memorandada

MoMA's `Dada' Shows Startling Art Made to Change the World

2006-06-19T21:58:00.000-07:00

Bloomberg.com: Culture

The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)By Carly Berwick
June 15 (Bloomberg) -- The mannequin has a prosthetic leg, a gun on its shoulder and dentures in its crotch. It's a piece of ornery protest art that could be in any Chelsea gallery today, but it was in fact conceived 86 years ago, by Dada artists George Grosz and John Heartfield in post-World War I Berlin.
The abrasive figure stands sentry in ``Dada,'' a must-see exhibition that opens June 18 at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Previously at the National Gallery of Art, ``Dada'' is the first major U.S. show devoted to one of the most influential art movements of the last century.
We are all a bit ``Dada'' now: crazed and awed by war, media and rampant technology. But the hostility toward received wisdom, skepticism toward pretty paintings and revulsion toward militarism that defines today's art world first surfaced some 90 years ago in Zurich and New York.
The founders of this movement wanted their art to be about ideas, not technique. Still, as this sweeping survey shows, they pioneered several visual and literary techniques -- from nonsense sound-poetry to camera-less photos called Rayographs -- and even managed to come up with some perversely attractive art in the process.
War Haters
Business as usual was out, the weird and freaky were in. Revolted by the carnage of World War I, draft-dodging German artists Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Richter and Christian Schad, as well as the Romania-born Tristan Tzara, moved to neutral Zurich.
In 1916, the Zurich group danced around in masks, made mooing noises and banged on drums for tiny audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire. They printed journals, sent letters and came up with a name for their ideas: Dada, a word randomly picked from a German-French dictionary and seized on for its infantile, primitive sound.
Still, the artists did not reject beauty entirely. The Dadaists wanted to change art, not eliminate it. Arp and Sophie Taeuber made masks and marionettes to confuse the distinction between high and low art. But Taeuber's untitled gouache on paper from 1920, a patchwork field of color, and Arp's 1917 ovoid, wooden wall-relief are elegant abstractions whose formal power pulses on the wall.
Independently and simultaneously, a group of like-minded refugees in New York antagonized the chattering classes with art made from common objects and based on machines. Marcel Duchamp concocted what he called a Ready-made in 1915, buying a snow shovel from a hardware store and suspending it from the ceiling.
Porcelain Slap
His ``Fountain'' (1917), a urinal turned upside-down, was a deliberate provocation. It compelled painter George Bellows to wonder if horse manure as art would be next. (In the Paris venue of this show, a man took a hammer to a ``Fountain,'' remade by Duchamp in 1964, and damaged it; the one in New York is a different 1964 version, owned by the Mugrabi Collection.)
MoMA's installation emphasizes New York's contribution to Dada by opening the exhibition through either of two doorways: one leads to Zurich, the other to New York, suggesting that Dada sprouted in both places at once.
It's a slightly disingenuous equivalence: the New Yorkers - - Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Man Ray -- joined the movement after hearing about it in missives from Zurich. The Zurich group's bold statements against tradition and for unruliness suited their existing methods just fine.
The New Yorkers were obsessed with machinery. Picabia's print ``Portrait of a Young Girl in a State of Nudity'' (1915) is, in fact, an image of a spark plug with ``For-ever'' inscribed on its face. Like many Dada works, the idea behind it -- revealed in the title -- makes it naughty and clever.
Collage Attacks
Political anger and bitter satire were most savage and unapologetic in Berlin. Hannah Hoch's brutally incisive collages laced into profiteering industrialists and lionized the new feminists. In ``High Finance'' (1923), the heads of two older gentlemen are sliced through with cocked rifle barrels as they stride across rows of factories.
Grosz produced deliberately grotesque paintings and collages of smug fat cats who extolled the virtues of their great nation. In his ink-and-collage ``Voice of the People, Voice of God'' (1920), clippings from conservative newspapers stream from the mouths of donkeys and apes sipping from coffee cups with swastikas on them. (Thirteen years before Hitler came to power, Grosz already recognized the danger of the symbol.) Hoch and Grosz used the mass media -- photos, advertisements, newspapers -- as material for layered invective.
A Fractious Group
Dada, which petered out as a movement about 1924, encompassed a history of shifting allegiances and manifestos made and broken. Those require a thorough read of the show's worthy catalog to comprehend. The Hanover branch of Dada, for example, consisted mainly of Kurt Schwitters, whose dreamy, compulsive collages were deemed insufficiently political by the Berliners.
Two of Dada's most prominent founders -- Duchamp and Ball - - ultimately distanced themselves from it. Such contrariness, however, is supremely Dada. Dadaists were the first avowed conceptual artists. Art-makers today work either in or against the waves they made.
``Dada'' is on view from June 18 to Sept. 11 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St. Information: (1)(212) 708-9400 or http://www.moma.org . The exhibition is sponsored by the Dana Foundation. It is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art.
(Carly Berwick is an art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the reporter on this story:
Carly Berwick at cberwick@gmail.com.
Last Updated: June 15, 2006 00:14 EDT

The Great Picabia - artnet Magazine

2006-06-19T21:54:00.001-07:00

The Great Picabia - artnet Magazine

It is no exaggeration to say that without the Museum of Modern Art, Dada as an art historical phenomenon, much less its overarching influence on contemporary art praxis for the last 35 years, would be forgotten.
Particular jewels of the Alfred Barr era dazzle throughout "Dada," the rakishly formal and charmingly comprehensive installation which opened at the Museum of Modern Art this week. Here are, for example, Max Ernst’s chilling and bucolic Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale and George Grosz’s portrait of John Heartfield in uniform, The Convict. (Dadaista Francis Naumann remarked at the opening, "I’ve never heard this called The Convict before. It’s always been known as The Admiral. Heartfield, of course, continued to wear his uniform, after the War.")
It would be a disservice to judge Marcel Duchamp, however, by the memorable ephemera included in "Dada." A toylike display of the refashioned readymades Duche created at the behest of Arturo Schwartz in the ‘60s comes across as a throwaway gesture in a most serious show. Marcel’s puerile puns and light plays upon the female anatomy have become so hackneyed in the discourse that their internment in storage for a couple of decades might be advisable. For "Dada" makes an intriguing case for a movement which can subsume Duchamp’s Borscht Belt tendencies with a flick of the dick.
Doing the flicking, exalted to protean heights by "Dada," is Francis Picabia. As the painter Holly Hughes commented on opening night, "The number of careers which owe a direct debt to Picabia is immeasurable." Her husband, curator Bruce Altschuler, trilled, "There are so many pieces in this show I’ve never seen in person before," and this is especially true of the deep and varied Picabia selections.
Take a small example, Francis Picabia’s Signature, a flowing blue announcement of self which anticipates and encapsulates the entire career of Ed Ruscha. Intervention of a Woman by Means of a Machine is what my wife, a Southern lady, acerbically described as "what they did, sexing up the machines, but this one works!!"
The Animal Trainer, a black colossus whipping a pack of Dada dogs, is the most esthetically pleasing and visually dominant piece in the show. What appears to be an amusing illustration of bowling balls, Volocelles, anticipates Al Held. The range of Picabia’s concerns, his mordant industrial humor and sheer manliness send Duchamp scurrying to the sidelines like an urchin picking snot from his nostrils.
Indeed, Picabia’s Tabac-Rat, a frame sarcastically showing string, is a hilarious send-up of The Large Glass and its author’s pretensions (the piece exhibited here was reconstructed in 1948). The triumph of "Dada" lies in a portly bachelor stripping a bride, the rape of Marcel by Francis in retro. Just glorious.
"Dada," June 18-Sept. 11, 2006, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10019
CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).

The Great Picabia - artnet Magazine

2006-06-19T21:54:00.000-07:00

'Dada' at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum - New York Times

2006-06-19T21:53:00.000-07:00

'Dada' at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum - New York Times

NOW is as good a time as any for a big museum to take another crack at Dada, which arose in the poisoned climate of World War I, when governments were lying, and soldiers were dying, and society looked like it was going bananas. Not unreasonably the Dadaists figured that art's only sane option, in its impotence, was to go nuts too.

