Make Art not War - Crass' grand- dada?
I found the following article in the Guardian last week and it prompted me to visit my mate Martin's second hand bookshop (Douglas Books, King Street, Castle Douglas) where I found:
Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modren Age by Modris Eksteins publiched by Papermac in 2000. I flicked through the pages and found this in the Preface
Our century [i.e. last century] is one in which life and art have blended, in which existence has become aestheticized. History, as one of theme of this book will try to show, has surrended much of its former authority to fiction...
For a mere £2.50 I had to ge the book. Only got to page 70 out of 370, but already found dozens of quotable quotes and unexpected revelations. It may take a wee while to digest, but as I do so will sample chunkcs and fold then int the mix. Existance has become aestheticized... sounds almost like a Situationist quote or Robert Anton Wilson and Shea's 'Immanatize the Eschaton' from their Illimantus trilogy.
Meanwhile, grok on this bit of dada...
Make art not war
Fot text plus images go to :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1636718,00.html
Grotesque, absurd and angry, Dada exposed the violent truth of the 20th century. Yet it started so humbly, says Jonathan Jones Tuesday November 8, 2005 in the Guardian
The man in the photograph looks utterly serious in his tubular suit with the wizard's cape and the tall striped headgear. He called it his "cubist" costume and "witch doctor's hat". The cardboard get-up was so immobilising that he had to be carried on and off stage to recite his lautgedichte or "sound poetry":
anlogo bung
blago bung
blago bung
bosso fataka
ü üü ü
This was in 1916. What does this suggest? Mud, poppies, mustard gas. Rat-infested trenches. The youth of Europe dying.
tumba ba- umi
kusagauma
ba - umf
On July 1 1916, in just a few hours, more than 20,000 British soldiers were killed and about 40,000 wounded in the first day's fighting in the battle of the Somme. By the time it was over this one battle in the first world war would kill nearly half a million Britons and the same number of Germans. The photograph in the vitrine at the Pompidou centre was taken exactly a week earlier, on the evening of June 23 1916, in a nightclub in Zurich.
The man in the picture is Hugo Ball. Like young men all over the continent, this German philosophy graduate had volunteered for the war, but he was rejected as unfit. He visited the front line and came home a pacifist. With a young doctor called Richard Huelsenbeck, he organised anti-war protests in Berlin before emigrating to neutral Switzerland with his lover Emmy Hennings, a cabaret singer and prostitute.
The club they founded was called the Cabaret Voltaire, but it wasn't exactly redolent of the rationalism of the 18th-century Enlightenment its name suggests. Hennings sang and gave puppet shows; Ball, Huelsenbeck and the Romanian Tristan Tzara recited their pre-linguistic poetry, often at the same time; there were fake shootings and "negro chants", and Tzara's old school friend Marcel Janco made masks in which the performers became other, stranger people. The artists Sophie Taeuber and Jean Arp contributed coloured assemblages and wooden sculptures but it was Hugo Ball who gave the whole tangential enterprise a name. It is there, in the display case next to the battered old photograph, in the original typescript of Ball's first manifesto; the very first word - "Dada. . ."
All of this is textbook stuff. Dada is one of the central art movements of the 20th century and perhaps the one whose mystique survives most in our idea of what is subversive. Greil Marcus even argues in his great, mad book Lipstick Traces that its spirit returned in the Sex Pistols. You could also meet its ghost in post-Wende Berlin.
In Berlin in the early 1990s, the spirit of Dada seemed to infest every mouldering old cellar on Oranienburgerstrasse that had been converted into a crowded bar straight out of the city's pungent past. History had shattered, the frozen time of the Berlin Wall was over, and everything was up for grabs. British anarchists created a sculpture garden of missiles and weapons behind an old Communist factory. And in the museums, we saw such bizarre old stuff, resurrected with the city itself: Hannah Höch's photomontage Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919-20), George Grosz's painting Pillars of Society (1926) with its moustached capitalists whose heads are literally full of shit . . . art that is all but excluded from modern memory.
The art of Dada has been all but invisible, especially Berlin Dada, which has been eclipsed like the city that spewed it up. Now the vaults are open, and this epoch-making exhibition bears witness to the genius of Höch, Grosz, Raoul Haussmann and the rest.
