DADA, DANU, de Chirico & André Breton…

I was always fascinated by the quirks and quarks of fate… the way hasard make things happen…

This is a shorted story of my artist name, Danu. In my native language, Romanian, it means YES-NO, sort of Yang-Yin, if you want. My mother-in-law called me that, long time ago, Danu being a diminutive for “Dan”… But this is just the first layer in the cake…

About 6-7 years ago I was browsing on the Internet and I fell over a text of memories from the begining of the DADA mouvement (founded, mainly by a compatriote, Tristan Tzara). I was already calling mysel Ion Vincent Danu, here and there… I was simply shoked reading that in a certain day in February 1916 Tzara and his friends fauded officially the DADA mouvement, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich! Because I was born exactly the same day, exactly 40 years later! Some coincidence! DADA (yes-yes in Romanian) and DANU (yes-no) ! It really shocked me to see this “simetry of the fate” (Sting would say: “the secret geometry of chance”…) From that moment on, I started to call myself, sistematically, Ion Danu or Ion Vincent Danu…

Later on, continuing to study the surrealism (which , chronologically and not only, was the NEXT level of the Dada mouvement, a lot of the first DADA members became surrealists – Tzara and André Breton being some of the most importants…) I fall upon this Giorgio de Chirico painting:”Le cerveau de l’enfant” (Child’s brain):

It’s a painting from 1914 and de Chirico was considered by the surrealists like a sort of “founding father”, just like Lautremont was in the literary side of the mouvement. André Breton bought this painting and had it with him a long, long time, until 1964 when he sold it (for he wasn’t too rich either…) to the Stockholm Museum for 250.000 F.

You can see that the eyes of the mature (almost old “father” character in the painting) are closed. (It seems that only that way the child could look at him…) André Breton made a photographic “interpretation” of his painting and the character in his photo (unfortunalelly I don’t have at hand…) had the eyes OPEN…

I was inspired by all these little quirks and quarks of cultural history and made my own interpretation of it: I figured the old guy as myself (I already have the bladness and the hair on the chest, I only had to change a bit the galic moustache into a greyer barbiche) The main “quirk” was that I open ONE eye and let the other close… and I have written all the DADA – DANU history over the table (and the orange book was intitled DADA-DANU). There are also some other changes that I let you discover… Ingenious, eh… Well, here it is the “old gorilla” in all his splendor: