Word: dadaist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nevelson was not, of course, the first artist to do this: her forerunner in the art of reclamation was German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who made thousands of collages from street refuse. When the sculptor Jean Arp saw Nevelson's great black environment Sky Cathedral in 1958, he wrote her a poem hailing her as Schwitters' spiritual granddaughter, but the fact seems to be that Nevelson had seen nothing by Schwitters...
FINALLY, THE DADAIST search for a new 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...