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Librado Romero/The New York Times
Marionettes made by the artist Sophie Taeuber in 1918 are among the works in "Dada," an exhibition opening on Friday at the Museum of Modern Art examining the movement that reacted to difficult times by throwing away the rules. A review by Michael Kimmelman. More Photos »

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"Mechanical Head (Spirit of Our Age)" by Raoul Hausmann. The sculpture is made from a hairdresser's dummy, parts of a pocket watch, pieces of a camera, tape measure and other objects. More Photos >
"Total pandemonium" was how the sculptor Hans Arp reported the situation in 1916 at the great Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where Dada was born. "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."

I'm sure you had to be there.

The Dada show, opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is pretty much an official survey (an oxymoron), and, this being MoMA, nearly all 450 or so objects in it look elegant, which they were certainly never intended to look. Interpret that as you will. The buttoned-down museum, which in many ways seems to have lost its bearings, returns to its roots.

The exhibition arrives after stops in Paris (where, papered with hundreds of documents and arranged like a chessboard of small rooms, it was by all accounts superbly eccentric) and in Washington, where it was pared down and didactic.

Splitting the difference, MoMA's curator, Anne Umland, has added Dada touches like two separate entrances. (You choose.) She knows the Dadaists were actually closet aesthetes. After Marcel Duchamp waltzed into a plumbing equipment manufacturer on lower Fifth Avenue, acquired a porcelain urinal, signed it "R. Mutt" and submitted the now notorious "Fountain" to an art show, he claimed to be horrified when people found his readymade beautiful.

Art by declaration had replaced art by discrimination. A urinal, a snow shovel, a hat rack and a bicycle wheel fastened to a stool were art because he said so, and who was to say they weren't? Except that, by the same token, if someone decided the urinal or snow shovel looked aesthetically pleasing, who was he to deny it?

Such became the world of modern art, and either you are the sort of skeptic who thinks that art went to hell in a handbasket, or you see that Dada opened art up to the everyday and we are its beneficiaries. That hat rack looks awfully stylish now, and so does the mobile fashioned out of clothes hangers by Man Ray, never mind if it's still a little hard to love the silvered plumbing trap that Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Livingston Schamberg titled "God." (I wonder if they noticed that the curlicue of the trap spells each of those letters in lowercase?)

In any event, it's good to be reacquainted with a generation that had no market to speak of and for whom society's corruption and exhaustion seemed a golden opportunity to make themselves useful. Politicians were responsible for mass murder, advertisers were conmen, the press self-censoring.

So Dadaists figured it was time to throw away the rules, and you can tell they had a ball doing so. Out with jingoism and the clichés of romanticism and Expressionism, whose self-centeredness they particularly despised, and in with a new spirit of internationalism, collaboration, serendipity and transparency. (Duchamp's cracked glass was the operative symbol.) Dada stood for freedom. Art may be useless but it is also indispensable.

The show is organized by cities, different artists having come to the same notion of Dada around the same time in different places. Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Arp and his wife, Sophie Taeuber, settled in neutral Zurich. Ball, seeing corpses on the battlefield, had contemplated suicide. Marcel Janco said that he could still hear the bombardments in faraway Verdun while he slept.

Out of this came antiwar happenings and lyrical abstractions. Arp and Taeuber, separately and together, made collages, jig-sawed reliefs, chalices and bowls in earthen colors, and marionettes with faces like Oceanic masks for retelling an 18th-century play, "The King Stag," as an allegory of psychoanalysis. "Kill me, kill me. I have not analyzed myself and can't stand it anymore!" was the king's minister's big line.

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"Dada" opens Sunday and continues through Sept. 11 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; (212) 708-9400.

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VOA News - Dada in DC: 90-Year-Old Art Movement is Still Provocative, Whimsical, Engaged

2006-05-15T22:04:00.000-07:00

VOA News - Dada in DC: 90-Year-Old Art Movement is Still Provocative, Whimsical, Engaged

Max Ernst, The Hat Makes the Man, 1920
The National Gallery of Art in Washington is about to say goodbye to a major show on Dada, the early 20th century art movement. Painting, sculpture, film, photography, collage and "readymades" from Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, Paris and New York are all part of Dada, which the Gallery calls the most comprehensive exhibition of Dadaist art ever shown in the United States.

Dada curator Leah Dickerman
German artists fleeing World War One founded the Dada art movement in Switzerland in 1916, naming it after a nonsense word. The movement was born out of the artists' horror at the war, particularly its mechanized killing, says the National Gallery's Dada curator, Leah Dickerman, and so she opens the show with a reel of World War One-era footage. “Many of the technologies that we associate with modern warfare, including tanks and aerial dogfights and poison gas, were invented in this moment,” she said in an interview. “These new strategies provided a new efficiency in killing. And for the Dadaists as well as their contemporaries, it really threw into question whether you could talk about a rational European civilization.”

Raoul Hausmann, Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Age), c. 1920
The Dadaists included artists with very different styles and interests, from George Grosz to Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber, to Man Ray. Wherever it migrated, from Zurich to Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, and on to Paris and New York, Dadaism rejected artistic convention, making art that was by turns angry and political, or witty, modest and abstract -- or a challenge to the very definition of art. “The idea that art is a picture where you can look through the surface onto an imaginary world, was something they exploded as a group,” Ms. Dickerman said. “They replaced it with many of the key strategies we see in the rest of the 20th century: things like collage, montage, installation art, media pranks, sound art.”

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)
The sound art at Dada includes a 1926 film score, Le Ballet mécanique -- played at the National Gallery for the first time with the fully robotic orchestra that composer George Antheil envisioned: sixteen player pianos, together with xylophones, drums, bells, and sirens. In every medium, from sound to sculpture, Dada art was provocative, oppositional, outrageous. Marcel Duchamp doodled on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, and exhibited a urinal as a piece of sculpture. But Leah Dickerman says Dadaism was never disengaged. “I think it's about people who want to understand their own moment,” she said, “and they want to analyze it, and they want to make it visible to their audiences, as well. They're trying to sometimes shock people into another understanding of their own times, to shock them out of a kind of amnesia, or shock them out of a kind of sleepwalking state.”

A visitor to the Dada show says it speaks to our times too
Visitors to the show said they were surprised at how topical it seemed. “It's really timely,” said one man. “A lot of those pieces could be today, you know, because of the reaction of the artists to the war, and to the mindless violence, and sort of incomprehensible stuff that's going on in society, I think is just exactly what we see in a lot of ways right now.” Another agreed, saying, “You can't divorce their art from the moment that they're in, and of course it makes you think about our moment." The National Gallery of Art show was selected from art works shown in Paris as part of a larger exhibit. A third version of Dada opens in June at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

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New Statesman - Arts - Keeping it surreal

2006-05-15T21:57:00.000-07:00

New Statesman - Arts - Keeping it surreal

In the 1920s Georges Bataille's art magazine Documents embraced all that was "soiled, senile, rank, sordid" in western civilisation. Its radical message is as fresh as ever, writes Ned Denny

What place does surrealism, once the most insurrectionary of modernist art movements, have in our brave new world of laptops, "passionate" sandwiches and CCTV? In the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, the group's self-appointed leader, André Breton, called for the liberation of desire and asserted the magical power of dreams. He argued that if we all unshackled the vital energies of the subconscious, not just in art but in our lives, the grim spectre of 19th-century humanism would be banished for good.

According to some, you have only to look around at our virtual, prodigious and ever-transforming landscape to see the ubiquity and triumph of the surrealists. Conversely, a recent article in the Observer contained the peculiar, dry-as-dust statement that "the relevance of surrealism . . . is generally agreed to be at an all-time low" (but relevant to what, and agreed by whom?).

In fact, these seemingly opposed positions both contain an element of truth. One cannot deny the dazzling bizarreness of contemporary life, yet this represents not freedom, but the manner in which industrial society turns the imagination to its own conformist ends. Far from having been liberated, the "rational" but pathologically destructive culture that the surrealists opposed with their calls to poetry and love has become more neurotic and impervious to change.

