Word: dadaisms
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...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...
...Dadaism was originally a movement formed in Europe to protest the horrors of World War I, but it spread to America during the teens and the twenties where it outraged its contemporaries, much as The Sex Pistols did. A sculpture entitled "fountain," no more than a toilet seat hung by a nail, drew special condemnation for its vulgarity. Another work--a print of the "Mona Lisa" with a moustache drawn over the famous smile and the phrase "L. H. O. O. Q." under it--was roundly criticized for its irreverence. The phrase, roughly translated, means...
Indeed, the wide-ranging ideas and intentions embodied in Dadaism have been adopted and reworked in different ways by artists in each subsequent decade. The social and political commentary of George Grosz's "End of the Day" (a sketch of factory workers making the dismal trek home) and satiric "Bourgeois Society" resurfaced in the Social Realism of Ben Shahn and other American artists working in the 1930s. Several years ago a scandal ensued when the Guggenheim Museum cancelled a show of photographs of tenement housing on the grounds that the art was too "political...
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...