Because of that I started a new research about its possible implication within the retail and commercial world and I surprisingly found out that Surrealism is one of the key words of visual merchandising and shop windows design.
In fact, looking at the movement under the lens of the desire and marvellous's research it is possible to reconsider it under another light, more close to commerce and materialism.
Indeed André Breton, founding 'First Manifesto of Surrealism' repeatedly stressed the intention not simply to reject the real world's bankrupt stock, but to rediscover its true nature in the light of imagination and the unconscious 'the future resolution of these two state dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.'
Surrealism's position in the world, then, is secured through a realignment of our understanding of the real by means of kind of passionate critical participation.
I think that if I play with the spectator/customer's unconsciousness (making him self-conscious of himself as a body, as a perceiving subject), I will allow him to became more socially and psychologically involved within his experience of purchasing and watching.
Viewed in this perspective, it might be possible to read Surrealism's problematic relationship with its commercial context in a more sophisticated way.
In the research for the marvellous discovered the real experience, the French Surrelist group's first generation entertained a particular fascination with the encounters generated by chance during their day-to-day flanerie around the street of Paris.
I particularly focused on an artist, who was actually american, and his series of boxes assemblages.
I am talking about Joseph Cornell whose life-long flanerie of Manhattan's streets in search of books, photographs and records found objects was in empathy with the spirit of Parisian Surrealism.
His boxes, subdivided into regular compartments containing nostalgic objects, might be seen as the very experience of the city. They suggest both the windowed facades of New York skyline, the department store vetrines and the grid of blocks that make up the Cornell's beat of Midtown and Uptown Manhattan, the very way in which a traveller on foot orients and experiences journeys across the city. Empty or filled compartments in these boxes suggest a diary of journey in search of junk shop and dime stores, where some block yield nothing while others offer un unexpected treasure.
While I was studying his body of work I pictured in my mind a structure which reassume a world of different traveller. If I think about people walking down the streets in London nowadays I can only recall a crowd with lack of attention for what is surrounding them. People today, especially in a city such as London, fast, full of spurs and possibilities, I can only see people with lack of attention. They are just very interested in following the current modern consumption. They are all under control of the mass marketing style; they don't purchase anymore for a real necessity, they purchase just because of the necessity of possession.
Everybody, looking through the same "glass", the same layer, the reality, makes his own personal synthesis of what he's just seen. While walking down the street people are unconsciously gaining images of the world around. I think, in a conceptual way, the place where we store those images is a kind of box, likewise Cornell's boxes, in which we project our own interpretation and view.
I was wondering: what might happen if a person, in the very middle of this collecting process, was projected literally, inside one of those boxes?
What would happen if that person didn't have kind of control inside this box? I am talking about the very wrong scale size of him or the objects inside it, the time in there, the sound.
Is that possible that the understanding of ourself resulted indeed from a total loss of control?
AM I ME?
IS THAT REAL?
AM I HUGE?
IS THAT VERY SMALL?
AM I ME?
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