What Is Dada

Offering new critical approaches to Dada as quintessential part of the Avant-Garde, Dada and Existentialism: the Authenticity of Ambiguity reassesses the movement as a form of (proto-) Existentialist philosophy. Dada is often dismissed as an anti-art movement with a merely destructive theoretical impetus. French Existentialism is often condemned for its perceived quietist implications. However, closer analysis reveals a preoccupation with philosophy in the former and with art in the latter. Moreover, neither was nonsensical or meaningless; both reveal a rich individualist ethics aimed at the amelioration of the individual and society. The first major comparative study of Dada and Existentialism, this text contributes new perspectives on Dada as movement, historical legacy, and field of study. Analysing Dada works through Existentialist literature across the themes of choice, alienation, responsibility, freedom and truth, the text posits that Dada and Existentialism both advocate the creation of a self that aims for authenticity through ambiguity.

his book is the first to make the case that women's changing role in European and American society was critical to Dada.

In 1916, as World War I raged around them, a group of bohemians gathered at a small nightclub in Zurich, Switzerland for a series of bizarre performances. Three readers simultaneously recited a poem in three languages; a monocle-wearing teenager performed a spell from New Zealand; another young man flung bits of papier-mâché into the air and glued them into place where they landed. One of these artists called the sessions “both buffoonery and a requiem mass.” Soon they would be known by a more evocative name: Dada. In Destruction Was My Beatrice, modernist scholar Jed Rasula presents the first narrative history of the emergence, decline, and legacy of Dada, showing how this strange artistic phenomenon spread across Europe and then the world in the wake of the Great War, fundamentally reshaping modern culture in ways we’re still struggling to understand today.

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.

Dada is often celebrated for its strategies of shock and opposition, but in Dada Presentism, Maria Stavrinaki provides a new picture of Dada art and writings as a lucid reflection on history and the role of art within it. The original (Berlin-based) Dadaists' acute historical consciousness and their modern experience of time, she contends, anticipated the formulations of major historians such as Reinhart Koselleck and, more recently, François Hartog. The book explores Dada temporalities and concepts of history in works of art, artistic discourse, and in the photographs of the Berlin Dada movement. These photographs—including the famous one of the First International Dada Fair—are presented not as simple, transparent documents, but as formal deployments conforming to a very concrete theory of history. This approach allows Stavrinaki to link Dada to more contemporary artistic movements and practices interested in history and the archive. At the same time, she investigates what seems to be a real oxymoron of the movement: its simultaneous claim to the ephemeral and its compulsive writing of its own history. In this way, Dada Presentism also interrogates the limits between history and fiction.

Dada magazines made Dada what it was: diverse, non-hierarchical, transnational, and defiant of the most fundamental artistic conventions. This first volume entirely devoted to Dada periodicals retells the story of Dada by demonstrating the centrality of these graphically inventive, provocative periodicals: Dada, New York Dada, Dada Jok, and dozens more that began crossing enemy lines during World War I. The book includes magazines from well-known Dada cities like New York and Paris as well as Zagreb and Bucharest, and reveals that Dada continued to inspire art journals into the 1920s. Anchored in close material analysis within a historical and theoretical framework, Dada Magazines models a novel, multifaceted methodology for assessing many kinds of periodicals. The book traces how the Dadaists-Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Dragan Aleksic, Hannah Höch, and many others-compiled, printed, distributed, and exchanged these publications. At the same time, it recognizes the journals as active agents that engendered the Dada network, and its thematic, chronological structure captures the constant exchanges that took place in this network. With in-depth scrutiny of these magazines-and 1970s “Dadazines” inspired by them-Dada Magazines is a vital source in the histories of art and design, periodical studies, and modernist studies.

A lavishly illustrated volume that views Russian avant-garde art through the lens of Dada. This is the first book to approach Russian avant-garde art from the perspective of the anti-art canons associated with the international Dada movement. The works described and documented in Russian Dada were produced at the height of Dada's flourishing, between World War I and the death of Vladimir Lenin—who, incidentally, was a frequent visitor to Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, the founding site of Dada. Like the Dadaists, the Russian avant-gardists whose works appear in this volume strove for internationalism, fused the verbal and visual, and engaged in eccentric practices and pacifist actions, including outrageous performances and anti-war campaigns. The works featured in this lavishly illustrated volume thrive on negation, irony, and absurdity, with the goal of constructing a new aesthetic paradigm that is an alternative to both positivist and rationalist Constructivism as well as metaphysical and cosmic Suprematism. The text and images show that, while not neglecting the serious project of public agitation for Marxist ideology, the artists often pushed the Dadaesque into Russian mass culture, in the form of absurdist and chance-based collages and designs. In such works, Russian “da, da (yes, yes)” was converted into a defiant “nyet, nyet (no, no)”. Russian Dada, which accompanies a major exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, includes 250 images, almost all in color, and essays by leading art historians. An appendix provides a wide selection of primary texts—historical writings by such key figures as Nikolai Punin, Kazimir Malevich, Varvara Stepanova, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Essays by Margarita Tupitsyn, Victor Tupitsyn, Natasha Kurchanova, Olga Burenina-Petrova Artists Natan Altman, Vasilii Ermilov, 41°, Ivan Kluin, Gustav Klutsis, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Valentina Kulagina, Vladimir Lebedev, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksei Morgunov, the Nothingdoers, Ivan Puni, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Sergei Sharshun, Varvara Stepanova, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Vladimir Tatlin, Igor Terentiev, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Ilya Zdanevich, Kirill Zdanevich Copublished with Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid

In 1916 a meeting of artists, writers, émigrés and opposition figures took place in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Under the shadow of the First World War, this was the starting point for the dissemination of the artistic and literary style known as Dadaism.