“The street, which I believed could offer my life its surprising detours, the street with its uneasiness and its glances, was my true element; there as nowhere else I caught the breath of the possible.” – André Breton
The time has come to stop pretending Medium isn’t actually the Message. Haven’t you felt it? Intuited its vast yet wholly invisible form? That vicious, marvel-dampening field which our modern mediumistic devils cast over our spirits? Webcaught, are we. Webcaught. Becoming pack animal, becoming farmdonkey. Mere slaves of Metaverse Cyber-perverse, those angelic dental technicians dragging zeros, dragging ones. Mere pawn in a thousand and 1 museumification dream-schemes, bodies languishing inside of their academonic nightmares. Been pulling out all our vampiric surteeth, haven’t they. Or filing them all down, into thinbaby almost-nothing. Dracula, thou art defanged. Dracula, managing not even 1 microbite ‘longside Capital’s barest beckoning shoulder. Our chosen mediums, planning clandestine convulsivity-castration for us, egged on by our own selfish, unsavage hands. Hands gone too soft, skins sopping in Wet. Slime hands, have we now? Alldrizzled with antibacterials, with double agents!? Yuk, yuk…yukky.
To lobotomize one’s newest-born surrobject, merely for the sake of a larger audience? A wider reach? Bad move, garbage move. We all know (don’t we?) that quality will always surpasses quantity, when it comes to the surrealist encounter. The surrealist rift. If the encounter itself is not convulsive–if everything which makes up the surrounding Medium-body [aka the eggshell] conspires to suck out and to flatten our SurrMessage’s [aka our yolk’s] truest spirit, well, then we lose. We are lost. And these days, it seems our chosen mediums, they always function in this way. A betrayal of surrealist purpose, encoded inside of its every casual use? Our surrealist barbs, becoming instead merest breadcrumb? Merest niblet, food for silicon valley’s doggyish algorithm…? A turdpebble to line some bitter academic’s slug-filled pocket…? Mere commodity creations, traded without joy? Our surrealist barb, become an empty sign…become a dollar sign?
Ah, but where (pray tell me) is a medium that we besieged surrealists can actually trust? Where (pray tell me) can we surrealists lay down our convulsive encounter-traps free of all compromise? And then, catch ourselves an uncircumcised arctic mouse, or perhaps, maybe even two? Well, my dear friend, I have enjoyed just one such a medium, of late. And this little medium is called–THE STREET. Yes! For all those dirty crosswalks, for all those silverfat electrical boxes, yes, for them O yes for them do I now do I quite happily, quite stubbornly, Surr-proselytize…
A surrealist saboteur never receives permission to use this particular medium, you see. And this, of course, is a large part of its strength. No social media account sign up for, no desperate appeal to the artworld gatekeepers. Yes, to use this particular medium is to microdose crime. Revolt, modest though it may often be, remains encoded inside of its very DNA. And? The kind of surrealist encounter which it propagates is freely shared, is freely given. One charges no admission to this ride, one asks for nothing at all in return. Ideally, one does not even sign it, claim it. Naturally, some people attempt to highjack this medium in order to nudge passerbys to make somekindof purchase, to like or subscribe…but these are pretenders, sad anti-earthquakes. Because mystery and anonymity remain at the core of this medium, too. We aren’t interested in guiding your hand. No. What we are instead interested in is creating Escape. In spitting black holes out onto sidewalks, slicing quickly on that fleshy thin wall called “The Present Moment.” Letting Revolution leak herself out, and through. Play hovers at this medium’s core too, undoubtedly. Every trek outside, made suddenly into a game. That childish excitement one often feels on tagging some new sign, on sticking one’s own poetryshard far up, up there in that one weird and really hard to reach place…foiling all the unseen sticker removal squads. While playing this game, my two little legs will take me quite far, will drift me quite wide. Yes, in the process of playing this game, I discover countless new areas of my city, too. And I begin, finally, to truly understand it, to love its twists and its turns. My urban environment, transformed utterly by Play. And so? I trickle onwards upwards…I continue casting my square ephemeral pearls, and casting Time outside Time. Look here. An old friend (fella by the name of Heraclitus) once told me “nature loves to hide.” Well, and so does Surrealism. Both surrealism and nature are “street artists.” Don’t ya know it?
Planning to jump ship with me then, eh? Come on in kid, waters fiiiiiiiiiine. Ha, but don’t be fooled by Aesthetic’s self-important swagger. No experience is necessary here, no mastery required. Just grab some cheap white poster board, and a big black can of paint. Just paint yerself some fresh automatist prophetics on 18×24 inch paper, yeah and paint it real sloppy kid, and paint it real real bad. Embrace your own natural oddities of expression, try reverting to childhood for once, let yerself go wild. And then? Slap that newly-epileptic mind-thang high up on some local street corner, and just wow! Look at those results…Shit, hot goose ‘n gravy…Unsuspecting Public, mainlining mad revolt pebbles from straight out tha belly of your own diseased surrhead now. Yea, its a direct line from tha mouth of thy automatic muse, to the bloodstream of the UnknownAnother. We’ve all had enough of prettypretty pictures, don’t ya think? Yea, methinks what this sad ol’ world needs now is a fastpleasurable slap in its face instead, or an earthquake. And I actually believe that the surrthing which bleeds all over us the most…the surrthing which really ruins our white clothes…is one most untouched by art’s oversanctified rules, by Spectacle’s tricks and his games. So burn that aesthetic rulebook ok, so toss it far away. It’ll respawn in time, of course, always does. But just keep it burning, dear friend. Keep it guessing. Don’t ever let that devious aesthetic rulebook crown itself god before you, or father or king. Lord knows, it sure as hell wants to. Give it too much leeway, it’ll soon be calling all the shots.
Lastly-why would we want all our precious encounter-traps to bw biting only on the feet of our way-overknown neighbors (and even close comrades) anyway? More shining excrement to quietly lay at the banks of our incestuous social media watering holes? More dulled stones for the jaded art-bougie tribe, more stinking cultural compost for those shifteyed academonoids? No, nah. A true stranger is the audience that I crave. An utter stranger, yes. This is Surrealism’s current craving. For, If I myself give birth to some fat and juicy surregg, well, then I’ll want of course for this surregg to find itself a very healthy new mate. One utterly unknown to me, quite far removed from my own clan. Would I want for myself merely an inbred line of faded surrshard, allrippling alldripping in sad backwoods birth defects? In dead ends? No good sir, no. My surr-arrow longs for that most unfamiliar of muffs. Longs for Fresh New Eye, landing on mine own automatic muse, and her spectral expectorations. For the Eye ever-unmet, the Eye never-to-meet-at-all. So let us send out our translucent ripple inside countries unseen by any of us. Among lands unmapped and unguessed. And gust who (pray tell me) shall pass by this newly-installed shard of mine in future? Just an Anyone, just an Anything. Just an Anywho, or [possiblymaybe] a Whatever. Very dangerous, you tell me, these roadside liaisons? Massive risks of mental STDs, of acephalic flus? Hmm, maybe so, maybe so. But for this stubborn asphalt trickster, there remains no better way. Nope, none better.
Yes, a Surrealist Spark is a very violent treasure to be had. And it is a gift best given at a time when Recipient least suspects its obvious, most inescapable arrival. Under conditions such as these, Spark is most likely to transform Spark’s self into phoenix, into flame. Into, perhaps, that unstoppable most city-ending flame…called Revolution.
