SURREALISM HERE AND NOW!:
Inaugural Declaration of the Surrealist Group in Sweden, 1986

SURREALISM HERE AND NOW!

 

We surrealists are breathing rapturous self-confidence and violation of duty through our pores! Rapturous self-confidence because we surrealists, "specialists in revolt" in 1986 as in 1925, know with whom and how we can communicate freely, without the burden of the usual depressing concessions, and because we know the tremendous potential we and our allies possess:

* The international working class, as great rearrangers, through socialist revolution and the establishment of workers' power, will make possible a world without classes, in which the realm of necessity will be replaced by the realm of Freedom;

* "Primitive" and colonized peoples, bearers of great and proud traditions, possessors of time-honored secrets, dazzling pockets of resistance against an ever more monstrous economic, political and cultural oppression;

* Children, closest to all true life, who know the occult powers of play;

*  The "insane," almost as skillful as children in creating other realities;

* All those who tirelessly continue asking the most inconvenient questions, who persist in hurling the most scandalous challenges, who refuse to accept the existing "state of affairs" and who live poetry in action.

Rapturous self-confidence because we also know that only we surrealists constitute, as Andre Masson put it, "a collective experience of individualism," and, according to Andre Breton, "an enterprise which mysteriously exceeds its numerical energies." This situates surrealism both in the great tradition of Secret Societies, and in the future, as the key to the hopeless contradiction between individual and collective, thereby strengthening its striking power.

Rapturous self-confidence because surrealism, as the most emancipatory movement existing today, can be surpassed only by more surrealism, and because we derive our poetry from a tomorrow full of promise that will form the dialectical negation of the abominable present, and because we are conscious that objective chance is driving us, creating sparkling connections and thrilling adventures, revealing implications whose full meaning becomes clear only when placed in the right psychic context. We are exploring the whole of reality psychoanalytically as well as with analogical/dialectical methods, motivated by antimiserabilist paranoia and desire for the Marvelous.

Violation of duty because we — here and now — intend to administer, expand and strengthen surrealism's subversive intentions in all fields that we find suitable:

* Against present-day class society and its agents — the treacherous social-democratic apparatus in the first place — we affirm the need for a revolutionary socialist international capable of leading the working class and its allies to final victory.

* Against all forms of dominant paternalism, we urge children and women, and all the oppressed, to revolt — and to affirm Eros and laziness against the Performance Principle.

* Against narrowminded bourgeois rationalism and the disgusting fetishes of utilitarianism, surrealism intervenes with the help of revelations of the unconscious, upholding the forces of desire, the acid effect of black humor, mad love and true poetry.

* Against the petty fiction of realism, we defend the naked truth of dreams, the surpassing reality of the Marvelous.

* Against eclecticism and confusion, surrealists strive to determine that "point in the mind" praised in the Second Surrealist Manifesto of 1929, where the contradictions between objective and subjective, dream and action, duty and lust, materialism and idealism, etc., are no longer perceived as contradictions, and where the storm-winds of freedom and exaltation rule unrestrained.

* Against the more and more intolerable miserabilism (the growing "accumulation of misery" that Marx discussed), and against the oppressive myths of western civilization — Fatherland, God, Money, Boss, Family, Work, Art, Kindness, etc., and their Swedish variations — surrealists actively participate in the elaboration of a collective myth of total libera­tion that will function as a true ignition for the imagination, and as an enthusiasm-provoking stimulant — of a transitional character — for the generalization of the Marvelous, the permanent revolution of everyday life and the dictatorship of the imagination.

In opposition to all academic, artistic, retrospective and other revisionist "surrealists," we still maintain Marx's "merciless criticism of everything in existence," and Fourier's method of absolute divergence.

We hereby announce the founding of the first Surrealist Group in Sweden . Together with surrealists in several other countries, and most especially with our comrades in Chicago, we shall actively participate in the reconstruction of the Surrealist International.

In the immediate future we shall initiate a propaganda activity for surrealist subversion, define our standpoints and principles in greater detail, and present an account of our research in the form of a journal. But not only that.

 

The Surrealist Group Midsummer 1986

Johannes BERGMARK, M. FORSHAGE, Bruno JACOBS, Petra MANDAL, H. Christian WERNER, Tomas WERNER

SURREALISM I SVERIGE

 

Trots olika individuella kontakter med den surrealistiska rörelsen under tidigare årtionden (Max Walter Svanberg, Gösta Kriland, Halmstadsgruppen m.fl.) och även olika typer av utställningar av surrealistiska målningar i Sverige (bland annat i Stockholm 1970), har in­gen egentlig organiserad surrealistisk verksamhet fun nits i det här landet hi tt ills. Det är vad vi har bestämt oss för a tt starta efter utgivningen av Surrealism! 1984, en broschyr som innehåller översatta texter av den surrealistiska rörelsen i USA och av gruppen i Australien.

I samb an d med bildandet av den första surrealistgruppen i Sverige i midsomras publicerade vi en första inledande deklaration, Surrealism här och nu!, som har distribuerats till surrealister i flera andra länder och till vänner och andra personer i Sverige som tidigare samarbetat med den surrealistiska rörelsen.

