In the conclusion of my article for the fourth issue of Tout-Fait Journal ⁽¹⁾, I identified a possible theme in the artistic events of the 1900’s. I’m referring to the gradual emergence, in art, of important ideas and conceptual themes which also belong to the grounding kernel of the complexity sciences.
As a first step, my concern was (and still is) to illuminate some unexpected links, all of them directly related to some fundamental ideas of complexity, between some leading figures in twentieth century art, namely Klee, Duchamp and Escher. This unexpected relationship is even more surprising considering the radical differences between their personalities and their artistic results, or at least the retinal (to use a duchampian term) ones. Furthermore, as far as I know, there is nothing in their writings that links these artists. Relations between Duchamp, Klee and Escher cover a huge range of ideas, and the complexity sciencesprovides us with a realm in which we can unify them.
At the yearly conference “Matematica e Cultura” in Venice ⁽²⁾, organized by Prof. Michele Emmer, I gave a talk titled “Strands of complexity in art: Klee, Duchamp and Escher”, ⁽³⁾where I presented some preliminary findings of my research. This article supplements those preliminary findings with new analogies. I’ll start by summarizing those first ideas; and then I’ll introduce other subjects, such as evolution, topology, impossible 3D objects and enlarged conceptions of perspective. Finally I’ll try to relate these themes with those of complexity.

1. A summary of preliminary findings

I divided the common traits between Klee, Duchamp and Escher into three groups, all of them mathematically relevant and strictly related to each other and to corresponding complexity themes. They are:
a. Recursion and fractals
b. Feedback loops and self organization
c. Instability and chaos
(Particularly for the a. and b. points, I took the most part of my argument about Duchamp from my article on Tout-Fait Journal cited above, where the reader can find some detailed explanations about the subjects summarized below).

a.

In Escher’s work the role of recursion, and the presence of fractal structures have been well known and accepted since the appearance of Hofstadter’s classic book ⁽⁴⁾.
As far as Duchamp is concerned, recursive structures underlie not only several individual works, but also creative processes on a larger scale, involving several works at once. I also suggested the presence (at least in embryonic form) of the idea of fractal structures, mainly linked to the typical duchampian procedure of repetition on a lower (reduced) scale.
Much of Klees work is based on recursive (iterative) procedures. Klee called themprogressions. They are mainly related to natural processes. In relation to natural processes Klee’s intuition of abstract mathematical concepts, like fractal dimensions (ie non-integer dimension), is notable, especially in relation to the botanical world.

b.

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Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even, 1915-23

Here Escher’s use of tessellation comes to mind. A game of symmetries could be seen as a complex system, where very simple rules (namely the given symmetries) exert their reciprocal feedback locally; as well as interacting to have dramatic, global and complex consequences on the whole tiling system. This can be (meaningfully) related to concepts regarding morphogenesis: simple rules can create global complexity, provided that the components of the system are sufficiently connected to each other.
In most of Klee’s works we can see feedback loops in action, both negative and positive. True dynamic systems are the results of these loops. Klee relates them to morphogenetic processes. Once again, the key point is: local simplicity coupled with a huge network of connections) can determine the emergence of global organizational patterns.
Several of Duchamp’s wordplays show self-organizing properties. In a broader sense there are similar random self-organizing processes acting in the Glass. (Fig. 1)

c.

Looking at Escher’s prints, exposure to conflicting stimuli (such as black-white, concave-convex, figure-background) destabilizes the observer. This theme has been already widely discussed by scholars ⁽⁵⁾. Also, Escher is particularly interested in whirling structures that draw together self-reference, fractal structures and whirling, chaotic motions.

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Figure 2
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors Even [The
Green Box], 1934

It is well known that instability plays a key role in Klee’s compositions. Moreover Klee was attracted by what nowadays is called deterministic chaos, ie. unpredictable, irregular behavior, rising from the iterations of simple deterministic procedures. A number of different figurative frameworks are borne out of iterative procedures that have been triggered to behave irregularly. The most interesting thing, however, is that from such quite chaotic tangles of lines, often perfect vital and shiny forms emerge. An interesting analogy can be drawn here with the edge-of-chaos idea of complexity.
Instability and chaos are quite typical duchampian themes. His wordplays depend on predetermined lexical conditions; the slightest differences in either a single syllable or letter or even simply intonation could cause radical shifting in the meaning of a sentence (here we have a true sensitive dependence on initial conditions). Furthermore, Duchamp saw the creative power of instability. In the loosest sense it could be seen everywhere in the Glass and in theNotes of the Green Box, (Fig. 2)but more specifically we see that in the works based on rotatory motion, where highly unsplanar sets of rotating circles can create the illusion of the sthird dimension. Here again the creative power of instability has been exploited which is also powerful edge-of-chaos idea.

2. Evolving systems
Before the twentieth century it was physics, not biology, that was the leading area of scientific endeavour. It was from physics that models and protocols for science were drawn. The 1900s saw a shift towards biology. This shift was consistent with the progressive affirmation of the new paradigm of complexity.
This interest in biology is reflected in the work of Klee, Duchamp and Escher. Firstly Klee, whose interest in Natural History (especially in botany) is well known; like a naturalist he focused (as both artist and teacher) on the central problem of organic growth. He investigated both morphology (the study of forms) and morphogenesis (the study of processes leading to form); his intuitive, biological investigations are notable.
Escher, for his part, was more attracted by abstract ideas; more mathematical than biological, but was nonetheless intrigued by the natural world. He dealt especially with the inanimate world of minerals and crystals. However biologists drew analogies of his abstract ideas with corresponding biological concepts; sometimes Escher dealt with biological processes themselves.

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Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp,Bride’s
Domain from the Large
Glass, 1915-23

Figure 4
Marcel Duchamp,Bachelor
Apparatus from the Large
Glass, 1915-23

Perhaps Duchamp is the artist who best expressed (both in advance and inadvertently) the inversion of the relationship between biology and physics: by distendingthe laws of physics and chemistry he bypassed the rigid determinism and the reductionism of those disciplines. By grafting the organic forms of the Bride (in the higher part of the Glass) (Fig. 3) onto the mechanical machinery of the Bachelors (in the lower part) (Fig. 4)Duchamp not only expressed the idea of a marriage between physics and chemistry (at the bottom, in a three dimensional world), and biology, (above, in a four dimensional world) but perhaps even the superiority of the latter: after all the bride is queen.
This new kind of interest in biology is related to the development in every scientific field of systemic theories. This began in the 1940’s with cybernetics and ended up with the establishment of complexity sciences: what better paradigm of a system is there than an organism? Biology teaches us that complex systems adapt and evolve, we call them complex adaptive systems (CAS) Adaptation and evolution are key in all areas of the complexity sciences. Can artists, that were aware of world-system complexity, have been unaware of these notions of adaptation and evolution, at least at some intuitive level? In my opinion no. Being sensitive to complexity implies having some awareness of evolutionary processes (not necessarily biological), driven by random probabilistic events coupled with adaptation, which make the world-system ever changing.
In Klees’ writings we find a number of references to evolutionary biology ⁽⁶⁾. He clearly had some understanding of the subject matter. However, it is what he did as a painter, more than what he thought as a naturalist, that is interesting here.
He would lovingly cultivate mistakes he made, and embed them in his paintings. He would encourage pupils to draw with their left hand, and to nurture the irregularities that ensued. He also would introduce subtle and repeated variations into his work that would form mobile, ever changing patterns. Klee clearly loved chance.

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Figure 5 Paul Klee, Red fugue,1921
Figure 6 Paul Klee, Sheet from the
town book, 1928

Here, two of Klees’ groups of work are of note: those of Red fugue (1921) (Fig. 5) andSheet from the town book (1928) (Fig. 6). Both groups are based on repetitive horizontal sequences, which are gradually transformed by introducing constant, apparently random variation in the repetitions of the starting shape. The representation of an evolutionary process could be seen in these paintings, where random mutations seem to be somehow selected to obtain certain properties of the resulting patterns. I discussed the subject in some detail in the article already cited ⁽⁷⁾, and I showed by means of computer simulations that evolutionary algorithms can produce quite similar patterns.
Let us consider now Escher’s use of tessellation or tiling (i.e. covering of the surface by means of repeated tiles, without empty gaps and overlapping), such as the one signed E15(1938) (Fig. 7). Each single piece of tiling contains the complete information necessary to build the whole surface; of course this holds.

