Arvind Sharma
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- October 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195676389
- eISBN:
- 9780199081974
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195676389.003.0007
- Subject:
- Religion, Hinduism
One development in modern Hinduism that is related to the God Brahmā, albeit indirectly, is represented by the rise of the Brahma Kumārī movement. Widely considered a Hindu movement, the Brahma ...
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One development in modern Hinduism that is related to the God Brahmā, albeit indirectly, is represented by the rise of the Brahma Kumārī movement. Widely considered a Hindu movement, the Brahma Kumārī movement traces its origins to Dada Lekhraj (1876–1969), a lifelong vegetarian and teetotaller who had a series of revelations warning him about the imminent end of the world. This movement is also associated with Brahmā owing to its millenarian nature. Millenarian movements are familiar in Hinduism, with the Kalkī avatāra itself representing one form of it. It is easy to see why Brahmā, as the creator of a new world after its end, would play an important role in the Brahma Kumārī movement. Brahmā was accused of having an incestuous relation with his daughter Sarasvatī, leading to his censure, especially by missionaries.Less
One development in modern Hinduism that is related to the God Brahmā, albeit indirectly, is represented by the rise of the Brahma Kumārī movement. Widely considered a Hindu movement, the Brahma Kumārī movement traces its origins to Dada Lekhraj (1876–1969), a lifelong vegetarian and teetotaller who had a series of revelations warning him about the imminent end of the world. This movement is also associated with Brahmā owing to its millenarian nature. Millenarian movements are familiar in Hinduism, with the Kalkī avatāra itself representing one form of it. It is easy to see why Brahmā, as the creator of a new world after its end, would play an important role in the Brahma Kumārī movement. Brahmā was accused of having an incestuous relation with his daughter Sarasvatī, leading to his censure, especially by missionaries.
Brett M Van Hoesen and Jean-Paul Perrotte
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199759392
- eISBN:
- 9780199918911
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199759392.003.0009
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Over the last decade or so, sound art has emerged as a seemingly new genre in the art world. While this trend has started to challenge the dominance of visual culture, the label of sound art ...
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Over the last decade or so, sound art has emerged as a seemingly new genre in the art world. While this trend has started to challenge the dominance of visual culture, the label of sound art dangerously delimits and potentially denies the long, rich history of sound projects that span the twentieth-century. This chapter begins with an analysis of the term sound art from the perspective of Art History and Music Composition. The second, larger aim of this essay is to chart the long historical trajectory of German-based sound projects, including those associated with Dada and Fluxus, music concrète and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and contemporary sound works by Christina Kubisch and those recently exhibited at venues such as the Berlin Biennale für Zeitgenössische Kunst and Documenta in Kassel.Less
Over the last decade or so, sound art has emerged as a seemingly new genre in the art world. While this trend has started to challenge the dominance of visual culture, the label of sound art dangerously delimits and potentially denies the long, rich history of sound projects that span the twentieth-century. This chapter begins with an analysis of the term sound art from the perspective of Art History and Music Composition. The second, larger aim of this essay is to chart the long historical trajectory of German-based sound projects, including those associated with Dada and Fluxus, music concrète and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and contemporary sound works by Christina Kubisch and those recently exhibited at venues such as the Berlin Biennale für Zeitgenössische Kunst and Documenta in Kassel.
Carol J. Oja
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195058499
- eISBN:
- 9780199865031
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195058499.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
New York City witnessed a burst of creativity in the 1920s. This artistic renaissance is examined from the perspective of composers of classical and modern music who, along with writers, painters, ...
