This is the work of a reluctant blogger.

Self-promotion does not sit easily on these shoulders. In previous decades the blatant hawking of one’s own work was seen as distasteful, but modern marketing and the growth of online communication has altered that perspective.

There is a propensity today to promote the artist rather than the work, and hence to elevate the artist above the art. Not everyone feels that is a good thing. The contemporary Italian novelist writing under the pseudonym Elena Ferranti eschews the ordering of the creator over the created and still nobly waves the flag of anonymity. She says:

The energy of the words is an honest emphasis. What’s very different is the media’s emphasis, the predominance of the author’s image over his work.  In that case the book functions like a pop star’s sweaty T-shirt, a garment that without the aura of the star is completely meaningless. It’s that kind of emphasis I don’t like.[1]

That deference is admirable.

Times change and attitudes evolve.   Evidently, we now live in the age of the authorpreneur.   We no longer need to go to the market because the market can come to us. It’s time to set out the stall.

uneasybooks and uneasywords grew sideways from the stalk that was uneasy theatre.  Our dramaturgical motto was to provide popular theatre with a worthwhile content. uneasybooks’ maxim is not dissimilar: to provide entertaining work that aims to be meaningful and truthful. uneasywords are related reflections in a disturbed pool.

Almost a hundred years ago the surrealist group of artists, writers, auteurs and others published their manifesto.  What is curious, is that a collection of self-acknowledged radicals should seek to unify and confine themselves so closely.  The raison d’être of all artists, especially radical artists, lies in their individuality and uniqueness. Artists are valued for the manner in which they break rules, not for the way they establish or adhere to them.

Their declaration was political and came amid a phase of social threat, upheaval and change unlike like any other hitherto.  They allied themselves to the revolutionary cause.

We are determined to make a revolution. We have joined the word surrealism to the word revolution solely to show the disinterested, detached and entirely desperate character of this revolution.[2]

Through that revolution they aimed to reveal the true workings of the human consciousness and expose its connections with the subconscious and hence sluice the political tide.  With the benefit of hindsight, they can be judged to have been beating a delusive path, but they might have been on to something.

It was the intuitive and immediate that underpinned the rules of their manifesto.  Through so called ‘automatic writing’ and the intuitive juxtaposing of iconography they sought to liberate the mind.

 

It is doubtful that the mind can ever be truly liberated. It is not the master, but the slave.  Striving to understand that oppression is the uneasy business.

 

The uneasybooks manifesto

 

• The first objective is to amuse.
• The second aim is to respect the instinctive and respond to the visceral.
• The third is to hunt for the natural truth, which is indifferent to trends and fashions.
• The guiding maxim in releasing the work is to respect the paradox that the work and the artist are both interdependent, and independent.

 

and for uneasywords

 

• The work is offered.
• Offence is not, even if it is taken.
• The first person singular will be restrained, as I was in less egotistic times.

 

 

[1] Elena Ferranti quoted in The Observer newspaper, 6 November 2016.

[2] Quoted in Fer, Batchelor, Wood, Art Between the Wars, page 51, Yale University Press. 1993