Search Results

Brahmā

Arvind Sharma

in Modern Hindu Thought: An Introduction

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 ... More

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

Sound Art—New Only in Name: A Selected History of German Sound Works from the Last Century

Brett M Van Hoesen and Jean-Paul Perrotte

in Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century: An Introduction

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 ... More

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

Ballet Mécanique and International Modernist Networks

Carol J. Oja

in Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s

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. ... More

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

Berlin Dada and Psychoanalysis in New York: Richard Huelsenbeck and Charles Hulbeck Talk to Karen Horney

Veronika Fuechtner

in Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond

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 ... More

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

Re-Reading the Machine Age: The ‘Audacious Modernity’ of the Techno-Bathetic Avant-Gardes

Eric B. White

in Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic: Avant-Gardes, Technology and the Everyday

Chapter 2 explores how the proto-Dada artists of New York City proposed new ways of reading Machine Age America. Rather than invoking the power and efficiency of its machines and infrastructure, it ... More

Chapter 2 explores how the proto-Dada artists of New York City proposed new ways of reading Machine Age America. Rather than invoking the power and efficiency of its machines and infrastructure, it argues that these vanguardists emphasised their delicacy, intricacy and fragility. Sections one and two detail the divergent aesthetics of two key modernist formations: the technological sublime of Alfred Stieglitz and his ‘Young American’ literary acolytes (including Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford); and the techno-bathetic proto-Dadaists of the magazine 291, exemplified by Francis Picabia. The third section analyses the techno-bathetic practices of Marcel Duchamp in his New York Dada phase, as well as crucial responses to that work by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams. The fourth section focuses on the work of the Baroness, who interrogated the implications of socio-technics for problems of sex, gender and nationality. Finally, section five focuses on Loy’s poetry, fashion designs, inventions, and technicities; for the first time, it unveils her invention ‘verrovoile’, a translucent thermoplastic she profiled in a previously unknown 1929 newspaper article. The chapter argues that, through her poetry and inventions, Loy helped introduce the concept of the artist-engineer to transatlantic discourse in the mid-1920s.Less

Abstract Concrete: Bob Cobbing

Greg Thomas

in Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland

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 ... More

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

Limbswish: Baroness Elsa’s “Ready-to-Wear” Poem-Objects

Yasna Bozhkova

in Modernist Objects: Literature, Art, Culture

This chapter explores the interrelation between the everyday object and the art object in the work of New York Dada poet, pioneer assemblage sculptor and performance artist Baroness Elsa von ... More

This chapter explores the interrelation between the everyday object and the art object in the work of New York Dada poet, pioneer assemblage sculptor and performance artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Her intermedial poetics revolves around an unprecedented intrusion of quotidian objects and mass-produced commodities in art and poetry, while her hybrid forms radically redefine both the visual artwork and the poem and do away with the boundaries between different kinds of artistic objects. This chapter situates her artistic practice in the context of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, while making important distinctions between them. Although the Baroness’ assemblages have been eclipsed by Duchamp’s work, she came up with a strikingly original poetics that is literally “ready-to-wear,” integrating singular arrays of objects into her radical self-performances which work toward developing new genres such as a living body assemblage or a body performance poem. This chapter argues that in Baroness Elsa’s “ready-to-wear” poem-objects unravels a radical and ironic craft which inextricably welds together the consumer product and the unique artwork.Less

Mass Media Culture

Steve Redhead

in The Jean Baudrillard Reader

This chapter is an extract from Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society, with an editorial overview

The Secret Politician: Richard Huelsenbeck, Dadaism and the Redemption of Literature

Sascha Bru

in Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes: Writing in the State of Exception

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 ... More

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

Permanent Dada

Dafydd W. Jones

in Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance

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 ... More

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

Cut and paste

Anna Dahlgren

in Travelling Images: Looking across the borderlands of art, media and visual culture

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 ... More

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

Little wireless magazines

Eric Bulson

in Little Magazine, World Form

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 ... More

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

Myth and the ‘home culture concept’

Leah Modigliani

in Engendering an avant-garde: The unsettled lansdcapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism

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 ... More

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

Thinking about Melville, Religion, and Machines That Think

John Lardas Modern

in Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between

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 ... More

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

Reforming and Uniforming the Body

Ron J. Popenhagen

in Modernist Disguise: Masquerade in Modern Performance and Visual Culture

In ‘Marionettes Unmasked’, King Ubu is analysed as a masquerade and architectural construction. Jarry’s oversized body mask is distinguished from the art of the puppet and from Edward Gordon Craig’s ... More

In ‘Marionettes Unmasked’, King Ubu is analysed as a masquerade and architectural construction. Jarry’s oversized body mask is distinguished from the art of the puppet and from Edward Gordon Craig’s Übermarionette. The masquerading actor in movement is situated and theorised, with consideration of Heinrich von Kleist’s commentary, and analyses from Schumacher, States and Taxidou. The chapter also includes thoughts on the performances of Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman and Sadda Yakko. Head and body masks created by Marcel Janco and Rudolf Laban and presented at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich or at the Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland contribute to the discussion on disguise and camouflage in the era of Dada and Cubism. Masquerading and ‘Pirouettes on Eastern Fronts’ extend modernist responses to the Great War to Germany, Romania and Russia while citing the work of sculptors and other visual artists like Ernst Barlach, Constantin Brancuşi, Emmy Hennings and Käthe Kollwitz. Commedia dell’arte treatments in ‘Pierrot and Harlequin Disguised’ feature Picasso images and others created by Heinrick Campendonk, André Derain, Juan Gris and August Macke. Arnold Schönberg’s texts, images and music further complicate the role of Pierrot from Viennese point of view.Less