Memorial for Hans Arp

No DADA = NADAism

Ascent Descent

Original Size: 8”X 10”

Multi-Media: Print Photo Montage, Digital, Internet

Time of Actualization: ‘95/09/17

…After William Blake’s “Ascent” and “Descent” (of Christ into Heaven and Hell)

The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of any of the participants in this event.

In "Dada: Paradox of Art, Paradox of Life" Graham Hunter writes:"...The Dadaists thought that by creating paradoxical art that emulated the unpredictable nature of life they could protest against the misguided rationality of society..." We feel they were sadly mistaken, yet much of contemporary art attempts to emulate DADA, having lost the original meaning and intent and that a true, "clean and sober" strain from the original Pacifist Berlin DADA, is a spiritual anti-art that is in fact an unorthodox Zen Buddhist "NADA" or a primitive Nada Yoga… as such much of the pseudo DADA replication that is entombed in museums Today is metaphysical kitsch at its worst and an insult to the spirit of NADA.

LONG LIVE NADA!!!

...

"Cloud Shepherd" Hans Arp (1953), Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas

(Hans) Jean Arp (September 16, 1886 – June 7, 1966) was a German-French sculptor, painter, and poet.

Hans Arp was born in Strasbourg. The son of an Alsatian mother and a non-Alsatian German father, he was born during the brief period following the Franco-Prussian War when the area was known as Alsace-Lorraine (Elsass-Lothringen in German) after it had been returned to Germany by France. Following the return of Alsace to France at the end of World War I, French law determined that his name become Jean.

In 1904, after leaving the École des Arts et Métiers in Strasbourg, he went to Paris where he published his poetry for the first time. From 1905 to 1907, Arp studied at the Kunstschule, Weimar, Germany and in 1908 went back to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian. In 1915, he moved to Switzerland, to take advantage of Swiss neutrality. Arp later told the story of how, when he was notified to report to the German embassy, he avoided being drafted into the army: he took the paperwork he had been given and, in the first blank, wrote the date. He then wrote the date in every other space as well, then drew a line beneath them and carefully added them up. He then took off all his clothes and went to hand in his paperwork. He was told to go home.

Arp was a founding member of the Dada movement in Zürich in 1916. In 1920, as Hans Arp, along with Max Ernst, and the social activist Alfred Grünwald, he set up the Cologne Dada group. However, in 1925 his work also appeared in the first exhibition of the surrealist group at the Galerie Pierre in Paris.

In 1926, Arp moved to the Paris suburb of Meudon. In 1931, he broke with the Surrealism movement to found Abstraction-Création, working with the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création and the periodical, Transition.

Throughout the 1930s and until the end of his life, he wrote and published essays and poetry. In 1942, he fled from his home in Meudon to escape German occupation and lived in Zürich until the war ended.

Arp visited New York City in 1949 for a solo exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery. In 1950, he was invited to execute a relief for the Harvard University Graduate Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts would also be commissioned to do a mural at the UNESCO building in Paris. In 1954, Arp won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale.

In 1958, a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, followed by an exhibition at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France, in 1962.

The Musée d'art moderne et contemporain of Strasbourg houses many of his paintings and sculptures.

Arp's first wife, the artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp, died in Zürich in 1943, and he subsequently married the collector Marguerite Hagenbach. Arp died in 1966, in Basel, Switzerland

From Wikipedia

William Blake in an 1807 portrait by Thomas Phillips.

William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, his work is today considered seminal and significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts. He has often been credited as being the most spiritual writer of his time.

According to Northrop Frye, who undertook a study of Blake's entire poetic corpus, his prophetic poems form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language." Others have praised Blake's visual artistry, at least one modern critic proclaiming Blake "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced."^[1]

While his visual art and written poetry are usually considered separately, Blake often employed them in concert to create a product that at once defied and superseded convention. Though he believed himself able to converse aloud with Old Testament prophets, and despite his work in illustrating the Book of Job, Blake's affection for the Bible was belied by his hostility for the church, his beliefs modified by a fascination with Mysticism and the unfolding of the Romantic movement around him.^[2] Ultimately, the difficulty of placing William Blake in any one chronological stage of art history is perhaps the distinction that best defines him.

Once considered mad for his single-mindedness, Blake is highly regarded today for his expressiveness and creativity, and the philosophical vision that underlies his work. As he himself once indicated, "The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself." From Wikipedia