Work #2

I love a good manifesto. And to that end, I've been devouring a compendium of ground breaking manifestos written by artists, filmmakers, writers and architects. Manifestos demand arrogance, irreverence and profundity in equal measures. Sometimes they read like poetry and sometimes they read like madness. They're a lecture, a berating, a coaxing and an inspiration. 

This compendium has some of the best known manifestos and declarations - the Surrealists, Futurists and Dadaists; the Dogme manifesto, the Yellow Manifesto, the Draft Manifesto; Herzog's 'Minnesota Declaration', Claes Oldenburgs' 'I Am For an Art' and Gropius' 'What is Architecture'. But, to my mind, the manifesto of the Arab Surrealist Movement embodies all the fury, beauty, disgust and power of a true manifesto. If you need to live by one manifesto, use this as your guide:

MANIFESTO OF THE ARAB SURREALIST MOVEMENT, 1975:

With disgust we shove aside the dregs of survival and the impoverished rational ideas which stuff the ash-can-heads of intellectuals.

1) We incite individuals and the masses to unleash their instincts against all forms of repression - including the repressive "reason" of the bourgeois order.

2) The great values of the ruling class (the fatherland, family, religion, school, barracks, churches, mosques and other rottenness) make us laugh. Joyously we piss on their tombs.

3) We spit on the fatherland to drown in it the fumes of death. We combat and ridicule the very idea of the fatherland. To affirm one's fatherland is to insult the totality of man.

4) We practice subversion 24 hours a day. We excite sadistic urges against all that is established, not only because we are the enemies of this new stone age that is imposed on us, but above all because it is through our subversive activity that we discover new dimensions.

5) We poison the intellectual atmosphere with the elixir of the imagination, so that the poet will realize himself in realizing the historical transformation of poetry:

a) from form into matter;

b) from simple words hanging on coat racks of paper into the desirable flesh of the imagination that we shall absorb until everything separating dream from reality is dissolved.

Surrealism is nothing but the actualization of this surreality.

6) We explode the mosques and the streets with the scandal of sex returning to its body, bursting into flames at each encounter - secret until then.

7) We liberate language from the prisons and stock markets of capitalist confusion.

It is plain that today's language, instead of being an agitational force in the process of social transformation and a vocabulary of revolutionary attack, is only a docile vocabulary of defense cluttered in the store of the human brain with one aim: to help the individual prove his complete subordination to the laws of existing society - to help him as a lawyer in the courts of everyday reality (that is, of repression). Surrealism intrudes violently on this abject spectacle, annihilating all obstacles to "the real functioning of thought" (Andre Breton).

When we write, our memory belches this language from the old world. It is a game in which our tongues become capable of recreating language in the very depths of the revolution.

Our surrealism signifies the destruction of what they call "the Arab fatherland." In this world of masochistic survival, surrealism is an aggressive and poetic way of life. It is the forbidden flame of the proletariat embracing the insurrectional dawn - enabling us to rediscover at last the revolutionary moment: the radiance of the workers' councils as a life profoundly adored by those we love.

Our surrealism, in art as in life: permanent revolution against the world of esthetics and other atrophied categories; the destruction and supersession of all retrograde forces and inhibitions.

Subversion resides in surrealism the same way history resides in events.

Maroin DIB (Syria), Abdul Kadar EL JANABY (Iraq), Faroq EL JURIDY (Lebanon), Fadil Abas HADI (Iraq), Farid LARIBY (Algeria), Ghazi YOUNIS (Lebanon)