Marcel Duchamp, readymades e o início da arte conceptual

Nude descending a staircase nº2 - 1916

A influência crescente do cinema e fotografia sobre a pintura como resposta à necessiade de recriação de movimento na pintura, ou a subversão irónica da teoria do cubismo e do seu inerente estatismo.

The bride stripped bare by her bachelores, even - 1915-23

"In the typically playful, often associative and even cryptic notes, Duchamp calls the boundary between the realm of the Bride and that of her Bachelors "the garment of the bride," which may refer literally to her clothing but also figuratively to the boundary of her body or psyche. The "Glider" introduces chance to the scene, thwarting the Bachelors' efforts by sliding back and forth at random between them and the Bride, and powering the "Scissors," two gigantic blades which threaten the Eyewitnesses--three opticians' charts and a lens. Peering through this lens, one sees through the piece without being able to look at it at all; in this way the work argues, as much of Duchamp's work does, that visual perception alone fails to yield understanding. With so many obstacles between the Bachelors and the Bride who tempts them, it's no surprise that, as Duchamp suggests in his notes, the bachelors have to grind their own chocolate."

O passo seguinte compreendeu a execução de um conjunto de obras designadas por "readymades". Estes constituiam uma experiência, uma provocação, sendo o producto de um esforço consciente para quebrar todas as regras da tradição artística, de modo acriar uma nova forma de arte, que estimule não o olhar mas mente, provocando o observador e incitando-o a pensar.

Bycicle Wheel - 1913


The Fountain - 1917

Este conjunto de obras foi o prenûncio do movimento artístico designado Arte conceptual surgido nos anos 60 que defende a primazia das ideias veiculadas pela obra de arte, deixando os meios usados para a criar em lugar secundário.

Em arte conceptual, a ideia ou conceito é o aspecto mais importante da obra. Quando um artista usa uma forma conceptual de arte, significa que todo o planeamento e decisões são tomadas antecipadamente, sendo a execução um assunto secundário. A ideia torna-se na máquina que origina a arte.

Sol Le Witt

A arte conceptual recorre frequentemente ao uso de fotografias, mapas e textos escritos (como definições de dicionário). Em alguns casos reduz-se a um conjunto de instruções escritas que descrevem a obra, sem que esta se realize de facto, dando ênfase à ideia no lugar do artefacto.

Links: Biografia, Arte conceptual, A Obra, Cronologia Virtual

O movimento DADA

(The signatories of this
manifesto live in France,
America, Spain, Germany,
Italy, Switzerland,
Belgium, etc. but have
no nationality.)

DADA EXCITES EVERYTHING

DADA knows everything. DADA spits everything out.

BUT . . . . . . . . .

HAS DADA EVER SPOKEN TO YOU:

about Italy
about accordions
about women's pants
about the fatherland
about sardines
about Fiume
about Art (you exaggerate my friend)
about gentleness
about D'Annunzio
what a horror
about heroism
about mustaches
about lewdness
about sleeping with Verlaine
about the ideal (it's nice)
about Massachusetts
about the past
about odors
about salads
about genius, about genius, about genius
about the eight-hour day
about the Parma violets

NEVER NEVER NEVER

DADA doesn't speak. DADA has no fixed idea. DADA doesn't catch flies.

THE MINISTRY IS OVERTURNED. BY WHOM?

BY DADA

The Futurist is dead. Of What? Of DADA

A Young girl commits suicide. Because of What? DADA
The spirits are telephoned. Who invented it? DADA
Someone walks on your feet. It's DADA
If you have serious ideas about life,
If you make artistic discoveries
and if all of a sudden your head begins to crackle with laughter,
If you find all your ideas useless and ridiculous, know that

IT IS DADA BEGINNING TO SPEAK TO YOU

cubism constructs a cathedral of artistic liver paste

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

expressionism poisons artistic sardines

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

simultaneism is still at its first artistic communion

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

futurism wants to mount in an artistic lyricism-elevator

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

unanism embraces allism and fishes with an artistic line

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

neo-classicism discovers the good deeds of artistic art

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

paroxysm makes a trust of all artistic cheeses

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

ultraism recommends the mixture of these seven artistic things

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

creationism vorticism imagism also propose some artistic recipes

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

50 francs reward to the person who finds the best
way to explain DADA to us

Dada passes everything through a new net.
Dada is the bitterness which opens its laugh on all that which has been made consecrated forgotten in our language in our brain in our habits.
It says to you: There is Humanity and the lovely idiocies which have made it happy to this advanced age

DADA HAS ALWAYS EXISTED
THE HOLY VIRGIN WAS ALREADY A DADAIST

DADA IS NEVER RIGHT

Citizens, comrades, ladies, gentlemen

Beware of forgeries!

Imitators of DADA want to present DADA in an artistic form which it has never had

CITIZENS,

You are presented today in a pornographic form, a vulgar and baroque spirit which is not the PURE IDIOCY claimed by DADA

BUT DOGMATISM AND PRETENTIOUS IMBECILITY

Paris January 12, 1921

E. Varèse, Tr. Tzara, Ph. Soupault,
Soubeyran, J. Rigaut, G. Ribe-
mont-Dessaignes, M. Ray, F. Pi-
cabia, B. Péret, C. Pausaers
R.Hülsenbeeks, J. Evola, M. Ernst,
P. Eluard, Suz. Duchamp, M. Du-
champ, Crotti, G. Cantarelli, Marg.
Buffet, Gab. Buffet, a. Breton
Baargeld, Arp., W. C. Arensberg,
L. Aragon

For all information
write "AU SANS PAREIL"
37, Avenue Kléber.
Tel. PASSY 25-22

DADAISTIC MANIFESTO!

