Arp by C. Giedion-W elcker, Zurich.
Arp was born in the Alsatian city
of Strassburg in 1887. Situated at
the foot of the Vosges Mountains
and the Black Forest, this beautiful
mediaeval city has for centuries been
subject to a curious interplay of
French and Alemannic elements.
This is clearly reflected in both lan
guage and political development.
Arp belonged to the harried and
menaced generation that had been
forced to bear the miseries that re
sulted from the neurosis for power
and technical ingenuity being di
vorced from imagination. There
were a few — the young Arp among
them — who boldly stood up against
everything that was spiritually bank
rupt and hypocritical. They kidded
and parodied the complexity of daily
existence and, with fanatical energy,
endeavored — with success — to
stimulate both a new and more ele
mentary mode of living and creative
expression through art. They re
nounced the false educational
clichés that asserted universal prog
ress. Culture was to be found among
the primitives, among the “barba
rous” in the eyes of an over-organized
and mechanical civilization. They
were convinced that those elemen
tary forces that are the fruit of
“thought sprung from fantasy,” as
Vico formulated it in the 18th cen
tury, could liberate mankind and
art from the sterility of mere vir
tuosity, from, among so much else,
the excrescence of man’s intellectual
and materialistic desire to be the
all-important nucleus of the uni
verse. The time had come for the
constructive forces of the imagina
tion to take up arms against the rule
of common sense. Vico’s struggle
with the world of Descartes was con
tinued with increasing vehemence.
What else were the first Dadaists
up against, if it was not the festering
rational world, its spurious moral
standards and its bloated beauty
cult founded on outworn classical
recipes? “We must destroy in order
that the lousy materialists may in
the ruins recognize what is essential.
. . . Dada wanted to destroy the
rationalist swindle for man, and to
incorporate him again humbly in
nature. Dada wanted to change the
perceptible world of man today into
a pious, senseless world without
reason.” 1
Behind the seemingly nihilistic
and destructive Dada actions lay a
firm belief in those concealed prop
erties without which there can be no
organic beauty, no human grace. It
was high time indeed that Hugo
Ball’s vox humana made itself heard
to remonstrate against the stifling
process of mechanization. From
1916-18 an inspired medley of paint
ers, poets, dancers and diseuses gath
ered in Zurich to form the almost
legendary Cabaret Voltaire/ anx
iously seeking for the “buried face of
the time, its personality and origin,
the cause of its affliction and its
resuscitation.” z Somewhere in his
1. From Arp’s diary, Transition, 1932.
2. Arp, Tristan Tzara, Richard Hiilsenbeck,
Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings and Marcel Janco.
3. Written by Hugo Ball, who had come to