dada

"When the word 'Dada' came to me [in German: 'mir begegnete'], I was called upon twice by Dionysios [Areopagita]. D.A. – D.A. (H...k [= Huelsenbeck] wrote about this mystical birth [of the new word, Dada], as did I in earlier notes)"

"As Arp and I are sitting in the large living room of my house on Central Park in November 1958, we try again and again to understand the significance of Dada for ourselves and for others. Many elements surfaced in me and in the 'Fantastic Prayers' [his poems Phantastische Gebete, Zurich 1916] at the same time; resistance against the 'civilization' we live in, fury about a purely factual world which leaves out personality and thus creative power, the means of irony and underlying religiousness. Ball turned religious during the times of dadaism, Arp is a religious person today, and I have always been one, without wanting to realize it, perhaps without knowing it."

"Have you seen the fish that have been standing in front of the opera in cutaways for the last two days and nights..? Ah ah ye great devils – ah ah ye keepers of bees and commandments With a bow wow wow with a bow woe woe who does today not know what our Father Homer wrote..."

"So, Huelsenbeck has put our feud in print -- HA HA So he sneers at my bourgeois home -- my child who cries, who has to be changed and fed So he laughs at my solid wife -- that she's no Anna Bloom.. ..The one who makes art -- he's the artist.. .So I spit back at you, Huelsenbeck But where you spit venom, I spit art I laugh at you -- HA HA -- I laugh at you"

"Huelsenbeck has arrived [from Berlin]. He pleads for an intensification of rhythm (Negro rhythm). He would prefer to drum literature into the ground."

"Dada hurts. Dada does not jest, for the reason that it was experienced by revolutionary men and not by philistines who demand that art be a decoration for the mendacity of their own emotions.. .I am firmly convinced that all art will become dadaistic in the course of time, because from Dada proceeds the perpetual urge for its renovation."

"There is a difference between sitting quietly in Switzerland [Dada in Zurich] and bedding down on a vulcano, as we did in Berlin."

"I hold peace and war in my toga but I'l take a cherry flip Today nobody knows whether he was tomorrow They beat time with a coffin lid If somebody had the nerve to rip the tail feathers out of the trolley car it's a great age..."

"[ Tinguely is a] Meta-Dadaist... [who had] fulfilled certain ideas of ours, notably the idea of motion."

"The cows sit on the telegraph poles and play chess The cockatoo under the skirts of the Spanish dancer Sings as sadly as a headquarters bugler and the cannon lament all day..."

"That is the lavender landscape Herr Mayer was talking about when he lost his eye Only the fire department can drive the nightmare from the drawing- room but all the hoses are broken..."

"The professors of zoology gather in the meadows With the palms of their hands they turn back the rainbows the great magician sets the tomatoes on his forehead Again thou hauntest castle and grounds The roebuck whistles the stallion bounds (And this is how the world is this is all that's ahead of us)"

"The dissection of words into sounds is contrary to the purpose of language and applies musical principles to an independent realm whose symbolism is aimed at a logical comprehension of one’s environment.. ..the value of language depends on comprehensibility rather than musicality"

"One does something for six months, a year, and one goes on to something else. That's what Picabia did all his life."

"For thirty days and thirty nights he remained in a lamentable state.. ..the doctor.. ..to relieve the pain prescribed granulated aconitine, a drug with which it is difficult to get the dosage right and possessing effects that vary according to the patient’s temperament. The doctor warned us to pay great attention to whatever symptoms it might produce and Picabia, apprehensive as always, developed a superstitious fear of the little box, though at the same time attracted by the relief it gave him."

"We are living in the age of the machine. Man made the machine in his own image. She has limbs which act; lungs which breathe; a heart which beats; a nervous system through which runs electricity. The phonograph is the image of his voice; the camera the image of his eye. The machine is his [Picabia's] 'daughter born without a mother'. That is why he loves her. He has made the machine superior to himself. That is why he admires her."

