The Parliament of Clocks by Michael Eakins

Dada was never nonsense for its own sake. It was a formal protest against the pretense that the institutions of the day were rational — staged by making their rituals literal and their participants absurd. A parliament of clocks is exactly the kind of motion Tristan Tzara would have seconded: the time-keepers convene in their tiered amphitheater, top-hatted, upholstered, punctual by definition — and the floor is empty. Nothing is before the house. Procedure continues anyway. The hats stay on.

The composition plays the absurdity straight, which is the only way it works. Curved ranks of sage-green armchairs, respectful posture, the flat theatrical light of a civic occasion — every formal cue of institutional gravity is present and correct, lavished on members whose Roman-numeraled faces can tell you the hour but not an opinion. Above the vacant podium hangs the session's single point of color and its only agenda item: a tomato-red pear, suspended from the great umbrella by a thread, flanked by two small plumb-bob weights, glowing with the unearned confidence of a motion everyone has agreed not to question. The house waits. The pear neither ripens nor falls. The vote, one feels, has been tabled since the invention of the afternoon.

The palette keeps the joke dry: aged plaster, umber, sage, brass — the colors of minutes, memoranda, and the long tenure of furniture — under a canopy of coral and black. Every institution, Dada kept finding, is a theater seated around an empty center, waiting for the suspended thing to drop. Here is the finding, framed, with a quorum present and the hour, on every face, slightly different.

Generation Details

Prompt

Dadaist surreal assemblage, absurdist collage painting - a solemn parliament chamber whose tiered benches are filled by large antique pocket watches and mantel clocks wearing tiny bowler hats and starched white collars, each clock face blank and handless. At the podium, an upside-down umbrella presides, cradling a single glowing pear. Plain aged kraft paper textures, muted earth palette of ochre, umber, cream and one saturated tomato red on the presiding pear, flat theatrical lighting, deliberate anti-logic in scale and gravity with one clock floating mid-air shedding tiny gears like confetti. Square composition, painterly Dada collage aesthetic with hard cut edges. No text, no letters, no numerals, no logos.