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New York City witnessed a burst of creativity in the 1920s. This artistic renaissance is examined from the perspective of composers of classical and modern music who, along with writers, painters, and jazz musicians, were at the heart of early modernism in America. The book also illustrates how the aesthetic attitudes and institutional structures from the 1920s left a deep imprint on the arts over the 20th century. Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still, Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, Marion Bauer, and Dane Rudhyar were the leaders of a talented new generation of American composers whose efforts made New York City the center of new music in the country. They founded composer societies—such as the International Composers' Guild, the League of Composers, the Pan American Association, and the Copland-Sessions Concerts—to promote the performance of their music, and nimbly negotiated cultural boundaries, aiming for recognition in Western Europe as much as at home. This book provides a new perspective on the period and a compelling collective portrait of the figures, puncturing many longstanding myths. American composers active in New York during the 1920s are explored in relation to the “Machine Age” and American Dada; the impact of spirituality on American dissonance; the crucial, behind-the-scenes role of women as patrons and promoters of modernist music; cross-currents between jazz and concert music; the critical reception of modernist music (especially in the writings of Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfeld); and the international impulse behind neoclassicism. The book also examines the persistent biases of the time, particularly anti-Semitism, gender stereotyping, and longstanding racial attitudes.Less
New York City witnessed a burst of creativity in the 1920s. This artistic renaissance is examined from the perspective of composers of classical and modern music who, along with writers, painters, and jazz musicians, were at the heart of early modernism in America. The book also illustrates how the aesthetic attitudes and institutional structures from the 1920s left a deep imprint on the arts over the 20th century. Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still, Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, Marion Bauer, and Dane Rudhyar were the leaders of a talented new generation of American composers whose efforts made New York City the center of new music in the country. They founded composer societies—such as the International Composers' Guild, the League of Composers, the Pan American Association, and the Copland-Sessions Concerts—to promote the performance of their music, and nimbly negotiated cultural boundaries, aiming for recognition in Western Europe as much as at home. This book provides a new perspective on the period and a compelling collective portrait of the figures, puncturing many longstanding myths. American composers active in New York during the 1920s are explored in relation to the “Machine Age” and American Dada; the impact of spirituality on American dissonance; the crucial, behind-the-scenes role of women as patrons and promoters of modernist music; cross-currents between jazz and concert music; the critical reception of modernist music (especially in the writings of Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfeld); and the international impulse behind neoclassicism. The book also examines the persistent biases of the time, particularly anti-Semitism, gender stereotyping, and longstanding racial attitudes.
Carol J. Oja
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195058499
- eISBN:
- 9780199865031
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195058499.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
More than any other event, the premiere of George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique at Carnegie Hall in New York City on April 10, 1927 brought music's role in the American machine movement into focus. ...
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More than any other event, the premiere of George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique at Carnegie Hall in New York City on April 10, 1927 brought music's role in the American machine movement into focus. Antheil's concert was also unusual in challenging racial segregation and in arranging a Dada spectacle that spurned long-held assumptions of concert decorum. A siren, airplane propellers, a player piano, ten conventional pianos, six xylophones, and a battery of other percussion instruments clustered on stage. At once infamous and undervalued, Ballet Mécanique presents a vivid picture of modernism's international traffic. It drew upon the culture of Dada, with which Antheil came in contact as a teenager in the United States, and was conceived together with a film by the Spanish cubist Fernand Léger. Furthermore, Ballet Mécanique's position as an early percussion work gives it historic pride of place next to Edgard Varèse's Ionisation of 1929-1931.Less
More than any other event, the premiere of George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique at Carnegie Hall in New York City on April 10, 1927 brought music's role in the American machine movement into focus. Antheil's concert was also unusual in challenging racial segregation and in arranging a Dada spectacle that spurned long-held assumptions of concert decorum. A siren, airplane propellers, a player piano, ten conventional pianos, six xylophones, and a battery of other percussion instruments clustered on stage. At once infamous and undervalued, Ballet Mécanique presents a vivid picture of modernism's international traffic. It drew upon the culture of Dada, with which Antheil came in contact as a teenager in the United States, and was conceived together with a film by the Spanish cubist Fernand Léger. Furthermore, Ballet Mécanique's position as an early percussion work gives it historic pride of place next to Edgard Varèse's Ionisation of 1929-1931.
Jonathan P. Eburne
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381434
- eISBN:
- 9781781382387
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381434.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Acknowledging its comic genealogy and resonances of SF, this chapter explores the Surrealist roman-photo as a meditation on the ‘tribulations’ depicted in the six extant photographs that comprise the ...
