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So here's a bit about Dada , Hans Arp & Hugo Ball etc.
Reinhard Döhl | Hans Arp and Zurich Dada
[Translated from the German by Roy F. Allen (and the author)]
Arp saw Dada above all as a new artistic attitude. His participation in the Dada demonstration and blagues in the Cabaret
Voltaire suggests that this new attitude also had for him a social, or, more precisely, an antisocial, antipolitical aspect:
Disgusted by the slaughter of the World War in 1914, we dedicated ourselves to the fine arts in Zurich. While in the distance
the thunder of the cannons rumbled, we sang, painted, glued, wrote with all our strength. We were looking for an elemental
art which would heal people of the madness of the times and a new order which would restore the balance between heaven and
hell.
Elsewhere he wrote:
Madness and murder were competing with each other as Dada was born of primeval sources in Zurich in 1916. The people who were
not directly involved in the horrible insanity of the World War acted as though they didn’t understand what was taking
place all around them. They stared into space with glassy eyes like lost lambs. Dada sought to wake them up from their pitiful
impotence. Dada abhorred resignation.
Arp’s role in Zurich Dada is characterised rather precisely by the fact that he painted, glued, and wrote "with all
the strength of his heart" in this political and social situation instead of becoming politically involved, as later did,
in particular, the Berlin Dadas. He opposed the "insanity" of the times with the "senselessness" of art. He searched for
and found an "elemental" art and tried to establish a "new order", a concept that for him meant first and foremost a new aesthetic
order.
What he calls "elemental" art here he later called "concrete" or at times also "abstract" art. "Abstract art (which Hans Arp
unswervingly advocates)," Ball noted on 13 April 1916, in his diary, which provides insight into Arp’s artistic views
and aims:
Arp speaks out against the bombast of the gods of painting (the expressionists). He says Marc’s bulls are too fat; Baumann’s
and Meidner’s cosmogonies and mad fixed stars remind him of the stars of Bölsche and Carus. He would like to see things
more ordered and less capricious, less brimming with colour and poetry. He recommends plane geometry rather than painted versions
of the Creation and the Apocalypse. When he advocates the primitive, he means the first abstract sketch that is aware of complexities
but avoids them. Sentiment must go, and so must analysis when it occurs only on the canvas itself. A love of the circle and
the cube, of sharply intersected lines. He is in favour of the use of unequivocal (preferably printed) colours (bright paper
and fabric); and he is especially in favour of the inclusion of mechanical exactness. I think he likes Kant and Prussia because
(in the exercise yard and logic) they are in favour of the geometrical division of spaces. In any case, he likes the Middle
Ages mostly for their heraldry, which is fantastic and yet precise and exists in its entirety, right to the last really prominent
contour. If I understand him correctly, he is not concerned so much with richness as with simplification. Art must not scorn
the things that it can take from Americanism and assimilate into its principles; otherwise it will be left behind in sentimental
romanticism. Creation for him means separating himself from the vague and the nebulous. He wants to purify imagination and
to concentrate on opening up not so much its store of images but what those images are made of. He assumes here that the images
of the imagination are already composites. The artist who works from his freewheeling imagination is deluding himself about
originality. He is using a material that is already formed and so is undertaking only to elaborate on it."
Taeuber’s work in particular had a decisive influence on Arp’s artistic development after 1915. "She is led in
her first abstract compositions to the greatest degree of simplification" by her search "for new solutions to the problems
in art", by "her spiritual purity and her love of craftsmanship." Arp and Taeuber subsequently worked together a lot on horizontal
and vertical images, glued works, on many other projects:
Working together or alone, we embroidered, wove, painted, glued geometric and static pictures. Impersonal, austere structures
were created out of planes and colours. No blotches, tears, no fibres, no inexactitudes were to spoil the clarity of our work.
We even threw away the scissors with which we had first cut out our paper images because they too clearly revealed the personal
involvement of the hand. After that we used a paper cutting machine. We tried humbly to get as close as possible to ‚pure
reality‘. What we practised was the art of tranquillity. We turned away from the outer world of rapid-paced lives to
our inner being, to inner reality, to pure reality. [...] our work aimed at simplifying, transforming, beautifying. [...]
I continued the development of glued works by structuring them spontaneously, automatically. I called this working 'according
to the law of chance.' The 'law of chance', which incorporates all laws and is as inscrutable to us as is the abyss from which
all life comes, can only be experienced by surrendering completely to the unconscious. I claimed that, whoever follows this
law, will create pure life.
A final quotation will conclude this excursus on Arp’s statements about his development as an artist during the Zurich
period and will at the same time make clear how he evaluated this period himself.
"The years during which we worked exclusively on paper and cloth pictures, embroidery work, with new materials and in which
we avoided oil painting had a cleansing effect on us; they were like intellectual exercises to help us finally understand
painting in its original pure state."
For Arp thus, the "tortuous period" came to an end in his Dada years in Zurich; in this period he concluded his attempts to
free himself from the "inculcated, traditional forms of art" and achieved a new understanding of the fine arts, encountered
the problems that were to reappear again and again in his work for the rest of his life.
