Word: dadaism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...iconoclastic school of Dadaism, photography parallels the development of fine arts rather than emulating it. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Frederick Sommer bring out visual puns of sexuality and tradition in their early 20th century images. In "Valise d'Adam" (1949) Sommers constructs a metaphorical expulsion of Eve from Adam's flesh: a blond baby doll emerging from a menagerie of fabricated objects in the form...
...show steers a didactic course through the recurrent images of jazz-age dreaming. Maria, the famous she-robot in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, mother of a whole brood of automatons down to George Lucas' See Threepio, was not alone: her brothers were the machine men of Dadaism, whose poetic meaning (like hers) was anguish in the face of inhuman technology. No phase of modern art showed such profound doubts about the present, or threw off such febrile dreams about new social orders. The millenarian hope that eventually spawned the totalitarianism of the '30s was felt by artists, architects...