Writer, Robin D. G. Kelley: My name is Robin D. G. Kelley. I am a historian. I was a friend of Ted Joans.
In 1975, he got the idea of creating the longest exquisite corpse ever. The idea of the exquisite corpse is that you are making a collective work of art, but there’s a mystery to it. Imagine you have a piece of paper folded four times. Each time someone would contribute a work, they couldn’t see what was there before. For Ted and for so many surrealists, it’s plumbing the depth of the dream to draw out visions that are usually suppressed. It is poetic knowledge.
Everybody who contributed to Long Distance believed their art can change the world. These are dream people—that’s how he puts it—he calls them “dream people.”
From all the stories that Ted Joans tells in relationship to each individual artist—but also the journey, the adventures of carrying this thing around—I began to realize just what it meant to have these encounters all captured and to be able to tap into the imagination of Ted’s heroes. He was carrying history with him.
I wrote this book called Freedom Dreams. Part of that had to do with being frustrated with a politics that’s always “anti.” We’re anti-racist, anti-sexist, but what are we for? Freedom Dreams is about “what are we for?” I could see how this work is an expression of freedom dreams. It is being forced to create something from a blank page on the spot. What will you create? Will what you create be expansive? Will it be figurative? Will it be abstract? These are all metaphors for the life that we are trying to create together.