Empty as lack of meaning: DADA

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917.

"It's too idiotic to be schizophrenic"

Carl Jung on the Dada productions

"Dada means nothing. It 's just a product of the mouth"
Dada Manifesto, Tristan Tzara, 1918

Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that corresponded to the war.

Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality.

Raoul Hausmann - ABCD (Self-portrait) 1923

Dada was not art, it was "anti-art". Everything for which art stood, Dada represented the opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics, the Dadaists hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics.

The Dada's goal was to have no message, because the interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the individual.

As Hugo Ball expressed it, "For us, art is not an end in itself ... but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in."

A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, a "reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."

Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization... In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."

 

 

Cover of Anna Blume, Dichtungen, 1919

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

Empty and Full: An Exhibition of Paintings

Yogendra Tripathi - Acrylic on Canvas

An Exhibition of Paintings: Empty and Full at AAKRITI ART GALLERY was inaugurated on Tuesday 9th September 2008, with Akhilesh, Amitava Dhar, Manish Pushkale Samindranath Majumdar, Sunil De, Yogendra Tripathi. 

The above six artists presented in this show have significantly contributed to the contemporary Indian art, with their innovative use of the pictorial language, and have made a new beginning in terms of visual vocabulary. They are eager to explore their artistic tools, a 'terrain' and firmament which in itself seem to be waiting to reveal certain potent images. The method of exploration  of the concepts Empty and Full, used by each artist is very distinct.

The way the 'findings' are deposited in a particular work, with alacrity, is singular from one to the other. Thus the show offers not just six important artists of a generation; it offers six different sets of listening, perceiving and registering certain momentous happenings. It is not the style per se of the artists, which enchants and mesmerizes us, but their sensitive handling of the works, and forces to fix our gaze time and again on every tiny detail.

Yogendra Tripathi offers visions of parched and moist earth, or a ground filled with an imminent light or some marks seen by a voyager; hinting that much more is to be unearthed. His works are also absorbing in their figurine feel. Samindranathís findings suggest some turbulence in the atmospheric realm, or indicate towards a capacious horizon.

http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2008/09/11/35187.html

The Hole in the substance

 

Henry Moore sculpture in his garden

 

Henry Moore - Three Piece Reclining Figure Draped (1976)

 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 

Henry Moore, Bronx Botanical Garden

Henry Moore - Nuclear Energy - Hide Park

Henry Spencer Moore (30 July 1898 – 31 August 1986) was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art.

Moore's signature form is a reclining figure. Moore's exploration of this form, under the influence of the Toltec-Mayan figure he had seen at the Louvre, was to lead him to increasing abstraction as he turned his thoughts towards experimentation with the elements of design. Moore's earlier reclining figures deal principally with mass, while his later ones contrast the solid elements of the sculpture with the space, not only round them but generally through them as he pierced the forms with openings, wiht holes.

Earlier figures are pierced in a conventional manner, in which bent limbs separate from and rejoin the body. The later, more abstract figures are often penetrated by spaces directly through the body, by which means Moore explores and alternates concave and convex shapes.

www.thebronxrocks.com/2008/09/more-on-moore
www.hydeparkhistory.org
www.chilterndfas.org.uk

Open/Closed, Big/Small, Full/Empty, On/Off

The Western Bridge gallery explored Martin Creed's oppositions in Open/Closed, Big/Small, Full/Empty, On/Off, which includes the continuous residency of a Chihuahua and an Irish wolfhound, just hanging out in the gallery together during exhibition hours.

In Creed's works, the world is made strange through simple and straightforward interventions. His focus is always on the experience of the viewer, as he described in a recent interview in the Guardian. "I think that the best things get under people's skin, make them remember them. People aren't stupid. They know what's fake and what's not. They respond to things. Art is just things in the world, usually an arrangement of colour and shapes. It's people who have the feelings and the reactions."

http://www.westernbridge.org/exhibits.htm                       

Scissors Master

 
Videos tell the whole story:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tIZ35DVlNQ

http://video-hned.cz/video/1qE7bSz3okA/Adam-Saaks-Ed-Hardy-Cutting-Couture-Fashion-Photo-Shoot-at-Tom-Greens-House.html

The full belly does not recognize the empty belly

The full belly does not recognize the empty belly

Olaf Leonhard Gulbransson (26 May 1873 in Oslo – 18 September 1958 in Tegernsee, Germany) was a Norwegian artist, painter and designer. He is probably best known for his caricatures and illustrations

Gulbransson’s sketches are simple line drawings… but they are deceptively simple. The images have been refined down to a few quick lines, but their simplicity and directness masks a depth of thought and planning that is almost superhuman.

      

http://www.animationarchive.org/?p=1012

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaf_Gulbransson