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Dada Meets New Stimuli |
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| Text: Øyvind Arntsen / Objects: Kjersti Myrehagen /Adv: Dr X | |
| «Nothing is serious enough to be taken seriously», said surrealism’s
«founder», Marcel Duchamp.
I put on my dadaist glasses and squint at New Stimuli. I found the glasses in a cardboard box in the attic together with exhibition catalogues and the remains of an education taken many years ago. New Stimuli? It must be something totally new. New? O.K., a new way of seeing? Seeing what? Life, the meaning of life, something creative that can give me new insight? I’ll tackle the easy part first. Stimuli. That has to be everything I experience through texts and pictures, in the flow of media that I am a part of, but which I am passively caught up in. Sound, visual impressions from the street, philosophical fragments I snatch, trends; conscious and unconscious pieces of a picture that I attempt to fit together like a puzzle. Things that stimulate my mind to think. That put something in motion. That pose questions. I will not accept a narrower definition. It is an easy one to come up with: Stimuli for the consciously conscious. For the politically correct postmodernists who use half the day to define their «position» before they lift their leg to mark their opinionative territory. With the media society’s new class at the top: those who convey; the rest become those who digest. But there is no time for that. Reflection is a luxury few grant themselves, and even fewer miss. Stimuli must stimulate without our analysing it first. On to the next issue; New New right now? New because we have forgotten what was new a little while ago? A new way of saying the old? New because everything is new? If it is connected to something else, something I know something about from before, will it be easier to understand then? Like the Renaissance. The contemporary reborn and discovered anew through the ideas of earlier times. Curiosity. To be interested in absolutely everything. Now is when I put on Guillome Apollinaire’s glasses. I am at a sidewalk restaurant in Paris, 1914, and I make myself invisible. Surrealism is a collision of various objects, thoughts, colours, feelings. Nothing is what it appears to be. I am not me. I look at the dadaists, become anonymous, and can simultaneously talk with everyone on www. I turn on my laptop computer. Marcel Duchamps places his bottle of wine on the neighboring table, and then signs the bottle-holder. Presto! An ready-made work of art. An arbitrary object taken out of its context is turned into a work of art. Marcel smiles at me, and takes a deep drag of his cigarette: «Art is reality, filtered through the imagination». Now, that´s a stroke of magic; a «new stimuli» of the imagination for reality! There are no rules. Not even qualitative criteria for craftsmanship. That is why Marcel Duchamp could elevate a bottle-holder to a work of art - an instant one, by merely swiping it with a signature. A kind of God’s finger had come in contact with reality and opened up for all kinds of new ways of seeing it. That is the first prerequisite for New Stimuli. A new way of seeing. Reflection unhindered by the old rules and an outdated language. Desire for reflection. A language without language. A language that is not so complicated that it can only be used to hide behind. To find such a language, both in literature and art was among the goals Andre Breton had for his surrealist magazine that he published in the U.S. during WWII. Strangely enough, the magazine was called VVV. I place my fingers on the keyboard. No sparks emerge from them like those from Michelangelo’s finger on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I am in search of «a whole picture» amidst the flow of information. I find no overall answer, only fragments, fragments. Despite heaps of megabites, I am just as ignorant. I turn off the computer. I read the newspaper. Watch TV. Think about the meaning of life. The Renaissance fresco, imbued with the breath of love, gave the order: «Live»! Apollinaire and Duchamps would most likely have said the same thing on internet as in the collections of poetry and declarations, now ragged and worn from use, from the days of old: «Turn it off, and live!». You just don’t find anything. «Dada in itself is nothing», says Picabas in his Manifeste Cannibale dada. it is like your hope: nothing like your paradise: nothing like your idols: nothing like your politicians: nothing like your heroes: nothing like your artists: nothing like your religions: nothing What is it that I cannot find? Nothing is not good enough. If nothing simply means no answer, then my conclusion is that it is wrong to answer. An answer that does not give birth to two new questions has to be a sin against all the principles of dialectics. One who looks for the great answer finds nothing. I plan to continue, up the next hill, to the next hilltop. Just one more hilltop. Beyond the horizon I can make out «the fifth element». As in Luc Besson’s fantasy fiction films; as in the future-oriented concept of «the fifth society». Is it to these ends we wish to use New Stimuli? The fifth element is the simple code everyone has such a close knowledge of that we don’t think of it as important in the least. «Feelings, love, hot air», a salesman would say, «nothing that can be measured by money, nothing that would fit into the categories of realism.» At least not a tangible answer. Normal reality now begins to be dismantled. If the most important thing isn’t even measurable in valid currency, I can finally make use of the currency of surrealism. Will chaos break out then? The question looks different the minute I put on my dadaist glasses. «Great!», I think. «Chaos it is... Go fetch New Stimuli!» ??? With the new insights of biology and mathematics into deterministic chaos, the study of fractures and the growth of a new «mad science», and the theory that not all in nature can be explained by organized concepts and order, we are able to see the laws of nature in a whole new light. Perhaps even the evolution of humans. Darwin put a hole in the fence between animals and humans, as Bergljot Børresen writes in her book, THE LONELY APE. If we accept that human feelings are also a part of the common evolutionary legacy that pertains to both animals and human beings, then we find ourselves in the vicinity of the most fundamental force behind all life on earth. Do we share the ability to love, feel grief and joy with all living creatures? Do we humans have the same soul as animals? Are those the same eyes that would have looked out of a chimpanzee’s body 500,000 generations ago as today? Then we wouldn’t have to be afraid to discover that there are societies of ants that number more than 350 million individuals; that with their «cities» of hills and transport tunnels, they communicate and work together in identifiable ways. Do ants live valuable lives? Are they aware of it themselves? What does that do to us humans? Perhaps it would be easier for us to tolerate not being master of everything in the universe? To accept our responsibility for our own lives? To be something for others? Is that so old-fashioned that it is rediculous? A kiss full of love is blown in a whisper in my direction from behind a door closing far away. The wind rustles the leaves of a birch tree. The strong wind makes the whole tree shake, and the forces are divided among the branches. I don’t care that a computer can systematize the tree’s movements into a theoretical chaos formula. Instead, I tell the crazy scientist that for me it is more important to reflect on whether I am able to move from chaos to order, and then back to chaos again, as often as I wish, without perishing in a computer society. Where do I find the energy to alternate between chaos and order? Is this the energy that dreams are made of? Are dreams real? What do we use our imagination for? How does love taste? Is it more important to question than to anwer? Is there room for posing unproductive, «unimportant» questions? Is it precisely this that we need to learn how to do? Is this what New Stimuli is supposed to stimulate us to do? Felipe Fernandez-Armesto imagines in his Millenium: The History of the Last Thousand Years, that if a museum were to be built over the 20th Century two thousand years into the future, somewhere or other in the galaxy, the museum curators would place one single, little object in a showcase and declare that this is really the thing that describes the civilization of the time: a Coca Cola bottle made of glass. If only they could have found Marcel Duchamp’s bottle-holder to put it in!
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WWW http://www.lm.com/~kalin/breton.html http://www-e815.fnal.gov/~romosan/surrealism.html What is Surrealism? |
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