Max Ernst, 1920

“Ambiguous Figures (1 copper plate, 1 zinc plate, 1 rubber cloth…),” circa 1919-20. Collage, gouache, India ink, pencil and painting over a print. Collection Judith and Michael Steinhardt, New York. Copyright 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Max Ernst's 1920 "collage is serious, desperately so. It is made up of cutting from pictures of machinery and other technical equipment, which have been pasted together so as to form two nightmarish 'mechanical men.' These stare at us blindly though their goggles and demand to know if we recognize them as images of modern man, slave to the machine and thus little more than a machine himself." -- H.W. Janson & Dora Lane Janson

World War One changed the world, drastically.

Things like Dada artwork erupted in response. With the aim to destroy traditional art and then replace it with new works they'd create, one of the Dada artists, Jean Arp (aka Hans Arp, 1886 - 1966), wrote this: 

"Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages, and wrote poems with all our might." 

Now, let me be clear, Dada-ists were politically very far left. I don't agree with their politics. I don't agree with their goal to destroy traditional art or culture. At all.

However, I understand that, while being very young, they felt fear and a lack of control or any sense to the War, to the destruction of life as they knew it. 

I am feeling the same things today, with the culture war drowning everything I hold dear, and at such a rapid pace. How quickly the structures of civilization are pulled down and either left ruinous or quickly replaced with evil. It is shocking.

So, while Ernst and I would disagree politically, we do agree that the barbarity of wars and the ensuing cultural upheavals need context, and art is a context that lasts.

This artwork of Ernst's comes to my mind often, because not only is it reflective of the existential crises experienced by the young in the early 20th century, but Ernst has proven himself prescient. His work reaches from the past to posit his questions to the early 21st century.

What is man becoming? Are we okay with it? How shall we respond to the blowing up of the world?