Essays
Beauty Has Not Vanished beneath the Ruins of the Centuries
When the personality, the intellect, philosophy arose from the legendary depths of mythical humanity, when nature was discovered by man, when "the earth, the wavy sea, the moist air, and the Titan Ether," were solemnly sung, beauty dwelled naked among men.
In every century beauty changed. Beauty did not vanish beneath the ruins of the centuries, it vanished into the Maya, into the mirage. So many rare and priceless garments had been showered upon her, she no longer knew in which to show herself.
Which is the original image of beauty? Which is the image "of beauty's gushing fountain, the picture that flows from the source...?"
Is it the naked corporeality of the Greeks, is it the disguise, the veil, the pageant of the Renaissance, is it the disembodied yearning of Gothic, is it the cube and the sphere, is it the love and the harmony of which Empedocles said: "There were no two arms extending from a trunk, nor were there feet or swift knees or organs of procreation; there was a sphairos the same in all its aspects." Is not beauty naked reality, inner reality, inner sphairos?
From "On My Way", 1948
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Sacred Silence
Soon people will speak of silence as they do about a fairy tale. 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. Cars, airplanes, radios, and atomic
bombs are the latest major triumphs of progress. Man no longer has anything essential to do, but he wants to do it at top speed and with superhuman noise. He seeks recreation and never realizes that the robot steering him is actually driving him into catastrophe and nothingness. Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
From "On My Way", 1948
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The Measure Of All Things
Man behaves as if he had created the world and could play with it. Pretty much at the beginning of his glorious development he coined the saying that man was the measure of all things. Then he quickly went to work and turned as much of the world as he could upside down. The Venus de Milo lies shattered on the ground. Man has measured with the measure of all things, him- self, measured and presumed. He has tailored and pruned away at beauty. This cutting to measure gave rise to a fashion shop, the fashion shop gave rise to madness in all its forms. Confusion, unrest, nonsense, insanity and frenzy dominate the world. Foetuses with geometric double heads, human bodies with yellow hippopotamuses heads, fan-shaped monsters with trunks like elephants, stomachs with teeth on crutches, corpulent or emaciated pyramids with dragging feet and tears in their eyes, clods of earth with sex organs, etc. , have appeared in painting and statuary.
From "On My Way", 1948
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Dreamers
Today only a few dreamers continue to sacrifice their lives for the sake of clarity. They eat badly and sleep on hard beds. They suffer heat and cold. But when the wings of light flutter round them all the misery of their lives falls off, and in their bare cells they sing and proclaim the real suns, the real life. Dada was more than a kettle-drum, a big noise and a joke. Dada protested against the stupidity and vanity of mankind. Among the Dadaists there were martyrs and believers, who sacrificed their lives in the search for life and beauty. Ball was one of these great dreamers. He dreamed and believed in poetry and the image. In Flucht aus der Zeit ("Flight from the Times"), Hugo Ball writes: "The word and the image are one. Painters and poets belong together. Christ is image and word. The word and the image have been cruci- fied." Malevitch painted the crucified image, and for this he was crucified by the Russians. The dreamers are still living in the catacombs within the image, the word, and music.
From "On My Way", 1948
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Art Is a Fruit
Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb. But whereas the fruit of the plant, the fruit of the animal, the fruit in the mother's womb, assume autonomous and natural forms, art, the spiritual fruit of man, usually shows an absurd resemblance to the aspect of something else. Only in our own epoch have painting and sculpture been liberated from the aspect of a mandolin, a president in a Prince Albert, a battle, a landscape. I love nature, but not its substitutes. Naturalist illusionist art is a substitute for nature.
I remember a discussion with Mondrian in which he distinguished between art and nature, saying that art is artificial and nature natural. I do not share his opinion. I believe that nature is not in opposition to art. Art is of natural origin and is sublimated and spiritualized through the sublimation of man.
From "On My Way", 1948
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The Navel Bottle
The middle classes regarded the dadaist as a scapegrace with no morals, a revolutionary villain, an uncultured barbarian, harboring evil designs on the church bells, and safes of the bourgeoisie and its brilliant roster of honors. The dadaist would think up all sorts of practical jokes to prevent the bourgeoisie from sleeping in peace. He would send false reports to newspapers about hair-raising dada duels in which his favorite writer, the "King of Bernina," was involved.
The dadaist made the bourgeoisie feel chaos and remote but powerful rumblings so that their bells began to buzz, their safes wrinkled their brows, and their honor was covered with stains.
The "egg-plank," an outdoor and parlor game for the upper crust, in which the players are smeared with egg yolk from head to foot by the time they leave the arena; the "navel bottle," a monstrous house-hold implement in which a bicycle, a sea-serpent, a brassière, and a Pernod spoon copulated; the "glove" that can be worn instead of the old-fashioned head-- all were meant to show the bourgeoisie the un-reality of their world, the futility of their efforts, and even the inanity of their profiteering flag waving. Our aim was naturally naïve since the bourgeoisie has less imagination than a worm, and a larger-than-life corn in place of a heart, the corn twitching only when the barometer, i.e. the market, drops.
From "On My Way", 1948
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I Became More and More Removed from Aesthetics
I became more and more removed from aesthetics. I wanted to find another order, another value for man in nature. He was no longer to be the measure of all things, no longer to reduce everything to his own measure, but on the contrary, all things and man were to be like nature, without measure. I wanted to create new appearances, extract new forms from man. This tendency took shape in 1917 in my "objects." Alexandre Partens wrote of them in the Almanach Dada: "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, for- mulating, 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 unto itself, an object which would be just as well off 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..."
Even in my childhood, the pedestal enabling a statue to stand, the frame enclosing the picture like a window, were for me occasions for merriment and mischief, moving me to all sorts of tricks. One day I attempted to paint on a windowpane a blue sky under the houses that I saw through the window. Thus the houses seemed to hang in mid-air. Sometimes I took our pictures out of their frames and looked with pleasure at these windows hanging on the wall. Another time I hung up a frame in a little wooden shack, and sawed a hole in the wall behind the frame, disclosing a charming landscape animated by men and cattle. I asked my father for his opinion of the work I had just completed. He gave me a strange, somewhat suprised look. As a child I also took pleasure in standing on the pedestal of a statue that had collapsed and mimicking the attitude of a modest nymph.
Here are a few of the names of my dadaist objects: Adam's Head, Articulating Comma, Parrot Imitating the Thunder, Mountain with Shirt Front of Ice, Spelling Furniture, Egg Board, Navel Bottle. The fragility of life and human works was converted with the dadaists into black humor. No sooner is a building, a monument completed than it begins to decay, fall apart, decompose, crumble. The pyramids, temples, cathedrals, the paintings of the masters, are convincing proof of this. And the buzzing of man does not last much longer than the buzzing of the fly spiraling so enthusiastically around my baba au rhum.
Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order. Dada wanted to replace the logical non-sense of the men of today by the illogically senseless. That is why we pounded with all our might on the big drum of dada and trumpeted the praises of unreason. Dada gave the Venus de Milo an enema and per- mitted Laocoon and his sons to relieve themselves after thousands of years of struggle with the good sausage Python. Philosophies have less value for dada than an old abandoned toothbrush, and dada abandons them to the great world leaders. Dada denounced the infernal ruses of the official vocabulary of wisdom. Dada is for the senseless, which does not mean non-sense. Dada is senseless like nature. Dada is for nature and against art. Dada is direct like nature. Dada is for infinite sense and definite means.
From "On My Way", 1948
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Dadaland
In Zurich, in 1915, disgusted by the butchery of World War I, we devoted ourselves to the Fine Arts. Despite the remote booming of artillery we sang, painted, pasted, and wrote poetry with all our might and main. We were seeking an elementary art to cure man of the frenzy of the times and a new order to restore the balance between heaven and hell. This art rapidly became a subject of general dis- approval. It was not surprising that the "bandits" were unable to understand us. In their puerile megalomania and power-madness, they demanded that art itself must serve to brutalize mankind.
The Renaissance taught men to arrogantly exalt their reason. Modern times with their sciences and technologies have consecrated men to megalomania. The chaos of our era is the result of that overestimating of reason. We sought an anonymous and collective art. For an exhibition of our work in Zurich, in 1915, I wrote the following: "These works are constructed with lines, surfaces, shapes, and colors. They try to transcend the human and attain the infinite and eternal. They are a denial of human egotism... Our brothers' hands, rather than serving as our own, had become enemy hands. Anonymity had been replaced by renown and masterworks, wisdom was dead... Reproducing means imitating, play acting, tightrope walking..."
