Word: dada
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...supposed to mark the country's full emergence from the dark epoch of Dictator Idi Amin Dada. But Uganda's unruly general election last week, the first in 18 years, only served to plunge the country deeper into its political muddle...
...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...
...Dada was outburst and outrage. It shook the cultural world, and its repercussions are still being felt. Some mention of contemporary endeavors would have rendered the material in the ICA show more conspicuously relevant to the present. Without such allusions, the apt timing of the exhibit looks like just a fortunate accident, an artistic coincidence--not a conscious design. More than simply betraying the spirit of Dada in straitjacketing its works, the ICA's presentation is a model of how museums function more as mausoleums than as regenerative forces that revive the art of the past to engage contemporary audiences...