Threshold Progression

Threshold Progression

Threshold Progression

Dada and Surrealism are religions with a view of the world, a code of behaviour … a joy in membership of a community of the like-minded, a demand that the faithful must sacrifice other attachments, a hope of transforming existence. Even their history suggested the history of a religion. Dada like primitive Christianity, is fervently new, somewhat nomadic, unsystematic in doctrine, unbureaucratised: Surrealism resembles the established Church, with its centralised direction and its empire-building, its hierarchy and its hagiography, its orthodoxy and its heresies, its excommunications and its schisms.

Surrealism was more than just an artistic or literary avant-garde movement. It was a state of mind, a lived experience, a complete way of life. In the Paris of the 1920s, the Surrealists created a system of beliefs and activities which stood in defiant opposition to the dominant world-view of their time. They cultivated a way of perceiving the world, directly antagonistic to bourgeois values, which deliberately subverted Western categories of thought.