Word: dada
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...assembly of junk into metaphoric objects has an ancestry that goes back to Surrealism and German Dada. Joseph Cornell in the 1940s was the first American to base a whole oeuvre on it; Robert Rauschenberg in the '50s picked up on him; and Kienholz in the '60s on Rauschenberg. But whereas Cornell was butterfly gentle and Rauschenberg effusively open, Kienholz was a raging satirist attached to the view from over the top. Show him any kind of Establishment, and he loathed it. Almost from the start his work was about social pain, madness, estrangement. He hated all cant, including...
...Celts" throbbed with more than just ordinary energy and enthusiasm. From the raging men in kilts to the heartbroken lovers twirling across stage to the fields filled with nearly-glowing fairies, every movement pulsed with free-flowing passion. Costume designer Tunji Dada displayed nothing short of brillinace by setting the fairies' stunning off-white rags, the head dancer's billowing black ensemble, and the lovers' deep crimson costumes against a deep gray backdrop of threatening thunderclouds. The energy of the coming storm pulsed through the thunderous music and the lightning-quick motions of the dancers, ensnaring the audience and lifting...
...pieces in the inaugural issue range from computer-enhanced graphics to an art review of a Neo-Dada exhibit to a parody of Cliff Notes...
...Plexiglas maze, scuttling about under the bombardment of rock drumming. It's Nauman's idea of the relationship between artist and audience. The artist as hero is long gone from American culture, and the artist as social critic is ineffective, but Nauman, with the example of Dada before him and a slackly therapeutic culture all around, has cut himself a different role: the artist as nuisance...
When it is really silly, the dumbness can be disarming, as it was with Nauman's predecessor, the American Dada gagman Man Ray. Witness early Nauman photo pieces like Self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1966-67, the artist expelling a jet of water through his pursed lips. And it is fully in the tradition of Marcel Du-champ, whose puns were equally feeble. An early Nauman like From Hand to Mouth, 1967 (a wax cast of the artist's arm, shoulder and throat) is a retread of Duchamp's 1959 With My Tongue in My Cheek, a cast...