The Lucky & The Damned

"I want to destroy everything." -Jackson Pollock /

Pre-conceptual Art derives its name by analogy from ‘Pre-Raphaelite’, as in The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and best exemplified in the work of Edward Burne-Jones, which sought to return art to its medieval roots prior to the ascendancy of the Renaissance typified by the art of Raphael.
Conceptual art is thought mainly to have begun with Duchamp and Dadaism.
Pre-Conceptual art therefore seeks to return to an aesthetic of preconceptual origin, pre-Dada and premodern. An example of this kind of art will be resolutely non-conceptual, emerging from the space between Post-Impressionism and Imagism.


“What nearly every contemporary discipline of psychology neglects, to their rue no less, is the existence of the Subconscious. Post-modernism exists in the space where exactly this subconscious erupts in that although its certain existence is well known to all, it is nonetheless vehemently denied.

The Beat poets, Abstract Expressionist painters & Method actors were able unleash this energy after it became materially manifest in the Atomic bomb explosions of the Trinity & Manhattan Projects and subsequent bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima & Nagasaki.

Japanese culture, which had always been allowed access to the Japanese subconscious then incorporated it into its own Pop cultural iconography. Its most striking representative in this regard was the writer and man of action Yukio Mishima, who was also a self-styled latter day Samurai and homosexual.”

Unlike America and most Western nations, Japan has no social prohibitions against rape, pedophilia, or cannibalism. This has primarily been attributed to the fact that Asian societies are not rooted in so-called Christian morality (The population of Christians in Japan is less than 1%.).

Ruth Handler (November 4, 1916 – April 27, 2002) was an American businesswoman, born to Jewish-Polish immigrants Jacob and Ida Moskowicz, the president of the toy manufacturer Mattel Inc., and is remembered primarily for her role in marketing the Barbie doll.

Ruth Handler had noted that her daughter Barbara, who was becoming a pre-teen, preferred playing with her infant paper dolls and giving them adult roles. She wanted to produce a plastic doll with an adult body but her husband thought it wouldn't sell.

But when the Handlers were on a European trip, Ruth Handler saw the German Bild Lilli doll (which was not meant for children at all; rather a gag gift for adults) in a Swiss shop and bought it and brought it home.

Back home she reworked the design of the doll and re-named her Barbie after her daughter. Barbie debuted at the New York toy fair on March 9, 1959.

Barbie became an instant success, rocketing the Handlers and their toy company toward fame and fortune. Later, they would add a boyfriend for Barbie named Ken, after Handler's son as well any many more other "friends and family" for Barbie's world.

Studies in England have shown that little girls treat their Barbie dolls like concentration camp prisoners; stripping them, cutting their hair off, burning their bodies and finally dismembering them.

One of my fields of interest, which I more or less created, is what I call "The Psychology of Super Heroes". Years ago as a student I created my own elective, "The Psychology of S&M" and this seems to be the logical follow-up to that.

"...Experiencing the id and ego engaged in a mating-dance while super-ego directs..." sums it all up brilliantly. You've touched a primal nerve with that one.

I have to admit, I'm not a big comic book guy. I prefer newspaper strips and then vintage Dick Tracy and Krazy Kat. I grew up reading underground comix while my friends all read super Hero stuff and nowadays it's mostly the cartoons in the New Yorker.

Because the symbolism of 'human-animal-god' is so basic and instinctual it remains perennial in popular culture but few people seriously ask why, and when they ask, they can't comprehend the answer.

Look at Holidays: Halloween (alter-egos, monsters, the supernatural), Christmas (the birth of a savior), fireworks (the celebration of war). Our entire culture consists of Idols, heroes, villains and super villains, robots and beauty queens.

My friend, who is also a big Kierkegaard guy, remarked last night on the nature of the struggle being eternal, which is perhaps the healthiest view, as in Japanese Shinto, which has no apocalyptic scenario. Which I'm sure is why some of Japanese pop culture's most enduring images emerged from the ashes of nuclear devastation.

I think Jung influenced Moulton in his rejection of Freud. In Moulton's psychology dominance and submission replaced the infantile Oedipus complex. Just as the super hero Superman parallels the Nazi idea of The Superman, Moulton's ideas of bondage and slavery parallel but do not correspond to the more heinous associations we have with those terms.

Super heroes are invincible and fly through the air, just as do angels, demons, and fairies, but do not correspond in exact psychic terms with those mytho-historical entities. Where they do correspond is in the perimeters of the collective consciousness where all of these beings and states coexist. That collective consciousness is neither Heaven nor Hell because all religions and mythologies are subsumed into it into a single psychic conglomerate.

Christianity and Islam are the only two religions with martyred heroes. You have to go back to ancient cultures like the Aztecs, etc., with virgin sacrifices for anything similar.

What Norse, Greek and even Jewish mythology reveal is that mythology is truly a mirror in that it is a tale told backwards, a flashback (as we say of film noir) that starts at the end and works its way to the beginning. Destruction comes first: in Greek myth the Olympians utterly defeat the Titans before creation even begins; Satan falls from heaven eons before God created the earth.

Piss on me and I'll piss on you. Wait, that's something else entirely, but maybe not! Good pulp fiction is artistic and well considered; thought through and executed with finesse like fine art.

Sophisticated and poetic yes, but to be cinematic there has to be an element of voyeuristic exhibitionism, a show, a spectacle: the gun going BANG! in the dark, the flash of the report, a scream, another BANG!; and then another!; A dying groan, the dead weight of a body landing to the floor, perhaps making a noise as things crash along with it. Inevitably sirens rise in the distance.

The hot breath of the girl and the feel of her well formed chest heaving with relief as she flings herself into the arms of her hero, his strong arm embracing her, the smell of gunpowder. The sense of safety and security in his arms but also the tingling thrill that danger still lurks nearby and the heated anticipation of rewarding him for his bravado, later that night when she can let her hair down and show him how he makes her pale skin ripple and their pulses race to a firm and exciting climax.

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