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Figure 7
M.C. Escher, E15, 1938

Figure 8
M.C. Escher, Metamorphosis, late 1930s

Figure 9
M.C. Escher, Verbum, 1942

Meaningful analogies with the idea of complete genetic information contained within each cell of an organism. Parallels between Escher’s tessellation and mechanisms in biochemistry have been developed by Edward Whitehead ⁽⁸⁾.
Interestingly, Escher’s tiling often depicts a process which gradually transforms the structure of the tiles. This transformation is rendered infinite by the introduction of a circular narrative pattern, which leads it back to its starting point. The strips namedMetamorphosis (the process which turns the larva into insect) are examples of this (Fig. 8) which Escher created in the late 30’s. Such transformation can be seen to some extent as a metaphor for evolutionary process. This, at least, was the opinion of Nobel chemist Melvin Calvin on Escher’sVerbum (1942) (Fig. 9) ⁽⁹⁾.
Let us thirdly consider Duchamp.
The theme of the dichotomy mother – egg, and the paradoxes that lie therein are worthy of investigation. I discussed the subject in the already cited article ⁽¹⁰⁾.
Duchamp used objects and moulds to signify the idea of mother and egg. The mould represents the egg, the object the mother. He used these in a number of different contexts, including the Malic Moulds of the Glass. (Fig. 10)The object and the mould are self-perpetuating and codependent : the object is used to cast the mould and the mould to shape the object. Similar ideas are identifiable in Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14) (Fig. 11)and Tu m’ (1918) (Fig. 12). For the latter he made three wooden templates, for transferring the outline of the threads contained in the Stoppages onto the oil painting. In Tu m’ these templates appear again, depicted in the bottom-left corner; their respective threads in the right hand corner. We have the old threads; their templates, and the new threads… The two elements (thread-Mother and template-Egg) are present in both the Stoppages and Tu m’. (En passant: notice that in Tu m’ the representations of templates and threads stand at the opposite sides of the picture, as we said above; in the middle, the psychological epopee of Bride and Bachelor is abridged, maybe as the necessary step to link egg and offspring).

Figure 12
Marcel Duchamp,Tu m’, 1918

Now the key question is: is this chain deterministic? Could this cyclic process repeat itself unchanged, giving rise to ever equal objects? It couldn’t. Indeed, remember that Duchamp explicitly connects the idea of mould with the idea of infra-thin difference:

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Figure 13
Marcel Duchamp,
Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, No. 2, 1914

Infra-thin separation. 2 forms cast in the same mould (?) differ from each other by an infra thin separative amount. All “identical” as identical as they can be, (and the more identical they are) move toward this infra thin separative difference. (Note posthume).
Thus the process contains an important random event (possibly corresponding to biological mutation). A parallel could be drawn between evolutionary process and the cyclical alternation of the object and the mould(Mother-Egg). At the very least, this observation would be consistent with Shearer’s idea that the cemetery of liveries (Fig. 13)(the Malic Moulds) could be seen as the place where scientific knowledge is recorded ⁽¹¹⁾. An empty livery is a repository for a scientific idea as well as being a mould that produces new ideas on which are encoded new theories, thence new liveries and so on.

3. Topology

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Figure 14
M. C. Escher, Moebius band I, 1961
Figure 15
M. C. Escher, Moebius band II, 1963
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Animation 1
Animation of Moebius Strips

Klee, Duchamp and Escher were all three attracted by topologically interesting figures.
Several of Escher’s works deal with topological figures, such as knots (Knots, 1965) and Moebiusstrips (as in Moebius band I, 1961 (Fig. 14) andMoebius band II, 1963 (Fig. 15)).
Moebius strips (see Animation 1 which explains a possible genesis of the strip starting from a cylinder) exhibit a number of interesting properties; I’ll recall and briefly explain some of them.
First, unlike the cylinder, which has both an internal and external surface, the Moebius strip has only one surface; This can be easily verified by mentally painting its whole surface, without lifting the brush from the strip.
Second, whilst a cylinder has two edges (lower and higher) the Moebius strip has one only edge; once again you can follow this edge completely with the finger without having to lift it from the edge.
Furthermore, if one cuts the cylinder longitudinally, two distinct cylinders will be obtained, whereas by cutting the Moebius strip the same way, one only new strip is yielded.
Escher carefully showed these properties in his prints. In Moebius band I he cut the strip longitudinally and obtained three snakes eating each other’s tail, while in Moebius band IInine ants in line walk on the strip, so as to highlight the single edge and single face concepts.
Escher was interested in the circularity of his knots and strips. He drew them together in a monograph ⁽¹²⁾ under the chapter heading spatial circles and spirals. His knots, Moebius strips, as well as planar and spherical spirals, were all drawn together in this section. The knots follow circular pathways which end up at the starting point after torsions and self-intersections. The same holds for the Moebius strips.
Klee too, was interested in knots, and had been since childhood. Several of his early drawings show knotted worms hanging from a fisherman’s hook. We see the same worms, now abstract knots, in later drawings such as Ways Toward the Knot (1930) (Fig. 16). 2D knots are also drawn according to even more essential forms, like the infinity-shaped motif (and its polygonal variants) shown in his pedagogical sketch (see Sketch 1). We see a huge collection of similar patterns in pictures like Dynamically polyphonic group (1931) (Fig. 17), which is based on a feature of those 2D knots Klee was interested in (see Animation 2): a hatch follows the course of the knot with continuity, but always remaining on the same side of the line; in so doing, the hatch highlights the inside of one half of the motif, and the outside of the other half. How is it possible to pass from inside to outside, while remaining on the same side of the line? It is due to the self-intersection of the 2D knot (corresponding with the torsion in the Moebius strip), which allows passage from an inner to an outer region, without passing from one side of the line to the other. As we saw before, Moebius strip has a similar property. Let us return to Klee’s 2D knots. He amplified them, to form complex, perpetual pathways, once again formed by uninterrupted, closed, self-intersecting lines (often polygonal instead of curved) and always returning to the starting point. This is typical of Klee’s drawings of the late 20’s and the early 30’s. An example is the drawingMechanics of an Urban Area (1928) (Fig. 18).

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Figure 19
Paul Klee, Excited, 1934

Sketch 2
Folding recursive process

We have other evidence of the special topological meaning of Klee’s images, such as labyrinths. Labyrinthine lines and signs are indeed among the most important patterns in Klee’s late style. Several hypotheses could be made to explain the genesis of such patterns, and in my opinion they are often linked to morphogenetic processes ⁽¹³⁾. There are, however, some drawings, such as Excited (1934) (Fig. 19) and all the others, based on the same framework, which particularly show the underlying presence of the folding recursive process (seeSketch 2). Similar (but reversed) processes are sometime used for classifying labyrinths in topology ⁽¹⁴⁾ unrolling them, to obtain the simpler equivalent form. But, interestingly, similar folding processes can also give rise to fractal and/or chaotic structures ⁽¹⁵⁾ which in turn can be connected with the corresponding themes highlighted above.
With reference to the use of Duchamp’s topological figures, I have already underlined the importance of the Kleinian bottle, along with some related Moebius-strip-like structures in his writings and works ⁽¹⁶⁾, and I have already stressed a possible meaning of this circular self-penetrating and self-encompassing figure, this is recommended further reading.
Now I’ll focus on further interesting links between Klee, Escher and Duchamp with respect to the use they made of the well-known topological properties of those surfaces. The analogy between the infinity-shaped motif of Klees’ and Eschers’ Moebius strips is further reinforced by observing some other prints of Escher’s, which came 10 or 15 years before his Moebius strips; Horsemen (1946) (Fig. 20) and Predestination (1951) (Fig. 21)show the planar infinity-shaped motif.
Let us take Duchamp’s Steeplechase (Fig. 22): it is a self-made racing course, for a childish horserace game in which there is a clear connection with both Klee’s infinity-shaped motif and Escher’s prints Horseman and Predestination. This could be seen as an antecedent ofSculpture for Travelling (1918). (Fig. 23)

Jean Clair ⁽¹⁷⁾ suggested an interesting analogy between the kleinian bottle and some alchemic symbols, such as the one of the pelican devouring itself, and then he connected it with Duchamp’s Air de Paris (Fig. 24). Look now at Escher’s preparatory sketch (Sketch 3)of a Pelican; although in the definitive print he substituted the pelican with a dragon (Dragon, 1952) (Fig. 25), he maintained however the same idea of a self-penetrating and self-eating animal (after all, the snakes eating each other’s tail in Moebius band I refer to the same theme). As far as Klee is concerned, we saw similar self-eating structures, though abstract, in the meandering lines of the drawings around 1934, use the same techniques as the previously mentioned Excited: the basic motif (see Sketch 4) is formed by two curves penetrating one another, the end of the one into the belly of the other.

In his latest style Klee used a typical pattern whose genesis and meaning we can better understand by looking at a detail of the drawing The fugitive is Looking Back (1939) (Fig. 26); the body of the fugitive is based on branching curved lines, the one starting from the back of another. The head too is formed by a similar, curved line, but it is branching from its own back, in a circular, self-referential scheme. This motif is further amplified in innumerable drawings and paintings around 1939-40, where we find a lot of self-embedded, self-encompassed figures, such as in Fastening (1939) (Fig. 27).

What is the significance of this trend for using topological figures? What relationship can we establish between that and complexity?
First, with Klee, Duchamp and Escher there is a tendency to represent very complex things, where the parts are widely connected to each other, interacting with non-linear pathways, often looping and returning to some crucial points. Thus the tangled intricacy of some knots or labyrinths visually and effectively expresses the corresponding intricacy of the components of their complex systems.
Second, such intricacy of connections within a system often produces unexpected outcomes, which in turn imply new unexpected outcomes, and so on. Thus in the complex system represented in their works by our artists, it is difficult to discern clearly causes and effects, because of the network of their reciprocal feedback. The unexpected, often strange and sometimes paradoxical outcomes rising from systems subjected to circular feedback and self-referential loops have corresponded with the strange and paradoxical properties of figures such as knots, the Moebius strip or the Kleinian bottle, due to their circularity, their self-intersections or self-penetrations. The same could be said for those figures discussed above, often used by the late Klee, which are self-encompassing.
Particularly in the case of Duchamp, as I have already shown ⁽¹⁸⁾, the topological properties of the kleinian bottle were used to express the paradoxical identity Egg–Mother (or Bride–Glass). This was discussed in the previous section, and in general to express the autopoetic properties of the duo Glass–Box.
 
