The Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts will present Dada: The Eternal Return, March 4 – April 22, 2017. The exhibition will consist of collaborative works, celebrating community, inclusive of all media: paintings, sculpture, video and sound.
This exhibition is being presented on fairly short notice, due to the increased need for artists to mirror contemporary culture utilizing one of the most influential art historical approaches.
This is a Centennial Celebration, as Beatrice Wood, Marcel Duchamp, and other artists in New York, as well as Zurich, were creating important works as part of the Dada Movement in 1917, ultimately having a major impact on art history.
We are asking our friends – both artists and non-artists – to contribute to this exhibition in one of the following ways:
1) Drop off or send us physical materials that can be included in a collage or assemblage. These can be works in progress, abandoned artworks, or simply elements that can be utilized. Please note that these works will not be returned to the artists, as they will likely be glued, tied, nailed, sewn, stapled or otherwise affixed to the work of others. Send physical items to:
For USPS, please use this address:
Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts
P.O. Box 804
Ojai, CA 93024
For Fedex and UPS, please use this address:
Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts
8560 Ojai-Santa Paula Road
Ojai, CA 93023
2) Send us a digital file of a visual work of art. This might ultimately be presented in any number of ways.
3) Send us a digital sound file, to be part of an audio collage.
4) Send us a video file, to be part of a video collage.
Our email address is: BeatriceWoodCenter@gmail.com
5) Take part in one of our Dada workshops to create elements that can be included in the exhibition.
6) Volunteer as one of the artists from the local community who will assist in creating collage, assemblage, videos and audio works from materials submitted.
Resulting works will be exhibited at the Center, shared on our website and via social media. All of the artists (aside from those who choose to be anonymous) will be credited.
Rationalization is on the March
John Heartfield |
Evening at Arensbergs, 1932
Beatrice Wood
|
The Mechanical Head
Raoul
Hausmann |
"In spite of many statements to the contrary, most Dadaists seem to have wanted to create a new art that would have nothing to do with former styles and notions. In order to find it, they absorbed or invented many new means of expression: abstraction; photomontage; collage; assemblage; frottage; typography; glossolalia; phonetic, concrete, visual and simultaneous poetry; conceptual art; the readymade; the drawing and painting of invented machines; happenings; performance art; and kinetic art, including film. No less crucial was the inspiration that came from African artifacts, from the art of the insane, and the drawings of children – an inspiration that proved fundamental to many visual artists of the twentieth century...
...Dada was not a fashion, a style, or a doctrine. It was more than a footnote to cultural history. We can better understand it as a condition, a spirit, a productive state of mind that has remained alive. Looking for core elements within the chaotic structure of Dada, I would mention paradox, chance, abandon, protest, aggression, antinationalism, humor, irony, bluff, art, and mysticism...
...There seems to me more than a little resemblance between the world a hundred years ago and much of what we observe today. There is no all-out war, but there is a sense of a deep crisis and an overbearing feeling of menace, of being faced with enormous threats."
– Alfred Brendel, October 27, 2016
Volume LXIII, Number 16
The New York Review, 22 - 25
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Dada: The Eternal Return is an exercise in collaboration, with individuals contributing their gifts, while relinquishing control of the results, in the interest of creating something that connects us all in the name of creation, invention, recreation and reinvention.
Cabaret Voltaire, 1916 - Marcel Janco |
Marcel Janco
“We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the tabula rasa.”
– Marcel Janco |
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Dada: The Eternal Return is an exercise in utilizing community, with individuals contributing their gifts, while relinquishing control of the results, in the interest of creating something that connects us all in the name of creation, invention, recreation and reinvention.
Tristan Tzara
“Having known 'the thrill of awakening', Dadaists proclaimed a 'harsh necessity free from all disciplines or morals', the 'identity between order and disorder, between I and non-I, between affirmation and negation as the radiance of an absolute art', and an 'active kind of simplicity, the incapability of distinguishing any degrees of clarity'. 'What is divine within us’.”
– Tristan Tzara
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It is an exercise in healing and vitalizing a divided nation, and a divided planet, that has likely passed a point of no return. While, it might seem an apolitical means of acting to impact the political sphere, or a nongovernmental means of addressing governance, more than anything it is a great experiment with an approach that finds meaning in the accidental, while utilizing the absurd to address the madness of the world.
