The Velvet Revolution of Black and Plume,  A Surrealist Mural by Poète Maudit at the Denman Art Centre

The Velvet Revolution of Black and Plume, 

A Surrealist Mural by Poète Maudit at the Denman Art Centre

By Keith Porteous

The “black swan” in anarchist surrealism is a powerful poetic symbol originating from the 19th-century proto-surrealist novel Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, later adopted by the Chicago Surrealist Group and their publishing imprint, Black Swan Press. Surrealists embraced Lautréamont’s famous phrase “beautiful as the retractile clutch of claws in birds of prey, or rather, as the absolute accordance of a black swan to signify radical otherness, revolt, and the subversion of bourgeois logic.”

From the artist Poète Maudit:

“In today’s world of neo-capitalism, the black swan becomes a symbol of rupture, an unforeseen event, the radical imagination, and the collective resistance capable of breaking through systems that present themselves as permanent and unchangeable.”

Black Swan Press was founded in Chicago in 1967 by prominent surrealists like Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, the press published revolutionary tracts, poetry, and art that fused libertarian socialism and surrealist direct action. In the Anarchist-Surrealist Synthesis, both movements shared a common enemy in the state, capitalism, and conventional morality, utilizing dreams, black humour, and automatism as practical weapons for total human liberation.

From author and surrealist Ron Sakolsky:

“The nomadic Poète Maudit has become a vital part of the Inner Island Surrealist Group. They are no stranger to the island, with their art work magically having appeared here, there and everywhere in recent years, erupting unexpectedly from the unruly margins of subsistence in sudden energetic bursts of colour, blazing a path way beyond the comforting stereotypes of “island art”.

In the illuminatingly disorienting experience that they have conjured up, it is alchemically designed to crack open a marvellous portal to another reality amidst the usually staid contours of the Denman Island Art Centre. In the process of challenging the authoritarian dreamscape of surveillance capitalism, surrealists defiantly refuse to pull the wool over their own eyes.” 

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ron-sakolsky-the-surrealist-adventure-and-the-poetry-of-direct-action