Art, in its execution and direction, is dependent upon the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be the one that presents in its contens of consciousness the thousand-fold problems of the time; to which one may note that this art allows itself to be tossed by the explosions of the last week, that it pieces together its parts again and again while being shoved by the day before. The best and most original artists will be those who hour by hour tear the tatters of their body out of the tumult of life's cataract, commited to the intellect of the age, bleeding from hands and hearts. Did expressionism ever fulfill our expectations of this kind of art that is a confirmation of our most vital concerns?

No!No!No!

Did the expressionists fulfill our expectations of an art that burns the essence of life into our flesh?

No!No!No!

Under the pretense of interiorization the expressionists in literature and painting have made of themselves a generation that is still waiting today for literary- and art-historical veneration and that puts itself forward as a candidate for an honorable bourgeois recognition. Under the pretense of propagating soul, they have found their way back--using a battle against naturalism--to the abstract-pathetic gestures that are the presupposition of a vapid, comfortable, and stolid life. The stages are filled with kings, poets, and faustian natures of every sort, while the theory of a melioristic conception of the world, whose childish, psychologically naive manner is significant only as a critical supplementation of expressionism, haunts actionless heads. Hatred of the press, hatred of the advertisement, hatred of sensation--all this speaks for people for whom a chair is more important than the noise of the street and who think of it as an advantage to be tricked by every con man. That sentimental resistance to an age that is no better and no worse, no more reactionary and no more revolutionary than any other age, that faded opposition that yearns for prayer and incense whenever it does not prefer to make its cardboard gun out of attic iambs--these are characteristics of a youth that never understood how to be young. Expressionism, discovered abroad, has become in Germany--as always happens--a fat idyll and the expectation of a good pension; it has nothing more to do with the struggles of active people. The signers of this manifesto have gathered under the battlecry

DADA!!!

for the propaganda of an art from which they expect the realization of new ideals.

What exactly is DADAISM?

The word Dada symbolizes the primitive relationship to ambient reality; with dadaism a new reality achieves its majority. Life appears as a simultaneous confusion of noises, colors, and mental rhythms that is absorbed cold-eyed into a dadaistic art with all the sensational screams and feverishness of its deviant everyday psyche and in its total, brutal reality. Here is the sharply marked parting of the ways that separates dada from all previous artistic directions and above all from FUTURISM, that some addlebrains have recently taken for a new edition of impressionist achievement. Dadaism, for one thing, no longer stands aside from life an an aesthetic manner, in that it shreds into its component parts all the jargon of ethics, culture, and an interiority that is only a jacket for weak muscles.

The BRUITISTIC poem shows a streetcar just as it is, the essence of the streetcar with the yawning of the pensioner Schulze and the scream of the brakes.

The SIMULTANEOUS poem teaches the meaning of the jumbledness of all things, whil Herr Schulze reads, the Balkan express crosses a bridge near Nisch, a pig bawls in the cellar at Nuttke the butcher's.

The STATIC poem makes individuals of words, the woods with its treetops, foresters' liverys, and wild boars spets out of the three letters "woods," maybe a small hotel even steps out, with the name Bellevue or Bella Vista.

Dadaism leads to unheard of new possibilities and forms of expression in all the arts. It has made cubism into a dance on the stage, it has propagated the BRUITISTIC music of the futurists (whose purely Italian concerns it however doesn't wish to generalize) in all the countries of Europe. The word Dada points at the same time to the internationalism of the movement, which is bound to no borders, religions or professions. Dada is the international expression of all these offensives, peace congresses, ruckus at the vegetable market, suppers on the Esplenade, etc. etc. Dada seeks the use of new materials in painting. Dada is a CLUB founded in Berlin that one can enter without taking on any responsibilities. Here everyone is chairman, and everyone can express an opinion on artistic matters. Dada is not a pretense for the ambition of a few belletrists (as out enemies would like to have you believe), Dada is a type of intellect that can reveal itself in every conversation so that one has to say: that one is a dadaist, this one is not; the Dada Club has members in every part of the world, in Honolulu as much as in New Orleans or Meseritz. To be a dadaist can mean, under certain circumstances, to be more of a businessman or politician than an artist--or to be an artist only by accident; to be a dadaist is to be thrown by all things, to be against all accretion of sediment, to sit down for a moment on a chair means that one has brought life in danger (Mr. Wengs has already drawn the revolver out of his pocket). A fabric is torn when touched, one says yes to a life that wants to move higher through negation. To say yes -- to say no; the mighty hocus pocus of existence gives winds to the nerves of the true dadaist -- he lies like this, he hunts like this, he cycles like this -- half Pantagruel, half Franziskus and laughs and laughs. Down with the aesthetic-ethical attitude! Down with the bloodless abstraction of expressionism! Down with holier than-thou theories of the literary fools! We are for dadaism in word and image, for the dadaistic happening in the world.

To be against this manifesto is to be a dadaist!

Tristan Tzara. Franz Jung. George Grosz. Marcel Janco. Richard Hulsenbeck. Gerhard Preiss. Raoul Hausmann. Others.

Links: Manifesto Original; Wikipedia; Cronologia.