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Acknowledging its comic genealogy and resonances of SF, this chapter explores the Surrealist roman-photo as a meditation on the ‘tribulations’ depicted in the six extant photographs that comprise the book ‘Les Tribulations de Monsieur Wzz…,’ which adopts its serial-panel form toward an exploration of ‘approximate life,’ a notion that pertains at once to the financial conditions of a group of young leftist writers who turned to screenwriting and translating as ways to make a living, as well as to broader questions about the technological and material conditions for modern life in general. The anthropomorphic Monsieur Wzz, a figure composed of twisted wire with no observable organs or mechanisms, accompanies human actors on a series of adventures that suggest the extent to which the technophilic machine-bodies of Dada had become assimilated into the photorealism of contemporary Paris. As in earlier avant-garde explorations of mechanical approximations of human life – whether the robots of Karel Capek’s R.U.R. or the mechanomorphs of Dada – it is the implied actions of Monsieur Wzz’ that become significant within the Surrealist comic book. At the same time, with no inner workings, Monsieur Wzz invokes the mystification its technophilic name suggests: life may be a ‘whizz,’ yet no less subject to tribulation. Thus the roman-photo comments no less directly on the explicit demands on life posed by the Surrealist movement’s discussions about communism, which become the focus of Tristan Tzara’s contemporaneous meditation on modern-day humanism in his poem ‘L’Homme Approximatif,’ an excerpt from which was published in 1929 in the main Surrealist journal of that decade La Révolution Surréaliste, around the time of the appearance of Monsieur Wzz.Less
Acknowledging its comic genealogy and resonances of SF, this chapter explores the Surrealist roman-photo as a meditation on the ‘tribulations’ depicted in the six extant photographs that comprise the book ‘Les Tribulations de Monsieur Wzz…,’ which adopts its serial-panel form toward an exploration of ‘approximate life,’ a notion that pertains at once to the financial conditions of a group of young leftist writers who turned to screenwriting and translating as ways to make a living, as well as to broader questions about the technological and material conditions for modern life in general. The anthropomorphic Monsieur Wzz, a figure composed of twisted wire with no observable organs or mechanisms, accompanies human actors on a series of adventures that suggest the extent to which the technophilic machine-bodies of Dada had become assimilated into the photorealism of contemporary Paris. As in earlier avant-garde explorations of mechanical approximations of human life – whether the robots of Karel Capek’s R.U.R. or the mechanomorphs of Dada – it is the implied actions of Monsieur Wzz’ that become significant within the Surrealist comic book. At the same time, with no inner workings, Monsieur Wzz invokes the mystification its technophilic name suggests: life may be a ‘whizz,’ yet no less subject to tribulation. Thus the roman-photo comments no less directly on the explicit demands on life posed by the Surrealist movement’s discussions about communism, which become the focus of Tristan Tzara’s contemporaneous meditation on modern-day humanism in his poem ‘L’Homme Approximatif,’ an excerpt from which was published in 1929 in the main Surrealist journal of that decade La Révolution Surréaliste, around the time of the appearance of Monsieur Wzz.
Greg Thomas
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620269
- eISBN:
- 9781789629538
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620269.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
In the work of the London-based poet Bob Cobbing, we can sense the culmination of a global shift in the definition of concrete poetry. For Cobbing, concrete poetry became a means of transcending or ...
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In the work of the London-based poet Bob Cobbing, we can sense the culmination of a global shift in the definition of concrete poetry. For Cobbing, concrete poetry became a means of transcending or evading language in order to access a space of objective communication. His work responded to a whole gamut of twentieth-century and historical forms, from ritual chant-based practices to Dada performance, to the contemporaneous sound poetry of French ‘Ultralettrists’ such as Henri Chopin, William Burroughs’s cut-ups, and auto-destructive art. The example of classical concrete poetry served more as a stylistic counterpoint than a direct influence. Cobbing’s practice was also centrally motivated by a counter-cultural belief that artistic forms which broke down boundaries between media could have more broadly, socially disruptive and revolutionary effects. The development of these sentiments is traced from Cobbing’s early production of duplicator prints during the 1940-50s to his non-semantic, performance-oriented concrete practice of the early 1970s, in which single visual poems become the basis for endless improvisatory reworking. At the close of the chapter, the non-linguistic quality of Cobbing’s work is considered as a manifestation of, and response to, broader tensions within the concrete style.Less
In the work of the London-based poet Bob Cobbing, we can sense the culmination of a global shift in the definition of concrete poetry. For Cobbing, concrete poetry became a means of transcending or evading language in order to access a space of objective communication. His work responded to a whole gamut of twentieth-century and historical forms, from ritual chant-based practices to Dada performance, to the contemporaneous sound poetry of French ‘Ultralettrists’ such as Henri Chopin, William Burroughs’s cut-ups, and auto-destructive art. The example of classical concrete poetry served more as a stylistic counterpoint than a direct influence. Cobbing’s practice was also centrally motivated by a counter-cultural belief that artistic forms which broke down boundaries between media could have more broadly, socially disruptive and revolutionary effects. The development of these sentiments is traced from Cobbing’s early production of duplicator prints during the 1940-50s to his non-semantic, performance-oriented concrete practice of the early 1970s, in which single visual poems become the basis for endless improvisatory reworking. At the close of the chapter, the non-linguistic quality of Cobbing’s work is considered as a manifestation of, and response to, broader tensions within the concrete style.
Veronika Fuechtner
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520258372
- eISBN:
- 9780520950382
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520258372.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside ...
