Word: dada
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...year was 1922. Dada was dead, Surrealism not yet born. Max Ernst, a fledgling artist who had figured prominently in the former movement and would soon help formulate the latter, was in his native Cologne, yearning for the radical friends that he knew were spawning the most adventuresome ideas of the day in postwar Paris. For Germans in those days, French visas were almost impossible to obtain. Finally, one August night, Ernst slipped across the border. Later he turned up at the Paris apartment of two friends, the poet Paul Eluard and his wife Gala...
MOTHERS OF INVENTION: RUBEN & THE JETS (Verve). Ruben is a put-on and a takeoff. Founding fathers of rock dada, the Mothers have a picnic singing their own freshly minted Golden Oldies ("Jelly roll gum drop got my eyes on you," "I need it, I need it, 'cause it feels so fine"). The mock-sentimental collection is hilarious, at least for a while...
...subject, West German animator Heinz Edelmann furiously ransacks the past. From the mannerists, he borrows "shot colors" -red blending into orange, blue fading into green. He employs the whiplash and the curvilinear strokes of art nouveau. He features the upholstered monsters of comic strips, the impudent whimsy of Dada, the vibrating poster art of Peter Max. The eclecticism almost becomes a style of its own, and occasionally it is effective, as in Eleanor Rigby when "all the lonely people" appear as gritty newsreel figures who float by each other in a surrealistic frieze...
Died. Marcel Duchamp, 81, France's Grand Dada of art, whose iconoclastic paintings, "readymades" and other assemblages of the early 1900s became cryptic formulas for the future; in Neuilly, France. "An explosion in a shingle factory!" hooted a critic, and guards had to restrain angry art lovers when Duchamp's disjointed Nude Descending a Staircase went on view at Manhattan's 1913 Armory Show. The gaunt, enigmatic Frenchman proceeded to thumb his nose all the more vigorously at the pantheon of art. He painted a mustache and goatee on a Mona Lisa reproduction, put his own portrait...
THIS consciousness, which has as antecedents such early avatars, as Jean Cocteau, Dada, Joyce, and the Marx Brothers, is to say the least, playful. All art is, of course, to some extent, playful, or draws on elements of the mind that serious people don't take seriously, but these artists are more playful than most. A gallery instillation that has you walk down a long dark tunnel to confront a white painting with the words You Are Here neatly lettered in black, certainly is more playful than the Sistine Chapel. (It was done this summer in London by John Lennon...