Ryan Larson - Dadaism and the journey

 Since we heard from an artist on Thursday, I thought I'd write a little about art and the journey. I've been reading a collection of writings by Hans Arp, who was a German-French sculptor and poet. Arp was one of the founders of the Dadaist movement, which used nonsense to try and convey some deeper message. He writes in one essay about how, seeing as the renaissance masters had already mastered realistic painting, he and his peers decided to express more abstract ideas-- to 'give direct and palpable shape to an inner reality.' These artists confined themselves to using only straight lines and rectangles, in mostly primary colors. It all seems a little pretentious to me, but I guess some art has to be a little pretentious in order to mean something.

This quest to find an inner or ideal structure reminded me about our discussion or Plato's metaphor of the line. Instead of trying to capture the literal form and structure of the world-- the forms-- the abstract (or concrete) artists tried to capture more vague essences of the world. The paintings are meant to invoke guttural feeling, not tell a story.

Another interesting aspect of this kind of art is that the reaction to it may vary from viewer to viewer. While with a painting such as Napoleon Crossing the Alps, or what have you, the painting has been specifically designed to illicit a certain emotional response. But due to the non-literal essence of the concrete paintings, the interpretation of it is largely up to your own experiences and ideas.

 

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