What's so romantic about Tony Kaye?

The notion of 'expression' best defines the difference between art and advertising.

Advertising is about selling an idea. Expression on the part of someone else.
Art is about creating individual experiences and responses. Expression of the self.

Tony Kaye is a rare bean that is responsible for a substantial amount of creative work in each discipline. Most notably to us advertisers as the director of Dunlop's 'Unexpected' (1994) and Volvo's 'Twister' (1996) commercials. His aesthetics in either discipline could be deemed surrealistic, yet Kaye's work, knowingly or not, rings truer to the ideals of the Romantic movement that occurred during the 18th century.

The era of Romanticism threw all rules upheld by the art world i.e. proportional figures, straight out of the window. It caused perceptions of art to change and the social value of art suddenly rose as people treated it as the most important knowledge generating device. The ideal of individual self-fulfillment is inscribed in Romantic philosophy making a clear distinction between art and advertising, where creativity is compromised in expressive freedom by the client or the marketplace. Even so, Nick Studzinski, Creative Director at Publicis claims that there are two types of creativity with the advertising industry: One follows the tradition of patronage-led art which works more narrowly within the limitation set by client and marketplace. The other gives the creative director a much freer hand at developing the concept and visuals, and it's this bracket that Kaye falls under.
  Joan Gibbons captures a clear example of Kaye's artistic freedom in Art & Advertising. She comments on Kaye's 1999 ad for the Vauxhall Astra, where, mimicking a union gathering, babies make demands for better conditions:

"See his  In the interests of authenticity, Kaye insisted on the actual presence of 800 babies, having trenches built for parents/nannies to hold the babies in place. Consequently he is able to produce a rare type of advertising that clearly draws its creativity from individual vision and from the ability to activate the imagination of the viewer in a way that had on notable occasions invoked the grander narratives of our culture rather than the everyday concerns of consumerism."

 There seem to be four central motifs upheld within Romanticism:  

• Expanding the bounds of experience
• Man vs. Nature 
• Unpredictability of life 
• Loss of innocence

All three paradigms are noticably challenged in Kaye's work. His 1996 'Twister' commercial is based upon the reliability of the Volvo to overcome the ravages of a tornado. A calm, documentary-style commentary accompanies the visuals which portrays a view of mankind superiority to nature - a concept very much explored in the Romantic era. Unpredictability of life is also addressed by way of a natural disaster, yet the influence of this motif is nowhere more apparent than in 'Unexpected'. The commercial is characterised by it's trippy visuals (created by laying artificial colour over black and white footage) and the equally hypnotic soundtrack (Velvet Underground - Venus in Furs) expanding the bounds of experince through a sensory overload. Images of dead vegetation further display Kaye's Romantic influences through a loss of innocence. This particular Romantic theme is central to the storyline of Kaye's feature film, American History X, in which a jailed neo-Naxi convicted of racially-incited murder can only watch as his brother begins to follow in his same treacherous footsteps.



The examples given above show how the central values of Romantic art weave throughout Tony Kaye's work, both as an advertiser and an artist. Yet whether this is a direct and knowing link is not entirely apparent. What is clear however is that almost every art movement involves themes that are universal and can be applied in almost any discipline. The surrealist fixation on the human subconscious for example, has cross-disciplinary ties with Freud's psychological theories. So indeed, Tony Kaye is a Romantic, just as much so as Sigmund Freud is a Surrealist.