Suddenly, nothing about Dada seems obvious when you see this show's abundance of works of art made in the name of anti-art. To begin in the Cabaret Voltaire: what exactly is the relationship between Dada and the great war? We know Dada was a "protest". But how, exactly? What this show reveals is that Dada had two quite different currents: the contemplative and the violent, or, to put it another way, Zurich and Berlin.
"In the liberal atmosphere of Zurich," remembered Huelsenbeck, ". . . we could scream out everything we were bursting with." And yet the surviving relics of the Cabaret Voltaire are quiet and pensive, a whisper not a scream. Even in that famous photograph of Hugo Ball, his face is so sombre. The artists most closely allied with the Cabaret, Arp and Taeuber, made almost mystical abstract works, wooden decorations for a sensitive child's bedroom. It also happened to be in Switzerland that Albert Einstein, while working in the patents office in Bern, had published in 1905 the special theory of relativity. He, too, was a pacifist. The philosophical games of chance that Dadaists enjoyed - Arp dropped pieces of paper at random to make collages - resemble Einstein's "thought experiments", and the resulting works might be pictures of the strange new worlds of 20th-century science. This is most obviously true of a painting that hangs in the first room of the exhibition. Marcel Duchamp painted Tu m' in 1918 for the artist and collector Katherine S Dreier. Duchamp didn't like her - the title is a polite shortening of "you bore me" - but he created a masterpiece whose shifting planes, perspectives and dimensions communicate fluidities of space and time.
In 1915 Duchamp, too unhealthy for the army, sailed from Europe for New York. He was in his late 20s and had already left aside his efforts at cubist/futurist painting to experiment with randomness and game-playing. Here you can see the Three Standard Stoppages he made by dropping three metre-long threads from a height of one metre on to a canvas and then sticking them where they fell. Here, too, you can see his bond for a company set up to beat the roulette tables at Monte Carlo.
Duchamp was a dandified metaphysician who preferred games to art. Yet he was a pure exponent of Dada. The movement's founders in Zurich were as enigmatic as he was, their sound poems just as bafflingly tangential: and he was just as much of an anti-warrior as they were. "We saw the stupidity of the war," he said in 1961. "Our movement was another form of pacifist demonstration."
The most straightforward Dada gesture in the entire exhibition is by Duchamp. In the almost obsessively archivist style of the show, there is a whole wall of defaced Mona Lisas - not just Duchamp's original "rectified ready-made" of 1919 but his notes, and later versions he made with his friend Picabia. Looking at them in series, you see how Duchamp's desecration is not an act of violence on the Mona Lisa. It rather draws attention to a dissolution that has already taken place. Duchamp has defaced a coloured reproduction, a "cheap chromo" in his words, of the painting. Dada is the first art movement fully to inhabit the age of photography in which every image can be easily and accurately reproduced.
Yet he is not the star of this show. The star is Berlin. In 1917, one of Dada's founders, Richard Huelsenbeck, came home from Zurich to Berlin. Early the next year he made a speech redefining Dada not any longer as contemplation but as apocalyptic reportage: "The highest art will be . . . the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday's crash."
Everywhere you looked in 1918, people were torn up by yesterday's crash. A war veteran hobbled by on crutches or pulled his legless body along on a cart. Faces "visibly shattered by the explosions of last week" hid themselves in the back rooms of cafes, like the one in Dresden where Otto Dix saw mutilated soldiers playing cards and portrayed them in his phantasmagoric picture Die Skatspieler (Skat Players). Limbless, with glass eyes, patches over missing noses, tubes stuck into faces that are pummelled mincemeat, these men proudly wear their medals.
The grotesque has been a strength of German art going back to Dürer and Cranach. Think of the British war poets, then look at Dix's Skatspieler, and there's something quite different going on. Dix takes a monstrous glee in his very rage: he is not mourning these men but ranting at them, blaming them for their patriotism and passivity.
