Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and PoetsHartley, Marsden
History
Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets
Hartley, Marsden
Art; Literature, Modern -- History and criticism; Vaudeville
"Dada is a fundamentally religious attitude, analogous to that of the
scientist with his eyeglass glued to the microscope." Dada is
irritated by those who write "Art, Beauty, Truth", with capital
letters, and who make of them entities superior to man. "Dada scoffs
at capital letters, atrociously." "Dada ruining the authority of
constraints, tends to set free the natural play of our activities."
"Dada therefore leads to amoralism and to the most spontaneous and
consequently the least logical lyricism. This lyricism is expressed in
a thousand ways of life." "Dada scrapes from us the thick layers of
filth deposited on us by the last few centuries." "Dada destroys, and
stops at that. Let Dada help us to make a complete clearance, then
each of us rebuild a modern house with central heating, and everything
to the drain, Dadas of 1920."
Remembering always that Dada means hobby-horse, you have at last the
invitation to make merry for once in our new and unprecedented
experience over the subject of ART with its now reduced front letter.
It is the newest and most admirable reclaimer of art in that it offers
at last a release for the expression of natural sensibilities. We can
ride away to the radiant region of "Joie de Vivre", and find that
life and art are one and the same thing, resembling each other so
closely in reality, that it is never a question of whether it shall or
must be set down on paper or canvas, or given any greater degree of
expression than we give to a morning walk or a pleasant bath, or an
ordinary rest in the sunlight.
Art is then a matter of how one is to take life now, and not by any
means a matter of how the Greeks or the Egyptians or any other race
has shown it to be for their own needs and satisfaction. If art was
necessary to them, it is unnecessary to us now, therefore it is free
to express itself as it will. You will find, therefore, that if you
are aware of yourself, you will be your own perfect dada-ist, in that
you are for the first time riding your own hobby-horse into infinity
of sensation through experience, and that you are one more
satisfactory vaudevillian among the multitudes of dancing legs and
flying wits. You will learn after all that the bugaboo called LIFE is
a matter of the tightrope and that the stars will shine their frisky
approval as you glide, if you glide sensibly, with an eye on the fun
in the performance. That is what art is to be, must come to in the
consciousness of the artist most of all, he is perhaps the greatest
offender in matters of judgment and taste; and the next greatest
offender is the dreadful go-between or "middleman" esthete who so
glibly contributes effete values to our present day conceptions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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