Peculiar Mormyrid No.5

Leeds Surrealist Group contributed a collage game, creating two ‘masks’ using maps of the centre of our city, for the fifth issue of the journal, Peculiar Mormyrid:

A pdf of the journal can be found here.

Peculiar Mormyrid No.4

Leeds Surrealist Group contributed a collage game, creating six imaginary sea creatures, for the fourth issue of the journal, Peculiar Mormyrid.

A pdf of the journal can be found here.

Waterloo & Elsewhere

Waterloo & Elsewhere by Peter Overton

A collection of photographs with accompanying captions that build into a verbal-visual poem. With 34 full-colour and 2 black-and-white plates printed on Chorus Lux Silk paper, and an introduction by Krzysztof Fijalkowski.

‘Peter Overton’s images of abandoned objects belong in a tradition of the documentation of detritus and material affray running from Atget’s pictures of early twentieth-century rag pickers in the zone on the outskirts of Paris, through the work of Czech photographers such as Emila Medková and Alois Nožička exploring waste grounds and marginal sites.’ – from the introduction, Down Is Up, by Krzysztof Fijalkowski.

In a limited edition of 100 numbered copies only.

42 pages – 17cm x 17cm square format – November 2015 – ISBN 978-1-906238-03-2

Price including postage & packing:
UK £8.00
Europe £10.50
USA & Rest of the World £11.00

Buy online at www.surrealisteditions.co.uk

The Little Shop of Magic – 116 Gallery

Members of Leeds Surrealist Group are participating in the exhibition ‘The Little Shop of Magic’, organised by Wedgwood Steventon, in Gallery 116, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire

The Baltic Artists’ Book Market – July 2015

LEEDS SURREALIST GROUP will have a Surrealist Editions table at the Artists’ Book Market on Friday 10th & Saturday 11th July at The Baltic, Gateshead.

For further information see The Baltic

Mike Peters

Mike Peters 1947 – 2015

We are very sad to have to report the loss of our friend and comrade, Mike Peters, who died of heart failure on the morning of Wednesday, 3^rd June. Mike had been a member of the Leeds Surrealist Group since 2005, but a long-time conspirator and fellow traveller before then; indeed, since our group was formed in 1994. Some of us knew him as an editor of and contributor to the influential Here & Now magazine; others as students at the institution in whose side he had been a thorn; and still others simply as a welcome critical presence in the political life of those radical milieus growing up outside Socialist or Anarchist orthodoxies.

A man whose creativity was rarely burdened by convention, Mike could always be relied upon to approach Surrealism as something grounded as much in humour as in poetic and intellectual enquiry. Indeed, despite occasionally doing battle with his own black dogs, he was the most stridently anti-miserablist of us all.

For a couple of years after joining the group, Mike would complain that he was unable to encounter ‘found objects’. One day, for reasons never elaborated, the dam burst and our meetings became coves where vast quantities of flotsam would collect after drifting in on Mike’s tide. Many of these objects would result in fascinating processes of collective enquiry, whilst others would exert a glamour upon him so mysteriously subjective that it would be almost impossible for the rest of us to penetrate. It is pleasing to think of the mixture of pride and child-like wonder that characterised him in this period, and the particular joyous and very honest vulnerability that Mike would bring to the group, challenging the rest of us to meet it. Yet, even in the context of such generosity, we all of us should have liked decades more in which to further appreciate the complex aggregation of compulsions, desires, plans, and peccadilloes of which our friend was composed.

What Will Be – Ce Qui Sera – Lo Que Será

With contributions from members of Leeds Surrealist Group, What Will Be, a 528-page almanac of the international surrealist movement is now available from Lulu here.

Published by Brumes Blondes in the Netherlands and edited by Her De Vries and Laurens Vancrevel, it contains essays, poems, texts & images, from  over 170 contributors from 25 countries, in English, French  & Spanish, as well as a chronology of the last 50 years of surrealism, 1964-2014.

Artist Statement

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

Ten Years On

In the build up to the invasion of Iraq, on the back of outrageous lies about weapons of mass destruction, we were promised shock and awe, to be followed by the liberation of a people. In the end, we got the London bombings, Wootton Bassett and the proliferation of jingoist militarism, and, above all else, the unimaginable numbers of Iraqi dead, wounded and displaced.
 
On the day that Iraq was invaded – Thursday, 20^th March, 2003 – together with thousands of others, we walked out of our workplaces in protest and took to the streets of our city.
 
For a very brief moment we felt the certainty of our collective convictions, permitting us to step outside ourselves, discard our ordinary lives, and turn the world upside down. We marched to lose the feeling of powerlessness and out of a conviction that the only course of action left was dissent.
 
As the obfuscation from the corporate media is perpetuated in what laughably passes for analysis in their ‘ten years on’ retrospectives, we thought it timely to reprint a short text of ours from that time.
 
There is no satisfaction in being able to say, ‘We told you so.’

Papers of Surrealism – Jan Švankmajer’s Response

To the Editors of ‘Papers of Surrealism’- online Journal 

I have recently had the opportunity to read the text: Querying Surrealism/Queering Surrealism (Sixth Biennial Symposium: Surrealism Laid Bare, West Dean, Chichester, United Kingdom, 18 – 20 June 2010), in which, it would appear, there is a complaint concerning the reason for my decision to decline the invitation to attend the symposium at West Dean:

“The claim that the organisers of the symposium misunderstand surrealism is, however, highly problematic. It suggests not simply that one group of people have a better understanding of surrealism, but that one group of people are in position to judge who understands surrealism better.” 

Despite this, there was never any assertion or indication that one or another group has a patent on the understanding of surrealism.

Instead, what was said, literally, was that it is good enough to study the source material instead of pursuing ignorance and a certain chicanery as to the facts. Therefore, it is not the case of putting one opinion above another, but rather the difference between knowledge and ignorance of the surrealist point of departure – which is objectively the same for everyone who opens their eyes.

The only reason for my responsible decision to decline the invitation to attend at West Dean was the detection, (just in time), that the West Dean symposium had – in this sense – its eyes wide shut.

Please see the attachment, in which this case was already objectively expounded in July 2010 and which, so I was informed, had previously been circulated to all the participants at the West Dean Conference.

Yours faithfully,

Jan Švankmajer.

Prague, September 21st.2011

(The review-article Querying Surrealism/Queering Surrealism to which Jan Švankmajer is responding can be found here. The attachment to which Švankmajer refers is the Staňkov Report.)