Below is the veritable psychic blast from the past–from 1997, in Canberra, when Gerald Keaney and I toyed around on the edges of surrealism, situationist inspiration and telekentic art. At the time our main enemies were the organised left and the miserable art ghetto that imagined itself avant-garde. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose...
And so the leaflet “Telekinetic Art Manifesto” was written and distributed. I presume that the telephone number at the bottom of the “leaflet” is no longer functioning.
As Gerald points out below, we are far more skeptical of the possibilities of telekinesis these days. Nonetheless, our sometime Hegelian ramblings still inspire: “It is because possibility is inexorable that rebellion is inevitable. There is no such thing as the sublime, only the possibility of liberation.” All else is BOREDOM.
Originally blogged at Gerald Keaney’s Interventions.
This manifesto was written by Anthony Hayes and myself in 1997 under the Bureau Of Revolutionary Experimental Disinterested Oneiric Materialism (B.O.R.E.D.O.M) banner. It was in Canberra. The manifesto interrelates institutional art, (DIY) surrealism, and telekinesis along historic avant-garde lines, i.e. along the lines of the generalisation of creativity via the abolition of capitalism. These days I am much more skeptical about telekinesis, though I wouldn’t deny it is possible. Indeed, here telekinesis stands in as an evocative image of possibility. Belmez and Ted Serios provide illustrations, chosen by me October 2016. – Gerald Keaney
Dated 13 March 1997(?) – this is the date on the recovered file [Ant’s Note].
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Bureau Of Revolutionary Experimental Disinterested Oneiric Materialism
(B.O.R.E.D.O.M – a division Of Ern Malley Press – who brought you the Revolutionary Poetry Reading in O week.)
The investigation of cultural phenomena is inadequate. You can become interested in, for example, strange unsolved mysteries or spaghetti westerns. But it is not enough to label such things as ‘discoveries’ among our cultural refuse, to be later transformed into aesthetic pre-occupations. Such things are what empires are built on – radioactive empires of decommissioned waste. They provide up and coming artists with marks at art school. They give commercially viable artists selling points. They leave the rest of us with elusive spectacles.
What might strange unsolved mysteries say? Could haunted houses be explained as galleries where subliminally or otherwise, new performances were being enacted, performances so eerie, so frightening, so exciting because they reveal what people are capable of? The faces which appeared on the tiles of a Spanish house in Cordoba in 1972, with an accompanying sound track of muttering voices, was detected and recorded by sensitive microphones – this could be telekinetic art. The same genre championed most brilliantly by Ted Serios, with his telekinetic manipulation of unexposed polaroid slides in controlled experiments and demonstrations. These were monitored repeatedly by groups of hundreds of US scientists in the 50’s and 60’s. Every teenager joins a punk band and has an attendant poltergeist.
Possibility both precedes and follows what is called art. Art is one moment in the inexorable imposition of possibility. It is because possibility is inexorable that rebellion is inevitable. There is no such thing as the sublime, only the possibility of liberation. The sublime is the unity of the life and death instinct in an instant of aesthetic beauty. The time has come to trash the aesthetic.
What could be left? The possibility of human liberation. Rebellious ideas can take some of their most powerful forms from what we are forced to categorise as philosophy and art. And whether such art explores the hopes for the future, whether it bewails the present in the face of such hopes, it is now the receptacle of the highest ambitions of those doomed to drudgery repression, inhibition, boredom, police batons and TV game shows. Only these hopes are explicitly or not so explicitly denied by many artists.
These artists are not just workers in the system – their ability to continue the system, to erase hope, makes them more akin to cops and strike-breakers. Ideally their ‘happenings’ should be picketed, until their natural allies – the police – take the demonstrating anti-poets away. They cling now to their sublime, their holy grails, their lies. They incite boredom, division, diversion. They are the bureaucrats of the imagination, channelling it with their forms – forms they have filled out meticulously, ticking all the right boxes, making sure their form is neat and ironed, their own signature and date of birth at the bottom.
The form is an ordinance which gives permission for a deferment in the payment of potential. A continuing laughable deferment. How parsimonious they are! Everything must go in its place with as much precision as possible. They consider themselves technicians, but really they are more like executives and capitalists. Possibility today can take only one form – that of the elimination of the system where the income of the wealthiest 285 individuals in the world is equal to the combined incomes of the poorest two and a half billion people.
Capitalism leaves no time for living, it is forced to cut education, arts, funding for science, libraries. Its circulation of knowledge is severely impeded by secrecy, copyright and patents. It throws the potential of most people on the scrap heap. And yet the majority of artists simply want to add their commodity to this grisly spectacle. Instead of trying to defer potential into oblivion, join BOREDOM. Our ‘happenings’ are picket lines where education can be saved. We want to channel these situations so that they suit our fondest whims. We care neither for their beauty or their sublime. We are interested rather in inciting riots and strikes. At the same time we investigate the real potentials of the mind; associative, pyschokinetic, onieric and imaginative.
We thus claim the mantle of revolutionary surrealism.
BOREDOM
Ph: 249 2755
the sinister science 