Dadaism

Hundred years after the birth of the Dada movement in Zürich, Tristan Tzara’s theatre is unjustly not as well known as his poetry or manifestos. Being himself a theatrical person, always staging his own personality as the leader of the Dadaists in Zürich and Paris, he refused to walk on already traced paths, in a similar way the medieval fools had done it in their search for the abolition of given rules and conventions. Turning upside down the traditional dramaturgical and staging patterns, Dadaist plays such as Mouchoir de nuages (Cloud Handkerchief) or Cœur à gaz (Gas Heart) leave behind a significant heritage if we think of surrealist performing arts and of the New Theatre of the 60’s, especially Eugène Ionesco’s and Samuel Beckett’s theatrical work. The present study focuses on how Tzara’s personality and work can be seen as part of the same genealogical theatrical line as the famous Shakespearian triad “the poet, the lunatic and the fool”, and which are the constants making of him not only an acrobat-poet (in the tradition of the antique mime and of the medieval fool), but also a path opener and a dramatic character in the history of the 20th and 21st century modern and postmodern literature.

Deutung und Bewertung des Rilkeschen Lebenswerkes, insbesondere seiner »Duineser Elegien«, sind nach wie vor durch eine erstaunliche Unsicherheit gekennzeichnet. Dies erklärt sich wohl vor allem aus der weitgehenden Vernachlässigung bewußtseins- wie literaturgeschichtlicher Zusammenhänge in der bisherigen Forschung. Die Arbeit stellt daher die »Duineser Elegien« in den Kontext von Rilkes Gesamtwerk und versucht, ihre Eigenart und ihren Rang vor dem Hintergrund der deutschen Lyrik zwischen Jahrhundertwende und dem Beginn der zwanziger Jahre zu bestimmen. Da sie dabei die wesentlichen Züge der europäischen Modeme einbezieht, enthält die Studie auch den Entwurf einer Geschichte der modernen Lyrik und leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Formulierung eines Epochenbegriffs der »Modeme«. Mit Hilfe ausgewählter philosophischer wie literarischer Texte der Zeit skizziert sie ein Entwicklungsmodell, das den französischen Symbolismus, die deutsche Jahrhundertwende, die »klassische Modeme« und die Avantgarde (Futurismus, Expressionismus, Wortkunst und Dada) in ein überzeugendes Verhältnis zueinander bringt, und zeigt Grundstrukturen der modernen Lyrik auf.
In ständigem Wechsel mit diesen Kontexten werden die »Duineser Elegien« eingehend analysiert. Nach rezeptionsgeschichtlichen und rezeptionsästhetischen Vorüberlegungen untersucht die Arbeit im Detail das Motivgeflecht des Werkes, Rilkes Verwendung von Mythos, Metapher, Vergleich und Symbol sowie die Bauformen des Zyklus und die intendierte Leserhaltung. Sie weist nach, wie Rilkes Deutung der condition humaine, sein neuer Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Subjektivitätsentwurf, und der poetische Diskurs der »Elegien« zusammenhängen und grenzt sie von den radikaleren Experimenten der Avantgarde ab.

Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of the First World War. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, began in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter, but the height of New York Dada was the year before, in 1915. Dada formed the foundation for Surrealism, influenced Pop Art, and was a prelude to post-modernism and a celebration of anti-art.The term anti-art was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 when he created his first ready-mades. Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend.

Gli artisti Squarci e Scalet con il nome di HackaTao si muovono lungo il cammino che dagli anni '60 e dalla cultura Pop arriva al Pop Surrealismo contemporaneo. Richiamando momenti importanti della storia dell'arte recente sviluppano i temi e le tecniche con ricchezza e approfondimenti artistici e concettuali. Il saggio è base dell'intervento all'inaugurazione della mostra Fight Fear presso il Circolo Maeci, in cui il Pop Surrealismo incontra interiorità e razionalità per il governo e il superamento delle paure.

In The Sound of Nonsense, Richard Elliott highlights the importance of sound in understanding the 'nonsense' of writers such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, James Joyce and Mervyn Peake, before connecting this noisy writing to works which engage more directly with sound, including sound poetry, experimental music and pop. By emphasising sonic factors, Elliott makes new and fascinating connections between a wide range of artistic examples to ultimately build a case for the importance of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting meaning.

