From: INMAN J S <S.Inman-AT-greenwich.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 3 Jul 1997 14:39:07 GMT Subject: Re: this is the colour of my ... There's two sides to one of Lukes comments, "...what I think surrealism is surrealism.." The trouble is that, as Luke admits, it leaves the situation open to abuse. I have come across so many people who have said this without having bothered to read anything or trying to undersatnd anything. It becomes a very random label, they might as well say bricklayer, catholic, chimpanzee. maximum irrelevance is maintained. Without undersatnding where surrealism comes from it is daft to call oneself a surrealist. On the other hand, it aint necessary to be a scholar of the subject, that can even get in the way. I have a need to try and know and understand everything about the movement, which i think is just my neurosis at one level, but quite a fruitful one for all that. My conclusion about "surrealism studies" is that a lot of academic writers on the subject, although the have gathered a lot of facts, are wankers. Some, on the other hand, are pretty good. One needs writers from outside the movement to mirror surrealism back to you. It is essential to read the surrealists themselves to understand what they were getting at, but to get some kind of feedback you need to go outside. Someone like hal foster, author of Compulsive Beauty, misrepresents surrealism to a ridiculous degree. J.H. Matthews was able to give very accurate accounts of surrealist thinking and practices, but seemed incapable of taking them beyond a certain level. Conroy Maddox once said to me that he wrote the same book a dozen times. My own unease about academic discourse (in which I have been involved to some extent) is that it attempts to turn surrealism into something it is not. For me it remains a way of experiencing the world and consequently a way of life. I am a bit distressed to hear of your mental state Luke, (I don't know what else to call it at the moment). I found myself in the same state every time I tried to paint a few years back, but when I didn't paint i remained "normal". The problem was bound up with painting itself and how that adventure affected my mental state. Interestingly, it was resolved to a great extent through automatism, drawing rather than painting. The thing about these states is that if they are not part of a manic/depressive, schizoid or whatever personality, but seem more like an infection ( I mean that you had not been like this before) it is likely to resolve itself in time. meanwhile, life is uncomfortable. Studying psychology, which i have only done as an autodidact, seems to help surprisingly little most of the time. But do you find your fluctuating state has any connerctions with your creativity? I am off now, will look in next week when I am printing off bits of my dissertation. If I don't get it done something worse than madness beckons... Stuart
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