It's this unsentimental fury that makes Berlin Dada some of the greatest art of the 20th century. It is the highlight of this show, and doesn't conform to any cliche of what 20th-century art was like. Otto Dix exhibited his paintings at the first Dada show in Berlin, the International Dada Fair in 1920, which this exhibition partly reconstructs: he showed a very similar painting to the Skat Players, but with collage elements. It's lost, not by accident, but deliberately destroyed by the Nazis. Photographs show that over part of it hung George Grosz's smaller painting/collage A Victim of Society, which survives and is in this show.
A Victim of Society is instantly recognisable as one of those broken faces recorded in terrifying photographs of the first world war: this man has a hole where his mouth should be and a new mouth pasted in. He has a twisted and dislocated eye. The surgeon, in a cruel experiment, has given him an extra eye inside his ear. And then there's his head, mutilated by a giant question mark . . .
These are collaged disfigurements. Collage was first used by Picasso and Braque but in German Dada it is infinitely more brutal. It's easy to see how Grosz develops from painting to collage; the fragmentation and violence in his and Dix's paintings can be rendered all the more unpleasant by cut-up photos. Yet Grosz never made pure photomontage: in his images the stuck-on newspaper pictures and bits of photographed machinery always collaborate with Hogarthian satirical drawing.
His talent for graphics was vast: others were less reluctant to abandon drawing. Hannah Höch made pure photomontages: it's as if she has swallowed magazines full of fashion, sport, celebrity and art images - then regurgitated them in wondrous absurdities such as The Beautiful Girl, with its chaos of sex and cars and advertising. In Cologne, Max Ernst used photomontage, collage and drawing to create a phantom aircraft with a woman's arms menacing two orderlies carrying a wounded man across no man's land.
When we look at the remains of Dada, we see the 20th century with its skin peeled off. Surrealism was to reject Dada in favour of something supposedly less gestural. Yet Dada spoke the truth. It is revealed here as one of the richest of all art movements, and I have left out so much. But the great contrast in Dada is between the poetic mystics such as Ball and Duchamp, who were true pacifists, and the revolutionaries in Berlin - Grosz joined the Communist Party - whose art is a form of street-fighting. I can't help admiring their rage
· Dada is at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, until January 9. Details: 0033 1 44 78 12 33.
Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modren Age by Modris Eksteins publiched by Papermac in 2000. I flicked through the pages and found this in the Preface
Our century [i.e. last century] is one in which life and art have blended, in which existence has become aestheticized. History, as one of theme of this book will try to show, has surrended much of its former authority to fiction...
For a mere £2.50 I had to ge the book. Only got to page 70 out of 370, but already found dozens of quotable quotes and unexpected revelations. It may take a wee while to digest, but as I do so will sample chunkcs and fold then int the mix. Existance has become aestheticized... sounds almost like a Situationist quote or Robert Anton Wilson and Shea's 'Immanatize the Eschaton' from their Illimantus trilogy.
Meanwhile, grok on this bit of dada...
Make art not war
Fot text plus images go to :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1636718,00.html
Grotesque, absurd and angry, Dada exposed the violent truth of the 20th century. Yet it started so humbly, says Jonathan Jones Tuesday November 8, 2005 in the Guardian
The man in the photograph looks utterly serious in his tubular suit with the wizard's cape and the tall striped headgear. He called it his "cubist" costume and "witch doctor's hat". The cardboard get-up was so immobilising that he had to be carried on and off stage to recite his lautgedichte or "sound poetry":
anlogo bung
blago bung
blago bung
bosso fataka
ü üü ü
This was in 1916. What does this suggest? Mud, poppies, mustard gas. Rat-infested trenches. The youth of Europe dying.
tumba ba- umi
kusagauma
ba - umf
On July 1 1916, in just a few hours, more than 20,000 British soldiers were killed and about 40,000 wounded in the first day's fighting in the battle of the Somme. By the time it was over this one battle in the first world war would kill nearly half a million Britons and the same number of Germans. The photograph in the vitrine at the Pompidou centre was taken exactly a week earlier, on the evening of June 23 1916, in a nightclub in Zurich.