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One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside the London Bloomsbury group, the Paris Surrealist circle, and the Viennese fin-de-siècle as a crucial chapter in the history of modernism. Taking us from World War I Berlin to the Third Reich and beyond to 1940s Palestine and 1950s New York — and to the influential work of the Frankfurt School — the book traces the network of artists and psychoanalysts that began in Germany and continued in exile. Connecting movements, forms, and themes such as Dada, multi-perspectivity, and the urban experience with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, it illuminates themes distinctive to the Berlin psychoanalytic context such as war trauma, masculinity and femininity, race and anti-Semitism, and the cultural avant-garde. In particular, it explores the lives and works of Alfred Döblin, Max Eitingon, Georg Groddeck, Karen Horney, Richard Huelsenbeck, Count Hermann von Keyserling, Ernst Simmel, and Arnold Zweig.Less
One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside the London Bloomsbury group, the Paris Surrealist circle, and the Viennese fin-de-siècle as a crucial chapter in the history of modernism. Taking us from World War I Berlin to the Third Reich and beyond to 1940s Palestine and 1950s New York — and to the influential work of the Frankfurt School — the book traces the network of artists and psychoanalysts that began in Germany and continued in exile. Connecting movements, forms, and themes such as Dada, multi-perspectivity, and the urban experience with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, it illuminates themes distinctive to the Berlin psychoanalytic context such as war trauma, masculinity and femininity, race and anti-Semitism, and the cultural avant-garde. In particular, it explores the lives and works of Alfred Döblin, Max Eitingon, Georg Groddeck, Karen Horney, Richard Huelsenbeck, Count Hermann von Keyserling, Ernst Simmel, and Arnold Zweig.
Veronika Fuechtner
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520258372
- eISBN:
- 9780520950382
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520258372.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This final chapter demonstrates a different account of exile, ending, and continuity for the Berlin Psychoanalytic. Richard Huelsenbeck's trajectory from agent of the Berlin Dada art movement to its ...
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This final chapter demonstrates a different account of exile, ending, and continuity for the Berlin Psychoanalytic. Richard Huelsenbeck's trajectory from agent of the Berlin Dada art movement to its living testimonial and from Berlin psychiatry and psychoanalysis to New York psychoanalysis and psychiatry once more, occurred at the very moment when Freudian psychoanalysis in the United States ceased to be part of the cultural avant-garde and became a psychiatric discipline. Huelsenbeck met Horney in his Berlin years, after the BPI had become an important institution of Weimar Berlin intellectual life. Horney was to become a crucial psychoanalytic interlocutor for Huelsenbeck during his exile in New York. His interest in maintaining a connection between artistic expression and psychoanalytic practice ultimately guided him to engage with both existential psychoanalysis and select aspects of psychoanalytic Marxism.Less
This final chapter demonstrates a different account of exile, ending, and continuity for the Berlin Psychoanalytic. Richard Huelsenbeck's trajectory from agent of the Berlin Dada art movement to its living testimonial and from Berlin psychiatry and psychoanalysis to New York psychoanalysis and psychiatry once more, occurred at the very moment when Freudian psychoanalysis in the United States ceased to be part of the cultural avant-garde and became a psychiatric discipline. Huelsenbeck met Horney in his Berlin years, after the BPI had become an important institution of Weimar Berlin intellectual life. Horney was to become a crucial psychoanalytic interlocutor for Huelsenbeck during his exile in New York. His interest in maintaining a connection between artistic expression and psychoanalytic practice ultimately guided him to engage with both existential psychoanalysis and select aspects of psychoanalytic Marxism.
Nell Andrew
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190057275
- eISBN:
- 9780190057312
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190057275.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
This book reenacts the simultaneous eruption of three spectacular revolutions—the development of pictorial abstraction, the first modern dance, and the birth of cinema—which together changed the ...
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This book reenacts the simultaneous eruption of three spectacular revolutions—the development of pictorial abstraction, the first modern dance, and the birth of cinema—which together changed the artistic landscape of early twentieth-century Europe and the future of modern art. Rather than seeking dancing pictures or pictures of dancing, however, this study follows the chronology of the historical avant-garde to show how dance and pictures were engaged in a kindred exploration of the limits of art and perception that required the process of abstraction. Recovering the performances, methods, and circles of aesthetic influence of avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period, this book challenges modernism’s medium-specific frameworks by demonstrating the significant role played by the arts of motion in the historical avant-garde’s development of abstraction: from the turn-of-the-century dancer Loïe Fuller, who awakened in symbolist artists the possibility of prolonged vision; to cubo-futurist and neosymbolist artists who reached pure abstraction in tandem with the radical dance theory of Valentine de Saint-Point; to Sophie Taeuber’s hybrid Dadaism between art and dance; to Akarova, a prolific choreographer whose dancing Belgian constructivist pioneers called “music architecture”; and finally to the dancing images of early cinematic abstraction from the Lumière brothers to Germaine Dulac. Each chapter reveals the emergence of abstractionas an apparatus of creation, perception, and reception deployed across artistic media toward shared modernist goals. The author argues that abstraction can be worked like a muscle, a medium through which habits of reception and perception are broken and art’s viewers are engaged by the kinesthetic sensation to move and be moved.Less
This book reenacts the simultaneous eruption of three spectacular revolutions—the development of pictorial abstraction, the first modern dance, and the birth of cinema—which together changed the artistic landscape of early twentieth-century Europe and the future of modern art. Rather than seeking dancing pictures or pictures of dancing, however, this study follows the chronology of the historical avant-garde to show how dance and pictures were engaged in a kindred exploration of the limits of art and perception that required the process of abstraction. Recovering the performances, methods, and circles of aesthetic influence of avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period, this book challenges modernism’s medium-specific frameworks by demonstrating the significant role played by the arts of motion in the historical avant-garde’s development of abstraction: from the turn-of-the-century dancer Loïe Fuller, who awakened in symbolist artists the possibility of prolonged vision; to cubo-futurist and neosymbolist artists who reached pure abstraction in tandem with the radical dance theory of Valentine de Saint-Point; to Sophie Taeuber’s hybrid Dadaism between art and dance; to Akarova, a prolific choreographer whose dancing Belgian constructivist pioneers called “music architecture”; and finally to the dancing images of early cinematic abstraction from the Lumière brothers to Germaine Dulac. Each chapter reveals the emergence of abstractionas an apparatus of creation, perception, and reception deployed across artistic media toward shared modernist goals. The author argues that abstraction can be worked like a muscle, a medium through which habits of reception and perception are broken and art’s viewers are engaged by the kinesthetic sensation to move and be moved.