De gångna månaderna har varit en hektisk tid av interna aktiviteter och förberedelser. Vi har först och främst velat relatera oss som g ru pp och som individer dels till surrealismen i sin helhet, och dels i forhållande till den svenska miserabilismen, d.v.s. till de viktigaste särdragen (politiskt, kulturellt, ideologiskt) av det svenska klassamhället. Utöver en mängd diskussioner, experiment av olika slag och naturligtvis lekar, har mycket tid ägnats åt att upptäcka olika aspekter av surrealismen, vilket också resulterat i att en hel del texter översatts till svenska för första gången i väntan på publicering. Vi har påbörjat en preliminär kartläggning av svenska fö re gånga re och av inhemska utt ry ck som ligger nära surrealismen. A ll t detta, liksom individue ll a bidrag av olika slag (till exempel texterna "Barn som leker med sina könsorgan"; "Tidens guld"; "De nya hjältarn as plats på kartan"; "Inn an orgasm i Lejonlandet"; "Min törst efter en kyss är oslickbar"; "Metkrokar i djupet" m.fl.) har publicerats i hi tt ills nio interna bulletiner.

Det enda riktigt utåtriktade ingripandet under denna medvetet interna tid har varit spridningen av ett litet flygblad, Dygdens besvärligheter, mot den våg av nationell enhetsyra som följde mordet på Olof Palme och som också innebär att surrealistgruppen blev en av de ytterst få tendenser som öppet fördomde detta hyckleri.

Proklamerandet av surrealistgruppen i midsomras sammanträffar med en vändpunkt i gruppens utveckling som med all säkerhet kommer att innebära ett språng framöver för oss som ett resultat av en större kollektiv slagkraft och utåtriktad verksamhet parallellt med en fördjupning av var och ens individuella dynamik.

Flera stör re p ro jekt år under förberedelse. Det gäller först och främst vår komm an de tidsk ri ft. Vi har också börjat diskutera en eventue ll utställning liksom dess funktion i forhållande till situationen här.

I den allra närmaste framtid ko mm er vi a tt inleda e tt samarbete med en organisation ti ll f ö rsvar av "primitiva" folkslag, Fjärde Världen, som vi anser vara mycket intressant i flera avseenden, inte minst vad gäller dess k ri tik av den västerländska civilisationen och av den svenska impe ri alismen. Vi hoppas kunna koppla detta med vår avsikt a tt publicera e tt flygblad riktat till barnen som skulle fokusera på försva re t av leken och av inbillningskraften. De tt a är bara två möjliga konkretiseringar av våra diskussioner kring utarbet an det av den surrealistiska myten av frigö re lse gentemot den härsk an de lögnen och fö rv irringen.

En svensk upplaga av boken André Breton och surrealismens grundprinciper är också på väg.

Vi har börjat kasta glas i stenhuset!
Surrealismen är här för att stanna!

 

Bruno JACOBS, Petra MANDAL, Tomas WERNER

Surrealism in Sweden

 

Despite individual contacts with the surrealist move­ment during earlier decades (Max Walter Svanberg, Gösta Kriland, the Halmstad Group and others), and even various exhibitions of surrealist painting in Sweden (among others, in Stockholm, 1970), no real organized surrealist activity has existed in this country so far. That is what we have decided to initiate, following the publica­ tion, by one of us in 1984, of the pamphlet, Surrealism!, containing translations of texts of the Surrealist Move­ment in the U.S. and of the group in Australia.

In connection with the founding of the first Surrealist Group in Sweden this midsummer, we published a preliminary declaration, Surrealism Here and Now! , that has been distributed to surrealists in several countries as well as to friends and other individuals in Sweden who have been cooperating with the surrealist movement.

The past months have been a hectic period of internal activities and preparations. First of all we have wanted to define our position, as a group and as individuals, regarding the whole of surrealism, on the one hand, and Swedish miserabilism — i.e., the most important features (political, cultural, ideological) of Swedish class society — on the other. Besides a lot of discussions, experiments of all kinds and of course games, much time has been devoted to discovering different aspects of surrealism. This has also led to the translation, for the first time into Swedish, of many texts now awaiting publication. We have started a preliminary reconnaissance of Swedish precursors and of indigenous manifestations close to surrealism. All this, as well as individual con­tributions of different kinds (for example, the texts "Children Playing with Their Genitals," "The Gold of Time," "The New Heroes' Place on the Map," "Before Orgasm in Lion Country," "My Thirst After a Kiss is Unlickable," "Fishing Hooks in the Deep," etc.), has appeared in nine internal bulletins so far.

Our only public intervention during this consciously internal period has been the distribution of a small tract, The Misfortunes of Virtue, against the wave of "national unity" hysteria that followed the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme. This tract placed the Surrealist Group among the very few currents that openly condemned that hypocrisy.

Our proclamation of the founding of the Surrealist Group in Sweden this midsummer coincides with a turning point in the development of the group that will surely lead to a leap forward for us, as a result of greater collective effectiveness and public activity together with a deepening of each of our individual dynamics. Several bigger projects are in preparation: first of all our planned journal. We have also begun to discuss an eventual exhibition as well as its specific function in regard to the situation here.

In the near future we shall start collaborating with an organization for the defense of "primitive" peoples, the Fourth World , that we find very interesting in several regards, not least for its criticism of western civilization and of Swedish imperialism. We hope to connect this to our intention to issue a leaflet for children focused on the defense of play and of the imagination. These are only two possible concretizations of our discussions around the elaboration of the liberating myth of surrealism against the ruling lies and confusion.

A Swedish edition of the book, André Breton and the First Principles of Surrealism, is under way.

We have started throwing glass in the stone house!
Surrealism is here to stay!

Bruno JACOBS, Petra MANDAL, Tomas WERNER