Psychoanalysis as the base of an important art movement
An interesting motto: "Don't mind anything. Take the streets"
(Could be "internet streets", "internet fora"?)
“The young poet was lucky to meet Rene Laforgue, founding member and first president of the Psychoanalytical Society of Paris, which had just been founded at that time”.
Translation from the following sources:
1. Blog link 2. Article by C.Giannakopoulos at news247 published 2015-04-06
“The young poet, Empeirikos, was lucky to meet Rene Laforgue, founding member and first president of the Psychoanalytical Society of Paris, which had just been founded at that time”.
(The Society sought to be affiliated with the International Psychoanalytical Society that originated from the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society created by Freud et al).
“Later he will meet the psychoanalyst Fra-Whiteman, friend of Andre Breton, who had the initiative to bring the young poet with the always active and restless group of surrealists; a group that he will meet every day at the legendary cafés of Place Blanche where they will talk with passion and lucidity on the liberation of man and society.”
“Fra-Whitman told me that he knows Breton, I was eager to meet him. We went the day after. I met with a divine creature“. Since that day he joined with enthusiasm the surrealist movement and until the end of his life he would not cease to speak with admiration and gratitude for Andre Breton and the other surrealists, as well as for Freud and psychoanalysis.
“Much later, in 1964, in the excellent poem of “The King Kong” from Oktana he gives us a self-portrait and an idea of the atmosphere of Paris at that time”:
"Sleep I had not and I had taken the streets of Paris, where I lived those years (between 1920 and 1930), when had begun to reign in Europe after midnight (in music) the Blacks.
Sleep I had not and I had taken the streets, then when I was bursting me too from the charm of Picasso, bathed - what am I saying - baptized in the fibrillations and the flares of Andre Breton's spirit.
Sleep I had not and I had taken the streets, filled that night with boredom, because I had not met the company I was seeking. The clatters of the day had long subsided and I was walking on the macadam, unwilling to return home because of the frowsty smell of my apartment and because it was hot in there, a lot of heat, suffocating, filled with dust. Deep breathing, not paying attention where I was going and moving to, I was saying again and again, like a spell, the words of Andrew Breton: "Lachez tout, partez sur les routes ...", "Don't mind anything, take the streets...", with the hope in my heart, that, perhaps, in this way finally, with the help of fortune, something pleasant I would meet, while in my mind flashed the amazingly shocking for me icon of Andre Breton.
From Montparnasse then brought by my footsteps and almost mechanically led I finally arrived at the streets of Monmartre (there, at rue Fontaine, lived Breton), filled with the boredom I mentioned above, and during my course I continued rambling in the straits surrounding Place Blanche, and the square with the colorful neon lights, whose name is Place Pigalle.
Above me, seeded in the sky the stars and the night was magical, filled with shooting stars, filled with stars, filled with the pleasure of the Universe. Around me were rising the houses - remnants of Haussmann's era and other eras - and between them many buildings of the time of Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Rimbaud, among which, by God, ofter even today loom the haloed and clearly visible vivid souls of these poets. "Lachez tout, partez sur les routes ...", "Don't mind anything, take the streets..." I was saying again and again and I was going on, lightening my boredom and anguish. "
"Don't mind anything, take the streets"
(The streets, the internet streets, the internet fora)
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"Every day at Place Blanche. Tanguy, Pérès, Eluard. Personally I had a special communication and connection particularly with Breton. At Place Blanche, we would meet and discuss on the surrealist movement, the views of the group, their dissemination, the means of liberation of each of us and of the man in general from social falsehood and injustice. We talked about Hegel, Marx, Engels, Freud."
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(Note: Rene Laforgue is considered to be a central but controversial figure of French psychoanalysis)
The Fine Art of Advertising
Preview available here
Barry Hoffman, a Managing Partner and Executive Creative Director at Young & Rubricam, has written numerous award-winning ads and television commercials for a wide variety of accounts, some literary (The New Yorker, People, The Wall Street Journal) and some decidedly not (IBM, Unisys, Xerox). He has served as a judge for the prestigious Steven E. Kelley Magazine Advertising Awards as well as the Andys and Clios. Prior to his carreer on Madison Avenue, he earned a Ph.D. in American Literature at Harvard and taught literature courses there and at the University of Massachusetts.
Popular art made advertising its subject. Its critics saw that as the essential problem. “Pop’s social effect”, Hilton Kramer said, “is simply to reconcile us to a world of commodities, banalities, and vulgarities—which is to say, an effect indistinguishable from advertising art”.
Pop art did take its spirit from the bold clarity of the advertising aesthetic. It sang the praises of commercial art with tunes of irony and respect. The pop aesthetic, rooted in the Dada of Duchamp and presaged in the early work of Stuart Davis, rejected the obscurity of abstract expressionism in favor of looking at things as they are, no matter how low or common or vulgar. It came bounding out of the jack-in-the-box of American culture in the works of Johns, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, and of course the man who plumbed the depths of the shallow with more abandon than any other, Warhol.
As has often been noted, virtually all of the painters who entered the pantheon of pop art started out working the more narrow veins of advertising. They began as show designers, window decorators, illustrators, billboard painters, cartoonists. They went on, in one way or another, to turn the contents of their first jobs into the subject of their art. They painted what was in front of them every day. They painted what we were seeing--soup cans, ads, beer cans, celebrities, and flags. They had the vibrancy and the verve of a moment; the energy of popularity and success gave them a sense of exuberance that had little to do with the myth of the painter as someone who suffers for his art.
Nothing captures the vitality of this “new” art better than Claes Oldenburg’s famous manifesto, now forty eight years old.
“I am for art…that does something other than sit in the museum…I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero. I am for an art that embroils itself with everyday crap and still comes out on top…I am for U.S. Government Inspected art, Grade A art, Regular Price art, Yellow Ripe art, Extra-Fancy art, Ready-to-Eat art, Spend Less art, Eat Better art, Ham art, pork art, chicken art, tomato art, banana art, apple art, turkey art, cake art, cookie art.”
As with Oldenburg’s sculptures, the sheer rhetorical inflation of the idea makes you smile. His use of purely commercial language to mark out the territory of art is at the heart of what this book is about.
Outstanding advertising can be proposed best
when everyone concerned with it
has a fanatical belief
that a sales curve bending upward
is one of the world’s most beautiful pictures.
Young & Rubicam, Inc., Advertising
The tension between art and advertising shows clearly in this 1945 ad run by Young & Rubicam in Fortuna Magazine. The hard-sell forces of business wanted to put art in its proper place.
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