In this regard, One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse's analysis of advanced societies, was prescient. Like all subversive currents, the surreal has become window dressing, in a world characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefaction; the need for administering such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets". If surrealism can safely be dismissed as irrelevant today, that is because its defeat has been almost total. Absorbed into a way of living whose end is a bland narcosis, André Breton's "convulsive beauty" has become an advertiser's gimmick.

In this somewhat dispiriting light, the Hayward Gallery's latest show on the surrealists is nothing if not timely. First conceived after the gallery's "Dada and Surrealism Reviewed" exhibition of almost 30 years ago, "Undercover Surrealism" pays homage to the movement's most uncompromising provocateur: Georges Bataille (prudently, Microsoft Word advises that I change his name to "Bastille"). Bataille was temperamentally opposed to the dreamier aspects of orthodox surrealism, despising what he saw as the latent idealism of Breton's project. He despised everything, in fact, that gave it an obscure kinship with the progressive civilisation it claimed to reject.

Bataille thus stayed closer to the surrealists' roots in Dada, that primal howl which rose out of Zurich in the depths of the First World War. The black soil to surrealism's wildly exotic flower, Dada prescribed strange chants and the ancestral throb of drums as remedies for a culture engaged in ritual self-slaughter. Enlightenment and the march of reason having led to a mass grave (both literally and psychologically), Dadaism sought a solution in the healing powers of so-called darkness.

In many respects, Bataille's Documents magazine - the central focus of "Undercover Surrealism" - was a continuation of the Dadaist onslaught against cultural somnambulism. In it, he wrote that "horror alone is brutal enough to break what is stifling", a statement that communicates the essence of his aesthetic. If the European mind had indeed become a "whited sepulchre" (as Marlow describes the unnamed city in Conrad's Heart of Darkness), cracking it open would require formidable tools.

This is why, for example, Documents carried a gruesome series of photographs taken in the abattoirs at La Villette. Bataille saw the modern abattoir as a direct descendant of the sacrificial temple, albeit one bereft of any sacred dimension. With the killing of animals not only secularised but carried out behind closed doors, people now occupied "an amorphous world where there is nothing horrible any longer". The result? A numbed and abstracted consciousness which, paradoxically, ushers in the industrial-scale sacrifice of technological warfare.

The "nature" photography that Documents reproduced had the same function: to shock the mind into a clear-headed (or perhaps simply fearful) perception of reality. An oddly angled close-up of a lobster's claw seems at first glance to be a portrait of a monstrous, evil-eyed parrot. Similarly, Karl Blossfeldt's images of alien-like plants militated against a sentimental view of the natural world. As Bataille wryly notes, "Even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centre by hairy sexual organs."

Such intuitions of a fundamentally vile and rapacious nature linked closely with the art of the Gauls, another of Bataille's fascinations. In his essay "The Academic Horse", published in the first issue of Documents, he examined how the noble steeds of classical currency were transformed on Gaulish coins into frenzied, ravening, insect-like beasts. The Gauls had "calculated nothing, conceiving of no progress and giving free rein to immediate expressions and violent sentiment". They were thus part of that same anarchic lineage that had more recently found expression in the formal shatterings of cubism, a style of painting he described elsewhere as being "maximally incompatible with social stability".

Botanical photographs, ancient coins, modern art - all mingled in Documents with reviews of the latest jazz, the un-expected juxtapositions blowing away the stale air of conventional scholarship. Bataille's love for the rhythms of black music is another link with the Dada poets, who "would have liked to drum literature into the ground". Even more than the comparatively jaunty Duke Ellington, the sparse pulse of the Ethiopian earth-drum was a key to the mysteries of African art.

Here Bataille shows his kinship with the savage pessimism of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, a holy text for the surrealists. Identifying not only with his pagan Gaulish ancestors but with the downtrodden "nigger" of the colonies, Rimbaud had commanded: "No more words . . . Shouts, drums, dance, dance, dance!" And then, abruptly: "The white men are landing. Cannons! Now we must be baptised, get dressed, go to work."

Just like the frantic horses on Gaulish coins, tribal masks had long been regarded by European art historians as "degenerate" attempts at classical serenity. Bataille, however, perceived that they bore witness to an overwhelming Dionysian force, one that might reconnect modern man with the long-neglected gods.

There has been a tendency to paint Bataille as a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde character, an unassuming librarian who, by night, turned into the "excremental philosopher" of popular notoriety. This is true up to a point, but misleading when it does not recognise that the antithesis is not personal, but cultural. If we spend our days in the hushed, book-lined chamber of conceptual thought, the energies we suppress are bound to resurface in frightening or destructive forms. What distinguishes Bataille is not his perversity, but his recognition of the tough measures needed to cure a perverse situation.

Shunned by mainstream surrealism for his attraction to all that is "soiled, senile, rank, sordid", Bataille saw that we can no more be healthy without embracing darkness than a tree be loath to dirty its roots by placing them in the ground. In a world moving further away from the shadowy yet nourishing earth, this insight is more urgent than ever.

"Undercover Surrealism" is at the Hayward Gallery, South Bank, London SE1 (0870 380 4300) until 30 July. [http://www.hayward.org.uk]

The Brooklyn Rail - Allan Kaprow (1927�2006)

2006-05-15T21:56:00.000-07:00

The Brooklyn Rail - Allan Kaprow (1927�2006)

Allan Kaprow, the Happener
In the late Fifties, the spirit of Dada was revived in Post-World War II American Art. For Allan Kaprow, the artist who led this revival was Jackson Pollock. In a famous article, written in 1956 (the year of Pollock’s death) and published two years later in Art News by the distinguished editor Thomas Hess, Kaprow claimed that Pollock was less important for his paintings as material objects than for the kind of choreographic approach to painting that the artist instigated. This led Kaprow to explore a concept, close to Dada, in which intermedia performances involving groups of participants—which came to be known as “Happenings”—became a new art form. By 1959 Kaprow was exploring a direction in art where idea and process were considered more important than the object. Others, like Jim Dine, Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg, and Red Grooms, eventually joined in with their own versions of this phenomenon. In many ways, Kaprow was as much a link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, or even the sculptor George Segal.

As the Happenings moved from its association with Neo-Dada in the late Fifties to Fluxus in the early Sixties, it became clear that Kaprow’s idea was also shifting between avant-garde aesthetics on one hand and popular culture on the other. By the late Sixties, his work had indirectly spurred various countercultural phenomena—such as the “be-ins” and “love-ins”—as well as the massive outdoor rock festivals of that era. This kind of popularization was not particularly welcomed by Kaprow, who believed his ideas were being distorted by the commercial media and, at a certain point, refused to allow journalists and press photographers admittance to his events. In retrospect, Kaprow’s Happenings were less “anti-art” than many claimed and were never entirely devoid of aesthetic interest. As much as he tried to integrate the art-and-life paradigm by giving his “activities” in the Seventies a purposefully bland and reductive appearance, Kaprow’s rarefied, somewhat overdetermined aesthetic became even more pronounced. As much as he tried to reduce the formal ingredients by which a Happening could be identified as “art,” its cultural framework somehow managed to remain indelible. Its spontaneous element was always guided by the structure of the piece, regardless of its openness.

Having curated a Kaprow retrospective at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Kansas in 1979, and then later, in 1987, giving a keynote talk at another in Texas (curated by Jeff Kelley), I grew increasingly to admire the importance of this deeply singular artist’s work. Allan never wanted to be part of a movement nor did he believe that the market had any real relevance to the future of art. He was forever committed to art as a medium that could feed and nourish our understanding of human psychology, sociology, aesthetics, and politics. Initially influenced by the philosophy of John Dewey and later by the teachings of Meyer Shapiro, John Cage, and Hans Hofmann, Kaprow believed in an expanded idea of art—prior to the conceptualists and long before the advent of postmodernism—that was inextricably bound to aesthetics and could encompass actions and ideas as much as objects. Allan Kaprow was always in advance of his time and, in many ways, he still is.

—Robert C. Morgan

First Nam June Paik. Now Allan Kaprow. Two great innovators, gone.
In 1957, I wrote a review for Art News in which I praised Allan’s wall-size collage-action-paintings. Raw, raucous, and frenetic, they introduced a fresh note of urban realism into Abstract Expressionist painting. I met Allan shortly after, and we became friends.

