Dadara is an artist and bank director based in Amsterdam.
In the beginning of the nineties he got known through his iconic imagery for the then upcoming electronic dance scene. The German magazine ‘Wiener’ called him ‘the prophet of the new Rave-Generation’ in those days. He moved on to painting on canvas and had many solo-exhibitions at the Reflex gallery in Amsterdam. In the past decade he started building big, and often very interactive installations, which popped up in Nevada deserts and Amsterdam rooftops. Examples of such installations were the big pink tank with four barrels, which he blew up with explosives, and the Fools Ark, a wooden threemaster, which he shipped to the States and burnt in the Nevada desert.
Currently he is CEO and founder of his own bank – the Exchanghibition Bank, which he started in times when governments spend billions on banks but don’t spend any money on art anymore.
Based on this project next year February the Art As Money festival will take place in Amsterdam, as well as an exhibition with all the original paintings of the banknotes at Famous. The Exchanghibition Bank is releasing their new 2012 banknote on the 20th of December. _
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Below you can find some of the stuff that has inspired him throughout the years:
The Codex Seraphinianus is a much sought after and amazing book.
It took Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini thirty months, from 1976 to 1978 to write and illustrate this book. Though I don’t know if the word ‘write’ is truly appropriate for the seemingly undecipherable alphabetic writing that fills the hundreds of pages of this book, which appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, from either another civilization or another planet.
My girlfriend Thera showed me the book in the past Millenium in a second-hand bookshop, while a nervous bookshop owner was breathing down our necks making sure we didn’t wrinkle any of the pages of this collectors item, which had a hefty price-tag of nearly 1500 (back then) guilders.
Many years later I managed to obtain a copy after a really long search on the internet for around 150 Euros. I was really excited when the book finally arrived in the mailbox and this enthusiasm was only slightly tempered when I received a phone call later that day from a friend to tell me that she found a really cool book in a thrift store for 20 euro. I am sure you all can guess which book that was…..
You can try your own luck here.
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Since I become a bank director and obsessed by money, obviously money should also pop up in this list of inspiring artists/artworks.
One of the art actions that probably has influenced me most was the burning of a million British Pounds by the K-Foundation, formerly the pop group KLF. After they quit the music business from one day to another and destroyed their whole catalogue they had 1.8 million British pounds left. After paying taxes they took the money to the Isle of Jura and burned all in a fireplace. Nothing more, but nothing less either………
I wrote more about it on the Art as Money blog.
A documentary about the burning can be watched online:
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Fire has played an important part in my life.
Not only the above-mentioned burning of the million British pounds, but also the day the Roxy club burnt down after the funeral of Peter Giele had an impact I’ll never forget. That happened in 1999 and two years later I found another place, which was equally inspiring as the Roxy. To be honest, probably even more inspiring: the Burning Man festival in Nevada – a temporary city where 60.000 people gather for a week, and which is based on a gift-economy, where money doesn’t exist. I have spent a lot of time in that Nevada desert during the last decade, building and (sometimes) destroying interactive projects. When I returned in 2002, I shipped a wooden threemaster – the Fools Ark – to the United States, and burnt it. Other projects were the Burning Greymen and Checkpoint Dreamyourtopia – a border control checkpoint to enter your own Dreams, which I eventually destroyed in an old swimming pool in Berlin. And of course this year I couldn’t resist bringing the Exchanghibition Bank to that place, where money doesn’t exist.
But the installation that probably had the biggest impact on me in all those years was the Temple of Tears by David Best.
It literally moved me to tears. I took this photo during a sand storm, which I hope shows the magic a little bit. And even though I am sitting in my dust free studio in the Pijp in Amsterdam while typing this, I can feel the dust by looking at this picture. Damn! I am getting homesick for the desert while typing this. It’s difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t been there, but at least I gave it a try.
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In 2008 – 2009 I was an artist in residence in Dallas, Texas.
Definitely not the same as Amsterdam…….The change of scenery also made me discover artists I had never heard of before – one of the interesting ones was Tom Friedman. I really liked this conceptual piece of his: ‘1,000 hours of staring’. It was executed over a period of five years, which means approximately 17 hours of staring every month. Staring at a white piece of paper (or canvas, wall, or computerscreen) seems to be one of the most time-consuming activities in an artist’s life and he managed to capture it. Just as with the burning of the Million Pounds sometimes Minimal is Maximal.
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An artist who also spends many hours on his canvasses, though not by staring at them but meticulously painting lots of tiny, realistic details is Alex Grey.
As we have seen above art can deal with society, fantasy, or art itself, but it can also be a powerful spiritual medium. And that’s what it definitely becomes in the hands of Alex Grey. He’s currently working on building the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in the town of Wappinger, near New York.
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My art often finds its place outside of the so called art world and in society, as for example the big pink tank which suddenly appeared on a rooftop in the center of Amsterdam, and I think art should leave its Ivory Tower more often and infiltrate in society, blurring the lines between reality, dreams, and fantasy.
This action by Berlin artist Iepe Rubingh is a great example of using the city as your canvas – a kind of modern day version of the action paintings by Jackson Pollock.
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