Unreal.

By Tim Buder

Dear Editorial Board of the Graduate Press,

I had heard from a friend that your magazine had an issue with surrealism. I’m here to say that enough is enough. I usually silence my anger, gnash my teeth and leave it at that. But this editorial decision carries things too far.

I get that, some paintings are disturbing, some distorted texts keep missing the punch line, and Goll and Breton’s open clash in 1924 at the “Théâtre des Champs Elysées” was childish, unnecessary and paints a bad picture of the whole movement. But to dedicate a whole edition to the issue with surrealism tests the limits of absurdity. It just seems unreal to me that one can find sufficient bored people with endless amounts of time and a tendency to dramatize incidents in order to fill up a whole magazine with opinionated rants on a simple concept of art. Is it really that big of a deal?

What are they going to do? Fight Andre? Critique Dalí? Defame Frida’s name? Grad Press articles are known for expressing anger and discontent to convert it into one united voice of strength and resistance. Is this what the voice looks like?

But maybe – just maybe – your choice of topic is an act of surrealism in itself. Maybe this call for submissions is, in reality, a hidden wake-up call to us students. Maybe the board is simply holding the mirror up to ourselves, eventually dismantling an elitist superiority that, for example, calls out to the importance of minimising the impact on the climate, but at the same time is at ease with contributing to the greatest waste of paper I’ve witnessed in a long time.

How stupid then will those young authors feel when they realise their contribution discussing their issue with surrealism is just based on an embarrassing misunderstanding. They just have been trolled. Good for them.

This is not a pipe joke.

(thanks to J.F.’s creative brainwave)

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This piece was orginally published in our Surreal 2020 Print Issue.