Sadman Hafiz-Week 11 Response

Steven Heller in his The Underground Mainstream explains the relationship between underground and mainstream concepts. According to Steven most Mainstream commercials or adverts uses ideas from underground trends, it simply steals an idea which trending and alters it slightly to make it a complete mainstream concept. After reading this I remembered reading somewhere about the collision between mainstream music and underground music mostly rap. It is often said that underground artists are more original, independent, and skillful compared to mainstream artists who are more dependent and restricted. While some may agree with this ideology and some may not but it is clear that the underground can use very deep meanings and unique elements which cannot go mainstream. Heller mentions “It was born in a small community that shared proclivities for sex, drugs, and anarchic behavior— all threatening to the mainstream.” In these lines, “proclivities” means the tendency of doing something that may not be considered proper in the general public eyes. These trends can only be seen used by underground artists both in art and music. Some of these underground trends are very extraordinary and unique and they hold the high potential of attaining mass popularity. Mainstream media sees that the content underground is not proper for the general audience, so they steal the entire idea from the underground concepts and alter them to make it proper for the audience. 

I’m not exactly sure how surrealism can be connected to the mainstream vs underground but this was inspired by the Dada movement which is a little similar to the underground vs mainstream movement. Britannica school high states “Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression.” Dada originally was a movement that highlighted mostly the negativity of wars that will trigger people’s anger by shocking them with the harsh situations that were created by violence. This movement was extremely similar to surrealism, it also use very strong visuals that symbolized hatred, disgust, and other negativity. Surrealism evolved from Dada but it was more focused on positivity expressions. This is very similar to mainstream vs underground in my opinion because just like how mainstream alters underground concepts, Surrealism also tried to do something different from Dada even though it emerged from the Dada movement. Surrealism starts to fall undermine stream because it contains more of a positive meaning than a negation. 

Britannica also mentions “Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.” Surrealism was also inspired by the psychologist Sigmund Freud’s theories on mental health. In another article about Andre Breton, Britannica states, “As a medical student, Breton was interested in mental illness; his reading of the works of Sigmund Freud (whom he met in 1921) introduced him to the concept of the unconscious. Influenced by psychiatry and Symbolist poetry, he joined the Dadaists” Relating to the theories of Freud, surrealism uses a lot of visual representation of mental health, the conscious and unconscious mind of an individual. In short Andre through this inspiration, tried to present a relation between reality and dream through surrealism and I believe this is a very vast and interesting topic for research.

–Sorry I used 2 sources from the same database because I wasn’t able to access most of the readings from the city tech database. I used the two that I could access with my ID, for the other ones that I got it tells me that I need to be in college to access them.