4. Enlarged perspective and Impossible 3D objects

Figure 28
Marcel Duchamp,
Apolinère Enameled, 1916-17

Figure 29
Paul Klee, Chess, 1931

Sketch 5
Trihedral junction
versus DihedralT-junction

Sketch 6
Trihedral
junction versus Dihedral
T-junction in Apolinère Enameled

Rhonda Shearer ⁽¹⁹⁾ thoroughly discussed the relationship between some of Eschers’ and Duchamps’ works, based on 3D impossible objects. She documented how Duchamp’s Apolinère Enameled(1916-17) (Fig. 28) predates by forty years the seminal paper of Lionel and Roger Penrose on impossible 3D figures ⁽²⁰⁾. She also stresses the bond of friendship between Duchamp and Roland Penrose, a close relative of Lionel and Roger. The cited Penrose article is the professed source of inspiration of Escher’s famous impossible figures, so that the reading of Shearer’s article cements a direct link between Escher and Duchamp via the Penroses.
But, what about Klee’s impossible 3D objects? We shall discuss some works, which are representative of corresponding frameworks, all of them developed in about 1930 and deeply linked with one another.
The first we shall consider is Chess (1931) (Fig. 29). I have elsewhere already examined this painting, its genesis and its possible meaning ⁽²¹⁾. Here I want only to recall that the bare, empty room in the background is an impossible 3D object (as a matter of fact, many other elements in the painting are spatially inconsistent, but here we shall confine ourselves to the background only).
The walls of the room are joined to each other by means of vertical edges, three of which are explicitly traced, whilst the fourth (the dotted one in Sketch 5) is only suggested by the left side of the paler rectangle in the upper right hand corner of the painting. Three of those vertical edges have mutually inconsistent junctions at the opposite extremities: one end shows a trihedraljunction, where three distinct edges converge, while at the opposite end, two of the three edges line up one another, giving rise to a dihedral T-junction. Thus, the background is an impossible, puzzling 3D object, and the checkerboard covering over the scene may suggest something like a chess problem, just to emphasize the spatial enigma posed by the background.
Look now at Apolinère Enameled: one among the ingredients for making this 3D object impossible, is just the same as for Klee’s Chess: mutually inconsistent ends of a edge, highlighted in Sketch 6.
Klee used to express the concepts and the ideas he was interested in, by means of graphic simplifications, focusing his attention on only the essential parts. He would discard irrelevant and non-essential details, that might mislead the observer and would especially avoid repetition and redundancy. If necessary they wold just suggested.
That’s the reason why we find traces of other impossible 3D objects in a very simplified form; as is the case for The Conqueror (1930) (Fig. 30). Look at his banner. Though a banner is essentially a flat object, at first sight we actually perceive something like a cube, a solid figure; but counting the peripheral sides of the overall silhouette, we find that there are five, not six, as we would generally expect (Sketch 7). Something here is wrong: as soon as we accept the hypothesis of a possible 3D vision, we immediately recognize that it is inconsistent with some details of the motif. There is something missing. To better understand what really is missing, let us examine a further simplified versions of the same motif in another of Klees’ pictures: Six species (1930) (Fig. 31). Look at the flower displayed in Sketch 8. To make it spatially plausible, we have to mentally add a missing edge to form a trihedron; the same holds of course for each other flower in the painting. Without the addition of the missing edge we perceive something oscillating between a dihedron and a trihedron, which leads us back to the analogous ambiguity we saw in Chess.

Notice now that Duchamp was interested in exactly the same ambiguity. Look indeed at the recto side of the Hershey Postcard note (circa 1915) (Fig. 32), or even at the miniature reproduction of Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? in the Boite-en-Valise (1941) (Fig. 33).

Returning now to Klee’s Conqueror, it is easy to see similar treatments in its banner. Especially in this case, as we said above, the perception oscillates continually between the 2D and 3D: no sooner have we arrived at a 2D hypothesis, then we are pushed to reject it and embrace 3D one, and vice versa. The relevance of some of Duchamp’s and Escher’s ideas is here clear, for it is well-known that the conflict between surface and space is one of the most important among their themes.
Let’s now turn our attention to Klee’s Soaring, Before the Ascension (1930) (Fig. 34) which is representative of several paintings based on the same framework, worked out in the years we are considering. The framework is based on rectangles freely soaring over the whole surface of the work, connected to each other with colored bars.
At the first glance we realize that the whole is spatially inconsistent, though the local details are not. Particularly, it happens that focusing our attention on a couple of connected rectangles at once, there is no problem; but considering three or more connected rectangles at once, in the most cases it yields spatial inconsistencies, that prevent the observer from seeing which are the closest or the farthest planes (unless one admits the bars could make a hole in the rectangles and pass through them).
In Soaring Klee used several skewed perspective boxes at once, like the ones in his pedagogical sketch (Sketch 9). Here we are confronted with the desired effect of spatial ambiguity, for a face (the red one in see Sketch 10) might simultaneously belong to several boxes, each of them suggesting a different perspective; thus, that face has an ambiguous spatial collocation. We can easily see the practical effects of such a strategy in Sketch 11, which displays several of the possible simultaneous perspectives contained in a single detail ofSoaring. Interestingly, because of their shared surfaces, the perspective boxes used by Klee form a wide network of connected elements. Notice: not just a linear chain of elements, but a true net, which allows a multiplicity of possible circular courses ⁽²²⁾.
This kind of construction makes me think to something like the hypercube displayed in Sketch 12and this of course recalls the Duchamp’s pet; the fourth dimension. Thus, look at Poster for the Third Chess Championship (1925) (Fig. 35), where Rhonda Shearer ⁽²³⁾ showed several analogous spatial inconsistencies.
One of the most famous 3D impossible objects of Escher’s is Ascending and Descending (1960) (Fig. 36): on the roof of a building we see an endless staircase. Once again we have a circular course ever returning to its starting point. It is well-known, and Bruno Ernst ⁽²⁴⁾ explained it carefully, that the building, which has the impossible staircase on its roof, has a strange perspective structure, shown in Sketch 13. More than any verbal explanation, animations 3 and 4 help us understand the key reason for this. Animation 3 is a perspective sketch with one only vanishing point. It starts by showing three distinct parallel planes. They are perspectively represented with three closed polygonal lines (namely three rectangles) whose edges are of course not connected with each other. But by slightly rotating one of the edges of the optical pyramid around the vanishing point, we get a spiraling polygon, which joins in a single connected line the edges of several planes. The same holds if perspective has three vanishing points: look at Animation 4, which explains the perspective structure of Escher’s impossible building. Here is the surprise. Look at Sketch 14: the impossible room in Klee’sChess is based just on the construction presented in animation 3, thus it is deeply linked to the impossible building of Escher’s Ascending and descending. (Further explanation for this can be found in the article cited above ⁽²⁵⁾).

Thus, in these cases both Klee and Escher conceived perspective in terms of an iterative process, whose outcome is the spiraling, growing motion we saw in their buildings, as well as in a nautilus shell; thus they thought of the vanishing point as a sort of attractor of a dynamic system.
Can we see anything of this in Duchamp’s work? Not exactly the same, but in a way the answer is: yes, there are.
One of the major achievements of Duchamp on perspective is of course the lower half of the Glass (we shall consider the Completed Large Glass, 1965 (Fig. 37)). Thus, look at the Slide, a perfect perspective box which contains the rotatory element named the Water mill. Many other rotatory elements can also be found in the lower part of the Glass, such as the Chocolate grinder or the Oculist chards, but particularly the pathway described by the Sieves or the Toboggan have the feature of a spiral shell we are interested in.
The analogy between these elements and the perspective spirals we saw above is admittedly weak. But look now at Rotary demisphere (1925)(Fig. 38). Animation 5 can help visualize the surprising perspective depth effect one yields once a similar device is rotating. This is quite close to Klee’s and Escher’s idea of considering the perspective vanishing point as a sort of attractor of an iterative process which implies spiral motions.

