Are there really no facts, only interpretations?

"There are no facts, only interpretations."

  Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was increasingly and thoroughly convinced that the world is driven by cosmic will and not that of reason... He also believed we have no access to absolute truth and that there are not facts, only interpretations. He goes on in his writings to say that no one person will have the absolute truth; facts are all merely their perspective. Nietzsche was not the first to de-couple morality from its divine sanction Aka “god is dead”. The line points to the western world’s reliance on religion as a moral compass and source of meaning. When God is dead we don’t have any absolutes, what regulates us in immanent life are the thoughts and perspectives we manage to produce. This godless universe is a scene where humans must project their own meanings into the act. Nietzsche's idea behind moral prescriptions lies nothing but mans “will to power” and to undermine a higher authority. Nietzsche's rebellion was a way of saying that no great metaphysical forces governed human life and created a framework for meaning, every individual faced the possibly absurdity of existence alone.

To me his theories had been offered as justifications for all kinds of moral sensibilities. If you’re on a path on which one attempts to overcome a seemingly limited or restricted belief systems…enjoy your tread into darkness.

"Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend".

"Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things - with resignations, yes, but above all, with blazing, serene hope".

I am....

I am the girl….

I am the girl falling asleep headfirst on top of the covers to the sound of the rain against the windowpane. I am dreaming in tarnished poetry and rotting hopes.

And I am the girl wandering the aisles of the book store. I am curling in corners with Shakespeare touching the pages like a lover, smelling the ink because I’m the girl who thinks books smell like faith. I’m tucking myself between each syllable, climbing down the commas and resting on the vowels. I am sticking my post-it-note-wishes over the adjectives, waiting for the words to bleed through the page and stain the backside of my skin.

And I am the girl holding her elbows when watching the ocean. I am pulling the stitches closed and wincing against the saltwater on my scars. I am not afraid to look in my opal-reflection, but I’m not ready to face it just yet. Because I am the girl building sand castles during high tide, the one running into the waves fully dressed. I am breathing in coral and starfish so that when I come apart, at least my insides will be beautiful.

And, oh, I am the girl throwing kerosene on the stars. I am the one setting the moon on fire. I am tearing apart the dictionary because none of the definitions work, ripping up words to create a collage of meanings that aren’t worth a thing. I am swallowing bullets and spitting out machine-gun-rounds, tearing off my skin because I swear it’s too tight. I am running with nothing but moonbeams, laughing with nothing but sarcasm, hating with nothing but empathy, and falling in love with nothing but vulnerability.

Could the Dada movement have existed without the First World War? Please use specific art examples.

The dada movement was a reaction against everything that was going wrong in modern society, and aversion against its destruction was the central motivating force for this new type of art. There was a feeling that artists had gone mad and that the war was a product of rational, logical thinking. The Dada movement called for anarchy, irrationality, and following the intuitive. The Dada movement had a slim possibility of emerging without the dramatic events of the First World War. The movement was an intense and direct reaction to the spectacle and carnage of war, and the elements of explored imagery were expressed by the subconscious minds of the period.

The Dada movement is now part of our art history more in spite of, than because of, its original intentions. Originating in Zurich and New York on the brink of the First World War Dada quickly spread to Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, and Paris and, to some extent, Russia. As an anti traditional art movement Dada changed the way art was appreciated, and because of it surrealism became much more than an art movement and it thrust home Dada’s subversive attack on rational standards. Both in their own way helped change our modern consciousness. (Achive) In an ambiguous fashion the term Dada was arrived at by chance and this was mirrored in it style because of its lack of formal aesthetic. One of their first defining steps much like all our past art movements was to attack icons of the old culture, but this time it was less rebellion and more of a revulsion. There was a new breed of artists that revolted against the barbarities of war and chose not to take refuge in conventional beauty.