The essay uses Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of "carnevalization" to reconstruct the poetics of Kurt Schwitters's Dadaist and Constructivist "Merzkunst". Works discussed include the poem "An Anna Blume" and the collage "Merzbild 25 A: Das Sternenbild".

Image-essay Trickster Tristan Tzara has been published in Romanian in A DADA-enquête in STEAUA (The STAR), the Romanian Literary Artistic & Cultural Review (Cluj-Napoca) summer Issue dedicated to the 125th anniversary of the birth of Tristan Tzara and in English in trouble issue no. 1 / summer 2021

This article deals with the fundamental question of movement in the work of Marcel Duchamp. It attempts to show that far from being a passing phase, it was present throughout his career, adopting different perspectives and explanations. Taking into account the actual words, notes and comments of the artist, it sets to establish a continuum, a link from one work to another. This helps to affirm that however revolutionary Duchamp might have been, his research about movement, optics and cinema lies solidly on painting.
Keywords: retinal art, precision painting, crono¬photography, optics, ready made, fourth dimension, image, movement.

Este artículo aborda el tema del movi¬miento, crucial en la obra de Marcel Duchamp. Inten¬ta mostrar que lejos de ser una fase temporal, estuvo presente a lo largo de su carrera, ya que empleó dife¬rentes perspectivas y explicaciones para investigarlo. Tomando en cuenta las declaraciones, notas, apun¬tes y comentarios propios del artista, se busca en este texto establecer un hilo conductor, una suerte de enlace entre una obra y otra, lo cual ayuda a afir¬mar que por muy revolucionario que Duchamp haya sido, su investigación sobre el movimiento, la óptica y el cine se asienta de manera sólida en la pintura.
Palabras clave: arte retiniano, cronofotografía, pin¬tura de precisión, óptica, ready made, cuarta dimen¬sión, imagen y movimiento.

Dragan Aleksić (1901–1958) was poet, movie director, art critic and the founder of Dadaistic movement in Yugoslavia in 1920. He studied Slavistic in Prague where he was introduced to the avant-guard movements as Dadaism. Stil living in Prague he started with dadaistic practice organizing happenings with other Yugoslav students, as Branko Ve Poljanski. On the road to Zagreb he met Lajos Kassák and published a poem in his magazine „Ma“. In Zagreb he became contributor in magazine “Zenit“ whose editor was Ljubomir Micić. In 1921, he started to publish art critic using dadaistic vocabular, showing a great knowledge of actual art movements and important dadaistic and constructivistic artists. So he wrote essays on Kurt Schwitters and Vladimir Tatlin. In 1922, Dragan Aleksić published two Dada magazines: “Dada Tank“ and “Dada Jazz“. In later he wrote abour Alexander Archipenko’s sculpture. At the end of 1922, he moved to Belgrade and continued to write abut visual arts and also on literrarry subjects, using dadaistic and futuristic teminology. This paper will show the importance of Dragan Aleksić for Yugoslav dadaistic movement, specially for a phenomenon of dadaistic art critic, and also the importance of his work for establishing Surrealistic movement in Serbia.
Key words: Dragan Aleksić, dadaism, art criticism

This paper explores the attempts of the political activist group Centre
for Political Beauty to restore beauty to politics. While the Centre
for Political Beauty claims that their performances can be traced back
to the multimedia artist Christoph Schlingensief, my contention is
that their self-understanding as artists is problematic. By approaching
selected interventions against the backdrop of their respective
contexts in the history of the avant-garde, I develop criteria facilitating
a differentiation between protest art and political activism. I posit
that protest art, in contrast to political activism, need not be driven
by a goal-oriented artistic intention, and must possess openness as
a strategy. Rather than aiming at a direct pedagogical or educational
effect on the audience, protest art desires to open up a dialogue between
the artwork and the audience. The way in which shame operates
in the interventions of the Centre for Political Beauty calls into
question whether their interventions actually allow for the open and
dialogical engagement that is promoted by protest art.

The essays on Aesthetics of philosopher Günther Anders are still almost unknown; for his part, painter George Grosz' production from the 1930s and during his American exile has been mainly despised by art historians. Both Anders and Grosz considered themselves as holding up an unmerciful mirror to society. The aim of this paper is to offer an analysis on the short but poignant texts which Anders wrote on Grosz' artistic research, providing some of the most vitriolic social criticism of his time. The studies of Anders show unpredicted connections, unveiling in an unprecedented way the deep unity of Grosz' wide oeuvre marked by an absolute pessimism, and therefore particularly near to the philosopher's "negative ontology". Moreover, these texts raise key questions concerning modern art itself which are still central in our time, among others: the political engagement of artists, their relationship with the market, and their clairvoyance, the ethical use of montage practice, and the thin line between life and art.

