Dada Lives!
c>log
Dada stands for a movement of radical, cultural revolt: the disgusted response of artists to the débâcle of Western civilization and its values. Dada represents a revolt against art by artists themselves who, appalled by developments in contemporary society, recognized that art was bound to be a product, reflection and even support for that society and was therefore criminally implicated. Dada stands for exacerbated individualism, universal doubt and aggressive iconoclasm. Debunking the canons of reason, taste and hierarchy, of order and discipline in society, of rationally controlled inspiration in imaginative expression, Dada resorted to the arbitrary, to chance, the unconscious and the primitive, where man is at the behest of nature and gives up pretending to be its master. Dada delighted in the shock effect of its blasphemies among the right–thinking.
The Dadas themselves energetically promoted such an idea of their action and it is this image which has passed into history. At the same time as they insisted that Dada was indefinable, they stressed its simplicity for the sake of maximum impact. How is one to define, let alone confine, a movement which cannot be identified with any one personality or place, viewpoint or subject, which affects all the arts, which has a continually shifting focus and is moreover intentionally negative, ephemeral, illogical and inconclusive? The term Dada refers at once to an avant-garde movement, a cluster of existential attitude and to a conception of the life force itself at work in the world. Each incarnation of Dada was unique. It could never appear exactly the same twice because it made itself an accusingly distorted reflection of the milieu in which it happened to find itself.
The true Dadas were against Dada. Dadas baffled the efforts of critics and historians to pin down their movement by publishing mystifying and mutually incompatible accounts of their past exploits and of the significance to be attributed to them. A tentative understanding of Dada’s real identity must be sought somewhere between the misleading simplicity of the label and the diversity of Dada’s manifestations. The Dadas ridiculed Western confidence in the autonomy of the rational ego and the efficacy of reason. They denounced the post-Renaissance anthropocentric conception of reality which assumed that the world was organized according to humanly intelligible laws. They condemned bourgeois culture’s deadening determination to stabilize and categorize all phenomena. For the Dadas, nature was a state of constant flux. It was energy and motion in a simultaneous process of becoming disintegration, alien and indifferent to the affairs of men. The same lawlessness held true for the human psyche where uncontrolled and contradictory currents made mere flotsam of man’s conscious intentions, and demonic drives deflected them from their purpose.
It followed from their rejection of the belief in progress, in tameable nature and rational man, that the Dadas should cast doubt on the power of language, literature and art to represent reality. The information which the sensed communicated to men were misleading, even the ideas of the individual ‘personality’ and the external world were elusive and incoherent. How then could language, by definition an instrument of public communication, do other than deform and betray life’s authentic character as a discontinuous sequence of immediate experiences? The Dadas answered that words were mere fictions an that there was no correspondence between the structures of language and those of reality. Thus the belief in order which the power of a common, inherited language inculcated was illusory.
At their most intransigent, the Dadas turned their backs on art as a dangerous mystification. Art conferred a false stability on the ephemeral, giving substance to the illusion of an anthropocentric universe. As a compensation or comfort in the midst of life’s confusion, it deflected men’s attentions away from the real source of their problems. What Dada proposed was not the end of art as such but a radically new conception of creative activity, a fresh equation between the variables: art – self – reality. It was here that Dada’s originality lay rather than in its artifacts which, in form, were often unabashedly derivative of Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism. Dada, like Surrealism after it, envisaged the artist as a spiritual adventurer for whom productivity was of secondary importance. Poetic significance and value was attributed to a certain stance before life. Moral exigencies were given priority over aesthetic ones.
Related c>log Articles
Dada: Response To The Horrors Of War
Dada: Merz ("something cast-off, as in junk")
Dada stands for a movement of radical, cultural revolt: the disgusted response of artists to the débâcle of Western civilization and its values. Dada represents a revolt against art by artists themselves who, appalled by developments in contemporary society, recognized that art was bound to be a product, reflection and even support for that society and was therefore criminally implicated. Dada stands for exacerbated individualism, universal doubt and aggressive iconoclasm. Debunking the canons of reason, taste and hierarchy, of order and discipline in society, of rationally controlled inspiration in imaginative expression, Dada resorted to the arbitrary, to chance, the unconscious and the primitive, where man is at the behest of nature and gives up pretending to be its master. Dada delighted in the shock effect of its blasphemies among the right–thinking.
 | |  |
The true Dadas were against Dada. Dadas baffled the efforts of critics and historians to pin down their movement by publishing mystifying and mutually incompatible accounts of their past exploits and of the significance to be attributed to them. A tentative understanding of Dada’s real identity must be sought somewhere between the misleading simplicity of the label and the diversity of Dada’s manifestations. The Dadas ridiculed Western confidence in the autonomy of the rational ego and the efficacy of reason. They denounced the post-Renaissance anthropocentric conception of reality which assumed that the world was organized according to humanly intelligible laws. They condemned bourgeois culture’s deadening determination to stabilize and categorize all phenomena. For the Dadas, nature was a state of constant flux. It was energy and motion in a simultaneous process of becoming disintegration, alien and indifferent to the affairs of men. The same lawlessness held true for the human psyche where uncontrolled and contradictory currents made mere flotsam of man’s conscious intentions, and demonic drives deflected them from their purpose.
 |  |
At their most intransigent, the Dadas turned their backs on art as a dangerous mystification. Art conferred a false stability on the ephemeral, giving substance to the illusion of an anthropocentric universe. As a compensation or comfort in the midst of life’s confusion, it deflected men’s attentions away from the real source of their problems. What Dada proposed was not the end of art as such but a radically new conception of creative activity, a fresh equation between the variables: art – self – reality. It was here that Dada’s originality lay rather than in its artifacts which, in form, were often unabashedly derivative of Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism. Dada, like Surrealism after it, envisaged the artist as a spiritual adventurer for whom productivity was of secondary importance. Poetic significance and value was attributed to a certain stance before life. Moral exigencies were given priority over aesthetic ones.
Related c>log Articles
Dada: Response To The Horrors Of War
Dada: Merz ("something cast-off, as in junk")
Trackbacks
-
Wednesday, August 13, 2008 2:55 PM
c>log art music pop culture wrote:
-
Wednesday, August 13, 2008 2:56 PM
c>log art music pop culture wrote:
-
Wednesday, August 13, 2008 2:58 PM
c>log art music pop culture wrote:
-
Sunday, April 26, 2009 10:44 AM
c>log art music pop culture wrote:
-
Sunday, April 26, 2009 11:03 AM
c>log art music pop culture wrote:
c -
Monday, March 22, 2010 11:27 AM
the Clog art music pop culture wrote:
c -
Monday, March 22, 2010 11:41 AM
the Clog art music pop culture wrote:
c -
Monday, March 22, 2010 11:50 AM
the Clog art music pop culture wrote:
c
Comments