all at once the everyday flowered with innumerable incidents, chance encounters multiplying like snowflakes until everything looked new, marvellous, filled with wonder? In an upsurge of dream, mundane life became transformed, momentarily revealing an experience of what can be, enabling us to understand social space poetically and politically.

How could we not turn into pallbearers on a last slow march around a familiar and well-worn path, witnesses to that moment at the very end when everything became quiet, no voices raised in protest, but only an outrage of silence? A moment when we remembered that it is still possible to make the world other than it is.

How could such a dream not remind you that the future can be made in dreams and that the present so often confirms past dishonesties?

There is no price to be paid for this dream.

The world has already seen too many crusades.

Bill Howe & Kenneth Cox

(written in 2003 and first published in Manticore/Surrealist Communication, No.7, 2004)

 For further information: www.leedsartbookfair.com

featuring L’Invention du monde and other short films by Michel Zimbacca from the forthcoming English DVD release by Choses Vues

at the Star & Shadow Cinema in Newcastle Upon Tyne at 7:30pm on Thursday, 18th October 2012

 For further information: www.hotbedpress.org

Further information on the bookfair can be found at Sheffield Anarchist Bookfair

Further information on the book fair and other Ante events can be found here.

 For further information: www.leedsartbookfair.com

From the OTHER AIR catalogue:

OTHER AIR

“Close your eyes and open the window.”

This retrospective exhibition, OTHER AIR (1990-2011), presented from the 10th February to the 4th April 2012 in The Old Town Hall in Prague, spontaneously observes a certain time pattern: since it was exactly twenty years ago that the exhibition THE THIRD ARK of the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovkia took place in Prague’s Mánes gallery which, at that time, mapped the whole previous twenty years of the group’s activities (1970-1991). The constituent turning point for collective presentation was represented by the exhibition, with international participation, SACRILEGE – THE MARVELOUS AGAINST THE SACRED, held at the Salm Palace in Prague in 1999. The present-day Group of Czech-Slovak Surrealists now has a modified and enlarged make-up of individuals. Due to the circumstances after 1989, the group was able to emerge from underground publication and open up their activities to the public sphere. They now collaborate with individuals from France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Romania, Greece, USA and other countries, whose creative work, also presented in this exhibition, confirms the international dimension of surrealist activities. So much for the fragment of history. Let us say, here and now that this other air is a desirable element, or even an element indispensable to man. This exhibition attempts to map the aerial currents and open, perhaps more and more effectively, these living, breathing air holes – windows that are always, again and again, being closed in vain.