Allan’s soft-spoken reasonableness belied his iconoclasm. I recall him taking the floor at the end of a panel at The Club, the Abstract Expressionist hangout, in 1958 and quietly challenging in the audience, which consisted primarily of painters. He said: “I am convinced that painting is a bore. So is music and literature. What doesn’t bore me is the total destruction of ideas that have any discipline. Instead of painting, move your arms; instead of music, make noise. I’m giving up painting and all the arts by doing everything and anything.” Like his mentor, John Cage, Allan was calling for artists to break down all barriers between art and non-art. There was a shocked silence in the room before the painters turned in fury on Allan. He had anticipated what to expect and remained calm. The avant-garde art world would never be the same.

In a seminal article, titled “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” published in the October 1958 issue of Art News, Allan predicted that in the future he and like-minded artists would “become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of everyday life…Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. [We shall show] as if for the first time, the world we have always had about us, but ignored.” The upshot would be a new kind of visual art theater.

If Allan’s thinking was influenced by Cage, it was also rooted in Harold Rosenberg’s conception of Action Painting. However, as Allan said, he had kept the action and jettisoned the painting. He put down all post-Pollock painting as passé. As a partisan of Abstract Expressionism, I disagreed strongly with Allan and rebutted his statements in a letter to Art News. Nonetheless, I recognized the importance and timeliness of his ideas and invited him to participate on Club panels. And in 1963, recognizing that he had become the primary spokesperson for Environments and Happenings, I introduced his ideas to the general public readership of The New York Post by publishing a lengthy interview with him in the newspaper.

Statements like the one Allan made at the The Club got him labeled as a Neo-Dada, but he was not anti-art. In the Post interview, he acknowledged the importance of Dada for its “healthy hatred for clichés and smug esthetics,” but he did not “count it as a major influence on [his] art, either in attitude, subject or method.” He only rejected what he believed was dead in contemporary art. And his nay-saying led him to innovate what he would label Environments and Happenings. As he said, the purpose of these works, like “that of any art [is] to come to grips with the world, to do something revelatory which in turn could make things about us more meaningful…This, I think, is central to the best art, no matter what else it may superficially be about.”

As I write this appreciation, memories of Allan’s Happenings come back to mind: happily clambering over a mountain of used tires in the yard of the Martha Jackson Gallery, or lost in an Environment of words painted and collaged on the walls of a gallery and three-dimensional constructions that Allan built within it. The mise-en-scene enveloped the viewer, calling to the mind the mesh of words—newspaper, magazine, radio, T.V., etc.—that clutters up our minds. It was a hyper slice of reality. In 1962, I helped arrange Allan’s most ambitious Happening. It took place in the nine-story high courtyard of the disused Mills Hotel on Bleecker Street. As its climax, a huge inverted mountain descended from the roof onto an upright mountain, the two peaks figuratively kissing.

I asked Allan if the transience of his works concerned him. He answered: “No. If the work is of value it will stimulate the creation of related works later on and thus the tradition will stay alive that way.” The trail-blazer of Environments and Happenings, Allan influenced Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine, among others in the late 1950s. He was also a formative influence on subsequent Installation Art and Performance Art, which is to be seen everywhere in today’s art world. Allan’s incisive polemics and the documentation of his work have been very much alive for almost half a century, and if current art is any indication,  will surely live on.

—Irving Sandler

I met Allan Kaprow at the High School of Music and Art in 1942. (Because of his asthma, his family had moved him from Arizona to New York.) I remember the first few weeks Allan used to come to school wearing cowboy hat and boots, talking about horses and all us New York kids thought he was strange, but we became friends anyway. After graduation in 1945, while I was away in the navy for a year, Allan had developed a hemorrhaged ulcer (a result of having argued with his father over his fate. Mr. Kaprow, the senior, was a self-made lawyer who wanted his son to follow his footstep instead of being an artist) which was so severe that they had to take him to the hospital in order to clean different part of his organs separately. At which point, the doctor told his father “you’ve got to let that boy do what he wants.” That was how Allan came to the Hofmann School with me.

Art school was where he wanted to be, but the environment didn’t quite fit his temperament. Allan wasn’t exactly the most natural painter. He used to say to me,” Every time I made a brush stroke it was taken from Kandinsky, Miro or Picasso”, which I responded,” That’s silly. You’re a student you can afford to be influenced”. But by nature Allan was too much of a rebel to do anything that has a look of tradition.

One weekend in the summer 1950, I had a job working on a farm in Hopewell Junction, New Jersey, Allan came by to visit me—he was staying with Stefan Wolpe, who besides John Cage, I think had an equally great impact on Allan’s thinking about the avant-garde—and he said to me, “ Painting is dead ”. That was the summer that marked the beginning of Allan’s new thinking about art, which he wrote eight years later in an article, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” In the interval Allan went to study art history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University and later with John Cage at the New School for Social Research. One of Allan’s first memorable show, Penny Arcade, was at Hansa gallery in 1956, with objects and things hanging from the ceiling and all kind of noises including a telephone ringing at unpredictable time, which would get Dick Bellamy, who was at the time the gallery director, running to the telephone for nothing. A few years later Allan became a member of the Reuben gallery where he installed his landmark, 18 Happening in 6 Parts. After that, through George Segal, Allan got a teaching job at Rutgers University and a few other institutions before heading to California. In spite of the long distance, we still managed to talk on the telephone quite regularly when he was at the University of California in San Diego, where he taught the rest of his professional life.

To my greatest surprise, Allan agreed to give a lecture on my work when I had a show at the San Diego Museum in 1981. Everyone said it was highly intelligent and praising of my work, and so I call Allan up and said: “Gee whiz, I thought you said painting was dead.” He said “Well you know that was a public statement. Privately, I might think something else.” Allan kept amazing me. We grew up with the idea that artists were marginal types who didn’t shake hands with the world at large. If anybody got popular or started to sell, it was the kiss of death. But Allan thought that was sophomorically romantic, and he wrote an article in repudiation,” Should the Artist Be a Man of the World.” Perhaps Allan’s vision was prophetic because I’m still struggling to be a man in the world. In the meanwhile I hope that Allan is doing good Household on Cloud Nine, spreading strawberry jam over an old Volkswagen and having the angels lick it off.

—Wolf Kahn

| Paradise Now

2006-03-19T16:55:00.000-08:00

Guardian Unlimited Arts | Arts features | Paradise Now

The world was in disarray, shattered by the first world war and heading into a second. Out of this chaos came the modernists - a group of utopian designers with thrilling new visions of what the future could hold. But was anyone ready for this brave new world? As a new blockbuster exhibition of modernist art, architecture and design opens at the V&A, we present a G2 special celebrating the Modern movement. To begin, Robert Hughes introduces its key players - and discovers how many of their dreams still survive

Monday March 20, 2006
The Guardian

Modernism is a weasel of a word, whose meanings slip and slide. They always have. Not that one should use "modernism" and "always" in the same sentence. Nobody talked or thought about modernism in the middle ages - the idea of a battle between "new" and "established" cultural forms was not an issue then. Now it has gone completely the other way. Nobody, or nobody with brains, assigns a missionary role to culture. The work of art is just one more consumer product among others.

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Modernism is something old that we look back on, not without nostalgia. Its ashtrays and dinner sets, the chrome-tube-and-leather-strap Marcel Breuer chairs, get revived and recirculated without comment. The idea of modernism connotes some kind of ideal and even quasi-official mindset. Seen in one light, it even suggests too much solidity: think of how the innumerable descendants and clones of Mies van der Rohe created, in their high, bland cliffs of steel and glass, the face of American corporate capitalism.
That certainly wasn't the modernité Charles Baudelaire was thinking of in 1863 when, in The Painter of Modern Life, he described "modernity" as an exaltation of "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable". Nor was it what Jonathan Swift complained of in a letter to Alexander Pope - the work of English scribblers "who send us over their trash in Prose and Verse, with abominable curtailings and quaint modernisms". That was in 1737, and was the first and probably the last time that "modernism" and "quaintness" were linked in the same sentence. The essence of modernism, to the early 20th century, when its lessons really began to catch on, would be that it was anti-quaint: clear, clean, stripped as a piston, dealing only in essentials. But by "quaint" Swift meant something more like "bizarre" - he wasn't thinking of picturesqueness.