Dragan Aleksić as a Critical Interpreter of Art

Dragan Aleksić (1901 – 1958) was a poet, film director, art critic and the
founder of the Dadaist movement in Yugoslavia in 1920. While studying Slavic Languages in Prague, he encountered Dadaism and began his Dadaist practice together with Branko Ve Poljanski. During two years of his Dadaist activities, one aspect of his work formed art criticism that was characterized by a writing style imbued with Dadaist poetics, particular vocabulary and sentences resembling advertising messages. In addition to essays in which he explained Dadaism as a new synthetic artistic expression, Aleksić wrote about the artwork of the movement’s key figures. After deliberately abandoning Dadaism, Aleksić kept writing about visual arts, which gradually transformed him from an avant-gardist into an interpreter of contemporary artistic developments. In this period, he moved from Zagreb to Belgrade and joint the artists gathered around the Moscow Hotel. Aleksić’s writing turned him into a commentator of
the most current developments in the international artistic arena. At the same time, he continued with his support and efforts to synthesize the creative discourse, which can be attested by his texts on African art and its impacts on the European artistic matrix and on expressionist painting, the latter of which was at the time becoming increasingly present on Belgrade’s artistic stage. In 1927, he became the culture editor and art critic for the Vreme daily newspaper and a chronicler of art developments in Belgrade. In spite of his obligation to regularly report on exhibitions, he never abandoned his affirmative attitude to phenomena and occurrences in the world of art that were ahead of their time.
He paid special attention to the work of Milena Pavlović Barilli, Mihailo S. Petrov, Branko Ve Poljanski, Kosta Hakman, Sreten Stojanović, Emanuel Vidović, Jovan Bijelić, Petar Dobrović and the Oblik Group among whose members he paid special attention to Ignjat Job and his work

In this essay, I explore the way in which the Dadaists used photomontage to critique the politics of the Weimar Republic, focusing on John Heartfield and George Grosz's photomontage on the cover of 'Everyone His Own Football', and Hannah Höch's 'Dada Panorama' and 'Heads of State'. In particular, I explore the way in which these artists used elements of femininity and techniques of feminization to accomplish a witty but sharp political critique.

A partir da obra de Claude Lévi-Strauss e das experiências dadaístas, Dorothea Voegeli Passetti formulou a noção de “colagem como procedimento das artes e das ciências”. Lévi-Strauss, em O Pensamento Selvagem, apresenta uma crítica ao chamado pensamento científico na medida em que este se coloca como o único verdadeiro, relegando a um patamar inferior o chamado pensamento selvagem. Lévi-Strauss mostra que esta ciência do concreto não parte de uma verdade/razão a priori e que mesmo a utilidade, ainda que possa ser encontrada, não é o que estabelece o seu fim. Passetti recupera a noção de colagem a partir da arte Dadá. Na colagem, o repertório é finito e os recursos escassos, mas as relações não são arbitrárias e nem displicentes. A relações produzidas por meio desta metodologia estão dadas no mundo concreto, mas não são estabelecida de antemão. Esta metodologia possibilita a emergência do imprevisível, uma vez que seu fim não está colocado a princípio e, portanto, não se vê limitado por este. O processo que me levou a esta metodologia iniciou-se com o encontro com Dorothea Passetti na graduação e a sua forma se tornou visível para mim com a tese de doutorado “Sexo no mercado: produção de verdades, desejos e moral” (2017). Sem abrir mão do rigor analítico, esta metodologia possibilitou contestar as minhas próprias certezas e deparar-me com encontros e resultados surpreendentes.

This short essay undertakes the view that Anna Blume, as it appeared in English (first in 1922 and later in 1927) might be considered within a feminist critical framework. It explores the notions of gender, equality, sexuality, femaleness, femininity, and translation.