Arp’s attempts to " overcome the inculcated, traditional forms of art" should be understood not only as opposition to
"academic painting" that depicts " illusion instead of life and nature"; it can also be seen as a fundamental attempt to free
himself from an inculcated, conventional notion of art, from traditional conceptions of art all together. This is characteristic
of Arp’s work in both the fine arts and in literature. Before I turn to his literary development then, I will summarise
my findings thus far.
What Arp wanted was an elemental, or, as he later called it, a concrete art. To be able to produce it, he gave up traditional
approaches to representation, gave up traditional oil painting. He created images out of materials that until then were scarcely
considered customary, such as paper, cloth, wood, instead of paint. He employed unusual techniques or invented new ones: gluing,
tearing, cutting up. He rejected the traditional contents of images by simplifying drawings of twigs, roots, grasses, or stones
into "dynamic ovals" or by creating geometric constellations from the very start out of planes and colours. The artistic aim
of this work, which he repeatedly stressed in retrospective commentary, was purity, impersonality, simplicity. The work of
art was no longer to have any relationship with a depictable external reality and its objects. He discovered in these experiments
the "law of chance".
In particular, using words to achieve captivating effects, "doing away with sentences for the sake of the individual word,"
and then doing away with the word as well were to become an essential language experience of the Dadas. All of this had, of
course, been anticipated again by Italian futurism.
...Ball records in his diary Die Flucht aus der Zeit:
We have now driven the plasticity of the word to the point where it can scarcely be equaled. [...] We tried to give the isolated
vocables the fullness of an oath, the glow of a star. And curiously enough, the magically inspired vocables conceived and
gave birth to a new sentence that was not limited and confined by any conventional meaning. Touching lightly on a hundred
ideas at the same time without naming them, this sentence made it possible to hear the innately playful, but hidden, irrational
character of the listener; it awakened and strengthened the lowest strata of memory. Our experiments touched on areas of philosophy
and of life that our environment – so rational and precocious – scarcely let us dream of. (21)
Arp did not go quite so far in his justification of his literary work during his actual Dada years in Zurich, that is, after
1916:
Words, slogans, sentences, which were selected from daily newspapers and especially from advertisements in them, formed the
basis of my poems in 1917. I often selected words and sentences from newspapers with my eyes closed by marking them with a
pencil. I called these poems "arpades". It was the beautiful "period of Dada" in which we hated and ridiculed with all our
hearts the enchasing of our work, the confused looks of wrestlers of the intellect, the titans. I interwove the words and
sentences selected from the newspapers with freely improvised words and sentences of my own. Life is a mysterious breath of
air, and the result of it can be nothing more than a mysterious breath of air. I wrote a number of "arpades", which, however,
as was fitting, quickly vanished, disappeared. We wanted to look through things and see the essence of life, and that is why
we were moved at least as much by a sentence from a newspaper as by one written by a great poet.
...Arp added an instructive preface to a 1957 reprint of his simultaneous texts, Die Geburt des Dada, which included, as well,
some poems never published before:
The Odeon Café in Zurich became Dada’s Mecca and Medina. The numbers of Dadaists became so large that whoever wanted
to have a sensitive exchange of ideas had to find a quieter place. Since Tzara, Serner, and I wanted to compose automatic
poetry cooperatively, we met in the Terrace Café. I wrote about this poetry in my book Unsern täglichen Traum the following:
'Tzara, Serner, and I wrote a cycle of poems in the Terrace Café, entitled Die Hyperbel vom Krokodilcoiffeur und dem Spazierstock.
This kind of poetry was later christened ‚automatic poetry‘ by the Surrealists. Automatic poetry is created directly
from the intestines or other organs of the poet which have stored suitable reserves. He was to be hindered neither by Lonjumeau’s
postilion nor the hexameter, neither by grammar nor aesthetics, by Buddha nor the sixth commandment. The poet crows, curses,
sighs, stutters, yodels, as he sees fit. His poems resemble nature. The things which people like to call trivial are as precious
to him as noble rhetoric, for in nature a particle is as beautiful and important as a star, and it is only people who presume
to decide what is beautiful or ugly.' (24)
The same year Arp wrote texts by himself that are "related to automatic poems":
Many poems in die wolkenpumpe are related to automatic poems. They were written down, like the Surrealistic automatic
poems, uninhibitedly without thinking or revision. Dialect constructions, ancient sounds, vulgar Latin, confusing onomatopoetic
words and verbal spasms are particularly noticeable in these poems. The "cloud pumps" are, however, not only automatic poems,
but already anticipate my "papiers déchirés", my "torn pictures", in which "reality" and "chance" can be developed uninhibitedly.
The essence of life and decay is incorporated into the picture by tearing the paper or drawing. The same intent produced the
"cloud pumps" in 1917. I wrote these poems in a script that is difficult to decipher so that the printer would be forced to
use his imagination, and in deciphering my text, participate poetically. This collective work was very successful. Horny verbal
forms and distortions resulted which moved and affected my at that time. How many medieval copiers of manuscripts, I said
to myself, will have contributed some deep thought to their work out of misinterpretation or inattentiveness! How much immortal
beauty is the result of the further development of a falsely interpreted art form! My attitude is slightly different today.
ON DADA AND HANS ARP:
Dada and Dadaism: Dadart.com
Artlex.com Dada
Tout-Fait:Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal
UBUWEB
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