Once, movements and works that no longer seem to match up with modernism as we understand it used to call themselves modernist. In Barcelona, the modernists were architects like Josep Puig I Cadafalch, Lluís Domènech I Montaner and even Antoni Gaudi, all of whose work fairly groaned beneath the weight of its historical references, exuberant natural detail and symbolic narratives - the very opposite of what people at the Bauhaus were thinking about. Would you call a concert-house ceiling encrusted with giant polychrome pottery roses, each the size of a cabbage, "modernist"? But that was what Domenech, the star of Catalan modernism, did in his masterpiece, the Palace of Catalan Music, a building almost unimaginably remote from the products and ideas of northern modernist architects and theorists like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who wanted to strip all ornament from buildings and, like Euclid, "look on Beauty bare".

Adolf Loos, in Vienna, actually wrote a polemical text entitled Ornament and Crime, in which he set forth the truly demented thesis that the impulse to decorate any shape or surface was in itself degenerate, characteristic of the bestial primitive: ornament was excrement. In the imagination of such people - mercilessly satirised by Evelyn Waugh in the character of the mad modernist architect Professor Silenus (read, "Gropius") in Decline and Fall - the only worthwhile culture in the 1920s was machine culture, made of the shapes that machines could make, with no caressing handwork, every form repeatable at will. "No noodles," van de Rohe, one of the heroes of the style, used to say. In 1900 Paris, l'art moderne was not machine culture at all. It was organic, luscious and hysterically decorative - what we now call art nouveau, whose twining whiplash curves (or noodles) were the polar opposite of machine metaphors.

But gradually the meaning of "modernism" settled down to its present form, based on utopian fancies, standardisation, industrial materials like chrome and plate glass, abstraction and a vehement ambition to make a new world, not just a new art. Design - the rethinking from zero on up of everything from teapots to whole cities - was imagined as potentially all-powerful. And this is the impulse to which the forthcoming show at the V&A in London, Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-39, is dedicated.

It's no accident that the exhibition's delimiting years should be the starting dates of two catastrophic world wars, 1914 and 1939. These dates mark the span of a hectic utopian hope among Europeans, who felt - as Apollinaire wrote in his great paean to cultural renewal: "In the end, you are tired of this old world." The hope of renewal took form in the rubble of post-first world war Germany and attained something like hysteria in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution. In broad terms, it said: things can't get worse than this. You can't take the elements of pre-1914 visual culture and put them, like Humpty Dumpty, together again, just as they were before. The corpse will not rise and speak. We therefore, as intellectuals and artists, can make one of three choices.

Either we throw out the vestiges of culture, all of them, dream romantic dreams of blank slates, reject everything that makes claim to humane and rational discourse, all that our parents called "adult", and call ourselves dadaists. The name "dada" parodied a child's first utterance; it was meant to symbolise the act of beginning again from nothing, having rejected the past in all its weighty totality - a cultural impossibility, but at least a challenge for disoriented self-made radicals in 1917.

Or we put our bets on transferring fantasies about the future back into the present, make enormously inflated claims about a technological millennium that hasn't arrived and isn't likely to appear just yet, and call ourselves futurists, a rhetorical stratagem that works best among the whimsical and operatic Italians.

Or else, we say that Europe, dire as its condition is, can actually be improved. So we must invent a new environment of buildings, cities, images and tools, whose end will be to create new societies of men and women. This engineering will get a name: modernism. It will be buoyed up by an immense and irrational hope shared, as cultural movements tend to be, by a small number of like-minded people who only have the haziest notion of, and generally rather despise, what the majorities around them want.

In Russia particularly, this hope attained an absurdity worthy of the inventors' isle of Laputa, as imagined by Swift. One inventor, Georgii Krutikov, put out an idea for a "flying city", kept in the air by electrical currents - this at a time when there was hardly enough surplus wattage in all of Moscow to run an egg timer. Another, Anton Lavinskii, came up in 1923 with the notion of a "city on springs" - a not-so-remote ancestor of some of the walking-city fantasies thrown off by the Archigram designers in England in the 1960s. And Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian constructivist, dreamed up what he hoped would be an everyman's bicycle of the air, the wooden Letatlin, on which (he hoped) members of the proletariat, having slipped the surly bonds of earth, would go gliding about from People's Dormitory to People's Cultural Centre. Of course, it did not and could not fly.

Tatlin's most grandly useless conception, however, which has always been the darling of "radical" art historians, was his design for a Monument to the Third International, 1920. It was to be a gigantic open-frame ziggurat of steel, spiralling up from the middle of Petrograd and dwarfing everything on the city's skyline. It would be built on a diagonal, representing that of the earth's axis. It would contain four enormous glass halls, each containing a different ceremonial structure for the Party, all turning at different speeds. The lowest one, a cylinder, would rotate once a year. The next, a pyramid, would turn once a month; and so on to the topmost hall, another cylinder, going round once a day. But although it would have some generally designated uses, these were never thought through - they were just part of the cloudy rhetoric that served to hide the disastrous shortages the revolution produced. The whole affair would be 400 metres high but it never materialised, because it would have used up far more structural steel than the whole of Russia had. It was the unbuilt and unbuildable tower of a Babylonian socialism. Perhaps some faint ghost of it lingers in those enormous and pointless space needles later constructed in the capitalist west, in places such as Seattle and Sydney, capped with revolving restaurants serving pretentious food.

This hope of world improvement expressed itself, everywhere, in the most idealist and highfalutin language. The people who used it have become fixtures in the firmament of 20th-century art, although they did not achieve what they thought their work could do. "Art is a universal and real expression of creative energy," wrote the constructivist artists El Lissitzky (Russian), Hans Richter (German) and Theo van Doesburg (Dutch), in the early 1920s. It would "be used to organise the progress of mankind, it is the tool of universal progress". If you didn't believe in progress, you couldn't call yourself a modernist. However, being a "modernist" was not necessarily the same as being a "functionalist". The most extreme illustration of their difference was afforded by the work of the Russian Kazimir Malevich, who called himself a "suprematist" - the postwar years were a bumper season for increasingly silly-isms - and made designs for various notionally habitable structures: big ones that he called "architectons" and little ones he named "planits", with an i. Malevich, who had no scientific background, was much given to waffling and burbling about how, in the marvellous Future, people of all nations would foregather on these extraterrestrial objects, creating termitaries of peace, love and cooperation as they were carried through space.

The prime building material of progress, of the longingly desired postwar utopia, was glass. Glass had several symbolic qualities to recommend it. First, its fragility. People remembered the gaping window frames, the shattered and empty openings, left in the wake of the great war. A society with intact glass buildings, manifestly, was a society at peace. Then, not only was glass fragile: with the correct framing, it could be very strong (though not in bending) and amazing feats of structural daring could be executed in it. Nobody who had seen Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, that prodigious triumph of British engineering, could possibly doubt that. Glass was the very opposite to heavy stone and opaque brick. Light streamed through it, the light of heaven itself. This offered social redemption. Glass forms, crystalline and suggestive of weightlessness, seemed to be the stuff of transcendence. Glass carried implications of myth, of other, soon-to-be-built Crystal Palaces. "Glück ohne Glas, wie dumm ist das," began one architect's paean to the wonderful substance : "Joy without glass, what stupidity!"

The sharpest expression of this utopian rapture was demolished long ago: an all-glass pavilion, resembling a faceted Islamic dome, that had been commissioned from the architect Bruno Taut by the German glass industry, for the 1914 Werkbund industrial exhibition in Cologne. Its likeness survives today only in drawings, photos and a model or two. The building was pervaded by colour shining from a reflecting pool of violet water and, although it is not clear just what the colour sequences were, by a kaleidoscope in the dome. This pavilion was tiny, almost toy-like, but it bears a distant similarity to one of the great buildings of the early 21st century - Norman Foster's "gherkin" in London, the Swiss Re building.