Far from being opposed to basic ideas of art Dadaist strove to find new ways to make new art in new ways. (Willette) Dadaists such as Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters used the technique of photomontage, using illustrations and advertisements cut out of popular magazines. (Achive) He painted Tatlin at Home in 1920 as part of the Berlin Dada movement. The idea of photomontage was as revolutionary as its content, and Dadaist were the first to use photographs as material to create different structures with often jarring and aggressive significance. To some this felt much like the tearing of flesh because their method possessed a propaganda power which their contemporaries had not the courage to exploit. This avant-garde group was deliberately anti-authoritarian and by definition could not have leaders. Aside from philosophy, Dada artists scattered across Europe after the Great War ended. (Willette)

Dada and Surrealism were both movements of writers, poets, artists as being part of a larger intellectual group fearlessly using old-fashioned techniques and subverting realism by painting dreams as if they were real. It can be said that both movements work with chance. Dada’s use of chance was radical and a complete disregard for laws assembling reconvening pieces as poetry. In contrast, Surrealist artists deployed a variety of games, from automatic writing or the exquisite corpse, to approach chance from another position. (Willette)The interest in Dada's historical role has continued to grow from the late forties to the present, despite desultory jabs in all directions. Dadaists did have several redeeming features.They were the first to consciously internationalize a major movement in the arts, and they did manage to develop the emerging techniques and provided a paradigm shift that clearly laid the groundwork for Surrealism and could also be seen as the beginnings of multimedia.

Dada may have been short lived, but it went on to form the basis of many other movements of anti-art. The concept of a movement that existed to reject and poke fun at the world struck a chord with many people. Movements that include surrealism, pop art, punk, post-modernism and abstract art are very different from each other, but what they have in common is their ability to shake people up and to force people into new ways of thinking, or to turn them away. These movements were not Dadaism, but they took and used some of its values. To them and us Dadaism is and was undoubtedly relevant.

Works Cited
Achive, The. Dada and Surrealism. 2012. 14 May 2012 <http://www.artchive.com/artchive/surrealism.html>.



Willette, Dr. Jeanne S. M. Art History Unstuffed: Comparison of Dada and Surrealism. 2011. 14 May 2012 <http://www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/comparison-of-dada-and-surrealism/>.

Analysis: Robert Delaunay and Marc Chagall

Robert Delaunay’s painting the Eiffel Tower was regarded as the ultimate symbol of the machine age. His experimentation with fragmentation of form has a rigid and recognizable motif. The Eiffel Tower shatters and planes merge with the forms of the surrounding buildings Delaunay frequently repeated the same subject many times, and this allowed him to explore new techniques. He believed light could be expressed as color independent of any objective content; and declared color alone is form and content. This idea ran counter to the Cubist ideas of Picasso and Braque, who were more interested in the analysis of physical form than in light. (Encyclopedia.com) This piece differs from analytic cubism because of the role that color plays. Delaunay disapproved the analytical period of the work of Picasso and Braque because of their rejection of color. In the image of the Eiffel Tower we see a real concern with color and its role created energy and movement. The use of color brings a deep expressive quality to the work and the chaotic fragmented structure emphases that physical structure is not so important.

Working from his memories of Paris, Delaunay showed the tower from many view points at once, suggesting movement through space and time and expressing a vision. He introduced an element of time and was able to synthesize several impressions of the tower, and the perpetual experience opens us to an inner awareness. Taking in the vast space the tower inhibits our vision begins to swing back and forth between foreground and background, shifting between its position as an autonomous three dimensional object and its part as an element of pattern in the picture surface as a whole. These optical effects become even more apparent in Delaunay’s later works from the Window series, which led him to a higher level of abstraction. (Cross)The Eiffel Tower series marks the beginning of Delaunay’s artistic deconstruction from in his earlier works; the fragmentation, shattered elements, energy, and immateriality of light become the essence of deep perception.

The poet Apollinaire described Delaunay’s distinct style of work as Orphism in reference to the musician Orpheus in Greek mythology whose music had magical powers. Many famous abstract artists found strong links between music and their work because neither depended on the imitation of phenomena found in the natural world. (Encyclopedia.com) Delaunay epitomizes Modernism; all the paintings are dramatic portrayals, pulsating with energy and present an elusive visual. Unlike such other highly regarded artists of that period as Picasso, Matisse, and Kandinsky, he did not maintain the innovations that propelled him into the limelight in his youth into his later work. As a result, his body of work can seem uneven, but his wife's work as an extension of her husband's theories and early discoveries helped to establish his reputation as a significant painter of the 20th century. (Encyclopedia.com) He was an enterprising painter whose influence to the art world was much greater than his art. The paintings "Eiffel Tower with Trees" and "Eiffel Tower" currently rest at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, while "The Red Tower" is at the Arts Institute of Chicago.

