STUDENTGUIDE National Gallery of Art, Washington February 19 – May 14, 2006 The
STUDENTGUIDE National Gallery of Art, Washington February 19 – May 14, 2006 The beginnings of dada were not the beginnings of an art, but of a disgust. 1 TRISTAN TZARA HAD ATTITUDE R E A D ER A L ERT ! THE N A M E S O F C I T I E S N O T E D O N THE S I D E O F I L LU S TR AT I O N S W I L L HE L P Y O U F I ND O BJ E C T S I N THE DA DA E X H I B I T I O N A S Y O U WA LK THR O U GH I T W I TH TH I S GU I D E Like the edgiest rock and hip-hop, Dada was young, smart, crude, angry, and outrageous. Dadaists, an interna- tional hodgepodge of mostly twenty-something artists and writers, were dismayed by the stupidity and horror of World War I. The conflict was unprecedented in human history because of its scale and its terrifying new weaponry. On average almost 900 Frenchmen and 1,300 Germans died every day between the outbreak of war in August 1914 and the armistice that ended it in November 1918. All told, nearly ten million people were killed. For the dadaists, World War I discredited the notion of a civilized European society. As dadaist Hugo Ball noted, the war proved that “this world of systems has gone to pieces.” For Ball and his contemporaries, the pillars of society—law, culture, faith, language, economy, educa- tion, and the roles assigned to men and women—had failed to prevent the war and its unparalleled destruction. A British Mark IV tank photo- graphed from German trenches during the Battle of Cambrai, October 21, 1917. Photograph Archive, Imperial War Museum, London Theo van Doesburg (and Kurt Schwitters?), detail, poster and program for Kleine Dada Soirée (Small Dada Evening), 1922/1923, lithograph. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Philip Johnson, 1945 HANNOVER 2 Dada counterattacked with an insurrection against every- thing in society that was pompous and conventional— everything that was part of the “rational” mindset that had led to the war [fig. 1]. Dada’s chosen weapon was art, but it was art the likes of which the world had never seen. Dadaists were repulsed by self-styled “enlightened” societies that fawned over pretty paintings while dispatching youths by the millions to their deaths. They wanted art to be the equivalent of a slap in the face that compelled people to confront life’s ugly realities and goaded them to think about the forces, structures, and clichés in society that gave rise to them. Dada reimagined what art could and should be in an age reeling from the world’s first industrial-sized slaughter and the onslaught of modern mass media that it triggered, which included war propaganda posters, films, and the photo-illustrated press [fig. 2]. Dada was not a particular style of making pictures, like impressionism. Rather, dadaists called into question the idea of art as a picture of the world. They invented a set of new approaches to art-making—strategies for being an artist in the modern world. Scorning traditional painting and sculpture, dadaists created new categories of art objects, embraced new technologies, and redefined ideas about artistic creativity. Sometimes this meant incorporating new materials into the art. And some- times it meant stepping outside of object-making to connect art directly to the public, which the dadaists did by staging outlandish performances, putting out in-your- face journals and manifestos, and manipulating the popular press for subversive purposes. Dada not only pushed the boundaries of art and society, it questioned their very forms. In the face of daily routine, civil propriety, and bourgeois self-satisfaction, Dada championed spontaneity, absurdity, and free will. HAD ATTITUDE German troops running through war zone in France, April 1918 fig. 1 Cover of the French photographic weekly Le Miroir, January 3, 1915 fig. 2 Stretcher bearers transporting a wounded soldier under enemy fire. Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of com- fortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equa- tion set up for the sake of val- ues by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions, and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontane- ity: Dada; elegant and unpreju- diced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one’s church of every use- less cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous water- fall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn’t matter in the least—with the same intensity in the thicket of one’s soul—pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE. Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto, Published in the journal Dada, no. 3, 1918 3 Dada journals were the lifeblood of the movement, enabling dadaists to exchange ideas and images among themselves and to convey them to the public, across the world [fig. 3]. Dada journals sprang up in all Dada centers, and many are famed for their innovative typography and layout. Some journals were short-lived—often because government authorities banned them shortly after learning of their subversive content—but many reappeared soon after with different formats and new names. At right, a sample of Dada rant: ZUR I CH Marcel Janco, illustration on the cover of the journal Dada, no. 3, Tristan Tzara editor, Mouvement Dada, 1918, wood engraving. National Gallery of Art, Library, Gift of Thomas G. Klarner fig. 3 DADA JOURNALS — 4 ARTNEEDS DADA AND THE ANTI-MASTERPIECE Dada disowned the idea of the “masterpiece”—a great, singular oil painting, like the Mona Lisa, made by a skilled genius. Dadaists found oil painting pretentious, and they ridiculed art history’s elite, from Leonardo da Vinci to Paul Cézanne [fig. 4]. Against the backdrop of the war, dadaists found this entire tradition of art pompous and bankrupt. And because they were skeptical about human character and the “cult of genius,” they advocated, instead, “imper- sonal” art that did not rely on artistic skill and did not reflect individual personality. In Zurich, Hans Arp and his companion Sophie Taeuber, a textile designer and professor, launched a quiet time bomb by challenging the distinction between “fine” and “applied” art. Applied art, which usually refers to the design or decoration of functional objects— and was often considered the domain of women—was viewed as a lesser form of art. But Taeuber and Arp framed embroideries and hung them on the walls like paintings. They also jointly made a series of abstract geometric “duo- collages” [fig. 5] that had roots in Taeuber’s textile designs. ZUR I CH PAR I S Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919, rectified readymade: reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with pencil. Private collection fig. 4 Marcel Duchamp’s graffiti-like defacement of a Mona Lisa repro- duction is the most famous of Dada’s many attacks against the traditions of high art. In French, the letters “LHOOQ” sound like the French phrase, which in loose translation would be, “She’s hot.” Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber, Untitled (Duo-Collage), 1918, collage of papers, board, and silver leaf on board. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie fig. 5 * !. /0%2!4)/. ! 2 ! : 4 . ! 4 3 ) 2 4 ( # ) 2 5 : ( # ) 2 5 : D E L T I T N 5 P R ! S N A ( R E M M A ( T N A L 0 Y B T N E , F E I L E R D O O W D E T N I A P C G A A ( N E $ M U E S U M E T N E E M E ' E H 4 S D N A L R E H T E . E H 4 E U G A ( E H 4 lG D E L T I T N 5 P R ! S N A ( C I T A M O T U ! G N I W A R $ D uploads/Finance/ dada-student-guide 1 .pdf
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- Publié le Jui 02, 2022
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