Modernism left its handprints everywhere: especially in communications, in typography, and in the design of household objects from Gropius' and Mies' chairs to the lamps of Marianne Brandt, which have never dated (though they were designed 80 years ago) and remain wholly covetable. And yet, one of the strange facts about modernism is that, given its recentness and the enormous spread of its ideas, so little of it remains. This makes it extremely difficult, maybe impossible, to think one's way back into the cultural fanaticism that gripped some European modernists in the 1920s and 30s, breeding contradictory reductionist movements like viruses in a lab and leading the designer/ architect/painter Theo van Doesburg to declare: "Art should not deal with the 'useful' or the 'nice', but with the 'spiritual' and the 'sublime'. The purest art forms do not cause the decorative change of some detail from life, but the inner metamorphosis of life, the revaluation of all values." This was way too much to expect of a few blocks of workers' flats.

The hopeful rhetoric of modernism was always way, way out in front of its actual products. Modernists were always hoping that big business, big planning, big government would latch on to their designs and make them generally available to people (preferably workers) who would recognise their benefits and gratefully use them. Alas, it didn't happen that way. There was not enough demand for "radical" designs of common household things, let alone buildings or whole suburbs, to attract anything like a mass market, which is why the occasional isolated Bauhaus workshop object, a jug attributable to Johannes Itten or a prototype Gropius chair, creates excitement among collectors today. Such things never entered the vernacular. Still less did the ugly, standardised clothes some modernist designers, Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko among them, proposed for the new millennium. (Universal worker clothing, unisex, democratic and cheap, would come from the American mills of Levi Strauss, not from European or Russian avant-gardists.)

What ordinary people wanted was culture they could relax into - the middle-class comfort of the upholstered armchair, not the bracing, challenging austerities of chrome tubes and leather thongs. What modernism, whose singing school was the Bauhaus presided over by Gropius and others, proposed to them was something rather different: the virtuous but not very alluring prospect of what German ideologues called Wohnung für das Existenzminimum, "minimum-existence housing", with its bedrooms the size of closets, and closets hardly bigger than shoeboxes. This had its reformative, even its holy aspect. When Gropius in 1919 wrote a program for the first state Bauhaus, which was set up in Weimar, he invoked the images of a cathedral, a crystal edifice, a new community of faith expressing itself in craft. At the root, there was always something penitential about modernism, with its stern abjuration of the world's sensuous pleasures in the interest of higher ones. You were never left in any doubt that the monk's cell was a better place to be than the capitalist's study, let alone his wife's boudoir.

If few modernist objects remain, even less of its architecture survives. The V&A's show does what it can with drawings and photographs, but these can never suffice. The fact is, not much of it was actually built and, of what there was, so much was torn down. I didn't altogether realise this until, 25 years ago, I and a team from the BBC were engaged in making a television series, The Shock of the New. We needed to film some great, canonical building in Europe that would exemplify all that passion over form and function, the abolition of ornament, the stripping away of "superfluous" detail, the overriding myths and utopian metaphors of the machine age. And one of the first things we found was that such buildings mainly existed on paper, hardly at all in the real world. Once the designers' ideas of what society "needed" came up against the things real people seemed to want, there was a collision that often amounted to a fiasco.

The memorable example, for me, was the one building in which Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887-1965), the Swiss watchmaker's son who went by the name of Le Corbusier, was able to pour out his notions of social amelioration through housing: the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles, which began receiving its first tenants in 1952. Raised on its thick, raw concrete stilts, massive and domineering, the Unité became an instant classic of Modern architecture. Just about everyone in the profession adored it, or said they did; the only people who couldn't stand the great grimy beast were the luckless ones who lived in it. We found when we arrived there in 1979 that it was in pitiable condition. Corbu's béton brut couldn't be cleaned, the metal-framed windows were hopelessly corroded, the electricity kept shorting out, the brise-soleils or concrete sunscreens were permanently foul with pigeon shit, the "shopping street" halfway up inside was locked and shuttered because ordinary French people prefer to do their marketing on real streets (an obvious aspect of social behaviour that eluded the intellectual grasp of the formgiver, who believed that folk ought to behave in accordance with the dotty authoritarian notions of idealist philosophes like Saint-Simon and Fourier). Saddest of all was the roof, which Corbu had imagined as a sort of concrete Acropolis dedicated to the cult of the sun and of physical culture, like a Greek palaestra, complete with pools and jogging track. It was a chaos of dried slime and broken cinder-blocks. And when the concierge, who hated the place, granted us admission to his flat in the Unité, we found that he and his wife had valiantly fought back against the functionalist plainness Corbu had prescribed for the residents: it was chock-a-block with fringes, bobbles and tassels, Louis this and that, and even a department-store rococo chandelier which, due to the lowness of the ceiling, almost touched the dining-table. Here, the working class had ceased to be the abstraction Corbu fancied. It had taken its revenge on the modernist emperor. I sometimes wonder if the decor of that concierge's flat is still the same today.

· Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-39 is at the V&A, London SW7, from April 6. Details: 0870 906 3883.

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Ne'Hunch engine' sharpens up your half-baked ideas - Technology

2006-03-11T21:33:00.000-08:00

New Scientist Premium- 'Hunch engine' sharpens up your half-baked ideas - Technology: "New software blends a computer's ability to rapidly sift large numbers of possible solutions with human-like hunches for what seems right

IMAGINE you could plug a computer into your brain and get the machine to do the donkey work while you concentrate on the creative bits. A novel piece of software that generates names and hunts down pictures gets close to doing just that.

The 'hunch engine' blends a computer's ability to rapidly sift through a large number of possible solutions to a problem with human hunches for what looks or sounds right. Whether you are trying to think up a company name or find the perfect image on the web, the system does the hard work and lets you have all the fun.

Developed by Icosystem of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the hunch engine uses a genetic algorithm (GA) whose evolutionary direction can be nudged by the person running it. The GA breeds initial solutions to a problem, two of which are used to spawn offspring with the best characteristics of both. ...
The complete article is 472 words long.
If you are not an existing subsc"

Study Grammar ability hardwired in humans

2006-03-06T17:37:00.000-08:00

Study Grammar ability hardwired in humans

University of Rochester scientists studying why characteristics of grammar are found in all languages say the use of grammar is hardwired in our brains.

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The study examined deaf individuals who were isolated from conventional sign, spoken and written language their entire lives, and yet still developed a unique form of gesture communication.

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(Ads by Google)"Our findings suggest that certain fundamental characteristics of human language systems appear in gestural communication, even when the user has never been exposed to linguistic input and has not descended from previous generations of skilled communicative partners," said Elissa Newport, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and linguistics

"We examined a particular hallmark of known grammatical systems and found these signers also used this same hallmark in their gestured sentences," said said. "They designed their own language and wound up with some of the same rules of grammar every other language uses."

The research was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

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Fredericksburg.com - Dada changed art world

2006-03-02T15:31:00.000-08:00

Dada changed art world

'Dada' at the National Gallery of Art explores the avant garde art movement born in the midst of World War I

Date published: 3/2/2006

By SHEILA WICKOUSKI

For THE FREE LANCE-STAR

Through the years, war has inspired art, or more specifically, anti-art move- ments. One of the edgiest ever was Dada, which emerged in the midst of World War I, first in the capital cities of Europe and then in New York.

Smart, trendy, crude, angry and outrageous, Dada was a movement of the young and the restless and like its contemporary counterparts, it is often dismissed as impulsive art with no lasting value. Indeed many critical art historians regard it as little more than a footnote or lump it together with the fantastical imagery of surrealism.

Now for the first time ever, the National Gallery of Art in Washington is presenting a blockbuster show with more than 450 works and assorted materials of 50 artists.

The premise is that Dada is an idea in itself, not just the seed of surrealism. Using a variety of media, and with strong principles but not set rules, Dada's revolutionary ideas made an irrevocable break with traditional approaches to artistic creation. The separation opened wide the possibilities of media and expression.

The entrance exhibit of "Dada" starts with grainy gray footage of World War I, to set the tone of the horror of the war that gave birth to the age of political, economic and social crisis.