"Picabia felt.. ..that the machine had accomplished its conquest of man.. ..that his diagrams had ceased to inflame the anger of the bourgeois.. ..The Eiffel Tower whose unaesthetic carcass had offered material for so many controversies.. ..was now part of the Parisian landscape. This is why new elements appeared in the painter's work from 1919: collage, the use of solid objects, materials reputed to be non-artistic, like [the use of] Ripolin paint."

"Perhaps we'll be able to do beautiful things, since I have a stellar, insane desire to assassinate beauty."

"Pour que vous aimiez quelque chose il faut que vous l'ayez vu et entendu depuis longtemps tas d'idiots."

"So Picabia has invented nothing, he just copies. But of course, Picabia copies an engineer's sketch instead of copying apples. Copying apples is something everybody understands, copying a turbine is stupid"

"We [ Tristan Tzara and Jean Arp ] found him [Picabia in 1919, in his hotel in Zürich] busy dissecting an alarm-clock.. .Ruthlessly he slashed away at his alarm-clock down to the spring, which he pulled out triumphantly.. ..and soon impressed the wheels, the spring, the hands and other secret parts of the clock on pieces of paper. He tied these impressions together with lines and accompanied the drawing with comments of a rare wit far removed from the world of mechanical stupidity. He was creating antimechanical machines.. ..machines of the unconsciousness.."

"Picabia, who at first extracted a profuse plastic inspiration from machines, adopts thereafter [after World War 1.] aspects which are directly photographic; but emptied of their utilitarian signification, Picabia charges them with a new reality, of which he alone is the arbiter, creating an atmosphere of migration which surrealism systematised."

"These two pieces ['The Cacodylic Eye' and 'Hot Eyes'] gave rise to more talk than all the other works in the Salon [in Paris, 1921] put together. Here was a fresh paradox: as Francis Picabia's position became more and more definitely independent of the [[w:Dada|Dada group, his personality continued to be more undeniably and obviously the most radically Dadaist of them all."

"..giving plastic reality to inner states of the mind."

"This visit to America.. ..has brought about a complete revolution in my methods of work.. ..prior to leaving Europe I was engrossed in presenting psychological studies through the medium-ship of forms which I created. Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression."

"Splendid, it has done me enormous good to finally see and read something in Switzerland that isn't bullshit. All of it is very nice, it is really something; your manifesto expresses every philosophy seeking truth, when there is no truth, only convention."

"'Udnie – I see Again in Memory my Dear Udnie' is no more the portrait of a young girl than 'Edtaonisl' (counterpart of his work 'Udnie'] is the image of a prelate, as we ordinarily conceive of them. They are [both] memories of America, evocations of over there which, subtly set down like musical chords, become representative of an idea, a nostalgia, a fleeting impression."

"I do not consider myself a Cubist either because I have come to the conclusion that cubes are not always made for expressing the thought of the brain and of the feeling of the spirit.. .I capture all these impressions [the visual sensations, Picabia sensed in the modern city] without any hurry to transfer to the canvas. I let them rest in my brain and then, when I'm visited by the spirit of creation, I improvise my paintings just as a musician improvises his music."

"FRANCIS PICABIA is an imbecile, an idiot, a pickpocket!!! 1921 BUT He saved Arp from constipation! The first mechanical work was created by madam Tzara the Day she put little Tristan into the world, however she didn't know it funny girl Francis Picabia is an imbecilic Spanish professor who has never been dada FRANCIS PICABIA IS NOTHING FRANCIS PICABIS likes the morality of idiots Arp's binocle is Tristan’s testicle FRANCIS PICABIS IS NOTHING!!!!!!!!!! But Arp was Dada before Dada."

"Naturally, form has come to take precedence over color with me, though when I began painting color predominated. Slowly artistic evolution carried from color to form and while I still employ color, of course, it is the drawing which assumes the place of first importance in my pictures."

"The aim of art is to get us to dream, just like music, for it expresses a mood projected onto the canvas, which arouses identical sensations in the viewer."