Jean Tinguely |
“With Dada I… have in common a certain mistrust toward power. We don't like authority, we don't like power, To me art is a form of manifest revolt, total and complete. It's a political attitude which doesn't need to found a political party. It's not a matter of taking power; when you are against it, you can't take it. We're against all forms of force which aggregate and crystallize an authority that oppresses people. Obviously this is not a characteristic of my art alone – it's much more general, a basic political attitude.”
– Jean Tinguely |
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Dada: The Eternal Return is an experiment in education, making both participants,
and the public, aware of this important art movement.
“Dada is a ‘state of mind’.”
– Man Ray
|
Man Ray
|
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Dada: The Eternal Return utilizes the technology that connects us, to draw from the community, repurpose and reinvent, and then return contributions to the community
in new form.
“You’ll never know why you exist, but you’ll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously”
– Tristan Tzara
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This exhibition is inspired by Beatrice Wood’s history as part of the New York Dada Movement, humanitarian nature, which was at once rebellious and humanitarian, and our role in caring for her legacy. At the Center, our approach to legacy & continuum is a means of uniting the experience of the past, the present, and the future. Our continuum is timeless and ever in the moment – similar to the concept of the Eternal Return. For us, Dada isn’t something from the past, it is alive, and waits on varied doorsteps.
Richard Huelsenbeck, Berlin 1917 |
“Dada is the sun, Dada is the egg. Dada is the Police of the Police.”
– Richard Huelsenbeck |
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Dada Manifesto - Hugo Ball |
Hugo Ball
“Our cabaret is a gesture… Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.”
– Hugo Ball |
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Kurt Schwitters
“We, the founders of Dada-movement try to give 'time' its own reflection in the mirror.”
– Kurt Schwitters
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Fountain, 1917 - Marcel Duchamp |
Marcel Duchamp (photo by Beatrice Wood)
“Dada is 'nothing'.”
– Marcel Duchamp |
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Theo van Dousburg |
"Dada is able to mobilize the optical and dimensional static viewpoint which keeps us imprisoned in our [three-dimensional] illusions. Thus it became possible to perceive the entire prism of the world instead of just one facet at a time. In this connection Dada is one of the strongest manifestations of the fourth dimension, transposed onto the subject... Dada is 'yes-no, a bird on four legs, a ladder without steps, a square without angles'. Dada possesses as many positives as negatives. To think that Dada simply means destruction is to misunderstand life, of which Dada is the expression.”
– Theo van Dousburg |
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“Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds.”
– Jean-Hans Arp
|
Jean-Hans Arp |
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Beatrice Wood with Marcel Duchamp (left)
and Francis Picabia (center) | 1917 |
Hans Richter
|
Costumes Designed by Sophie Tauber Arp
for a dance performance
by Sophie and her sister
to acommpany a Poetry Reading by Hugo Ball.
Artwork by Hannah Hoch |
Art Critic by Raoul Hausmann
|
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“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...”
– Richard Huelsenbeck
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Join us for an hour or two over the weekend and be part of our art-making assembly line. Whether you paint, sculpt, collage, work with paint, wood, ceramic, paper, found objects of all persuasions, we invite you to take part in this collaborative, community event.
Works created will be included in the exhibition DADA: The Eternal Return, presented March 4 - April 22 at the Center.
Saturday & Sunday Workshops, February 25 & 26, 2017 / 12 - 4 pm:
These free workshops will begin with a PowerPoint presentation on Dada history and aesthetics by Kevin Wallace, Director of the Center, followed by hands-on exploration of collage and assemblage techniques, as well as how chance and accident can expand artistic exploration.
Participants will be asked to donate their creations to the Center, to be included in the exhibition DADA: The Eternal Return, presented March 4 - April 22, with all proceeds supporting educational programming.
These workshop are being presented in conjunction with our two DADA: Eternal Return Collaborative Community Weekend Events.
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The Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts is Open to the Public
Fri, Sat, & Sun 11:00 am - 5:00 pm.
8585 Ojai-Santa Paula Road, Ojai, CA 93023
Tel: (805) 646-3381 / Email: BeatriceWoodCenter@gmail.com
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