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In 1915 Sophie Taeuber and I painted, embroidered, and did collages; all these works were drawn from the simplest forms and were probably the first examples of "concrete art." These works are Realities, pure and independent, with no meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected all mimesis and description, giving free rein to the Elementary and the Spontaneous. Since the arrangement of planes and their proportions and colors seemed to hinge solely on chance, I declared that these works were arranged "according to the law of chance," as in the order of nature, chance being for me simply a part of an inexplicable reason, of an inaccessible order. Around the same time Russian and Dutch painters were producing works rather close to ours in appearance but with totally different aims. They were really a tribute to modern life, a glorification of the machine and technology. Although treated abstractly, they always contained some residue of naturalism and deception.
From 1916 to 1920 Sophie Taeuber was dancing in Zurich. Here are the lovely lines that Hugo Ball wrote about her in an essay entitled "Occultism and Other Fine and Rare Things":
She is bathed in the brightness of the sun and the miracle that replaces tradition. She is full of inventiveness, whimsy, and caprice. She danced to the "Song of the Flying Fish and the Sea Horses," an onomatopoetic lament. It was a dance full of flashes and edges, full of dazzling light and penetrating intensity. The lines of her body broke up, each gesture decom- posed into a hundred precise, angular, and sharp movements. The buffoonery of the perspective, the lighting, and the atmos- phere is a pretext used by a hypersensitive nervous system for witty and ironic fun. The figures of her dance are at the same time mysterious, grotesque, and ecstatic.
I met Eggeling in 1915 at Mme. Wassilief's studio in Paris. Mme. Wassilief had organized a canteen in her two studios, and artists could eat supper there cheaply. Friends returning from the front would tell us about the war, and when our depression got too strong for us a young woman with a a lovely voice would sing: "En passant par la Lorraine avec mes sabots..." A drunken Swede accompanied her on the piano. Every night my brother and I would walk the miles of darkness separating Montmartre from the Wassilief studio near the Gare Montparnasse in a Paris threatened by the Germans. Eggeling lived in a humid and sinister studio on Boulevard Raspail. Modigliani lived across from him and he would often drop in on Eggeling to recite Dante and get drunk. He also took cocaine. One evening it was decided that I and several other innocents were to be initiated into the "Arti- ficial Paradises." Each of us gave Modigliani a few francs to stock up on the drug. We waited for hours. Finally he returned, jovial and sniffling; he had devoured all the cocaine by himself. Eggeling rarely painted in those days; he would spend hours talking about art. I ran into him in Zurich in 1917. He was seeking the rules for a sculptural counterpoint, having already composed and designed the primary elements. He was tormenting himself to death. On huge rolls of paper he had formulated a sort of hieratic script with the help of unusually beautiful and finely proportioned figures. These figures grow, subdivide, multiply, move, tangle from one group to the next, vanish, reappear in part, organizing into stately construction in accordance with the architecture of vegetal forms. He and his friend Hans Richter had already managed to adapt his invention to film making. Hiding out in his quiet little room, Janco devoted himself to a zig-zag naturalism. I can forgive this secret vice of his, for he evoked and fixed the Cabaret Voltaire on canvas. On the stage of a gaudy, motley, overcrowded tavern there are several weird and peculiar figures representing Tzara, Janco, Ball, Huelsenbeck, Madame Hennings, and your humble servant. Total pandemonium. The people around us are shouting, laughing, and gesticulating. Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups, poems, moos, and miaowing of medieval Bruitists. Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost. We were given the honorary title of Nihilists. The managers of stultification applied this name to anyone who refused to go their way. The big stars of the dada movement were Ball and Tzara. Ball, I think, is one of the greatest German writers. He was gaunt and lanky and his face was like a pater dolorosus. Around that time, Tzara wrote the Twenty-five Poems, which belong to the greatest poetry ever written in France. Later we were joined by Doctor Serner, adventurer, detective- story writer, ballroom dancer, dermatologist, and gentleman burglar.