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Figure 34
Paul Klee, Soaring,
Before the Ascension, 1930

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Sketch 12
Hypercube
Figure 35
Marcel Duchamp, Poster for the
Third French Chess Championship, 1925

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Figure 37
Marcel Duchamp,
Completed Large Glass, 1965

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Figure 39
M.C. Escher, Another
world II, 1947
Figure 40
Paul klee, Perspective
with inhabitant, 1921

What I said so far shows clearly that the theme of the impossible 3D objects and the one of an enlarged conception of the perspective are tightly linked to each other. Thus I want just to recall some of Escher’s experiments on perspective which Klee and Duchamp also did with similar outcomes.
In Escher’s Another world II (1947) (Fig. 39)the only vanishing point (roughly in the center of the print) must be considered at once on the horizon, or at the zenith or at the nadir, depending on which bird (and which wall) we are considering. The same holds for Klee’s Perspective with inhabitants (1921)(Fig. 40).
In Relativity (1953) (Fig. 41) Escher needed three distinct vanishing points to represent a world with three different gravitational fields, where people can walk on the walls as well as on the floor or the ceiling. In Klee’s Arab town (1922) (Fig. 42) we see a similar effect: the ground plane containing the floor of the higher part of the painting is the same plane containing the back walls in the lower part.
The fluid perspective in Escher’s House of stairs (1951) (Fig. 43) could be also explained by Klee’s idea of a stray viewpoint, and the final outcome could be compared with the one ofSoaring.

Finally, as far as Duchamp’s perspective experiments are concerned, Shearer showed a quantity of different perspective tricks devised by Duchamp, ranging from stray viewpoints, multiple vanishing points, fluid perspective, photographic overlapping, and so on ⁽²⁶⁾. Of course, they maintain an high degree of similarity with the ones of Escher and Klee.
Let’s now return to the impossible objects, and see them from another viewpoint.

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Figure 44
M.C. Escher, Waterfall, 1961

Sketch 15
The simple tribar
underling the building
of Waterfall

What do they represent? Especially in Escher’s case it is evident that they are variation on a leitmotiv: the one of perpetuum mobile. Look at Waterfall (1961) (Fig. 44) or even at Ascending and Descending, which explicitly show endless motions. But look even at the simple tribar (Sketch 15) which underlies the building of Waterfall. As we go with the eye along its bars, we perceive a sense of depth, we feel we are leaving the plane where the bars are actually drawn, to enter in the third dimension; and the pathway is really endless because, once the turn is completed, we can repeat it again and again; every time we find ourselves at the starting point.
Thus the impossible objects belong to a world which isn’t subjected to the law of thermodynamics: here entropy doesn’t increase, but reduces itself, to allow perpetual motions, such as inWaterfall.
A similar overturning is exactly what happens in complex systems with self-organization, which is one of the key concept in complexity sciences. Self-organization means that a system, provided certain conditions (one of them being the complexity of the system itself) spontaneously reduces its entropy, by introducing new levels of order among its elements. The slogan coined by Stuart Kauffman ⁽²⁷⁾, Order for free, effectively captures the essence of the stunning and seemingly paradoxical discover of a self-established order.
Now, if Klee, Duchamp and Escher guessed something about self organization as I believe and as I tried to highlight, then the impossible objects in a way could express with their paradoxical properties the surprising order-for-free nature of complex systems.
After all, something similar has been already said by Jean Clair about the Glass:
Michel Carruoges ⁽²⁸⁾ noticed that the intricate machinery of the Glass shows several analogies with other imaginary machines and engines, devised in same period by Jarry, Roussel, Kafka… Several years after, Jean Clair ⁽²⁹⁾ recalled Carrouges’ statement, and further deepened the parallelism, including in the list a quantity of pseudoscientific inventions which were popular in those years. One of the leitmotivs of those peculiar machines (Glass included) was that they produce more energy than they use, said Clair, thus they are variations on the theme of the perpetuum mobile. In fact they overturn the reality principle (the second law of thermodynamics) into the pleasure principle (the dream of an energy completely free and available).
In short, in my way of seeing things, we can group impossible objects and these machines together.

click to enlarge

Sketch 16
Necker Cube

But a further connection can also be found, particularly referred to the Necker Cube (Sketch 16), which underlies several impossible objects, such as the Impossible Bed of Apolinaire enameled. Indeed, as Rosen ⁽³⁰⁾ observed, the Necker Cube encompasses within itself, thus we can connect it to the same themes we discussed for the self-encompassing topological figures: hence feedback looping and self-reference.

5. A unifying reading perspective
In conclusion, I would like to delimit the context in which this paper should be read.
Often it happens that many people at once, unconsciously, independently and following different courses, elaborate the same new ideas and concepts, and help cement them into the Zeitgeist. In fact they contribute to the emergence of new sensibilities and new ways of observing, interpreting and understanding the world. This was the case for Klee, Duchamp and Escher: I believe they expressed (being in advance on their time) and contributed towards ideas that would grow and be affirmed. Nowadays, this new paradigm, this new way of seeing things is expressed by the so called complexity sciences.
Reiner Hedrich ⁽³¹⁾ stressed some salient traits in the development of complexity sciences. Here I’m interested in two of them. First, the gestation period of the new theories has been very long, about one hundred years. This long latency period, necessary to find a solid mathematical theory useful to describe dynamic systems behavior generously covers the lifetimes of Klee, Duchamp and Escher. Thus, in a way, they were immersed in a stream of ideas and concepts which were still under construction and organizing in theories. I’m talking about a nascient stream in the cultural subconscious, not one that was flowing on the surface of the well established scientific culture of those years; thus I don’t think that our artists could have been directly influenced by those scientific ideas; generally speaking, even admitting the possibility of such an exchange of views, in my opinion it is easier to think it happened in the opposite direction. With a few exceptions: for some aspects (I think of concepts such as instabilities and chaos) scholars acknowledge Duchamp has been influenced by the reading of Poincaré; but they are just only some aspects of his complex thought; the same holds for Klee’s possible understanding of (evolutionary) biology and natural sciences, or for the mathematical readings of Escher, which moreover in some cases he admitted to be unable to understand. The second feature in the development of complexity sciences stressed by Hedrich is that the grounding ideas of the new paradigm, the kernel of complexity, didn’t deal with a specific disciplinary field: instead, they are a sort of conceptual foundation, a shared background for any empirical discipline dealing with complex systems. This fact makes it conceivable that there was, to some extent, a widespread and unconscious emergence of such ideas, even though in purely qualitative and intuitive terms. In other words, I’m talking about quite general concepts, and not about specific subjects or details of a well-defined disciplinary field: it makes possible that the same ideas could have been grasped by someone in more intuitive forms, which is what I’m suggesting for Klee, Duchamp and Escher.
The concepts I’m talking about are closely related to each other, they form a tangle of interconnected ideas, that bringing one of them to the light, mostly implies that many (or even all of) the others could also somehow come out. Really, it is impossible to examine thoroughly one of them without revealing a cascade connection with each other. Indeed, the idea of cyclic dynamism of a system entails feedback, recursion and self-reference; in turn self-organization, fractals and chaos are entailed, and again emergence, dynamic and unsequilibria, (co)evolution; further, the visual expression of such a complexity needs new and different ways to conceive the space, where new and more complex relations may occur between its elements; thus, the represented space has strange topological properties.
It is well-known that complexity introduces several relevant changes in the way we used to know the world. This is not the place to discuss them: I’ll limit myself to summarizing some of them.
First: mainly due to both deterministic chaos and sensitive dependence on the initial conditions which characterize the dynamical systems, we have to accept two weaker versions of both the causality principle and determinism.

click to enlarge

Sketch 17
Diagram explaining
concept of complexity

Second: because of the concept of emergence, the reductionist approach is not more suito study complex systems. This is sometime expressed by opposing reductionism and holism. I like the way Chris Langton expresses the concept by means of Sketch 17 which I took from Roger Lewin ⁽³²⁾.
To effectively explain the radical change in the way of seeing the world implied by complexity, a set of dichotomies is often used, which confronts old paradigms with new:
simplicity-complexity, reductionism-holism, determinism-uncertainty, quantity-quality, necessity-contingence, predictability-unpredictability, reversibility-irreversibility, repeatability-unrepeatability, causality-randomness, law-chaos… Interestingly, if we attempt to describe Klee, Duchamp and Escher by choosing either of the poles in such dichotomies, we always have to choose the second one.
As far as Duchamp is concerned, the discussion about the crisis of determinism and reductionism has been already widely discussed, particularly in relation to the ideas of Poincaré’s.
Coming to Klee, I want just recall his essay titled Exact experiences in the field of art ⁽³³⁾, where he expressed a concept which is one of the leitmotiv of his activity as both artist and teacher: the freedom and the intuition of the artist act in the space between law and unpredictability, but always remembering the necessity of both:
Oh, don’t let the eternal spark become completely smothered by law’s measure! Take steps in time! But don’t go away from this world completely. ⁽³⁴⁾
Escher expressed a similar ambivalence with his prints, in the paradoxical coexistence of extreme formal rigor and uncertainty, mathematical exactness and instability, rigorous application of exact principles and unpredictability in the outcomes.
On the other hand, only a few words are needed to recall that Klee, Duchamp and Escher built their work as organisms, composed by a number of interacting elements, where the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. In their works complex processes are mostly represented, whose outcomes can be emergent, unexpected properties. We can dissect them, but in so doing we always lose something. This is the true essence of their holistic art.

Notes

1. Roberto Giunti, “R. rO. S. E. Sel. A. Vy”, Tout-Fait : The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal 2.4 (January 2002) Articles <https://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=1240&keyword=>.

2. < http://www.mat.uniroma1.it/venezia2005/>.