Steve Redhead
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748627882
- eISBN:
- 9780748671182
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748627882.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter is an extract from Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society, with an editorial overview
This chapter is an extract from Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society, with an editorial overview
Sascha Bru
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748639250
- eISBN:
- 9780748651931
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748639250.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter discusses Richard Huelsenbeck and his pre-Dada writings, showing that his extensive knowledge of how his country was politically and practically directed partly determined his literary ...
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This chapter discusses Richard Huelsenbeck and his pre-Dada writings, showing that his extensive knowledge of how his country was politically and practically directed partly determined his literary agenda. It reveals the notion of the other politician and how this politician was gendered in Huelsenbeck's last Dada text. The chapter shows that Huelsenbeck provided an alternative to the practical organisation of democracy through his experimental literature.Less
This chapter discusses Richard Huelsenbeck and his pre-Dada writings, showing that his extensive knowledge of how his country was politically and practically directed partly determined his literary agenda. It reveals the notion of the other politician and how this politician was gendered in Huelsenbeck's last Dada text. The chapter shows that Huelsenbeck provided an alternative to the practical organisation of democracy through his experimental literature.
Dafydd Jones
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781781380208
- eISBN:
- 9781781381526
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781380208.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Dada formed in 1916 in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion – in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, at the core of Western art. ...
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Dada formed in 1916 in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion – in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, at the core of Western art. This book sets out new coordinates in revision of a formation that art history routinely exhausts by its characterisation as a ‘revolutionary movement’ of anarchic cultural dissent, in order to contest perpetuated assumptions that underlie the popular myths of Dada. Dada is difficult, and the response to Dada is not easy. What emerge from the theoretical readings developed here are profoundly rational bases for the non-sense that was pitted against a self-proclaimed civilisation, critically and implicitly to propose that what coursed in 1916 continues as vitally today. Given as art-historically identifiable along a trajectory of sustained ruptures and seizures, this book proposes not a history of Dada in Zurich but theoretical engagements with the emergencies of 1916–19, from laughter to ‘lautgedichte’, masks to manifestos, chance to chiasmata, rounding on the permanent Dada that drives against the closure of culture.Less
Dada formed in 1916 in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion – in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, at the core of Western art. This book sets out new coordinates in revision of a formation that art history routinely exhausts by its characterisation as a ‘revolutionary movement’ of anarchic cultural dissent, in order to contest perpetuated assumptions that underlie the popular myths of Dada. Dada is difficult, and the response to Dada is not easy. What emerge from the theoretical readings developed here are profoundly rational bases for the non-sense that was pitted against a self-proclaimed civilisation, critically and implicitly to propose that what coursed in 1916 continues as vitally today. Given as art-historically identifiable along a trajectory of sustained ruptures and seizures, this book proposes not a history of Dada in Zurich but theoretical engagements with the emergencies of 1916–19, from laughter to ‘lautgedichte’, masks to manifestos, chance to chiasmata, rounding on the permanent Dada that drives against the closure of culture.
Dafydd W. Jones
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781781380208
- eISBN:
- 9781781381526
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781380208.003.0009
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
The conclusion poses the ongoing and continually unfinished quality of Dada that brings the book’s positions into the present, invoking permanent revolution and a notion of ‘permanent Dada’. The ...
