Venus Verticordia
Nikolaus Pfaff
NIKOLAUS PFAFF, c.1609. CARVED IVORY ON EBONY PEDESTAL
In the face of meaningless war, wanton destruction and the spectacle of collective genocide that seems sanctioned by society, a group of artists across Europe felt that they were left with no option but to reject the very foundation their modern world was built on. It was logic and reason, capitalism and society that had got the world to where it was in 1916, and so these same tools were useless to get it out. Enter Dada, a loose movement built on the embrace of nothingness and the absence of meaning, its very name a manifesto for the chaotic, irrational and absurd. Dada was designed to offend, not in content but in sensibility, flying boldly in the face of conceptions of aesthetics and art, ideas that the artists saw little use for. Arp was one of the founders of this movement, though sects sprang up across the continent, and he worked across mediums, applying the dada anti-philosophy to poetry, sculpture, art and collage. His work still puzzles and entices, for we still need an embrace of chaos when logic seems to fail us.