Zurich, which is represented as part of the exhibit, was a neutral wartime refuge, home to political dissidents and a center for an expatriate community that included Dada artists such as Hans Arp and Tristan Tzara. In an alcove off the Zurich room, one can listen to a recording by Hugo Ball that re-creates what might have been heard in their hangout, Cabaret Voltaire.

Particularly delightful is a complete set of Sophie Taeuber's turned-wood marionettes, created for a performance meant to satirize the new field of psychology and including characters like Freud Analytikus, Dr. Komplex and the fairy Urlibido.

In Germany, Berlin and Hannover differed in their political tones and their art forms. The Berlin Club Dada group pioneered the new medium of photomontage. Hannover hosted an alternative form of Dada called "Merz," which embraced the principle of using any material at all, and spawned collages and assemblages from what we might today call "recycled materials."

British-occupied Co-logne hosted an exhibition that encouraged visitors to destroy artwork with an ax, something which might strike us as a more recent idea.

In New York, the Dadaists focused on machines and "readymade" objects. Most famous is Marcel Du-champ's "Fountain," an inverted urinal. The artist's "In Advance of the Broken Arm" is a snow shovel.

For perspective on how contemporary these ideas are, one might recall that Man Ray's "Obstruction," a series of wooden hangers, looks surprisingly familiar to the white paper hangers that recently showed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

The Paris portion of the show is filled with articles first exhibited there, creating a feeling of what it must have been like to have actually been there for an exhibition during the Dada movement. A favorite piece is Duchamp's mockery of the icon of Renaissance art--the "Mona Lisa" with a goatee and mustache.

The Dada movement literally used anything--paint, prints, photomontage, poems--to express itself. The more ephemeral Dada experience was captured in film, of which 10 are being shown in a continuous loop in a small side theater and in a series of musical concerts the NGA has scheduled to re-enact Dada performances.

This exhibit is teasingly fun, reminding the viewer of how robust and youthful these ideas from nearly a century ago still are.

So what is the meaning of Dada? Or rather, what are the meanings, (the Dadaists delighted in employing word play to describe the linguistic divisions of the European countries at war)? For instance, Dada means "yes, yes" in Romanian and "rocking horse" or "hobby horse" in French. In German, it means "there, there" and was a sign of the foolish naivete and joy of procreation.

It may sound like a child's word, but Dada was also the brand name of a popular soap and hair tonic. The competing definitions allowed these artists to proclaim that "Dada means nothing."

For all its chaos and cacophony, the Dada movement, born out of despair and disillusionment, took one strong ethical stance--against absolute rules. To artists who have come after, Dada represents a freedom of thought and expression.

WHAT: Dada

WHERE: the National Gallery of Art East Building, on the National Mall between Third and Fourth streets at Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington

WHEN: The exhibit runs through May 14. Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

COST: Free

INFO: 202/ 737-4215, nga.gov/exhibitions/ dadainfo.htm

Entanglement heats up (February 2006) - News - PhysicsWeb

2006-02-23T21:14:00.000-08:00

Entanglement heats up (February 2006) - News - PhysicsWeb

Entanglement" could occur at any temperature and not just in systems cooled to near zero according to new calculations by a team of physicists in the UK, Austria and Portugal. Vlatko Vedral of the University of Leeds and colleagues at the universities of Porto and Vienna have found that the photons in ordinary laser light can be quantum mechanically entangled with the vibrations of a macroscopic mirror, no matter how hot the mirror is. The result is unexpected because hot objects are usually thought of being classical. The finding suggests that macroscopic entanglement is not as difficult to create as previously believed and could have implications for making room-temperature quantum computers in the future (Phys. Rev. Lett. 96 060407).

Light and mirror entanglement
Entanglement is one of the most mysterious and fundamental properties of quantum mechanics and allows particles to have a much closer relationship than is possible in classical physics. If two particles are entangled, we can know the state of one particle by measuring the state of the other. However, entangled states are thought to vanish above a certain temperature because of thermal effects that make the system classical in a phenomenon known as "decoherence".

Now, Vedral and colleagues have shown otherwise. The UK-Portugal-Austria team have calculated that an entangled state formed between the photons in a laser pulse and the phonons -- quantum mechanical vibrations of the crystal lattice -- in a mirror can persist at arbitrarily high temperatures. The physicists obtained their results by treating both the laser light and the mirror as simple quantum-mechanical harmonic oscillators. The photons and phonons interact via the so-called light pressure mechanism, in which photons bombarding the mirror exert a pressure on it because of mutual interactions.

The pressure exerted on the mirror depends on the number of photons hitting it: the more photons in the laser, the more pressure they exert on the mirror and the more the mirror vibrates. Vedral and co-workers calculated that if they were to measure five photons in the light field, then there would be five phonons in the motion of the mirror; and if they measured ten photons, then that meant ten phonons, and so forth. This is typical of an entangled state but the difference in the new calculation is that it works for large systems too -- there are millions of photons in the laser beam and more than a billion atoms in the mirror.

The results show that macroscopic entanglement is not that difficult to create. "If our analysis is confirmed in an experiment -- and I see no reason to believe otherwise -- then this would push the limits of the validity of quantum mechanics further," says Vedral. This may also have important implications for quantum computers: "Perhaps we would not need to cool quantum bits (or 'qubits') down to low temperatures in order to use them for quantum computation. Maybe we could have room temperature quantum computers, just like the classical ones of today."

About the author
Belle Dumé is science writer at PhysicsWeb

New Scientist SPACE - Breaking News - Is our universe about to be mangled?

2006-02-23T17:50:00.000-08:00

Is our universe about to be mangled?

Our universe may one day be obliterated or assimilated by a larger universe, according to a controversial new analysis. The work suggests the parallel universes proposed by some quantum theorists may not actually be parallel but could interact – and with disastrous consequences.
Random quantum fluctuations mean the behaviour of particles and photons of light cannot be predicted exactly. The quantum equations that describe them contain a variety of different - and opposing - outcomes in their solution, such as a particular particle causing a bell to both ring and not ring in an experimental setup. Physicists then have to use an equation called the Born rule to calculate the probability of the bell ringing, and countless experiments have shown the rule works.
But researchers have long struggled to understand why a bell will ring – or not ring – in any given run of an experiment, since in theory it has the option of doing both. This conundrum, known as the quantum measurement problem, has led a small subset of physicists to argue that in fact the bell does do both - but that each possible outcome takes place in a different, parallel universe that pops into existence during the experiment.
"This is what the math suggests if you take it literally," says Robin Hanson of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, US. But the idea that "every microsecond, the universe splits into a bunch more universes boggles the mind."
Destructive interaction
And this idea, called the "many worlds" interpretation, raises other problems. Some theorists say it suggests that physicists doing a quantum experiment would find themselves in a random world, such that they would have an equal chance of seeing the bell ring or not ring. But this does not match the well-tested Born rule, which may predict that the bell should ring 70% of the time, for example.
Physicists have attacked this problem in a number of ways. Now Hanson, an economist who also studies physics, is taking a new approach. He argues that these multiple universes are not actually independent, as was thought, but interacting and sometimes destructive.
Quantum theory states that all universes are not created equal - each "parent" universe is much larger according to a particular quantum measure than its later descendants.
Quantum interactions between the universes were thought to be too small to really affect them, but Hanson says the interactions can be significant between universes of vastly different size.
Boiled worlds
The interactions can "smash or mangle the small worlds", says Hanson. He has not worked out exactly what happens, but he believes the small universes would be either destroyed or assimilated by the large universes, like specks of dust colliding with a planet.
"It could act like a big random fluctuation, like suddenly making the temperature of the universe become really high and boiling everything," he told New Scientist. "Or it could be more peaceful, where you're simply converted into somebody who remembers stuff from the large world, so the statistics would be those of the large world."
In this scenario, Born rule predictions that a bell should ring 70% of the time in an experiment work out because small worlds – in which bells ring less or more often – are too mangled to be observed. Hanson says there is a cut-off between small worlds that become mangled and large worlds that do not, and that most universes are near or below this line.
That suggests that the universe we live in now could be mangled at any moment by a larger universe, he says. "It could be there's a moment of pain before the end," Hanson says. "But you could be comforted by the fact that versions of you will go on, even if you don't."
Finely tuned
Physicists who have studied Hanson's idea say it is interesting, though preliminary and probably flawed. Michael Weissman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US, says his biggest concern with the work is the notion of a cut-off.
He points out that the range of universe sizes is constantly growing. So the cut-off for what makes a universe observable must be perfectly balanced with that growth to produce the probabilities seen with the Born rule. "We don't have any real reason to think this fine-tuning will actually work out in practice," Weissman told New Scientist.
"It's interesting work and might feed into part of the Born rule problem," says David Wallace, a philosopher of quantum mechanics at Oxford University, UK. But he criticises Hanson's approach because "it doesn’t seem to handle one-off probabilities, only long-term sequences of probabilities," he told New Scientist. "It doesn’t tell us why right now we’d be better off betting on the bell ringing than not ringing."
Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society A (DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2005.1640)
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National Gallery opens dada exhibit

