Nell Andrew
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190057275
- eISBN:
- 9780190057312
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190057275.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
Among the founding members of Zurich Dada, Sophie Taeuber created patterned textiles, pure painterly abstraction, anthropomorphic sculpture, intimate dolls, collaborative collages, and live dance ...
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Among the founding members of Zurich Dada, Sophie Taeuber created patterned textiles, pure painterly abstraction, anthropomorphic sculpture, intimate dolls, collaborative collages, and live dance performances, but she is predominantly discussed as a designer and applied artist without political motivations. Using a photo of Taeuber in a dancer’s pose and costumed in a Dada body mask, this chapter registers her dance training and performances as a potent hybrid of art and movement that bridged the polarized concerns about art making during wartime. Taeuber’s danced intervention amid her artist colleagues puts Dada’s self-estrangement and alienation into contact with visceral self-recognition and agency. By working across a diversity of media, Taeuber’s process harnesses adaptive, circulating, collaborative, unauthored, and private modes of making, which highlight and bridge the gulf between the aesthetic and the political, or in avant-garde terms, between art and life.Less
Among the founding members of Zurich Dada, Sophie Taeuber created patterned textiles, pure painterly abstraction, anthropomorphic sculpture, intimate dolls, collaborative collages, and live dance performances, but she is predominantly discussed as a designer and applied artist without political motivations. Using a photo of Taeuber in a dancer’s pose and costumed in a Dada body mask, this chapter registers her dance training and performances as a potent hybrid of art and movement that bridged the polarized concerns about art making during wartime. Taeuber’s danced intervention amid her artist colleagues puts Dada’s self-estrangement and alienation into contact with visceral self-recognition and agency. By working across a diversity of media, Taeuber’s process harnesses adaptive, circulating, collaborative, unauthored, and private modes of making, which highlight and bridge the gulf between the aesthetic and the political, or in avant-garde terms, between art and life.
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/9781781380208.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
As an artistic movement, Zurich Dada offers very little visual residue. What remains is uneven and inconsistent but is wholly redeemed by the remarkable works that Hans Arp, and then Sophie Taeuber, ...
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As an artistic movement, Zurich Dada offers very little visual residue. What remains is uneven and inconsistent but is wholly redeemed by the remarkable works that Hans Arp, and then Sophie Taeuber, produced during this phase. In this chapter, Arp’s so-called ‘chance’ collages are documented in terms of visual strategies of cultural resistance, read through Deleuzian schizoanalysis as correlates for creation itself, and detouring to Herman Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby’, along with Deleuze’s readings of a passive yet destructive resistance thoroughly revised in their historical context.Less
As an artistic movement, Zurich Dada offers very little visual residue. What remains is uneven and inconsistent but is wholly redeemed by the remarkable works that Hans Arp, and then Sophie Taeuber, produced during this phase. In this chapter, Arp’s so-called ‘chance’ collages are documented in terms of visual strategies of cultural resistance, read through Deleuzian schizoanalysis as correlates for creation itself, and detouring to Herman Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby’, along with Deleuze’s readings of a passive yet destructive resistance thoroughly revised in their historical context.
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.