3. Roberto Giunti, “Percorsi della complessità in arte: Klee, Duchamp ed Escher”, in: M. Emmer (ed.)Matematica e Cultura 2003 (Milano, Springer Verlag – Italia, in print)

4. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (New York, Basic Book, 1979)

5. Teuber M. R. “Perceptual theory and Ambiguity in the Work of M. C. Escher against the background of 20^th Century Art”, , in H. S. M. Coxeter, M. Emmer, M. L. Teuber, R. Penrose (ed.) M. C. Escher: Art and Science, (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1986)

6. Giunti, R. “Una linea ondulata lievemente vibrante. I ritmi della natura nell’opera di Paul Klee”, Materiali di Estetica No. 2, (2000)

7. Giunti R. [6]

8. Whitehead E. P.
“Symmetry in Protein Structure and Functions”, in H. S. M. Coxeter, M. Emmer, M. L. Teuber, R. Penrose (ed.) M. C. Escher: Art and Science (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1986).

9. Calvin M. “Chemical Evolution”, Oregon State System of Higher Education, Eugene, Oregon, 1961

10. R. Giunti [1], p. 13, <http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=1240&keyword=>.

11. Shearer, R.R.
“Marcel Duchamp’s Impossible bed and Other Not Readymade Objects: A possible route of Influence from Art to Science (Part I and II). “ Art & Academe, 10:1 & 2. (Fall 1997 and Fall 1998) <http://www.marcelduchamp.org/ImpossibleBed/PartI/> and <http://www.marcelduchamp.org/ImpossibleBed/PartII/>

12. Escher M. C. The Graphic work (Bendikt Taschen Verlag, Koeln, 1992)

13. Giunti R. “Paul Klee on Computer. Biomathematical models help us understand his work” in M. Emmer (Ed.) The Visual Mind 2, (The MIT Press, Cambridge MASS, in print)

14. Tony Phillips “The topology of Roman Mozaic Mazes” in M. Emmer (Ed.) The Visual Mind (The MIT Press, Cambridge MASS, 1993).

15. D. J. Wright, Dynamical Systems and Fractals Lecture Notes, <http://www.math.okstate.edu/mathdept/dynamics/lecnotes/lecnotes.html>.

16. R. Giunti [1], p. 11, <http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=1240&keyword=>.

17. J. Clair, Duchamp at the turn of the Centuries, ToutFait Journal, Issue 3. <http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=877&keyword=>.

18. Giunti R. [1], p. 13,<>

19. Shearer R. R. [11]

20. Penrose L.S., Penrose R. “Impossible Objects: a Special Type of Visual Illusion”, Brit. Journal of Psycology, vol. 49, 1958

21. Giunti R. “Analysing Chess. Some deepening on the concept of Chaos by Klee”

<http://www.mi.sanu.ac.yu/vismath/giunti/00Chess.htm> or <http://members.tripod.com/vismath/pap.htm>

22. Indeed, Klee gradually passed from a first conception, where things are mechanically enchained to each other in a rigid, linear successions, with a well defined cause-effect relation (look at the drawing Parade on the track, 1923) Fig. 45 to a final conception where each thing is connected with each other in a complex network, and causes and effects are not clearly distinguished: look at the pedagogical sketch (sketch 18). Its caption is says: «Building of an higher organism: the assembling of parts viewing at the overall function».

The framework of Soaring is just the first important achievement of such a creative course, which will lead in the late works to the theme of morphogenesis.

23. Shearer R.R. “Examining Evidence: Did Duchamp simply use a photograph of “tossed cubes” to create his 1925 Chess Poster?” Tout-Fait Journal, issue 4, <http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=1375&keyword=>.

24. B. Ernst, Der Zauberspiegel des M. C. Escher (Taco, Berlin, 1986)

25. Giunti R. [21]

26. Shearer R. R. “Why the hatrack is and/or is not Readymade: with interactive software, animations and videos, for readers to explore”, Tout-Fait Journal, Issue 3, <http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=1100&keyword=>

27. Kauffman S. At Home in the Universe. The Search for the Law of Self- Organization and Complexity(Oxford University Press, 1995)

28. Carrouges M. Les Machines célibataires (Arcanes, Paris, 1954)

29. Clair J. Marcel Duchamp ou le grand fictif (Galilée, Paris, 1975)

30. Rosen, S. M. “Wholeness as the Body of Paradox”. 1997 <http://focusing.org/Rosen.html>.

31. Hedrich R. “The Sciences of Complexity: A Kuhnian Revolution in Sciences?” Epistemologia XII.1 (1999) <http://www.tilgher.it/epiarthedrich.html>

32. Lewin R. Complexity. Life at the edge of chaos (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999)

33. The essay is contained in: Klee P. Das Bildnerische Denken (Basel: Benno Schwabe & Co., 1956)

34. P. Klee, Tagebücher von Paul Klee 1898-1918 (Köln:Verlag M. Dumont Scauberg, 1957), note 636, 1905

Figs. 1-2
©2003 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

“If you are alive, you are a Dadaist,” Richard Huelsenbeck wrote in 1920. Huelsenbeck belonged to the now well-known group of poets and performers who came together in Zurich during 1916 under the name Dada. Whilst Dadaist movements appeared in other places, and took on different manifestations, the Zurich Dadaists were concerned principally with poetry and performance. And if Dada may be defined or understood in many ways, it is arguable that to those in Zurich in 1916 Dada was precisely about the ambiguity of language and its relation to the world, and this was not only demonstrated through performances and writing, but also in the attempt to resist the kind of identification that language, seemingly, cannot escape:

Spit out words: the dreary, lame, empty language of men in society. Simulate gray modesty or madness. But inwardly be in a state of tension. Reach an incomprehensible, unconquerable sphere.
Hugo Ball (Ball, 1996: 77)
Dada is elasticity itself.
Richard Huelsenbeck (Huelsenbeck, 1993: 11)

click to enlarge

Figure 1 Richard Huelsenbeck
(source unknown)
Figure 2 Hugo Ball (source unknown)

As the mediator of sense experience and as a regulator of ideas and concepts, the use of language–one may even say, of words–was extremely important to Huelsenbeck, Hugo Ball and the others (Figs. 1 and 2). And we may suggest that where Richard Huelsenbeck could claim that being itself was ambiguous (i.e., being, like Dada, was ‘elastic’), he was aware that language both connects and disconnects the individual from a world of experience; and we may read what the Zurich Dadaists proclaimed as suggesting that life was a kind of Heraclitean flux, in which all objects, experiences and perceptions were fundamentally unstable. Life, in short is ever moving forward, whilst language (which, in its attachment to categories of understanding, always works in a backward direction), by contrast, masks a kind of immanent disorder. The problem with language was not only one of, say, referentiality, but also of the way in which it gives order, or ‘makes’ the world–and in this sense the uses of language can be nefarious: “Human beings,” Huelsenbeck added, “are simply ideologues if they fall for the swindle perpetrated by their own intellects; that an idea, symbol of a momentarily perceived fact, has any absolute reality” (Huelsenbeck, 1993: 9-11).

1. Logos and Identity

click to enlarge

Figure 3
Poster for the first
evening at Cabaret Voltaire

In this essay I want to suggest that the play of identity in language and appearance that was a feature of the short-lived Cabaret Voltaire (Fig. 3), which the Dadaists established in Zurich in 1916, can be read as an attempt to destroy the idea of logos, by which I mean it was an attack on the idea that reason (through the mediating discourse of identity) reveals its own perfectibility in overcoming the shortcomings of the historical present, by reaching towards a future that would be evermore perfect. So whilst the word ‘logos’ translates as ‘word’ or ‘speech’ its associations are far richer than this, and in general terms logos refers principally to a series of developments within the philosophical tradition of the West, which taken together can be understood as an idea of perfectibility, or of the power of reason to attain such perfection. As Mark C. Taylor has written:

[t]he Logos has been interpreted in various ways: Platonic forms, the mind of the creator God, the son of God, the image of God, Reason, Spirit, Absolute Subject, creative archetypes, numbers, geometric forms, and so forth. In each of its incarnations, the logos forms the ground and provides the reason for all that exists. From a logocentric perspective, to under-stand anything, one must penetrate appearances and comprehend what stands under the surface (Taylor, 1992: 188-89).

Thus, any attempt to understand (under-stand as Taylor says), justify, or examine a ‘reality’ beyond appearance, or the relationship between language and such objectivity becomes part of this logocentric tradition, even, it is argued, when such understanding takes the form of a denial of logos (because to deny it is nevertheless to affirm a relation to it, even if it is one of unwelcome parentage, for example) (Rorty, 1991: 107-118). For our purposes the important aspect of this tradition is found in the way language and rational categories create connections between words and the world, and thus assume a principal role in the making ofidentities. It was the world as presented by such rational language around 1917 that Dada sought to question, with Hugo Ball in particular believing that only the spiritual reassertion of logos could destroy the claims of reason to reveal all–in other words, reason’s claim tologos had to be destroyed.