2006-02-23T14:08:00.000-08:00

National Gallery opens dada exhibit

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- Washington`s National Gallery of Art has launched a 447-work exhibit devoted to the irreverent dada art movement.
The brief movement launched in Switzerland during World War I was a nonsensical protest against the war, The Washington Post said.
The six capital cities of dada -- Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, New York and Paris -- are all represented in the National Gallery`s exhibit.
Although much of dada is sheer silliness, several of the compositions paved the way to more legitimate forms of art down the road, such as the minimalist movement that began 50 years later in the United States, the Post noted.
The exhibit includes abstract sculptures and collages as well as pioneering sounds and documentation of performance art of the time.
Admission to the National Gallery is free.
Copyright 2006 by United Press International
WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- Washington`s National Gallery of Art has launched a 447-work exhibit devoted to the irreverent dada art movement.
The brief movement launched in Switzerland during World War I was a nonsensical protest against the war, The Washington Post said.
The six capital cities of dada -- Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, New York and Paris -- are all represented in the National Gallery`s exhibit.
Although much of dada is sheer silliness, several of the compositions paved the way to more legitimate forms of art down the road, such as the minimalist movement that began 50 years later in the United States, the Post noted.
The exhibit includes abstract sculptures and collages as well as pioneering sounds and documentation of performance art of the time.
Admission to the National Gallery is free.
Copyright 2006 by United Press International

Quantum computer works best switched off

2006-02-22T18:52:00.000-08:00

New Scientist News - Quantum computer works best switched off

Even for the crazy world of quantum mechanics, this one is twisted. A quantum computer program has produced an answer without actually running.

The idea behind the feat, first proposed in 1998, is to put a quantum computer into a “superposition”, a state in which it is both running and not running. It is as if you asked Schrödinger's cat to hit "Run".

With the right set-up, the theory suggested, the computer would sometimes get an answer out of the computer even though the program did not run. And now researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have improved on the original design and built a non-running quantum computer that really works.

They send a photon into a system of mirrors and other optical devices, which included a set of components that run a simple database search by changing the properties of the photon.

The new design includes a quantum trick called the Zeno effect. Repeated measurements stop the photon from entering the actual program, but allow its quantum nature to flirt with the program's components - so it can become gradually altered even though it never actually passes through.

"It is very bizarre that you know your computer has not run but you also know what the answer is," says team member Onur Hosten.

This scheme could have an advantage over straightforward quantum computing. "A non-running computer produces fewer errors," says Hosten. That sentiment should have technophobes nodding enthusiastically.

Journal reference: Nature (vol 439, p 949)
From issue 2540 of New Scientist magazine, 22 February 2006, page 21

Modeling Swarm Behavior

2006-02-22T16:41:00.000-08:00

Modeling Swarm Behavior

The swarming behavior of ants, bees, termites, and other social insects has implications far beyond the hive. Swarm intelligence — the collective behavior of independent agents, each responding to local stimuli without supervision — can be used to understand and model phenomena as diverse as blood clotting, highway traffic patterns, gene expression, and immune responses, to name just a few. Swarm technology is proving useful in a wide range of applications including robotics and nanotechnology, molecular biology and medicine, traffic and crowd control, military tactics, and even interactive art.

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Students and faculty in the Evolutionary and Swarm Design (ESD) Research Group at the University of Calgary, Canada, use Mac computers and Mac OS X to model swarm behavior and to apply it to an ever-increasing number of real-world problems. Swarm modeling theories provide new conceptual frameworks for extending the field of artificial intelligence and suggest new possibilities for computer hardware and software design.

Christian Jacob has led the ESD Research Group since its inception. Like many swarm researchers, he believes that biologically-inspired computational tools like the ones being developed in the ESD Research Group will prove invaluable for developing many of the important technologies of the twenty-first century.

“What I find intriguing is the fact that very similar principles seem to apply to swarm-like systems regardless of scale,” Jacob says. “We can use the models that describe army ant raiding behavior to predict the behavior of automobile traffic or pedestrians on the road. The models that describe how birds and fish flock and school have practical applications in, for example, genetic algorithm test functions and the training of artificial neural network weights.”

A Mind of Its Own

In contrast to the top-down organization that characterizes many human endeavors, many social species achieve their communal goals using a purely bottom-up approach with no central command-and-control structure. A swarm of termites, for example, exhibits a collective intelligence that far exceeds the intelligence of any individual insect, which by itself has limited capabilities for processing and communicating information.

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(Ads by Google)The collective intelligence of the swarm emerges in a decentralized way from the actions of individual insects responding to local stimuli from the environment and, most importantly, from other members of the swarm. There is no “boss” in charge. No individual insect grasps the big picture. Yet in the aggregate, the local actions of each insect based on the local stimuli available to it can accomplish a collective goal that serves the interests of the whole community.

“It turns out that what makes sense in the biological world often make sense in the computational world as well,” explains Jacob. “For some types of applications, a collection of small, simple agents with limited intelligence, local decision-making capability, and a communication path to nearby peers can outperform a large centralized processor. Moreover, a decentralized system has several important advantages over a centralized one, most notably robustness and flexibility.”

Source: University of Calgary (By Frank Lacombe)

Big fine for damaging artistic urinal - World News - MSNBC.com

2006-02-20T18:10:00.000-08:00

Big fine for damaging artistic urinal - World News - MSNBC.com

PARIS - A Frenchman who attacked and damaged “Fountain,” a urinal declared a work of art by Dada pioneer Marcel Duchamp, was ordered on Tuesday to pay a fine of $262,700.

A Paris court also gave Pierre Pinoncelli, 77, a three-month suspended sentence for taking a hammer to the absurdist artwork, the second time he has attacked it since 1993. The attack last month left the ceramic urinal slightly cracked.

Duchamp was a leader of the Dada movement, an avant garde “anti-art” school of the early 20th century that mocked conventional standards, and “Fountain,” made in 1917 — is considered one of the most influential artworks of its kind.

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“This was a wink at Dadaism,” Pinoncelli told the court in his defense. “I wanted to pay homage to the Dada spirit.”

Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

Knowledge is proud

2005-12-03T22:40:00.000-08:00

"Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more."
William Cowper (1731 - 1800); English poet.

The age of your heart

2005-12-03T22:39:00.000-08:00

"The age of your heart is the age of what you love."
Marcel Prévost (1862-1941); French writer.

It is not enough to have a good mind

2005-12-03T22:38:00.000-08:00

"It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well."
René Descartes (1596-1650); French philosopher and mathematician.

Education is

2005-12-03T22:37:00.000-08:00

"Education is the best provision for old age."
Aristotles (384 BC-322 BC); Greek philosopher.

What is past

2005-12-03T22:36:00.000-08:00

"What is past is prologue."
William Shakespeare (1564-1616); English playwright, poet

A wise person does at once

2005-11-26T01:09:00.000-08:00

"A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last.
Both do the same thing; only at different times."
Lord Acton (1834-1902); British historian.

Hope herself ceases

2005-11-19T21:48:00.000-08:00

"Hope herself ceases to be happiness when Impatience companions her."
John Ruskin (1819-1900); British writer and critic.

try to stop knowledge from going forward

2005-11-19T21:46:00.000-08:00

"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward.
Ignorance is never better than knowledge"
Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) US Italian-born physicist