LECH LECHOWICZ, AVANT-GARDE TOWARDS THE STILLNESS OF PHOTOGRAPHIC PICTURE
For the first time the title problem became a subject of interest of Avant-garde art movements.
Photodynamism, developed in Futurism allowed to record fluidity and continuity of movement, was the combination of its interpretation with the attempt to reflect a character of phenomena occurring in the inside world of the author and the audience.
Dadaism was interested in photographic picture for two basic reasons. A photograph, as a mechanical picture which could be easily reproduced and at the same time functioning in large numbers in visual culture, was one of the tools of Dadaist anti-art.
In photography Constructivism valued and developed mainly its possibility to picture the world objectively and extensively. The modern formal techniques of photography were to broaden visual knowledge of man and to develop his visual perception.
For Surrealism photography with mechanicalness of its depiction and its objectivity allowed to transgress the restrictions of direct perception of the world controlled by the rationalised reason.

Essay on mutual relations between mental illness, social opression, genius, art and creativity. Contains references to ideas of Hans Prinzhorn, Cesare Lombroso, Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, as well as works of Paul Klee, Andre Masson, Adolf Wölfli, Jean Dubuffet and the like.

Artists and theorists of the early 20th century explicitly undermined the idea or the notion of originality and artistic genius in reaction to WWI. Dadaism, De Stijl, and Russian Constructivism can all be seen as movements that are against originality and employ avant-garde artistic techniques to undermine the traditional artistic institution.

Modernist Cultures 12.3 (2017): 331–344. This essay reconsiders Reyner Banham's classic study of early twentieth-century architecture and design, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, originally published in 1960. Banham surveyed the architecture, design, and visual arts of the 'first machine age', characterized by industrial production and motorized transportation, from a self-consciously thematized perspective within the 'second machine age', populated by expendable consumer technologies and images. This revisionist perspective enabled Banham to challenge long-standing myths propagated by the dominant figures of the modern movement. In his polemical emphasis on the contingency and plurality of that which had empirically transpired in first machine age, Banham rejected the reduction of the messy history of the modern movement to the victory of a putative 'international style'. Banham reasserted the intimate connection of architectural modernism with the avant-garde artistic movements of the 1910s and 20s, emphasizing particularly the most radical ones such as expressionism, futurism, and dadaism.

Analizando el gran cambio que supuso el paso del siglo XIX al XX a nivel estético y artístico nos encontramos con personajes como la Baronesa Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, pionera en la canalización y adecuación de las nuevas premisas artísticas a nivel personal. Las acciones que llevó a cabo esta mujer en la vanguardia europea y en especial, la por aquel entonces naciente vanguardia neoyorquina, fueron uno de los comienzos para el entendimiento de la performance, que a su vez se estaba desarrollando por parte de futuristas, dadaístas y diversos protoperformers.
Utilizando su cuerpo como arma de batalla, Elsa se enfrentó a todo convencimiento moral decimonónico cambiando la forma de entender el arte a comienzos del siglo XX, algo que sin duda fue trascendente para el arte de mitad de siglo. Su planteamiento artístico enlazó a su vez con la acentuación de la emancipación de la figura de la mujer, que comenzaba a verse cada vez más libre.

This article is an inquiry into Richard Huelsenbeck’s definition of Dadaism as "love of movement". I consider poetic texts, novels, manifestos and leaflets written by a panel of Dadaists from Zurich, Paris, and Berlin, to analyze how Dada invented—or more precisely, intensified—a specific kind of subjectivity, inherently linked to the question of “movement”. Second, I show that this particular subjectivity is correlated with contemporary revolutionary politics. Far from being a nihilistic and frivolous movement, Dadaist’ critical teachings prefigure Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of form-of-life and inoperativity. I start by analyzing the Dadaist conception of life and subjectivity; I thus historicize this conception and emphasize Dadaism’s historical originality; in the last part, I link these findings to Agamben’s political theory. I conclude by reconsidering the link between Dadaism and politics: the article suggests that the Dadaists were all engaged in revolutionary politics, not just the members of the Berlin group.

It has long been axiomatic that the readymades of Marcel Duchamp exemplify the New York dada movement. But the mass‐produced objects that he famously chose and inscribed with his name were also a response to another paradigm of early twentieth‐century modernism: that of primitivism. Indeed, it is surprising to discover the extent to which the immediate culture from which the readymades emerged was one saturated in notions about the so‐called ‘primitive’, the result of a sudden influx of African art into New York in the years following the First World War. This essay re‐situates the readymades within this historical context and posits that they allegorized primitivism. It is equally argued that the profound impact of African art on the development of twentieth‐century modernism exceeds traditional art‐historical narratives. If Duchamp's primitivism has remained largely invisible it is because of the ways in which the primitive (as a set of ideas about art that are racial in origin) has been corralled within Western modernism.