PCM

“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.”

Now Andre’s not saying go and do just that, the act represents the subconscious mind, the juxtaposing of ideas, the creation of fantastic imagery to aid creativity. Surrealism sought to disperse the 'rationalism' that created World War 1, the rational belief that reason and logic are the primary sources of knowledge that should be relied upon in searching for and testing the truth of things. Surrealism offered an alternative to rationalism; it shaped the future and continues to shape creativity to this day. The Dada movement was similarly nihilistic; rejecting established social conventions and beliefs sharing Surrealism’s bitterness towards militarism and WW1. Like the Surrealist manifesto, Dada had Salvador Dali’s, paranoid critical method, which served the artificial reproduction of a paranoiacs view on the world, seeing the world in a new light, creating unsuspecting connections, analogies and patterns. 

“Paranoid-Critical Method is both the product of and the remedy against that anxiety: it promises that, through conceptual recycling, the worn, consumed contents of the world can be recharged or enriched like uranium, and that ever-new generations of false facts and fabricated evidences can be generated simply through the act of interpretation.”

Similar to Surrealism the Paranoid-Critical Method proposes to destroy, what we already think we know, to re-classify everything, to make a fresh start, 

“like banging a piece into a jigsaw puzzle so that it sticks, if not fits.”

The Surrealist Manifesto and the Paranoid-Critical Method made undoubtedly changed future creativity, today there is no great war, no great depression, we live in an age of meaningless consumerism, a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, paranoia and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more, an unsustainable addiction to economic growth. Where is our liberator, constructing future creativity?