I would meet with Tzara and Serner at the Odéon and in Zurich's Café de la Terrasse to work on a cycle of poems: The Hyperbola of the Crocodile-Hairdresser and the Cane. This kind of verse was sub- sequently dubbed "Automatic Poetry" by the surrealists. Automatic poetry emerges directly from the poet's guts or any other organ that has stored up reserves. Neither the Postilion of Longjumeau, nor the Alex- andrine, nor grammar, nor aesthetics, nor Buddha, nor the Sixth Commandment could interfere. The poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels at will. His poems are like nature: they stink, laugh, and rhyme like nature. Trivia, or at least what people call trivia, are as precious to him as sublime rhetoric, for in nature a broken twig is as beautiful and as important as a star, and it is men who arrogate for themselves the right to judge what is beautiful or ugly.
Dada objects are made of found or manufactured elements, simple or incongruous. The Chinese several millennia ago, Duchamp and Picabia in the United States, and Schwitters and myself during World War I, were the first to invent and spread these games of wisdom and acumen that were meant to cure human beings of the sheer madness of genius and to lead them back more modestly to their proper place in nature. The natural beauty of these objects is as inherent as that of a bouquet of flowers picked by children. Thousands of years ago a Chinese emperor sent his artists into the most distant lands to seek stones of rare and fantastic shapes which he collected and placed on pedestals next to his vases and his gods. It is clear that this game will never suit our modern thinkers-- careerists who lie in wait for art collectors like a hotel porter waiting for his clients at a station.
Are you still laughing wildly as you sing your diabolical song of the windmill of Hirza-Pirza and shake your Gypsy locks, my dear Janco? I haven't forgotten the masks you made for our "Dada Demonstrations:" they were terrifying and usually painted blood red. With cardboard, paper, horsehair, wire, and cloth, you created languorous foetuses, Lesbian sardines, and ecstatic mice. In 1917 Janco produced abstract works whose significance has been growing all this while. He was a passionate man who had faith in the evolution of art.
Auguste Giacometti was already a success by 1916; yet he loved the dadaists and often took part in their demonstrations. He looked like a well-to-do bear; and, doubtless sympathizing with the bears of his native region, he wore a bearskin cap. One of his friends revealed to me that the lining of this cap concealed an enviably fat bankbook. Once, during a dada evening, he awarded us a thirty-yard-long memento, painted in all the colors of the rainbow and covered with sublime inscriptions. One night we decided to modestly create some private publicity for dada. We made the rounds of all the bars on Limmatquai, Giacometti cautiously opened the door of each and said in a loud and clear voice: "Long live dada!" and then just as carefully closed the door. The patrons opened their mouths in amazement, dropping their sausages. What could be the meaning of that mysterious cry uttered by a decent and mature man who didn't look like a practical jokester or a foreigner? At the time, Giacometti was painting blossoming stars, cosmic blazes, sheaves of flame, burning chasms. What interested us about his paintings was that they arose out of color and pure imagination. Giacometti was also the first artist to attempt a mobile art work; he created it with a pendulum clock transmuted by forms and colors. Despite the war it was a lovely era which we will always remember as idyllic when the next world war comes and we are changed into hamburgers and scattered to the four corners of the world.
From "On My Way", 1948
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With Lowered Eyelids
I let myself be guided by my work and I trust it fully. I never reflect. As I work, friendly, strange, evil, inexplicable, mute, or sleeping forms arise. They take shape on their own. I seem merely to motion. We should show gratitude and amazement in welcoming the light and the darkness sent to us by "chance." "Chance," which guides our hands when we tear up paper, and the figures that result from this, reveal mysteries, deeper events of life. The chance interruption and postponement of a work will later turn out to have been timely. It is an essential action during the genesis of a work. "Blind choice" of a color often gives a picture its vibrant heart.
The content of a sculpture has to come forward on tiptoe, unpre- tentious and as light as the spoor of an animal in snow. Art has to melt into nature. It should even be confused with nature. But this should be attained not by imitation but by the opposite of naturalistic copying on canvas or stone. Art will thus rid itself more and more of selfishness, virtuosity, and foolishness.
All one has to do is lower one's eyelids, and inner rhythm will pass purer through the hand. In a dark room the flow of inner motion is easier to control. The great artist of the Stone Age knew how to conduct the thousand voices singing within him. The drawing thus loses all its opacity and thus the harmonics, the pulsation, the repetitions, and the metaphor of the melody become the rhythm of a deep breath.