The man in the picture is Hugo Ball. Like young men all over the continent, this German philosophy graduate had volunteered for the war, but he was rejected as unfit. He visited the front line and came home a pacifist. With a young doctor called Richard Huelsenbeck, he organised anti-war protests in Berlin before emigrating to neutral Switzerland with his lover Emmy Hennings, a cabaret singer and prostitute.
The club they founded was called the Cabaret Voltaire, but it wasn't exactly redolent of the rationalism of the 18th-century Enlightenment its name suggests. Hennings sang and gave puppet shows; Ball, Huelsenbeck and the Romanian Tristan Tzara recited their pre-linguistic poetry, often at the same time; there were fake shootings and "negro chants", and Tzara's old school friend Marcel Janco made masks in which the performers became other, stranger people. The artists Sophie Taeuber and Jean Arp contributed coloured assemblages and wooden sculptures but it was Hugo Ball who gave the whole tangential enterprise a name. It is there, in the display case next to the battered old photograph, in the original typescript of Ball's first manifesto; the very first word - "Dada. . ."
All of this is textbook stuff. Dada is one of the central art movements of the 20th century and perhaps the one whose mystique survives most in our idea of what is subversive. Greil Marcus even argues in his great, mad book Lipstick Traces that its spirit returned in the Sex Pistols. You could also meet its ghost in post-Wende Berlin.
In Berlin in the early 1990s, the spirit of Dada seemed to infest every mouldering old cellar on Oranienburgerstrasse that had been converted into a crowded bar straight out of the city's pungent past. History had shattered, the frozen time of the Berlin Wall was over, and everything was up for grabs. British anarchists created a sculpture garden of missiles and weapons behind an old Communist factory. And in the museums, we saw such bizarre old stuff, resurrected with the city itself: Hannah Höch's photomontage Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919-20), George Grosz's painting Pillars of Society (1926) with its moustached capitalists whose heads are literally full of shit . . . art that is all but excluded from modern memory.
The art of Dada has been all but invisible, especially Berlin Dada, which has been eclipsed like the city that spewed it up. Now the vaults are open, and this epoch-making exhibition bears witness to the genius of Höch, Grosz, Raoul Haussmann and the rest.
Suddenly, nothing about Dada seems obvious when you see this show's abundance of works of art made in the name of anti-art. To begin in the Cabaret Voltaire: what exactly is the relationship between Dada and the great war? We know Dada was a "protest". But how, exactly? What this show reveals is that Dada had two quite different currents: the contemplative and the violent, or, to put it another way, Zurich and Berlin.
"In the liberal atmosphere of Zurich," remembered Huelsenbeck, ". . . we could scream out everything we were bursting with." And yet the surviving relics of the Cabaret Voltaire are quiet and pensive, a whisper not a scream. Even in that famous photograph of Hugo Ball, his face is so sombre. The artists most closely allied with the Cabaret, Arp and Taeuber, made almost mystical abstract works, wooden decorations for a sensitive child's bedroom. It also happened to be in Switzerland that Albert Einstein, while working in the patents office in Bern, had published in 1905 the special theory of relativity. He, too, was a pacifist. The philosophical games of chance that Dadaists enjoyed - Arp dropped pieces of paper at random to make collages - resemble Einstein's "thought experiments", and the resulting works might be pictures of the strange new worlds of 20th-century science. This is most obviously true of a painting that hangs in the first room of the exhibition. Marcel Duchamp painted Tu m' in 1918 for the artist and collector Katherine S Dreier. Duchamp didn't like her - the title is a polite shortening of "you bore me" - but he created a masterpiece whose shifting planes, perspectives and dimensions communicate fluidities of space and time.
In 1915 Duchamp, too unhealthy for the army, sailed from Europe for New York. He was in his late 20s and had already left aside his efforts at cubist/futurist painting to experiment with randomness and game-playing. Here you can see the Three Standard Stoppages he made by dropping three metre-long threads from a height of one metre on to a canvas and then sticking them where they fell. Here, too, you can see his bond for a company set up to beat the roulette tables at Monte Carlo.
