The Chief Role Of The Universities Is

The Marriage Of Reason And Nightmare Which Has Dominated The 20th Century Has Given Birth To An Ever More Ambiguous World. Across The Communications Landscape Move The Specters Of Sinister Technologies And The Dreams That Money Can Buy. Thermonuclear Weapons Systems And Soft Drink Commercials Coexist In An Overlit Realm Ruled By Advertising And Pseudoevents, Science And Pornography. Over Our Lives Preside The Great Twin Leitmotifs Of The 20th Century-sex And Paranoia.

Actually, The Suburbs Are Far More Sinister Places Than Most City Dwellers Imagine. Their Very Blandness Forces The Imagination Into New Areas. I Mean, One's Got To Get Up In The Morning Thinking Of A Deviant Act, Merely To Make Certain Of One's Freedom. It Needn't Be Much; Kicking The Dog Will Do.

The Technological Landscape Of The Present Day Has Enfranchised Its Own Electorates - The Inhabitants Of The Marketing Zones In The Consumer Society, Television Audiences And News Magazine Readerships, Who Vote With Money At The Cash Counter Rather Than With Ballot Paper At The Polling Boot. These Huge And Passive Electorates Are Wide Open To Any Opportunist Using The Psychological Weaponry Of Fear And Anxiety, Elements That Are Carefully Blanched Out Of The World Of Domestic Products And Consumer Software.

The Surrealists, And The Modern Movement In Painting As A Whole, Seemed To Offer A Key To The Strange Postwar World With Its Threat Of Nuclear War. The Dislocations And Ambiguities, In Cubism And Abstract Art As Well As The Surrealists, Reminded Me Of My Childhood In Shanghai.

I Feel That The Surrealists Have Created A Series Of Valid External Landscapes Which Have Their Direct Correspondences Within Our Own Minds.