New York Surreal Parties
Summer in New York is something that holds a great deal of promise, and for weary world travelers, cooped up all winter, the idea of a summer getaway comes looming at all hours of the day or night. Traveling and wanderlust are things that can work their way into the nighttime dreams, and can also start to make daydreaming more necessary. When the days and nights get confounded, New York is the perfect remedy, because there are times when it’s hard to tell what time it is.
At an event sponsored by Surreal Estate , the art collective in Brooklyn, this is especially true, because the events are something out of a dream. It could be something as interesting as an afterparty for an anarchist book fair, or something with an obvious appeal to daydream tendencies like a Madhatter Tea Party. It’s hard to imagine a vacation more exciting, where one can leave their New York hotel to hang out for awhile with some of the young and radical artists in the city, along with some pretty exciting international guests.
Surreal Estate is a fairly large collective, with about 35 people at any given time, and for any group of artists this large, organizing isn’t always a strong suit. They seem to have it down, however, taking their multiple perspectives and points of view, and finding things to agree to focus on.
The history of the art collective in the city is very long and complex. For some, it reached its zenith at the end of the 1960s, when this was the preferred way of creating new work. For theaters, it was an obvious leap, where the connections between communal living made sense when people were working intensely for hours at a time. For other art collectives, it had advantages particularly in combining resources for rent, as well as sharing other artistic resources, like minds. This tradition lives on in the city, and it’s a great opportunity to see how it might work for the next generations.