Paul Cowdell
This Happens To Be Now
Surrealism has existed longer since the death of André Breton than it had before it.
Surrealism’s first 42 years were a line of development – not a positivist, upward, predictable route, but an engaged, adaptive, complicated attempt to Surrealise the world, an attempt that responded and reacted to whatever it encountered. The next 50 years did the same, dealing also with the added disorienting factor that we had lost a groundbreaking, innovative and resolute Surrealist thinker.
Not gods, not masters. Forebears, precedents, inspirations.
We are where we are because of that past.
Where we go develops from it, not as hagiography or abandonment of the past, but as an engaged, adaptive attempt to Surrealise the world, one that will respond and react to whatever we encounter, no matter how complicated.
The world still needs to be Surrealised.
