Word: dada
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There was a time, long past, when modern art was thought dangerous. Its subversive reputation rested on two movements, Dada and surrealism. From them, most subsequent avant-gardes have sprung. Cubist paintings by Georges Braque now look about as threatening as a pastoral scene by Nicolas Poussin. But most of the "radical" gestures in these dying years of the avant-garde have emerged from Dada or surrealist precedents. The swarm of prototypes is so thick that when a Los Angeles body artist, a few years ago, created an "event" by shooting a pistol at a jet aircraft passing over Venice...
...Dadaists and surrealists were the last of the real avantgarde, not because they were "great" artists but because they were the last men to believe that art and poetry could change the objective conditions of life. Dada promised, in the words of its mercurial chatterbox poet, Tristan Tzara, "to destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organization; to sow demoralization everywhere." A surrealist declaration, issued in Paris in 1925, announced: "Surrealism ... is a means of total liberation of the mind and of everything resembling it. We are determined to create a revolution...
...huge, rambling, scholarly show on view at London's Hayward Gallery until the end of March. Containing about 1,000 items -paintings, sculpture, prints and drawings, objects, polemics, documents-it was organized by a team headed by the distinguished English art critic David Sylvester, under the title "Dada and Surrealism Reviewed." It attempts to treat Dada and surrealism on their own terms (those of dandyism, revolt, love, dream and myth) rather than judge them by official "painterly" standards. As a result the show goes further into the labyrinth than any retrospective for years on writers like Andre Breton, Paul...
Surrealism was too volatile and too hard to define to be a system. As a viable "movement," it lasted from the end of the first World War to the end of the second-a span of nearly three decades. Like its ancestor Dada, surrealism was brought to term by young refugees in the cafes of neutral Zurich during World War I, in a clamor of theatrical high jinks, concrete-poetry recitals, chance-based collages and mock rituals. Surrealism became a common ground for bourgeois intellectuals agonized by the futility of their expected social roles. But it smacks of artificiality...
...great detail, the show is a dramatic reminder of how vital a contribution Dada and surrealism made to the modernist imagination. No painting or poetry had been so resolutely and bitterly antiauthoritarian. Dada was the child of trauma; the first World War, that cultural chasm, had revealed - in the sheer incapacity of words to convey its degree of lethal absurdity - the extent to which language itself was owned by the officer classes of Europe...