Word: dada
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...recent article in Artforum magazine, critic Ronny H. Cohen describes a contemporary trend in art that is similarly aggressive, one that may have evolved from Dada by way of Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s. Cohen dubs the work of the artists "Energism" and states that Energist works have the ability to "flash out pictorial/emotive expression with such force that the impact freezes us." What the works fear most "is the possibility of coming across as boring." Significant in Cohen's analysis is that Energism (like Dada) is defined not by a set of formal criteria...
...recourse to a wide range of materials was another aspect that, while not unique to Dada, influenced many later artists. Hannah Hoch, Raoul Hausmann and others made striking collages in which they jumbled and juxtaposed photographs from newspapers to create disturbing images of dissembled bodies in confused scales. Robert Rauschenberg's collages of the 1960s owe much to the Dada legacy. Duchamp's adoption of ordinary objects in sculpture is analogous to the selection of unadulterated common building materials in post-modern architecture. Frank Gehry's new house in California uses unfinished two-by-fours, asphalt and chain-link fencing...
...language, a more effective means of communication, has preoccupied many twentieth-century artists. In post-modern dance, this took the form of introducing ordinary movements and gestures into performance. Some punk music assaults the listener with a directness and intensity, stripped of contrived "artistic" mediation, that echoes "bruitism," the Dada noise-music that aimed at a forced penetration of our minds and senses...
...works in the ICA show reveal the formal similarities of much Dadaist graphic art to contemporary examples. The Dadaists experimented with the nature of graphic communication, mixing typefaces and altering size and scale. Ernst's poster "Dada Zeigt!" (Dada Wins!) uses assorted lettering with unrelated symbols--a rope, a bed, a cow, a housewife. The asymmetric anarchic quality of such compositions also characterizes contemporary New Wave graphics. This aesthetic, which has sprung up alongside of punk music and fashion, is characterized by the juxtaposition of disparate forms, symbols and lettering in designs that often are consciously crooked, random and askew...
Even the titles of the publications bear an affinity to Dadaism. The 1910s and '20s saw the creation of Dead Serious, Dada and Cloudpump; in the 1970s and '80s we have Impulse, Slash, Damage and Fetish. The element of satiric humor remains: Dada's contents included, "Painting, Sculpture, Drawings...and Vulgar Dillentantism"; Fetish proclaims itself "The Magazine of the Material World...