Word: dadaism
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...name but continued to dispute what the word - and the movement - signified. Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet and the author of the Dada Manifesto of 1918, came up with what may be the only accurate definition: "Dada means nothing." That presents the curators of a new exhibition of Dadaism with a wonderful opportunity: to define the undefinable through the remarkably varied work the Dadaists produced. And produce the Dadaists did - collages, letters, manifestos, music, paintings, posters, photographs, sculptures, textiles, typography and more. They had no common medium and no particular mission, simply a dedication to spontaneity, chaos, innovation and nonsense...
...recently finished its run on the mainstage, may be Tom Stoppard’s most famous play, Travesties is certainly his most virtuoso, flawlessly combining the plots of two plays and pulling off stunts like a scene in the style of a chapter from Ulysses or a debate about dadaism, traditional art and love composed entirely of lines from Shakespeare. Travesties features the lives of three famous foreigners who lived in Zurich during World War I: James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and the dadaist Tristan Tzara. Each of these men is radical in his own way, and all three disagree about...
...fair to say that this tragedy--and probably more important, the ensuing conflict--will change the culture. Great events do that. The absurdity of the First World War gave us Dadaism. The Great Depression created an appetite for frothy screwball comedies. World War II replaced them with sentimental, patriotic dramas and eventually film noir and social-issues movies and plays. The atomic age fed science fiction and rock 'n' roll; the Vietnam War gave us Norman Lear sitcoms and Robert Altman films...
...pleasure were segregated in a popular culture that was dismissed by finer sensibilities as aesthetically retrograde. Nor was it that everything interesting in high culture had been accomplished. Brancusi's and Hemingway's pursuit of pure form, stripped of all Victorian encrustations, proceeded. And most of the isms (Dadaism, Surrealism, Absurdism) in some way derive from what we might oxymoronically call classic modernism...
Yesterday's aggro and shock, today's museum relic. "Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York," curated by Francis Naumann and Beth Venn and now running at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art, is an interesting show of what is, ultimately, a spiky but fairly thin subject. Dadaism--its name made of baby-talk syllables, its intent to disorient bourgeois expectations of culture by any means possible--was a short-lived but fecund movement born and raised in Europe in the century's teens. It was more like a tiny religion than an art event, with a proselytizing...