The Wine Glass No Longer Towers Out Of The Sea But Stands On The Table Between Us

Stephen Clark

The Czech poet Vitizslav Nezval once described surrealism as realism. His materialist and pragmatic understanding of the use of poetic juxtaposition, as a way of reinvigorating life, serves as a fiery coordinate on the map of Surrealism.[1] Reaching beyond the formal use of juxtaposition, Nezval emphasised a renewed passion for life, a passion that is at odds with socially enforced habituation. Nezval envisaged the simple poetic disarrangement of juxtaposition as one solution in the desire to reveal the enigma and ecstasy of experiencing. In the language of alchemy, the volatile and the stable exchange places. In the language of surrealism the values of sacred and profane tend to do the same. It is this transgression of the habitual, through black humour and iconoclasm, this opening-up onto a particular scope of imaginative possibility in each instance, which throws new light on the commonplace. The activity of poetic contemplation makes the unuttered and invisible interrelationships between imaginary possibilities and so-called banal or profane things emerge from the abysses of habit. We can call upon the anti-language of poetry, the pregnant shadows and silences steeped in subtle puns and negations that we first sensed in childhood, when we were strangers to the movement of words and images, still learning how to articulate and be articulated.

For surrealists creativity goes beyond the aesthetics of defamiliarisation and becomes a tool used to explore the latency, lacunae and ellipses inherent in how we experience. The daily conditioning and promotion of habitual behaviour, as an extension of the work ethic and routine, has become a way of denying the potential eruption of poetry and inspired social encounter. Habit is perhaps increasingly becoming an enemy of love, of friendship, of possibility and generosity. Habit becomes an artificial continuity. Through slow attrition we lose sight of asserting our own desires and rights and the ability to value our own and others lives. We are encouraged to neglect, to cast into shadow, these ways of relating to the extent of becoming resentful of the social connections in which we find ourselves entangled, as if it is these inconvenient social conditions that must be transcended to ensure a satisfying life. In the absence of any communal, creative transgression of this habituation work has become a relentless contagion to further defer, debilitate and impoverish our lives. We forget how we are interrelated. We become obstacles to each other.

Poetry is a way of relating things through analogy and metaphor, according to subjective sensibility and spontaneous appeals to the unconscious. We must imagine playful methods of disorientation that encourage revelations, insights that arise from the dialectic flashes that pass between subject and object. By systematically applying these creative methods to our experience of daily phenomena we can supplant established habits and return to our senses anew. This emphasis on raw, immediate sensory experience suggests a useful dialectical opposition to ideological and theoretical a priori notions of both transcendence and immanence. In questioning the mythology of hermeticism, of all religious, magical, occult or sacred metaphors, in returning to the freedom of the moment, a challenge can be made against all religious and ideological impediments which can blind us from a simple desire to look to others in the inspiration of community, of discovering, playing and making meaning with others. At the heart of this potential creative-communal experience lies a struggle to free oneself from a dangerous mesmerism by the ideologies of deferral and oppressive legacies of dogma. In other words, when in search of a modern mythology, all the uses of myth must be questioned. The wine glass no longer towers out of the sea but stands on the table between us, within reach.

Today surrealists continue to speak about the problematic nature of art to some extent, often seeing it as a reflection of the creative, intellectual and moral poverty and disassociation that exists in the cultural mainstream and artistic establishment; if art is not elitist then it is entertainment or attempts to be both. All that matters is that it delivers a profit and consolidates a brand name. In broad terms surrealists remain preoccupied with the relationship between the results of expression and ways of understanding and showing them. If art has significance for surrealists then it perhaps lies in the well-acknowledged dynamic of re-enchantment. Distinctions demand to be made. A critical playfulness is of course integral to surrealist creativity; surrealist processes arent concerned with worshiping the static light found in a particular sign or image, or a particular way of reaching that sign. If it can be concisely characterised surrealist creativity is a collective exploration of the transformation of experience and expression. The old, nomadic stirrings of the spirit strain at the stasis of modern living. The imagination longs to move on. Some surrealists still maintain that they have little interest in art at all, yet for other surrealists art must seek to return to its mythological currents. Far from being anti-art then, surrealists are partly concerned with arts rehabilitation in a kind of renaissance yet without canonical sanctification or justification. The significance that the surrealist finds in the use of creative expression and the value that the British critic finds in art are entirely divergent. Surrealism however, will always be historically associated with this artistic question, with avant-gardism, to some extent, even when art and its historical concerns are perhaps, one day, categorically abandoned by surrealists for an emphasis on a more egalitarian expressiveness, closer to notions of craft rather than the hierarchical grandiosity of an historically-aware artistic gesture.

Art today tends only to perpetuate a value-system that welcomes innovation within certain highly predetermined constraints, including what has come to be known as the shock of the new. Dissent will never arise effectively from that quarter nor should it be expected to. Revolt in art today is so easily usurped and appropriated. Its history can be so easily called upon in a functional way, as a proof of so-called civilised refinement. The potential exists far from such preoccupations in a search for collective expression that has a separate value-system, is itself an organic, self-sufficient way of living poetically. A community centre would seem a more appropriate home for an exhibition, manifestation or revelation of surrealist community than a gallery.

Surrealist creativity is both an attempt to embody and encourage a freedom of interpretation in its most immediate, experiential sense and a search for methods of communing through creative expression. To find ways in which to communicate this freedom in the space where words often fail, to consolidate and inspire interrelationships, bridging the gap between differences with primal gestures. Poetry could be lived by all.

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[1] Logically the glass belongs to the table, the star to the sky, the door to the staircase.