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The conclusion poses the ongoing and continually unfinished quality of Dada that brings the book’s positions into the present, invoking permanent revolution and a notion of ‘permanent Dada’. The revised readings developed in the book present us today with an imposing sense of Dada’s continuous, permanent, uninterrupted revision and variation within limits.Less
The conclusion poses the ongoing and continually unfinished quality of Dada that brings the book’s positions into the present, invoking permanent revolution and a notion of ‘permanent Dada’. The revised readings developed in the book present us today with an imposing sense of Dada’s continuous, permanent, uninterrupted revision and variation within limits.
Anna Dahlgren
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526126641
- eISBN:
- 9781526139016
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526126641.003.0002
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
Chapter 1 considers the mechanisms of breaks and continuities in the history of photocollage with regard to gender, genre and locations of display. Collage is commonly celebrated as a ...
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Chapter 1 considers the mechanisms of breaks and continuities in the history of photocollage with regard to gender, genre and locations of display. Collage is commonly celebrated as a twentieth-century art form invented by Dada artists in the 1910s. Yet there was already a vibrant culture of making photocollages in Victorian Britain. From an art historical perspective this can be interpreted as an expression of typical modernist amnesia. The default stance of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde was to be radically, ground-breakingly new and different from any historical precursors. However, there is, when turning to the illustrated press, also a trajectory of continuity and withholding of traditions in the history of photocollage. This chapter has two parts. The first includes a critical investigation of the writings on the history of photocollage between the 1970s and 2010s, focusing on the arguments and rationales of forgetting and retrieving those nineteenth-century forerunners. It includes examples of amnesia and recognition and revaluation. The second is a close study of a number of images that appear in Victorian albums produced between 1870 and 1900 and their contemporary counterparts in the visual culture of illustrated journals and books.Less
Chapter 1 considers the mechanisms of breaks and continuities in the history of photocollage with regard to gender, genre and locations of display. Collage is commonly celebrated as a twentieth-century art form invented by Dada artists in the 1910s. Yet there was already a vibrant culture of making photocollages in Victorian Britain. From an art historical perspective this can be interpreted as an expression of typical modernist amnesia. The default stance of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde was to be radically, ground-breakingly new and different from any historical precursors. However, there is, when turning to the illustrated press, also a trajectory of continuity and withholding of traditions in the history of photocollage. This chapter has two parts. The first includes a critical investigation of the writings on the history of photocollage between the 1970s and 2010s, focusing on the arguments and rationales of forgetting and retrieving those nineteenth-century forerunners. It includes examples of amnesia and recognition and revaluation. The second is a close study of a number of images that appear in Victorian albums produced between 1870 and 1900 and their contemporary counterparts in the visual culture of illustrated journals and books.
Leah Modigliani
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526101198
- eISBN:
- 9781526135957
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526101198.003.0004
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace’s rejection of ‘home’ and ‘homeland,’ and the primacy of the manifesto as an important polemical tool in framing one’s work, are explored in Chapter 3 in relation to Wall’s ...
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Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace’s rejection of ‘home’ and ‘homeland,’ and the primacy of the manifesto as an important polemical tool in framing one’s work, are explored in Chapter 3 in relation to Wall’s art history master’s thesis on the Berlin Dada group, which established “myth” as an anti-critical cultural practice that was broadly applied to much of the cultural activity then active in Vancouver. Vancouver’s seeming “lack of history,” the existence of back-to-the-land intentional communities living outside of the urban centre, the proliferation of other performance and media based art groups, and the influence of visiting American artist Robert Smithson’s earthworks are all examined as cultural expressions deemed a-historical or romantic by photo-conceptualists.Less
Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace’s rejection of ‘home’ and ‘homeland,’ and the primacy of the manifesto as an important polemical tool in framing one’s work, are explored in Chapter 3 in relation to Wall’s art history master’s thesis on the Berlin Dada group, which established “myth” as an anti-critical cultural practice that was broadly applied to much of the cultural activity then active in Vancouver. Vancouver’s seeming “lack of history,” the existence of back-to-the-land intentional communities living outside of the urban centre, the proliferation of other performance and media based art groups, and the influence of visiting American artist Robert Smithson’s earthworks are all examined as cultural expressions deemed a-historical or romantic by photo-conceptualists.
Eric Bulson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231179768
- eISBN:
- 9780231542326
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231179768.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Chapter Six examines how Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of the wireless telegraph in 1895, which eventually enabled the widespread use of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, challenged avant-garde ...
