„Es gibt keine Tyranneien, die nicht versuchen, die Kunst einzuschränken, weil sie die Macht der Kunst sehen. Kunst kann der Welt Dinge sagen, die sonst nicht geteilt werden können. Kunst vermittelt Gefühle.“

- Volodymyr Selenskyj, Präsident der Ukraine

Jan Cox

©Courtesy Archief De Zwarte Panter, Antwerpen
The Meaning of Surrealism
Text , 12 p

This manuscript of an educational lecture values surrealism as a move to liberate the human spirit from conformity and hypocrisy.  The two World Wars are cited in evidence.  That world that surrealism challenged is a world totally out of balance, living on the edge of a volcano.  Cox illustrated this mindset with quotations from De Chirico. The liberating action of surrealism, with its use of automatic writing and paranoiac-critical activity, and with its tight relationship to the real, is explained by Cox through works by Duchamp, Dali, Ernst and Miro.

The manuscript The Joy of Experience of Totality appears to be an earlier version of this text.