Surrealpolitik

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There were 2 results from your search for keyword(s): 'Psychedelia'.

  1. Surrealism was exclusive; psychedelic art is inclusive; it does not withdraw from the external world but rather affirms the value of inwardness as complementary awareness. The aim of psychedelic experience is to expand the consciousness so that it can be a consciousness of more. Unlike surrealism, psychedelic art makes a basic tenet of spiritual harmony with the universe. Psychedelic art is not antagonistic to the religious art of the past and does not find its affinities with daemonic and heretical art as such. It is more mature than surrealism in declining to equate the beautiful with the bizarre. It has no fascination with madness or the hallucinations of madness. It seeks out the images and other phenomena to be found in the depths of the normal expanded mind. It shares with surrealism, and much other art, the intent to shock the viewer into a transformed awareness.

    Where surrealism is magical, psychedelic art would be scientific in its approach to "mind." It also would be religious and mystical and finds no incongruity between being all these things; in fact, it might be called a scientific-religious or mystical-scientific art. In some ways more naive than surrealism, psychedelic art has yet to work its way through a kind of childish wonder at the realities uncovered in the altered states. Particularly, psychedelic art tends to be naive in its metaphysical outlook and in its religious and mystical awareness. These are generally shallow and rather primitive. Barry Schwartz calls psychedelic art "the surrealism of the technological age." This is true if we understand that psychedelics, with technology, have worked a transvaluation of many of surrealism's concerns.

    Source: Psychedelic Art, p. 97
  2. [Fourier's] Theory of the Four Movements offers detailed accounts of life following this cataclysmic transmogrification. The auroras of the northern and southern circumpolar regions become more active and more frequent, eventually expanding to link together like the rings of Saturn and filling the earth's skies with rippling curtains of colour, light and heat. Over time, the outer edge of the earth's aurora-ring will extend to the corona of the sun, and the ensuing radiation will trigger a magical change in the natural world -- animals will learn to play musical instruments, stars will copulate and spray us all with their sexual fluids, weather patterns will shift, new moons begin to revolve the earth, and the chemical composition of the world's oceans change to 'aigresel', a tart, potable liquid. Even the human body mutates under the rays of the 'northern crown' as human beings overcome the need for sleep and grow taller. Humans will also sprout an 'archibras' ('ancient arm'), a prehensile tail with a sensory organ at its tip that will act as a fifth limb and enable one 'to swim as fast as a fish', to 'reach a branch twelve feet high', to triple one's natural leaping velocity, and to form a revolving, conelike 'inverted parachute by means of which one can fall from a considerable height without risking more than a bruise'.

    From chapter: Attacks of the Fantastic, Donald LaCoss
    Source: Surrealism, Politics and Culture, p. 274-275