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Chapter Six examines how Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of the wireless telegraph in 1895, which eventually enabled the widespread use of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, challenged avant-garde movements like Futurism and Dada to develop new modes of print production and distribution that would allow them to communicate faster and farther. Instead of using a single magazine model to consolidate their movements, the Futurists and Dadaists relied on the wild proliferation of magazine titles in many different locations all at once (110 for the Futurists in Italy between 1910 and 1940; 175 for the Dadaists around the world between 1916 and 1926). In doing so, they made the magazine function like a wireless transmitter capable of sending and receiving information quickly, and, in the process, they established expansive communication networks that were not bound by the infrastructure of the postal system.Less
Chapter Six examines how Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of the wireless telegraph in 1895, which eventually enabled the widespread use of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, challenged avant-garde movements like Futurism and Dada to develop new modes of print production and distribution that would allow them to communicate faster and farther. Instead of using a single magazine model to consolidate their movements, the Futurists and Dadaists relied on the wild proliferation of magazine titles in many different locations all at once (110 for the Futurists in Italy between 1910 and 1940; 175 for the Dadaists around the world between 1916 and 1926). In doing so, they made the magazine function like a wireless transmitter capable of sending and receiving information quickly, and, in the process, they established expansive communication networks that were not bound by the infrastructure of the postal system.
John Lardas Modern
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823249800
- eISBN:
- 9780823252480
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823249800.003.0009
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter demonstrates that the concept of feedback—as a technological condition, historical ontology, and theoretical frame—challenges traditional ways of conceiving of religion and writing its ...
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This chapter demonstrates that the concept of feedback—as a technological condition, historical ontology, and theoretical frame—challenges traditional ways of conceiving of religion and writing its history. This essay dwells within 1920's America, a moment when the capacity of machines to regulate both nonhuman and human systems reached a point of critical mass and intensity. The chapter addresses responses to this changing technological atmosphere among Anglo-Protestant leaders, American Dada, as well as leaders of the infamous “Revival” of Herman Melville and his long-forgotten Moby-Dick (1851). Historically, the chapter demonstrates how Protestant strategies of self-centering, so pervasive in the early twentieth century, failed to contain the billowing nature of feedback technology. Theoretically, the chapter argues that the principle of feedback allows us to redefine religion not as something primarily ideological—that is, not exclusively about ideas, beliefs, creeds, nor simply as some lived extension or revision of such ideas, beliefs, and creeds. The chapter concludes by arguing that attention to feedback pushes us to consider that religion is not about the freedom to believe but rather about the possibilities that condition our unbelief.Less
This chapter demonstrates that the concept of feedback—as a technological condition, historical ontology, and theoretical frame—challenges traditional ways of conceiving of religion and writing its history. This essay dwells within 1920's America, a moment when the capacity of machines to regulate both nonhuman and human systems reached a point of critical mass and intensity. The chapter addresses responses to this changing technological atmosphere among Anglo-Protestant leaders, American Dada, as well as leaders of the infamous “Revival” of Herman Melville and his long-forgotten Moby-Dick (1851). Historically, the chapter demonstrates how Protestant strategies of self-centering, so pervasive in the early twentieth century, failed to contain the billowing nature of feedback technology. Theoretically, the chapter argues that the principle of feedback allows us to redefine religion not as something primarily ideological—that is, not exclusively about ideas, beliefs, creeds, nor simply as some lived extension or revision of such ideas, beliefs, and creeds. The chapter concludes by arguing that attention to feedback pushes us to consider that religion is not about the freedom to believe but rather about the possibilities that condition our unbelief.
Dalia Judovitz
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816665297
- eISBN:
- 9781452946535
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816665297.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 readymade, L.H.O.O.Q., which he created by drawing a moustache and goatee on a commercial reproduction of the Mona Lisa, precipitated a radical reevaluation of the meaning of ...
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Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 readymade, L.H.O.O.Q., which he created by drawing a moustache and goatee on a commercial reproduction of the Mona Lisa, precipitated a radical reevaluation of the meaning of art, the process of art making, and the role of the artist. This book explores the central importance of appropriation, collaboration, influence, and play in Duchamp’s work—and in Dada and Surrealist art more broadly—to show how the concept of art itself became the critical fuel and springboard for questioning art’s fundamental premises. The book argues that rather than simply negating art, Duchamp’s readymades and later works, including films and conceptual pieces, demonstrate the impossibility of defining art in the first place. Through his readymades, for instance, Duchamp explicitly critiqued the commodification of art and inaugurated a profound shift from valuing art for its visual appearance to understanding the significance of its mode of public presentation. And if Duchamp literally drew on art, he also did so figuratively, thus raising questions of creativity and artistic influence. Equally destabilizing, the book writes, was Duchamp’s idea that viewers actively participate in the creation of the art they are viewing. In addition to close readings ranging across Duchamp’s oeuvre, even his neglected works on chess, the book provides interpretations of works by other figures who affected Duchamp’s thinking and collaborated with him, notably Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí, as well as artists who later appropriated and redeployed these gestures, such as Enrico Baj, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Richard Wilson. As the book makes clear, these associations become paradigmatic of a new, collective way of thinking about artistic production that decisively overturns the myth of artistic genius.Less
Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 readymade, L.H.O.O.Q., which he created by drawing a moustache and goatee on a commercial reproduction of the Mona Lisa, precipitated a radical reevaluation of the meaning of art, the process of art making, and the role of the artist. This book explores the central importance of appropriation, collaboration, influence, and play in Duchamp’s work—and in Dada and Surrealist art more broadly—to show how the concept of art itself became the critical fuel and springboard for questioning art’s fundamental premises. The book argues that rather than simply negating art, Duchamp’s readymades and later works, including films and conceptual pieces, demonstrate the impossibility of defining art in the first place. Through his readymades, for instance, Duchamp explicitly critiqued the commodification of art and inaugurated a profound shift from valuing art for its visual appearance to understanding the significance of its mode of public presentation. And if Duchamp literally drew on art, he also did so figuratively, thus raising questions of creativity and artistic influence. Equally destabilizing, the book writes, was Duchamp’s idea that viewers actively participate in the creation of the art they are viewing. In addition to close readings ranging across Duchamp’s oeuvre, even his neglected works on chess, the book provides interpretations of works by other figures who affected Duchamp’s thinking and collaborated with him, notably Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí, as well as artists who later appropriated and redeployed these gestures, such as Enrico Baj, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Richard Wilson. As the book makes clear, these associations become paradigmatic of a new, collective way of thinking about artistic production that decisively overturns the myth of artistic genius.
