STEVEN ZUCKER: We're at the Museum of Modern Art looking
at a really famous collage.
It's Jean Arp, sometimes known as Hans Arp.
It's an untitled object, but it's always
known as Collage with Squares Arranged
According to the Laws of Chance.
And that's exactly what it is.
It's a gray piece of paper, construction paper,
almost children's construction paper.
And it's got some cream colored and almost denim blue colored
squares that have been ripped into these shapes
and then scattered on the surface.
BETH HARRIS: What strikes me is what year we're at, which is
1916 and '17's, sort of at the end--
STEVEN ZUCKER: We're right in the middle of the war--
BETH HARRIS: --of the First,
STEVEN ZUCKER: --or the end, right.
BETH HARRIS: --middle end of the First World War.
But what strikes me is how far we've come from Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon, which is 1907.
And really how radical--
STEVEN ZUCKER: --Ten years.
BETH HARRIS: --yeah, but how radical Dada was for a time.
We have a completely abstract work.
We have it not arranged with any kind of artistic intention.
STEVEN ZUCKER: It really begins to play fast and loose
with the very definition of what a work of art is.
BETH HARRIS: Yes, absolutely.
STEVEN ZUCKER: It sort of rips at the heart
of what our definition is historically.
BETH HARRIS: It's not self-expression.
It's not skill.
It's not an expression of the unconscious,
even, like surrealism would claim later.
STEVEN ZUCKER: So it's actually in some ways
still really challenging in that--
BETH HARRIS: It is.
STEVEN ZUCKER: --in that we look at painting
for the decisions of the artist.
And here that's been given up.
BETH HARRIS: Completely.
STEVEN ZUCKER: It is a kind of real anti-art.
It's a--
BETH HARRIS: It is a real anti-art.
STEVEN ZUCKER: --real destruction
of the very foundation with which
we understand how to deal with
BETH HARRIS: It is.
STEVEN ZUCKER: --an object in space.
BETH HARRIS: And, it still is, right.
STEVEN ZUCKER: And it's an extraordinary thing.
So how can we understand this though,
in the context of the war?
You mentioned that this was 1916, 1917.
BETH HARRIS: Yes.
STEVEN ZUCKER: The war is raging.
It's unprecedented.
But this is being made in Zurich.
You know, Arp was one of the founders of the Zurich Dada
movement, and Zurich, of course, is a neutral--
BETH HARRIS: Country.
STEVEN ZUCKER: It's--
BETH HARRIS: Switzerland.
STEVEN ZUCKER: --in Switzerland, a neutral country, right?
So I guess I'm just wondering, where
is the relationship between this kind of aggression
against the traditions of art and the violence that's
taking place across Europe.
BETH HARRIS: Well, I think the answer that's usually
given to that is that this sort of emphasis
on rational and on human reason was part of bourgeois culture
that had created
STEVEN ZUCKER: The violence.
BETH HARRIS: The violence and the irrationalness
of World War I. But what strikes me also
is just the irrationality people-- because this
is something created according to the laws of chance.
And people are being called to the war.
They're being drafted.
They're sent to the front lines.
They live, they die, they suffer.
STEVEN ZUCKER: It was all chance.
BETH HARRIS: They get legs and limbs amputated,
all basically on a roll of the dice.
STEVEN ZUCKER: Yeah.
And Arp would have seen that.
The number of veterans that came back--
BETH HARRIS: Everyone saw it.
STEVEN ZUCKER: --who were deformed, who had--
BETH HARRIS: Post-traumatic stress syndrome.
STEVEN ZUCKER: --limbs blasted, who had been exposed to gas
and been disfigured, was extraordinary.
And then those that came back unscathed.
BETH HARRIS: Right, what rules are there in life?
Where is the rationality for what happens to who
for what reason?
STEVEN ZUCKER: It actually makes the absurdity of this
object somehow much more profound.
BETH HARRIS: Yep.