pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE TIME OF THE TURNIP 25. Okay. Close your eyes and listen to Jim Morrison sing it's the tiiiiime of the turnip... Have been thinking about the Dada movement. The urinal is the obvious symbol for this style and people either latch onto it or Mona Lisa with a mustache, but I prefer the fur-lined cup myself. Dada is so much more than what is represented by these images though. And yeah, I know it was an exhaustible style—and quickly so—but I love that it existed. The Dada Manifesto that Hölsenbeck and Hausmann wrote in Berlin in 1918 called for aninternational revolutionary union of all creative men and women; for progressive unemployment through the mechanization of all fields of activity; for the abolition of private property; for the provision of free daily meals for creative people and intellectuals, for the remodeling of big-city life by a Dadaist advisory council; and for the regulation of all sexual activity under the supervision of a Dadaist sexual center. These proposals were put forward at what George Grosz called "the time of the turnip."Now I do not know what I think about any council regulating my sexual activity, but I do recognize these artists' disgust with the world around them. They experienced destruction in a way that is hard for Americans to fathom and saw firsthand that structures that had stood in their midst for thousands of years could be destroyed in an instant, learned how easily such destruction can result in permanent loss. (Think of those Catholic icons that were desecrated or destroyed in Shakespeare's time, the cultural loss that resulted from the ruler's need to force a particular belief system on a nation). The Dadaists' disgust with human responses to the world around them symbolized their recognition of the fact that the visual images we hold dear continue to be subject to the whims of any slack-jawed pilot's trigger-happy finger and our ruler's good graces. And THAT is the point behind Mona Lisa with a mustache. The Dadaists didn't disrespect the image so much as they lamented the reality that her existence is so tenuous—that it is subject to the whims of people who could care less about art, about creation. So they confronted the randomness of destruction in their works and mourned a world where destruction is so commonplace. Duchamp's QuestionsCoincidences. Good artists recognize the symbolic relationships between seemingly disparate elements, establish connections that some people simply can't see until the artists point out these connections. This can resemble schizophrenic or delusional behavior, especially if the artist isn't articulate enough or in touch with her unconscious enough to makes these connections resonate with others. Now, between my mother and my sister, let me just say that there is too damn much schizophrenia in my life. Within the last month, for example, I have received a letter from my sister outlining, in detail, how her reconciliation with her ex-husband would bring about the end of conflict between Israel and Palestine and end the Iraqi conflict. I know that this is delusional thinking, but am a logical person and therefore try hard to trace her connections. I'd like to figure out how she reached these conclusions—which, for some reason, is important to me. And, even though it continues to be a fruitless mission, I try to point out the logical inconsistencies in these conclusions. My father's approach to delusional behavior was, at first, frustration, but this quickly turned into appeasement.My family lived through a period of time when my mother wrapped everything in plastic wrap. You would sit on your bed and slide off because she had wrapped the dang mattress in plastic wrap (to keep some kind of evil something's germs inside it) when you weren't looking. She had a witch hazel stage, too. And a tin foil stage. And I came home from school one day—without a friend, thankfully—to find the entire piano wrapped in tin foil and my father and sister and mother just sitting in the room there with it, drinking Cokes. And Daddy was reading the paper across from the silver monstrosity. There was this unspoken agreement in my family that we were supposed to pretend that the most extreme behavior was normal normal normal, that we were supposed to ignore that elephant sitting in the living room. But I could never do this. "Excuse me," I inevitably said, "but has anyone noticed that the piano is wrapped in tin-foil!???"11:40 p.m. - 2005-03-09 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||