1955
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Fiction
From The Man Who Lost His Skeleton
novel by Jean Arp, Leonora Carrington, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Georges Hugnet, Henri Pastoureau, Gisèle Prassinos, et al.
Chapter Four: The Skeleton on Vacation
(By Jean Arp)
The skeleton was as overjoyed as a lunatic having his strait jacket removed. It was a true release for him to be able to stroll about without the burden of flesh. The mosquitoes no longer bit him. He no longer had to have his hair cut. He was no longer hungry, thirsty, cold, or hot. He was far from the lizard of love and its bourgeois, far from the milk of concubines, far from the lunar mucus. The tenor-mushrooms that grew on the meridians no longer preoccupied his mind. A German chemistry professor, who planned to convert him into delicious ersatz, dynamite, strawberry jam, sauerkraut with sausages... etc., lay in wait for him for a certain length of time. The skeleton easily managed to put him off the scent by dropping the bone of a young zeppelin, and the professor flung himself upon it, reciting chemical anthems and covering the bone with hot kisses that were ever so slightly incestuous.
The skeleton's home had an ancient head and modern feet. The ceiling was the sky, the floor the earth. It was painted entirely in white and decorated with snowballs in which hearts were throbbing. It looked like a transparent monument that dreams of an electric teat, and with a gentle and invisible smile it gazed eyelessly into the inexhaustible supply of silence that surrounds our star. The skeleton didn't care for disaster, but in order to suggest that life also has certan perilous moments, he had placed a giant die in the center of his lovely apartment and from time to time he would sit on it like a true philosopher. Occasionally he vaguely performed some entrechats-six to the tune of Saint-Saën's La Danse Macabre. But he executed them with such grace, and such candor in the style of midnight dances in romantic and obsolete graveyards, that no one seeing him would have thought of anything unpleasant. He gazed in satisfaction at the Milky Way, that immense host of skeletons enveloping our planet. Twinkling, sparkling, shining with all those myriads of little skeletons who dance, leap, somersault, and do their duty. They welcome the dead of a thousand fields of honor, honor of hyenas, vipers, crocodiles, bats, lice, toads, spiders, tape worms, and scorpions. They give them their first advice and guide their first steps, for at their birth the dead are as wretched in their neglect as newborn babies. Our repugnant and emiment colleagues, colmiles, colyards, and colmeters, smelling like wild boars and with the encrusted noses of mummified oysters, turn, when they die, into skeletons of a terrifying beauty. Have you heard the dreadful sighing of the dead in the hecatombs? It's the terrible disenchantment of the newborn dead who had certainly hoped for and deserved eternal sleep, and who now see themselves cheated and caught in everlasting gears of pain and sorrow. The skeleton people were at a loss as to what to make of and do with our skeleton. Was he a professional skeleton or an amateur?
The skeleton wasn't the least bit concerned about that errant flesh, Mister Maple. Every morning he would get up pure as a Gillette blade. He embellished his bones with seasoning herbs, brushed his teeth with ancestor marrow, and did his nails with Fatma nail polish. Every afternoon at cocktail time he made his way to the corner bistro, where he regularly perused The Necromancer's Daily, the favorite tabloid of the beautiful corpse people. He would frequently enjoy a game of ivory towers and dandy. Once he pretended to be thirsty and ordered something to write with; he emptied the inkwell into his jaws down on the inside of his carcass: the ink spattered and splotched his lovely white bones. Another time he went into a toyshop and bought a supply of those droll Parisian items, imitation turds; the same evening he put some into a chamber pot, and when the butler awoke he couldn't get over it: to think that a skeleton, who never eats or drinks, would relieve nature just like everyone else.
Now one day the skeleton drew a few tiny hazelnuts which walked on darling little footsies across mountains that spat frogs through the mouth, the eyes, the ears, the nose, and other openings and holes. The skeleton was as frightened as a skeleton meeting a skeleton in broad daylight. He quickly grew a detective pumpkin on his head, and the pumpkin had the day side of a loaf of patchouli and the night side of the egg of Columbus; then he went off, halfway reassured, to see a fortuneteller.
1939
From "Arp on Arp: poems, essays, memories"
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