Dada Culture

How Dada is to break its cultural accommodation and containment today necessitates thinking the historical instances through revised application of critical and theoretical models. The volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde moves precisely by this motive, bringing together writings which insist upon the continuity of the early twentieth-century moment now at the start of the twenty-first. Engaging the complex and contradictory nature of Dada strategies, instanced in the linguistic gaming and performativity of the movement’s initial formation, and subsequently isolating the specific from the general with essays focusing on Ball, Tzara, Serner, Hausmann, Dix, Heartfield, Schwitters, Baader, Cravan and the exemplary Duchamp, the political philosophy of the avant-garde is brought to bear upon our own contemporary struggle through critical theory to comprehend the cultural usefulness, relevance, validity and effective (or otherwise) oppositionality of Dada’s infamous anti-stance. The volume is presented in sections that progressively point towards the expanding complexity of the contemporary engagement with Dada, as what is often exhaustive historical data is forced to rethink, realign and reconfigure itself in response to the analytical rigour and exercise of later twentieth-century animal anarchic thought, the testing and cultural placement of thoughts upon the virtual, and the eventual implications for the once blissfully unproblematic idea of expression. From the opening, provocative proposition that historically Dada may have been the falsest of all false paths, the volume rounds to dispute such condemnation as demarcation continues not only of Dada’s embeddedness in western culture, but more precisely of the location of Dada culture. Ten critical essays – by Cornelius Partsch, John Wall, T. J. Demos, Anna Schaffner, Martin I. Gaughan, Curt Germundson, Stephen C. Foster, Dafydd Jones, Joel Freeman and David Cunningham – are supplemented by the critical bibliography prepared by Timothy Shipe, which documents the past decade of Dada scholarship, and in so doing provides a valuable resource for all those engaged in Dada studies today.

International, iconoclastic, inventive, born out of the institutionalised madness of the First World War, Dada erupted in cities throughout Europe and the USA, creating shock waves that offended polite society and destabilised the cultural and political status quo. In spite of its sporadic and ephemeral character, its rich and diverse legacy is still powerfully felt nearly a century later. Following on from Dada and Beyond Volume 1: Dada Discourses, the sixteen essays in this collection provide critical examinations of Dada, placing particular emphasis on the ongoing impact of its creative output. The chapters examine its pivotal figures as well as its more peripheral protagonists, their different geographic locations, and the extraordinary diversity of their practices that included poetry, painting, printmaking, dance, performance, theatre, textiles, readymades, photomontage and cinema. As the book’s authors reveal, Dada not only anticipates Surrealism but also foreshadows an extraordinary array of more recent tendencies including action painting, conceptual art, outsider art, performance art, environmental and land art. In its privileging of chance and automatism, its rejection of formal artistic institutions, its subversive exploitation of mass media and its constant self-reconstitution and self-redefinition, Dada deserves to be seen as a cultural phenomenon that is still powerfully relevant in the twenty-first century.

Series numbering from publisher's Web site.

This book, for the first time, examines in depth the link between modernism and postmodernism and demonstrates the extensive similarities, as well as the few crucial differences between the ideas and art of the Dadaists on the one hand, and those of contemporary postmodern thinkers and artists on the other.

Presents a collection of essays, manifestos, and illustrations that provide an overview of the Dada movement in art, describing its convictions, antics, and spirit, through the words and art of its principal practitioners.

This excellent overview of new research on Dada and Surrealism blends expert synthesis of the latest scholarship with completely new research, offering historical coverage as well as in-depth discussion of thematic areas ranging from criminality to gender. This book provides an excellent overview of new research on Dada and Surrealism from some of the finest established and up-and-coming scholars in the field Offers historical coverage as well as in–depth discussion of thematic areas ranging from criminality to gender One of the first studies to produce global coverage of the two movements, it also includes a section dealing with the critical and cultural aftermath of Dada and Surrealism in the later twentieth century Dada and Surrealism are arguably the most popular areas of modern art, both in the academic and public spheres

The Dada movement, revered as perhaps the purest form of cultural subversion and provocation in 20th-century Europe, has been a victim of the readiness with which cultural historians have swallowed its own propaganda. Based on extensive close analysis of French-language Dada work in its original form, and offering English translations throughout, this major reappraisal looks at a broad range of media and topics - including poetry, film, philosophy, and quantum physics - in order to get beyond Dada's typecasting as avant-garde anti-hero. Work by women writers and other marginalized figures combines with that of canonical Dadaists to present Dada in a radically new set of guises: poetic and textually subtle; intellectually and philosophically meaningful; peaceable and quasi-Buddhist; and, perhaps most uncomfortably of all, conformist and reactionary.

This title was first published in 2003. Drawing on literary, art historical and historical studies, this essay collection explores the complex encounter between culture and politics within Surrealism. The Surrealist movement was one of the first cultural movements to question explicitly the relation between culture and politics, and its attempt to fuse social and cultural revolution has been a critical factor in shaping our sense of modernity. This anthology addresses not only the contested ground between culture and politics within Surrealism itself, and within the subsequent historical accounts of the movement, but also the broader implications of this encounter on our own sense of modernity. Its goal is to delineate the role of radical politics in shaping the historical trajectory of Surrealism.