Lindsay Ricketts

This quote inspired a photoshoot and research in the man who wrote it. I’ll try and have my own picture here soon.

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation…tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. ~Jean Arp

So then I researched Jean Arp who is a Sculpture/Poet involved in Dada Movement. I remembered that from brief mention in brit lit and art history. Here’s some info for the curious. Its an interesting movement.

Philosophy:
The movement was a protest against the barbarism of World War I, the bourgeois interests that Dada adherents believed inspired the war, and what they believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society.

Dada thought that reason and logic had led people into the horrors of war, so the only route to salvation was to reject logic and embrace anarchy and irrationality. However, this could also be thought of as the logical side of anarchy and rejection of values and order; it is not irrational to embrace the systematic destruction of values, if one thinks them to be flawed.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art — it was “anti-art“. Went against the rules, current forms, and all aesthetic values of art. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics they hoped to destroy them. As it spread (i think it origniated in Zurich), it was twisted into a more political rebellion form, especially in Germany.

Legend:
While broad, the movement was unstable. By 1924 in Paris, Dada was melding into surrealism, and artists had gone on to other ideas and movements, including surrealism, social realism and other forms of modernism. Some theorists argue that Dada was actually the beginning of postmodern art.[3]

By the dawn of World War II, many of the European Dadaists had fled or emigrated to the United States. Some died in death camps under Hitler, who persecuted the kind of “Degenerate art” that Dada represented. The movement became less active as post-World War II optimism led to new movements in art and literature.

- a more famous Dada piece that pictures a meaningless upsidedown toilet

- Hannah Hoch collage

-John Heartfield. Anti-hitler poster durning election. Reflects the financial backing he received from wealthy industrialists.