Marc Chagall’s avant-garde painting Paris through the Window is a piece inspired by the orphic cubism of his colleague Robert Delaunay. The overlapping planes of vivid color in the sky of the cityscape mimic Delaunay’s series of the Eiffel tower; both artists used Paris as a metaphor for modernity. (Blessing) Delaunay's "Eiffel Tower" and Chagall's "Paris through the Window" typify the revolutionary work of the Parisian avant-garde. Cubism certainly got to Chagall, as did the swirling disks of Robert Delaunay’s

Orphism. In fact, what Chagall mainly saw when he looked out of his window was a world with perspective shattered only to be reconstructed in planes and spheres. Marc Chagall forged relationships with several other pioneers of the modernist movement. Under the influence of Metzinger and Robert Delaunay, among others, he introduced fractured forms to his enchanted scenes of city life. Chagall’s parachutist seems to refer to a contemporary experience, because in1912 the first successful jump occurred. The painting is an enlarged version of a window view from the self portrait painted one year earlier, contrasting the artists birth place. Chagall didn’t prefer literal interpretations of his paintings, but instead thought of them as lyrical evocations. The two faced man is seen to mediate between two worlds; interior versus exterior space, past and present, the imaginary and the real. The green violinist evoked nostalgia for his homeland, and his cultural and religious legacy is illuminated by the figure of the violinist dancing in a rustic village. In a painting like this it is clear that the artist favoured life of the mind, memory, and magical Symbolism over realistic representation. (Blessing) Many artists from around the world saw the city of Paris as a symbol of culture, freedom, and modernity in the early part of the twentieth century. Artists’, sculptors, writers, and poets settled in the vibrant area of the city which was sprinkled with art galleries, residences, and cafés and it was there this group discovered each other’s work. (Art)There was a commonly held notion that Chagall remained a small town artist at heart much like the fiddlers in his paintings, even when he was associating with the Parisian elite.

Using shining colors, strange figures, and unusual composition this painting speaks volumes about a mysterious and indecipherable Paris where nothing or nobody is really what they appear to be.When we take a closer look we see a human headed yellow cat perching on a window sill; the Eiffel Tower looming above the many roofs, and a parachute jumper descending from the sky. An upside down train and two figures float past; a blue-faced, man lurks in a corner, holding a heart in his blue palm. The delicate flowers and subjects are saturated with full-spectrum colors, but what makes it truly memorable are the slashing Cubist inspired planes that slice and animate the images. (WILKIN) Through fine works in many mediums, we watch Chagall's characteristic imagery evolve. The reason this work is still powerful for us today is because we see the way he formed his distinctive identity in the many hued images of his famous motifs. “Chagall, of course, wanted to be loved, by the world he left behind and the world he eventually conquered with paint and brush. He said so in 1922, in the last lines of his memoir: "And perhaps Europe will love me and, with her, my Russia." Does anyone leave home for any other reason?” (Kennicott) The best thing about "Paris through the Window" is the vision it gives of Chagall working desperately to earn the love he craved and it's clear that Chagall had won the battle as he reached a level of visual metaphor seldom attempted in modern art.

Works Cited

Art, Philadelphia Museum of. Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle. 10 July 2011. 10 May 2012 <http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/401.html>.

Blessing, Jennifer. Guggenheim:Marc Chagall . 2011. 10 May 2012 <http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/piece/?search=Marc%20Chagall&page=1&f=People&cr=3>.

Cross, Susan. Guggenheim: Robert Delaunay. 2012. 9 May 2012 <http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/piece/?search=Solomon%20R.%20Guggenheim%20Founding%20Collection&page=1&f=Major%20Acquisition&cr=8>.

Encyclopedia.com, The. Robert Delaunay. 2004. 9 May 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Robert_Delaunay.aspx>.

Kennicott, Philip. The Washington Post: Chagall Through the Eyes of Paris. 4 March 2011. 10 May 2012 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/04/AR2011030404924.html>.

WILKIN, KAREN. The Wall Street Journal: Beyond Fragile Fantasies. 4 May 2011. 10 May 2012 <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704517404576222631997971992.html#>.