Word: dada
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...Dada artists had definite opinions concerning the way in which their works were to be exhibited. Dadaism sought to strip away the pretentious trappings surrounding art, and as such, the Dadaists objected to the institution of the museum. But at the same time, exhibitions provided the exposure necessary to reach the public. The solution was to display the works in a manner that would be as shocking as the ideas themselves. The following is a description of "Early Dada Spring," an exhibit held in the 1920s...
...major fault in the ICA exhibition was its choice of conventional means of presentation. Objects are arranged in neat, well-spaced rows. One wishes the curators had been more adventurous, more responsive to the nature of Dada. Inventive presentation strengthens the experience of art. For example, this past summer a group of New York artists organized an art show in Times Square. The unusual location reflected the radical nature of the art exhibited, which, in turn, used live performances and striking imagery to comment on the environment. In an exhibit of early twentieth-century Russian art now at the Hirschorn...
...EXHIBIT also fails to point out the relevance of showing Dada art in 1980. While museums commonly exhibit works from past periods without making historical connections, the situation here is different. The status of an institution of contemporary art that chooses to exhibit works that are now 60 years old is somewhat questionable; some reference to recent work would have proved that the spirit of Dadaism guides and inspires many contemporary artists...
...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...