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Dadaland
Out of his nine openings framed in curls, man exhales blue vapor, gray fog, black smoke. Sometimes he tries like a fly to walk on the ceiling, but he always fails and falls with a crash on the table covered with the best crockery.
-Jean Arp
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I became more and more removed from aesthetics
“It was the distinction of Jean Arp to have at a certain moment discovered the true problem in the craft itself. This allowed him to feed it with a new, spiritual imagination. He was no longer interested in improving, formulation, specifying an aesthetic system. He wanted immediate and direct production, like a stone breaking away from a cliff, a bud bursting, an animal reproducing. He wanted objects impregnated with imagination and not museum pieces, he wanted animalesque objects with wild intensities and colors, he wanted a new body among us which would suffice onto itself, an object which would be just as well of squatting on the corners of tables as nestling in the depths of the garden or staring at us from the wall…To him the frame and later the pedestal seemed to be useless crutches…”
Alexandre Partens in the Almanach Dada
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Ballet Mécanique by Fernand Léger
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Ballet Mécanique is a Dadaist post-Cubist art film conceived, written, and co-directed by the artist Fernand Léger in collaboration with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy.
Notes from screening at Anthology Film Archives:
beautiful entrancing rhythms
camera work - jump cuts - pull you in and repel you simultaneously
magnetic pulls
great cubist rendering of the body - lips, eyes, framed in sections against post industrial machine movement
organic - in-organic in sync and out of sync
barrage of imagery
landscape overlays
lost in time and space
images of mind, memory floating, transposed - creating pattern
revealing pattern - commonality of gestures
double meanings
collage - simultaneity - variety (variety of Keaton, vaudeville)
beautiful collage rendering of paper Chaplin puppet at end - eccentric dance via animation cut and paste
puppetry
language of symbols, images
slapstick of camera and movement -
Dada timeline
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![Bicycle Wheel by Marcel Duchamp
Inspired by the Dadaists irreverence for belonging to an intellectual, artistic class - I found this recent quote from a “Pamphlet rebutting Weimar’s point of view,” published in Der Einzige 1919 in Berlin from Raoul Hausmann:
“Club Dada represented the world’s international, it is an international and anti-bourgeois movement…Club Dada is a revolt against the intellectual worker”.
And this statement from Duchamp: “scientific attempts to define and categorize them [ready-mades] prove to be difficult. How to integrate into a system the manifestations of a spirit for whom seriousness is the enemy?….The fact that they have been considered with the same reverence as objects of art probably means that I’ve failed to resolve the problem of the attempt to entirely get out of art.”
The ready-made doesn’t call out for contemplation. These DIY impulses for resisting the institutions of art are powerful. I am moved by the sheer humor in resisting the academic consumption of an art experience.
“It doesn’t need to be deeply studied. It’s simply there. The eyes notice that it exists… simply take note…”. - Duchamp](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m63ow77Kp11rukzkko1_500.gif)
Bicycle Wheel by Marcel Duchamp
Inspired by the Dadaists irreverence for belonging to an intellectual, artistic class - I found this recent quote from a “Pamphlet rebutting Weimar’s point of view,” published in Der Einzige 1919 in Berlin from Raoul Hausmann:
“Club Dada represented the world’s international, it is an international and anti-bourgeois movement…Club Dada is a revolt against the intellectual worker”.
And this statement from Duchamp:
“scientific attempts to define and categorize them [ready-mades] prove to be difficult. How to integrate into a system the manifestations of a spirit for whom seriousness is the enemy?….The fact that they have been considered with the same reverence as objects of art probably means that I’ve failed to resolve the problem of the attempt to entirely get out of art.”The ready-made doesn’t call out for contemplation. These DIY impulses for resisting the institutions of art are powerful. I am moved by the sheer humor in resisting the academic consumption of an art experience.
“It doesn’t need to be deeply studied. It’s simply there. The eyes notice that it exists… simply take note…”. - Duchamp
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Footage from our first work-in-progress screening of Ghost line - created by film artist, Shona Masarin and myself.
OUR WAY LIT BY THE PROJECTOR’S GLOW @ Vaudeville Park in Brooklyn, NY
A night of 16mm film shorts presented by Kenneth Zoran Curwood. Live score by Ian M. Colletti and friends.
Shown alongside these brilliant filmmakers:
Marie Losier, Bradley Eros, Martha Colburn, Margaret Rorison, Katherine Bauer, Steve Cossman, Molly Surno, Stephanie Wuertz, Rachel Blackwell/Miguel Drake-McLaughlin, Joshua Lewis, & Sarah Halpern
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Our head is round to allow thoughts to change direction.
Francis Picabia
La Pomme de pins, 25 february 1922
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To Make A Dadist Poem
Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd. - Tristan Tzara
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Film still from Ghost line test film #2, by Shona Masarin.
A chance dot turned up on the first frame of our footage! Reminds me of Oscar Schlemmer’s shape characters!
"Ghost lines" is a movement practice that uses an archival impulse to conjure a vaudevillian past.
As a project, it manifests in a variety of ways – through film, live art happenings, live performance, as photos, drawings, and an ongoing freestyle movement practice.
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