Duchamp was a dandified metaphysician who preferred games to art. Yet he was a pure exponent of Dada. The movement's founders in Zurich were as enigmatic as he was, their sound poems just as bafflingly tangential: and he was just as much of an anti-warrior as they were. "We saw the stupidity of the war," he said in 1961. "Our movement was another form of pacifist demonstration."
The most straightforward Dada gesture in the entire exhibition is by Duchamp. In the almost obsessively archivist style of the show, there is a whole wall of defaced Mona Lisas - not just Duchamp's original "rectified ready-made" of 1919 but his notes, and later versions he made with his friend Picabia. Looking at them in series, you see how Duchamp's desecration is not an act of violence on the Mona Lisa. It rather draws attention to a dissolution that has already taken place. Duchamp has defaced a coloured reproduction, a "cheap chromo" in his words, of the painting. Dada is the first art movement fully to inhabit the age of photography in which every image can be easily and accurately reproduced.
Yet he is not the star of this show. The star is Berlin. In 1917, one of Dada's founders, Richard Huelsenbeck, came home from Zurich to Berlin. Early the next year he made a speech redefining Dada not any longer as contemplation but as apocalyptic reportage: "The highest art will be . . . the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday's crash."
Everywhere you looked in 1918, people were torn up by yesterday's crash. A war veteran hobbled by on crutches or pulled his legless body along on a cart. Faces "visibly shattered by the explosions of last week" hid themselves in the back rooms of cafes, like the one in Dresden where Otto Dix saw mutilated soldiers playing cards and portrayed them in his phantasmagoric picture Die Skatspieler (Skat Players). Limbless, with glass eyes, patches over missing noses, tubes stuck into faces that are pummelled mincemeat, these men proudly wear their medals.
The grotesque has been a strength of German art going back to Dürer and Cranach. Think of the British war poets, then look at Dix's Skatspieler, and there's something quite different going on. Dix takes a monstrous glee in his very rage: he is not mourning these men but ranting at them, blaming them for their patriotism and passivity.
It's this unsentimental fury that makes Berlin Dada some of the greatest art of the 20th century. It is the highlight of this show, and doesn't conform to any cliche of what 20th-century art was like. Otto Dix exhibited his paintings at the first Dada show in Berlin, the International Dada Fair in 1920, which this exhibition partly reconstructs: he showed a very similar painting to the Skat Players, but with collage elements. It's lost, not by accident, but deliberately destroyed by the Nazis. Photographs show that over part of it hung George Grosz's smaller painting/collage A Victim of Society, which survives and is in this show.
A Victim of Society is instantly recognisable as one of those broken faces recorded in terrifying photographs of the first world war: this man has a hole where his mouth should be and a new mouth pasted in. He has a twisted and dislocated eye. The surgeon, in a cruel experiment, has given him an extra eye inside his ear. And then there's his head, mutilated by a giant question mark . . .
These are collaged disfigurements. Collage was first used by Picasso and Braque but in German Dada it is infinitely more brutal. It's easy to see how Grosz develops from painting to collage; the fragmentation and violence in his and Dix's paintings can be rendered all the more unpleasant by cut-up photos. Yet Grosz never made pure photomontage: in his images the stuck-on newspaper pictures and bits of photographed machinery always collaborate with Hogarthian satirical drawing.
His talent for graphics was vast: others were less reluctant to abandon drawing. Hannah Höch made pure photomontages: it's as if she has swallowed magazines full of fashion, sport, celebrity and art images - then regurgitated them in wondrous absurdities such as The Beautiful Girl, with its chaos of sex and cars and advertising. In Cologne, Max Ernst used photomontage, collage and drawing to create a phantom aircraft with a woman's arms menacing two orderlies carrying a wounded man across no man's land.
When we look at the remains of Dada, we see the 20th century with its skin peeled off. Surrealism was to reject Dada in favour of something supposedly less gestural. Yet Dada spoke the truth. It is revealed here as one of the richest of all art movements, and I have left out so much. But the great contrast in Dada is between the poetic mystics such as Ball and Duchamp, who were true pacifists, and the revolutionaries in Berlin - Grosz joined the Communist Party - whose art is a form of street-fighting. I can't help admiring their rage
· Dada is at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, until January 9. Details: 0033 1 44 78 12 33.
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