Dinosaur Dinosaur opens for BÀBE at the Drake, Toronto, November, 2010. While warming up the circuits, and the fluid head on my HD kit, I got to a lil’ filming with zee band.
Dinosaur Dinosaur opens for BÀBE at the Drake, Toronto, November, 2010. While warming up the circuits, and the fluid head on my HD kit, I got to a lil’ filming with zee band.
The old question, “Who are we?” receives a disappointing answer in the world in which we must live. Actually, we are merely the subjeccts of this so-called civilized world, in which inteliigence, baseness, heroism and stupidity get on very well together and are alternately being pushed to the fore. We are the subjects of the incoherent, absurd world in which weapons are manufactured to prevent war, in which science is used to destroy, to construct, to kill, to prolong the life of the dying, in which the most insane undertaking works against itself, we are living in a world in which one marries for money, in which one constructs palaces that rot, abandoned, by the sea. This world is still holding up, more or less, but we can already see the signs of its approaching ruin glimmering in the darkness.
It would be naïve and useless to restate these facts for those who are not bothered by them, and who are peaceably taking advantage of this state of affairs. Those who thrive on this disorder hope to consolidate it, and, the only means available to them being further disorders, they are contributing to its imminent collapse, albeit unwittingly, by replastering the crumbling structure in their so-called realistic way.
Other men, among whom I am proud to count myself, despite the utopianism they are accused of, consciously desire the proletarian revolution that will transform the world; and we are acting toward this end, each according to the means available to him.
Nevertheless, we must protect ourselves against this second-rate reality that has been fashioned by centuries of worshipping money, races, fatherlands, gods, and, I might add, art.
Nature, which bourgeois society has not completely succeeded in extinguishing, provides us with the dream state, which endows our bodies and our minds with the freedom they need so imperatively.
Nature seems to have been overly generous in creating for those who are too impatient or too weak the refuge of insanity, which protects them from the stifling atmosphere of the real world.
The great strength for defense is the love that binds lovers together in an enchanted world made precisely to their oder, and which is admirably protected by isolation.
Finally, Surrealism provides mankind with a methodology and a mental orientation appropriate to the pursuit of investigations in areas that have been ignored or underrated but that, nonetheless, directly concern man. Surrealism demands for our waking lives a liberty comparable to that that we possess in dreams.
- Excerpt from René Magritte’s lecture given November 20, 1938, at the Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, Antwerp.
