Nadja, Andre Breton - 1928
One of the courses I am taking, this last semester of my undergraduate career, is titled Modernity & the Avant Garde, and it is one of the most interesting and powerful subjects I’ve studied so far. We began with Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen (1869) and “The Painter of Modern Life”. Moving into the 20th century, we skipped over Dadaism and took up the heavy task of understanding the motivations and inspirations of the Surrealist movement. Moving from Baudelaire’s modernism to 2oth century surrealism was not much of a jump because the 19th century French poet shared much of the same aesthetic appreciation for that which is not traditionally understood as aesthetic. (Aesthetic was used by Enlightenment Philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, to describe “the science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception.”) The modernist movement that Baudelaire pioneered found beauty in the things that most people found repulsive, vulgar, and even demonic. The surrealists, such as André Breton, took that definition of beauty and art to explosive new heights. Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, in all of its chaotic order, revealed the motives driving artists living in Europe after the first world war. After reading his novel (?), Nadja, the class was instructed to write our own manifesto based on what we read and our own vision of the modern world. I titled my short essay, The Unreal Manifesto. So, take a look by following the jump, and tell me where I’m wrong, right, or just bat-shit crazy.
The Unreal Manifesto, 2010
The course of human events, complete with political, economic,and technological innovation, has brought humanity no further than its own destruction. In the infancy of the 21st century, nations as they stand now are just as willing to destroy each other as they were two millennia ago. It is time for a new modernism to take hold, one that rejects the defeatism of cynical people whose entire consciousness have been are utterly stolen through commercialistic development; one that affirms the possibility of providing a more equitable existence that finally opens art and beauty up for those who have never or could ever know it. To release art, and so too beauty, from its confines in the gravesites we know as museums and watch roam free among the poorest, filthiest, most downtrodden corners of the darkened earth because that is where the beauty of human survival and life determined to resist being shut out are most abundant. The goal of every artist and student of beauty is to reject their political, religious, economic, and even academic bondage for the many different truths the world of difference has to offer. It is time for the unreal, the parts of our world that we could never possibly imagine to exist be brought out into life. The unreal is by necessity that which has refused to be killed; those women (and by women I mean young girls, children) who are shipped like most inanimate cargo across thousands of miles of ocean to arrive in a distant shore and be sold into slavery, in the 21st century, only to escape and build a life of her own; the unreal are the tribes who, after thousands of years of being able to avoid so-called civilization are now taking full page ads out in the New York Times to save their indigenous, untouched by industry way of life. The unreal is and are those things that our five hundred years of education and documentation have told us should not exist in the so-called modern day. To be beautiful in the 21st century, to be worthy of artist reverence, the artist must be able to take the worst of our advanced abilities, to reveal the unreal, in one’s creation so that all those who look at it can see the destruction our progress has made; to make them question what is real and what is unreal.
Chronicle of Higher Education