Although the question of identity between appearance and reality has been problematic to an understanding of the world since the dawn of philosophical speculation, the problem of bridging the apparent gap between the two becomes more marked in modern society precisely because more aspects of our experience of the world are now mediated than ever before–from the fact that one can now ‘experience’ situations, lives, or cultures beyond our own (e.g., through film, fiction, etc.), to the commonplace act of, say, purchasing a carton of milk without any knowledge of how to obtain it without the mediation of commerce (this is the inevitable mediation of material life as a consequence of the division of the field of production). Couple that with the historical emergence of contrasting ways of thinking about Western assumptions about reality (anthropology, for example, revealed a variability in beliefs about the nature of the physical world), and the problem of identity becomes so overbearing that one can see by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century the ease with which the normally expansive curiosity of the Western mind is directed inwards. A retreat to safety, it seems, in an attempt to prevent philosophical speculation from making the gap mediated by language into an unbridgeable chasm.

In technical or formal terms this was reflected, for instance, in the development of a philosophy that advocated the abandonment of speculations about the nature of reality (the so-called Anglo-American analytic school of the first half of the twentieth century). Already, in fact, by the late 1890’s, the groundwork for this withdrawal from metaphysics was found in Gottlob Frege’s work on the sense, meaning and reference of language; although his attempt to elaborate the grounds for a firm identity between words or names and an external object that these referred to was of limited success–because he found that meaning had an unavoidable contextual determination that allowed for a degree of ambiguity (Frege, 1980: 56-79) ⁽¹⁾. In trying to make philosophy scientifically respectable, the philosophers of language who followed Frege, determined that, in language, every term must therefore be unambiguous, or rather, for talk of reality to avoid the charge of meaninglessness, words had to refer to one thing or another–word meanings must be ‘tight’ and not ‘elastic’. This meant that a conception of language taken in such terms could be understood to have a backward directed referentiality function, which is to say that language itself was for the most part assimilated to already available categories of ordering experience. The important point about this with relation to Dada is that the ‘proper’ use of language reflected a version of the logos:that is to say, the philosophically respectable notion of language in the early twentieth century cannot easily be disentangled from associated ideas of referentiality and identity, which suppose a ‘reality’ to which language use, and representations generally (be they verbal/textual or material) should match up (Wittgenstein, 1953; Goodman, 1978). The reason for this was simple–words always refer to something. Dada, as we will see, sought to say something about reality, but did not use language in this way. Of course, this was not entirely new with respect to Dada–certain uses of words (e.g., in verse or poetry) would never claim to reach for such strict conditions of use, but did this entail meaninglessness? Was the apparent gap between words and worlds not an aspect of the problem of language providing the grounds for different kinds of views of the world (e.g., scientific as against literary, etc.), that reason-as-logos had sought to overcome? As Richard Rorty has said, the basis of this problem is that the realist picture (which demands strict association, or a ‘tight’ application of words) ultimately cannot cope with the idea that there may be nothing below a surface that is ‘made’ by the connecting function of language–that actually there is no universal method for providing the means to de-contextualize words and language to get below the surface, and perhaps more importantly the metaphors that form such a large part of the representational practices of language do not have any meaning (Rorty, 1989: 19).

2. Worlds in Motion

The primacy of the logocentric tradition in Western thinking since the Enlightenment (i.e., in its association with the notion of the power of reason) ensured that any experience or phenomena that contradicted the idea of reason’s perfectibility (or that suggested gaps in reason’s applicability) was categorized in a more or less residual manner (the list could be endless–‘nonsense’, ‘coincidence’, ‘chance’, etc.), and thus an awareness of the deceptiveness of appearance, or of experiences of disorder in appearance or imagination were constituted in symbols of a sublunary world. A representation of this is found in the mythical figure of Proteus who was, according to the ancient Greek Lucian:

[n]o other than a dancer whose mimetic skills enables him to adapt himself to every character: in the activity of his movements, he is liquid as water, rapid as fire; he is the raging lion, the savage panther, the trembling bough; he is what he will (quoted in Orgel, 1967: 9-10).

In other words, the sublunary is equivalent to some conception of base existence, and Proteus, like Dada (as we have seen) is not susceptible to fixed definition, and is thus elastic in terms of ‘character’–which is to say without character. Thus, where logos is taken to be a reason that overcomes the appearance of deceptiveness, the cause of deception is itself associated with an unruly nature that is forever moving–or protean–in character. And for the Zurich Dadaists (and others) in the first decades of the twentieth century a world in motion was seen to demand new methods of interpretation, presentation, or other poetic re-enactment, as artists began to explore the centrality of disorder and deception to life as lived, and as portrayed in language and through the visual medium.

The Italian futurists, for example, were impetuous seekers of chaos and urged, simply, abandonment to the de-humanizing rush of the mechanized and rationalized industrial age. Zurich Dada, by contrast, was propelled by the need to take a long and hard look at where the consequences of modernity had taken humanity, and at the debasement of culture that was seen in the inevitability that young men would almost certainly be marching off to war with a volume of Goethe in their knapsacks ⁽²⁾. And for Hugo Ball in particular war was nothing less than the destruction of the Word (logos), the ‘magical’ nature of which was in its connection to ancient texts that contained the ‘plaintive words’ that no human mind could resist (Ball, 1996: 66). The recovery of the Word was what was required, and it was to be achieved through the destruction of words, of language as conventionally conceived, to be replaced by ‘vocables’, or combinations of word voicings in the sound-poem (Richter, 1997: 31). The poème simultané for example was the result of several voices combined in recitation of discordant elements. Ball noted that:

[t]he subject of the poème simultané is the value of the human voice […] the noises represent the inarticulate, inexorable and ultimately decisive forces which constitute the background. The poem carries the message that mankind is swallowed up in a mechanistic process. In a generalized and compressed form, it represents the battle of the human voice against a world which menaces, ensnares and finally destroys it, a world whose rhythm and din are inescapable (quoted in Richter, 1997: 31).

Dada was then also an elaboration of something that was there for all to see, but which was largely obscured by language and conventions of meaning. By indulging in a series of hide-and-seek games, Ball and the others revealed that the protean world of uncontrolled movement and unforeseeable forms was within us all, a position that was simply reinforced by the mechanized military technology of the twentieth century; which had reduced society to some kind of Hobbesian state of nature where war, as the novelist J.G. Ballard has noted, seemed to affirm that the whole world was merely a stage-set that could be swept aside at a moment’s notice ⁽³⁾. The average individual, stripped of active power in times of industrial war, was merely a puppet, set into motion by the authorial hand of the objective and sovereign state.

In such circumstances a sense of self, and no less a sense of the world, was difficult to maintain in the face of the obvious slaughter of the war. Whatever this meant for the notion of a world governed by reason and objectivity, by the pursuit of logos, it said clearly that we could not be whom we are, or who we hoped to become, without accepting that the self is to a large extend an incidental–even accidental construct–and as such was part of a ‘reality’ to which it was difficult to reconcile oneself. The suspicion that one’s being is not found in any self-determining or rationally autonomous fashion–as the words and aims of reason proclaimed–but by the apparent contingency of a being that is formed only insofar as the immanent disorder within the heart of humankind (within society) is kept under control, was demonstrated by the descent into war.

The trappings of selfhood, from the ‘construction’ of subjectivity to the foundations underlying society and morality (in all their complex causality), emerge in consequence of the affirmation of some identity; an identity which, in withdrawing, or taking something (qualities, experiences, meanings, etc.) is something to itself–is rather something than some other thing. In simple terms identity is a claim of order, or of self-composition against the contingency of all other relations. The perfect banality of such an observation is evident in the most elementary of childlike assertions of categorical learning, necessary though they are to a growing awareness of the location of oneself in the world; that, for example, ‘to be a man is to not be an animal,’ or ‘an animal is not a vegetable.’ The antinomy of characteristics or qualities that provides the language of identity is, once again, a mask. It is the order of the world thus made, defined, and so on, that directs our view away from the artificiality of the categories that support it: no identity is simply extracted, or withdrawn from the world (and no order is simply made from disorder, and then end of story) without an implicit relationship or debt to the what-is-not of identity. A thumb, for example, is not a forefinger, yet at the same time it is only a thumb in respect of its relation to the forefinger. This is true simply in abstract terms (in terms of the words and their associations alone) but also true in every instance where an actual thumb can be identified. The point is that the relationship between words and worlds is simple–words ‘make’ or reveal worlds, and so words affirm identities, or even ‘truths.’

click to enlarge

Figure 4
Sophie Tauber in masked
performance. (source unknown)
Figure 5
Sophie Tauber (and unknown other)
in masks. (source unknown)

But Dada was about the fakery of the language of reason, of a world divided and understood by such identities. It was about the essential truth of the idea that order can ever be really more than a neat arrangement of ‘things’ that could just as easily be displaced, or destroyed. This aspect of an identity that takes–extracts–itself, could be rationally autonomous in the sense that it is active; but it is alsoacting, or the metaphorical adoption of the mask that conceals a depth below the surface. Yet when the mask is actually utilized to point out, or make a reminder of how misleading appearances could be (as it was in the Cabaret Voltaire performances), the surface order of relations paradoxically vanishes under the confusion of what is presented being mediated through a symbol of deception (Figs. 4 and 5), as Hugo Ball noted:

What fascinates us all about the masks is that they represent not human character and passions, but characters and passions that are larger than life. The horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible (Ball, 1996: 64).>

Similarly the use of words by the members of the Cabaret served equally to disconnect, or untie such relations of identity: “Silk stockings are priceless,” Walter Serner wrote reasonably enough (its reason is demonstrated by the fact that one may disagree with it), but that was not all; identity is then destroyed in the novel declaration of broken categories that are only demonstrations of unreason:

A vice queen IS an armchair.World views are word mixtures.A dog IS a hammock.
L’art est mort. Viva Dada! (Ball, Huelsenbeck and Serner, 1995: 160)

click to enlarge

Figure 6
Tristan Tzara, Zurich 1917 (source unknown)

In a similar fashion, Tristan Tzara (Fig. 6), the most volatile character amongst the Zurich Dadaists declared that he aimed to disorder sensible relations–he “smashed drawers, those of the brain and those of social organization” (quoted in Richter, 1997: 34). Confronting such declarations at the time must have been equivalent to wandering into some unknown land devoid of any human differentiation in the organization of world and experience–into, in fact, a sublunary world of natural immediacy. Equally one may now may be reminded of the psychiatric typology which tells us that a mind lacking order also–in terms of personal characteristics at least–fails to realize the autonomy so valued as a proof of the triumph of modernity (but instead, in modern terms, displays pathological tendencies): such a person becomes the ‘non-subject,’ threatened by whim, existing at the mercy of caprice. Such a ‘person’ is Proteus. A lack of order, then, is necessarily about the absence of means, or of efforts to affirm an identity (i.e., the failure to control the movement of forces beyond one’s control; the failure to differentiate oneself from the protean). What we see with Dada, and what lends credence to the claim (by Hugo Ball) that it demanded gestures that were bordering on madness is the contrast between one who is moved (disordered) and one that moves (ordered)⁽⁴⁾.

3. The Destruction of Logos

With Dada, it is sometimes difficult to know how seriously the intentions of the participants were, mainly because it is clear that there were differences all along as to the purpose of a phenomenon that had ‘no programme’ (Richter, 1997: 34). However, Richard Huelsenbeck’s statements/ writings/ contributions to Dada literature allow one to suggest that Dada was established in opposition to what we might recognize as dualistic modes of conventional thinking, of the categorization of concepts, objects, and so on, in oppositional terms (e.g., subject/object; theory/fact, etc.). These “loving polarities” as Harvie Ferguson has called them “are so many ways of rendering experience accessible by dividing it against itself” (Ferguson, 1990: 7). But Dada, if one reads Huelsenbeck’s words in this way, recognized no such conceptual ordering, and instead proposed that the reinvigoration of language would see such polarities collapse. Dada, he said (and the demonstration is in the language) “blusters because it knows how to be quiet; it agitates because it is at peace” (Huelsenbeck, 1993: 10). In other words, Dada traded on the indeterminacy of ‘is-ness,’ on the elasticity of being where one quality is identified in terms of an opposite, rather than inoppositional terms.

In the varied responses of the members of the Cabaret Voltaire between 1915 and 1919 one can plot the dissolution of Dada as anything resembling a coherent movement (Richter, 1997; Huelsenbeck, 1993). Hugo Ball, the principal founder of the Zurich Dada group, would have no truck with the issuing of manifestos, or with any other propagandist work (which seemed to emulate the activities of futurism), but this was eagerly taken up by others, such as Tristan Tzara, and then exported to a variety of other European cities ⁽⁵⁾. One thing that did bind them was the idea that language had to follow painting in re-ordering the world, in making the sensible human image that language portrays equally as fragmentary as the abstract and cubist paintings of the time. Ball, for example, wrote in 1916 that:

The image of human form is gradually disappearing from the painting of these times and all objects appear only in fragments. This is one more proof of how ugly and worn the human countenance has become, and of how all the objects of our environment have become repulsive to us. The next step is for poetry to decide to do away with language for similar reasons (Ball, 1996: 55).

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Figure 7
Text of Hugo Ball’s ‘Karawane’

The power behind the Dada destruction/reinvention of language was found in the belief that language and literature had already been debased–in patriotic declarations of support for the war, and in the use of literature in providing moral sustenance for soldiers at the front. The point was that language had become abstracted from life to the extent that it was rendered worthless–for example, what value did words have when they could support butchery? And what of modernity? Did not the very ‘nuts and bolts’ of reason deliver war as a “vindication of modernity, violently completing the abstraction of the world”? (Conrad, 1998: 211) So, whilst Ball sought to situate language within the evident dissonance of the times, his aim was also to create, as Malcolm Green has said, “a field of words that bypassed the author’s own associations and triggered new ones in the listener” (Fig. 7) as an aspect of regaining the world, and words, from such abstraction (quoted in Huelsenbeck, 1993: v). One important point that Dada had picked up from Italian futurism was the idea that art was created in the spatio-temporal dimension, rather than being produced merely in time, or in space. The printed word, as a possible medium for creation, was staid and fixed in both of these dimensions (although texts in Futurism and Dada experimented with font styles), and in books and newspapers, it was seen to abstract language from its real context, the context within which life takes place. What Ball and the others sought to achieve at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 was a way past this abstraction to a synthesis of the arts that would surpass the mimetic and representational limitations of mediation and traditional artistic practice (whether in writing, painting, or poetry).

This introduced the masked dances, and simultaneous recitals of poems (and so on) to combat the conventional trappings of performance in which the stage–‘staging’ suggesting a set of expectations–as the medium got in the way of substance and delivery: acting was a mask–a truth so obvious that it had become invisible. In the performances at the Cabaret Voltaire words were transformed, they became ‘vocables’; not really words at all, but concretized combinations of sounds produced by the performer voicing what can only be called a series of combined letters of the alphabet which had apparently been randomly jumbled into a new kind of vehicle for expression, and these then delivered without any regard to reference or identity ⁽⁶⁾. This corresponded in some small way to Luigi Russolo’s new idea of the human voice, the characteristics of which he listed as comprising one of six “families of noise of the Futurist orchestra,” under the heading Voices of Animals and Men(Apollonio, 1973: 86). These he listed as, “Shouts, Screams, Groans, Shrieks, Howls, Laughs, Wheezes, Sobs,” and the similarity between the two divergent movements with regard to the elevation of ‘meaningless’ sound in performance is shown if we compare the Dadaist Jean Arp’s remarks about “automatic poetry,” which he claimed “springs directly from the poet’s bowels or other organs, which have stored up reserves of usable material. The poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels, as he pleases. His poems are like Nature” (cited in Richter, 1997: 30). Of course, this ideal could only be realized in certain kinds of performance, and consequently was considered a more laudable goal in some cases than in others. It is in this respect that Hugo Ball seems to have diverged from the others. In his introduction to Ball’s diaries, translated as Flight Out of Time, John Elderfield writes that:

Ball had found that the act of recitation itself tested a poem’s quality and determined its impact. Basic to his interpretation of poetry was his conviction that it had far more aspects to it than its written words (quoted in Ball, 1996: xxvii).

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Figure 8
Hugo Ball in performance, 1917 (source unknown)

What the sound-poem had that was greater, according to Ball, was its connection to a realm of spiritual logos that was mediated through the performance and universal recognition of ‘ancient mystical words’ (which one takes to have been given form by the vocables). Not at all incidental to Ball’s view that performance should converge upon new possibilities was the use of masks and costumes in the Cabaret, and these, it turned out, were to become an essential component in transcending the limitations of words and language, bringing Hugo Ball, in particular, to a startling realization of the possibility of renewing the Word (i.e. logos) through the sound-poem which, in connecting to the spiritual would unmask the fakery of ideas about language and truth. The accidental nature of this discovery reveals a serious point behind the use of masks, which seems only to have been realized after Marcel Janco had prepared the costumes and the participants in the Cabaret had taken up ‘character’ under the influence of these new appearances. The masks, in fact, only highlighted the protean nature of expression–which is to say, the elusiveness, the naked strangeness of the sound and motion of performance–and Hugo Ball in particular noted that a transformation had overcome the performers (Fig. 8). The mask, he observed, “Demanded a quite definite, passionate gesture, bordering on madness” (Ball, 1996: 64). The masks also brought home to Ball the deceitful nature of the phenomenal world, the ambiguity of appearances (of words, gestures, etc.) that taken together provide a stage for meaningful life, and suggested the possibility that the only way to come to terms with this illusion was through the transforming power of a more serious kind of gesture:

Although we could not have imagined it five minutes earlier, we were walking around with the most bizarre movements, festooned and draped with impossible objects […] the motive power of these masks was irresistibly conveyed to us. All at once we realized the significance of such a mask […] they represent not human character and passions, but character and passions that are higher than life. The horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible (Ball, 1996: 64).