Jennifer Le Zotte
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469631905
- eISBN:
- 9781469631929
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469631905.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter describes the economic, cultural, and demographic supports for the rise of flea markets during the interwar period. I introduce the duality of secondhand consumer motivations, as well as ...
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This chapter describes the economic, cultural, and demographic supports for the rise of flea markets during the interwar period. I introduce the duality of secondhand consumer motivations, as well as the contradictions of a perennial avant-garde adoration of used materials. The reframing of novelty to include the not-new was connected to, on one hand, transnational art movements tinged with political radicalism, such as Surrealism and Dada, and on the other, nostalgic sentimentalism forged by conservative patriotism, like that of automitive mogul-turned-collecter Henry Ford. While the growth of flea markets did rely on a broadening consumer market for secondhand goods, the forms and locations of the outdoor venues demonstrated the independent determination and entrepreneurialism of marginalized classes, especially immigrants and black southern migrants; xenophobia and antisemitism helped establish the locations and format of many urban flea markets. As chain grocery stores like the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (the A & P) replaced direct-to-consumer food distribution via farmer’s markets in the country and city-sanctioned public markets in urban areas, secondhand commodities filled in the gap, sustaining preexisting open-air venures.Less
This chapter describes the economic, cultural, and demographic supports for the rise of flea markets during the interwar period. I introduce the duality of secondhand consumer motivations, as well as the contradictions of a perennial avant-garde adoration of used materials. The reframing of novelty to include the not-new was connected to, on one hand, transnational art movements tinged with political radicalism, such as Surrealism and Dada, and on the other, nostalgic sentimentalism forged by conservative patriotism, like that of automitive mogul-turned-collecter Henry Ford. While the growth of flea markets did rely on a broadening consumer market for secondhand goods, the forms and locations of the outdoor venues demonstrated the independent determination and entrepreneurialism of marginalized classes, especially immigrants and black southern migrants; xenophobia and antisemitism helped establish the locations and format of many urban flea markets. As chain grocery stores like the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (the A & P) replaced direct-to-consumer food distribution via farmer’s markets in the country and city-sanctioned public markets in urban areas, secondhand commodities filled in the gap, sustaining preexisting open-air venures.
Peter Nicholls
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199545810
- eISBN:
- 9780191803475
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199545810.003.0037
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter discusses the histories of Broom and Secession, two publications that were key to the evolution of the American avant-garde and especially to its connections with European Dada and ...
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This chapter discusses the histories of Broom and Secession, two publications that were key to the evolution of the American avant-garde and especially to its connections with European Dada and Surrealism. Broom, founded in 1921, was published in Rome and Berlin, while Secession, its successor one year later, moved between Vienna, Berlin, and Florence. Broom's editor Harold Loeb and Secession's founders, Matthew Josephson and Gorham Munson, belonged to a generation of young men in the 1920s who left America in search of artistic freedom and the libertarian life style in Europe.Less
This chapter discusses the histories of Broom and Secession, two publications that were key to the evolution of the American avant-garde and especially to its connections with European Dada and Surrealism. Broom, founded in 1921, was published in Rome and Berlin, while Secession, its successor one year later, moved between Vienna, Berlin, and Florence. Broom's editor Harold Loeb and Secession's founders, Matthew Josephson and Gorham Munson, belonged to a generation of young men in the 1920s who left America in search of artistic freedom and the libertarian life style in Europe.
