Salon Apocalypse: “Secret Theater”

As long as no Stalin breathes down our necks, why not make some art in the service of…insurrection? Never mind if it’s “impossible.” What else can we hope to attain but the “impossible”? Should we wait for someone else to reveal our true desires?

Potentially, everyone is now some kind of artist- and potentially every audience has
regained its innocence, its ability to become the art that it experiences. Provided we can
escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling
ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by manipulation of living symbols (in this case the images we’ve been “given” by the organizers of this salon- murder, war, famine, & greed).

We might now contemplate aesthetic actions which possess some of the resonance of terrorism aimed at the destruction of abstractions rather than people, at liberation rather
than power, pleasure rather than profit, joy rather than fear. “Poetic terrorism.”

Our chosen images have the potency of darkness- but all images are masks, and behind
these masks lie energies we can turn toward light and pleasure. A conspiracy of artists, anonymous as any mad bombers, but aimed toward an act of gratuitous generosity rather than violence- at the millennium rather than the apocalypse- or rather, aimed at a present moment of aesthetic shock in the service of realization and liberation. Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.

Is it possible to create a SECRET THEATER in which both artist & audience have
completely disappeared- only to re-appear on another plane, where life & art have
become the same thing, the pure giving of gifts?

- Black Fez Manifesto, Hakim Bey