"The Cubists want to cover Dada with snow; that may surprise you, but it is so, they want to empty the snow from their pipe to bury DaDa. Are you sure? Positively sure, the facts are revealed by grotesque mouths. They think that Dada can prevent them from practicing this odious trade: Selling art expensively. Art costs more than sausages, more than women, more than everything. Art is visible like God (see Saint-Sulpice). Art is a pharmaceutical product for imbeciles. The table turns thanks to spirit; the paintings and other works of arts are like strong-box tables, the spirit is inside and becomes more and more inspired according to the auction prices. Farce, farce, farce, farce, farce, my dear friends."

"It is not a recognisable scene [his two paintings 'Dances at the spring', 1912 - Picabia painted the motion and the excitement of a peasant dance while he was on his honeymoon in the countryside of Italy; one version is lost]. There is no dancer, no spring, no light, no perspective, nothing other than the visible clue of the sentiments I am trying to express.. .I would draw your attention to a song of colours, which will bring out for others the joyful sensations and feelings inspired in me on those summer days when I found myself somewhere in the country near the Italian border, where there was a spring in a wonderful garden. A photograph of that spring and that garden would in now way look like my painting 'Dance at a spring' I was shown for the first time at the w:Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1912."

"[The Baroness was] a citizen of terror, a contemporary without a country."

"[The Baroness] is not a futurist. She is the future."

"Everything emotional in America becomes a mere show and make-believe. Americans are trained to invest money, are said to take even desperate chances on that, yet never do they invest [in] beauty nor take desperate chances on that. With money they try to buy beauty--after it has died--famishing--with grimace. Beauty is ever dead in America."

"People were afraid of her because she was undismayed about the facts of life--any of them--all of them."

"Else von Freytag-Loringhoven is the first Dadaiste in New York and [...] the Little Review has discovered her. This movement should capture American like a prairie fire."

"We were people of a circle of supposed highcultivated life conduct by intellectual morality--higher than society in its hypocritical meshes."

"I had sexlogic implanted and used it."

"[I had] pushed through to a spiritual sex: art--that nobody protects as readily as a charming love body of flesh."

"All who want me would like to eat me up, But I am too expansive and am open to all sides, desire this here and that there."

"Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life."

"Quote of Benjamin Péret, (1926), in 'Cahiers d'art', 1937, p. 60; as cited by Edward Quinn in Max Ernst, Barcelona, Poligrafa, 1984, p.140"

"He had the ears of an oyster"

"Reader, when you cross the threshold of Max Ernst's world abandon all hope of receiving help from the outside.. ..you will have to walk alone"

"First contact with occult, magical and enchanting forces. One of his best friends, a very intelligent and affectionate pink cockatoo, died in the night of 5 January. It was a terrible shock for Max when he found the dead bird in the morning, at the same moment as his father told him of the birth of his sister, Loni. The boy's consternation was so great that he fainted. In his imagination, he linked the two events and made the baby responsible for extinguishing the bird's life. A series of psychological crises and depressions followed. A dangerous amalgamation of birds and human beings became firmly established in his mind and later found expression in his paintings and drawings."

"Mixed feelings when he [Max Ernst frequently writes about himself in the third person] enters the forest for the first time: delight and oppression. And what the Romantics spoke of as 'being at one with Nature'. Wonderful joy in breathing freely in an open space, but also anxiety at being encircled by hostile trees. Outside and inside at the same time, free and trapped."

"Quote of Paul Éluard, his poem on Max Ernst in 'Capitale de la douleur', 1926; as cited by Edward Quinn in Max Ernst, Barcelona, Poligrafa, 1984, p.132"

"The Dada movement was an anti-movement which corresponded to a need born of the first World War.. .Max Ernst's activities in Cologne in 1917 made him the foremost representative of the Dada painters. Between 1919 and 1921 his paintings, drawings and collages depicting the world of the subconscious were already a foretaste of Surrealism.. .In fact his previous achievements had certainly influenced, to a great extent, the literary Surrealist exploration of the subconscious."