The Exquisite Corpse vs The SS
A group of surrealists play a game of consequences or exquisite corpse, as they call it. Each artist takes it in turn to make a drawing on a sheet of paper. They then fold the paper over so the drawing is invisible except for four lines. The next artist, unaware of what has been drawn, uses the four lines as a start. The finished piece is a collective a new whole that is greater than each individual part.
While the Surrealists set their unconscious free, a rocket scientist captures the subliminal energy in a battery.
“Here he was in the moonlight with a battery full of distillate, of this overlapping thing, of this Surrealism. That was a freedom right there…he would build a freedom machine.”
Before he can build his freedom machine, the battery is stolen and later, when opened in a Paris cafe, it goes up.
“A city-wide outrushing, an explosion, a sweep and stream and a nova, megaton imaginary, of random and of dreams…A fucking storm, a reconfiguring, a shock wave of mad love, a burning blast of unconsciousness.”
The explosion of imagination (or S-Blast) weaponises works by Dali, Breton, Ernst, Carrington, Magritte et al. Paintings leave their canvasses and walk the street with sculpture. The Eiffel Tower levitates, a Shark eats the sun while an Exquisite Corpse lays waste to SS patrols.
In China Miéville’s, The Last Days of New Paris, surrealist works of art come alive and fight alongside the surrealist resistance. The novella is a glimpse of an alternate reality where WWII never ended and Paris is surrounded and isolated in the 1950’s. It is a counterfactual parable of the solidarity that exists between a city’s art and its citizens as art comes to the rescue of the good and the brave, the rebels and dreamers.
The living artworks are called Manifests. They are manifestations of beautiful and absurd ideas and a living manifesto in a very literal sense.
The books afterword claims the story of New Paris is true, told to Miéville by in a Clerkenwell hotel room. So it is fake news. A section of notes at the end reveal an intense knowledge of surrealist art by the author. It is fake and it is deeply authentic.
It is about art as creative and destructive energy and it is about how our imagination produces ideas that will fight alongside us and kick up a storm when the bad guys threaten.