The power of the mask lies in its relation to indeterminate play. In modern society play is not readily understood by the categorical mind (i.e., ‘play’ is a residual category), and certainly not as the route to truth–rather, in its frivolity and sensuousness, play is contrasted with reason and emerges as the source of error, which means it is an aspect of existence that reason-as-logos seeks always to overcome (Ferguson, 1991: 7-27). In archaic societies, on the other hand, play is taken as the return of an arbitrary cosmos to the divine lottery of Zeus–in other words, as an earlier way to divine truth, or we may say to the spiritual-as-logos (Spariousu, 1989). For Hugo Ball and the others the donning of masks and costumes upset the cozy familiarity of a modern world charmed into existence by the bending of language to suit the most grotesque ends. In the Cabaret Voltaire the liquidity, or protean quality, of the performance of bizarre movements and ecstatic recitation presented language (in the unstable form of the Dadaist vocables) ‘draped’ in the unrecognizable garb of meaninglessness. “We have now driven the plasticity of the word to the point where it can scarcely be equaled,” Ball remarked on the success of performances:

We have loaded the word with strengths and energies that helped us to rediscover the evangelical concept of the word (logos) as a magical complex image […] touching lightly on a hundred ideas at the same time without naming them. (Ball, 1996: 67-68).

Thus, the notion of logos as reason’s progress to perfection was destroyed by the impenetrable vocables and simultaneous poems, which were intended to drag the listener underneath the deceptive appearance of an industrial society that proclaimed the triumph of reason–to touch on a hundred ideas at the same time. And to return to the problem of appearance, what is crucial to our understanding is that performances like these, which employed disguise on several levels, dramatized the very problem of appearance and reality within the context of change (Napier, 1986: 2-3). This seemed to open the gap that had driven philosophy to strict terms of language association: what now was real, and what was fake, it asked. It said that change is found in unpredictable performance, but identity by contrast (as a kind of tautological redescription-of-the-same) only pertains in a state ofchangelessness. Yet, it is undeniable that things in the ‘real’ world (and not just in performance) do change–being is becoming–thus, the possibility that the world, or nature, may be ambiguous is rehearsed through the disguises of performance. Nevertheless, the potential disorder implied in such upsetting of certainties can hold a certain degree of danger, and the experience of Hugo Ball seemed to demonstrate this.

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Figure 9
Hugo
Ball in performance, 1917 (source unknown)

It was in June 1916, and barely a year after arriving in Zurich that Ball began to drift apart from the others involved in the Cabaret after one particularly harrowing performance. In his diaries he describes giving a reading of some of his sound-poems in a costume specially made for the event. The costume was so confining as to require many on the spot adjustments to the performance, and so it determined his movements in a particular way that he could not have foreseen, which in turn influenced the modulation and timbre of his readings. And having been carried on stage due to his immobility, Ball was left with only his arms free; the rest of his body, wrapped in a tightly fitting cylinder, was stiff (Fig. 9). Nevertheless, with arms free he found that he was able to “give the impression of winglike movement by raising and lowering [the] elbows,” which he duly did by flapping them energetically between readings, at the same time furtively trying to work out how this thing might end:

I noticed that my voice had no choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation […] for a moment it seemed as if there were a pale, bewildered face in my cubist mask, that half-frightened, half-curious face of a ten-year-old boy, trembling and hanging avidly on the priest’s words in the requiems and high masses in his home parish. Then the lights went out, as I had ordered, and bathed in sweat, I was carried down off the stage like a magical bishop (Ball, 1996: 70-71).

This removal of self–a destruction of the world of self–is wrought by an incalculable plunge. In letting himself be taken by events he permitted the experience to become one where the world was, for him, transformed into a magico-religious sensorium. Delving deeply into the unknown–these were performances, remember, that were described as ‘bordering on madness’–he becomes caught in the vertigo of the playful forces of denial and affirmation. He may have chosen the stage, but in the act, and through the mode of presentation he loses dominion over it. The audience witnessing this was equally unsettled; after initially being baffled, it ‘exploded’ (Richter, 1997: 42). The impact on Hugo Ball was no less emphatic–after this he “progressively disengaged himself from Dada” (Richter, 1997: 43). Tristan Tzara had begun to take a more prominent role in the presentation of Dada, nudging things in a more propagandist, pamphleteering, and confrontational direction, which seemed to be diverging sharply from the kind of activity Hugo Ball was involved in, one which aimed at the destruction of world and will, and seemed on this occasion to have been successful on at least one count, the destruction of his own will to continue: “I have examined myself carefully,” Ball said, “and I could never bid chaos welcome” (quoted in Richter, 1997: 43). The truth was that he already had, and it proved disconcerting enough to draw him back from the abyss.

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Figure 10
Cover of Serner’s ‘Letze Lockerung’
(Last Loosening), Hanover: Paul
Steegman, 1920.
Figure 11
Walter Serner, Zurich 1917.
By Hans Richter.

With Ball’s disengagement Dada then spread out into other European cities (and was exported to New York), and what followed the Cabaret Voltaire was a continuation, if not repetition, of an ever more provocative tomfoolery (minus Ball’s pursuit of a spiritual logos), and instead of Ball’s declared intention to create a new fusion of arts, Dada became an attack on art itself. With a barely concealed hint of nihilism, Walter Serner, a latecomer to the Cabaret Voltaire, took the radical nominalism of Dada rhetoric to an extremity of meaningless and disintegration in his Last Loosening (Figs. 10 and 11)⁽⁷⁾. This riposte to good taste, executed to hilarious effect in a slim volume of fifty pages, displayed a keen sense of the ultimate profanity of things, of the obvious cosmetic re-ordering of filth and garbage that provides a basis for identity and meaning, and that no less provides the spur for art as well. Although it is not clear whether he included his fellow Dadaists in his disparaging appraisal of the artistic objective of appropriating the world (but a good guess would suggest it is likely), it is evident that he was reaching for the chaos that Hugo Ball recoiled from: “It is generally known that a dog is not a hammock; less so that failing to accept this tender hypothesis would cause the painter’s daubing fists to slump at their sides” (Ball, Huelsenbeck and Serner, 1995: 155). Ergo, painting is hamstrung by problems of identity and representation. He goes further, suggesting that the artistic impulse derives from an embarrassment at the thought of doing nothing, from a kind of impotence compounded by an inability to constrain oneself. And all this in the face of the gratuitousness of existence:

It’s all just the same […] the desire to escape one’s embarrassment by giving it (stylistic, ogodogodo) form. Dreadful word! Which is to say: to make something that is profitable out of life, which is improbable to the tips of its toes! To clap a redeeming heaven over this filth and enigma! To perfume and order this pile of human excrement! (Ball, Huelsenbeck and Serner, 1995: 156)

In short, art was evidence of an inability to get to grips with being, to refrain from fixing things–it was a manifestation of impatience: “all in all, my dearest,” Serner wrote, “art was just a teething problem” (Ball, Huelsenbeck and Serner, 1995 : 156).

Notes

1. E.g., “the meaning of the ‘evening star’ would be the same as that of ‘morning star’, but not the sense […] the designation of a single object can also consist of several words or other signs.” Frege, 1980: 57.

2. Richard Huelsenbeck had said in 1920, “none of us had much appreciation of the kind of courage it took to get shot for the idea of a nation which is at best a cartel of pelt merchants and profiteers in leather, at worst a cultural association of psychopaths who, like the Germans, marched off to war with a volume of Goethe in their knapsacks, to skewer Frenchmen and Russians on their bayonets.” Quoted in Greil Marcus (1989) Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: 194-95.

3. I paraphrase here from comments made by J.G. Ballard in an interview with Tom Sutcliffe, broadcast on BBC television in the UK as In Profile: J.G. Ballard, November 2001. Ballard was actually talking about World War Two and the experiences that went into shaping his Empire of the Sun, but the point stands equally for war in general.

4. See, for example, Michel Foucault (1999) Madness and Civilization, London. Here there are several examples of the importance of movement to autonomy. Foucault memorably begins by describing the ‘ship of fools,’ the madmen flung between ports, but detained at sea, in motion, but immobile, because of their lack of autonomous control. In other places he relates the idea that cures for madness and melancholia rested on the constraining of movement–for example, as a passenger on long sea voyages (174); and, as a passenger of an entirely different kind on the ‘rotary machine,’ a device that sought to redistribute the bodily humours of the patient. (177)

5. See Hugo Ball (1996) ibid. Entry for 24.V.1916: “we are never in complete or simultaneous agreement” (63); and Richard Huelsenbeck (1993) ibid: “Whoever turns ‘freedom’ or ‘relativity’ including the insight that the contours of everything shift, that nothing is stable, into a ‘firm creed’ is just another ideologue, like the nihilists who are almost always the most incredible, narrow-minded dogmatists. Dada is far removed from all that.” (11)

6. Tzara took this principle from performance into the printed word, and created the ‘cut-up’. According to Hans Richter (1997) ibid: “he cut newspaper articles up into tiny pieces, none of them any longer than a word, put the words in a bag, shook them well, and allowed them to flutter onto a table. The arrangement (or lack of it) in which they fell constituted a ‘poem’” (54)

7. Huelsenbeck (1993) in the Dada Almanac describes him thus: “Dr. Walter Serner…extreme adventurer, nihilist and venereologist…The epitome of the ‘gentleman burglar’ (Arp), he was later the author of numerous sleazy crime stories.” (92)
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