Crisis And The Arts Dada The Coordinates Of Cultural Politics

During World War I, an international group of young artists and writers fled to Zurich, in neutral Switzerland. In reaction to the horror of the war and the onslaught of new technology, as well as to the suffocating aesthetic of futurism and cubism, these artists began to create a new kind of art - art that was antilogical, anti-aesthetic, anarchistic, confrontional, shocking. Performing and exhibiting at the famous Cafe Voltaire, these artists called the new art "Dada." Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural of Cultural Politics, the first in the eight-volume series Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, provides parameters for the historical and sociological context of Dada. In a collection of essays from internationally respected scholars, Dada's manifestations in visual arts, theater, the media, and literature, as well as the correspondence between Dadas and their various manifestos, are explored to present a nuanced examination of the movement. In addition, the volume addresses the relevancy of an extensive study of Dada to present-day concerns.

Launches an eight-volume series on the rebellious art form created during World War I by artists and writers in Zurich reacting to the horror of war, the onslaught of new technology, and the stifling aesthetics of futurism and cubism. In 11 essays, provides parameters for the historical and sociological context of the movement; its manifestation in visual arts, theater, the media, and literature; the correspondence between the actual works and the various manifestos; and the relevance of studying the phenomenon to present concerns. Illustrated in black and white. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

How Dada is to break its cultural accommodation and containment today necessitates thinking the historical instances through revised application of critical and theoretical models. The volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde moves precisely by this motive, bringing together writings which insist upon the continuity of the early twentieth-century moment now at the start of the twenty-first. Engaging the complex and contradictory nature of Dada strategies, instanced in the linguistic gaming and performativity of the movement’s initial formation, and subsequently isolating the specific from the general with essays focusing on Ball, Tzara, Serner, Hausmann, Dix, Heartfield, Schwitters, Baader, Cravan and the exemplary Duchamp, the political philosophy of the avant-garde is brought to bear upon our own contemporary struggle through critical theory to comprehend the cultural usefulness, relevance, validity and effective (or otherwise) oppositionality of Dada’s infamous anti-stance. The volume is presented in sections that progressively point towards the expanding complexity of the contemporary engagement with Dada, as what is often exhaustive historical data is forced to rethink, realign and reconfigure itself in response to the analytical rigour and exercise of later twentieth-century animal anarchic thought, the testing and cultural placement of thoughts upon the virtual, and the eventual implications for the once blissfully unproblematic idea of expression. From the opening, provocative proposition that historically Dada may have been the falsest of all false paths, the volume rounds to dispute such condemnation as demarcation continues not only of Dada’s embeddedness in western culture, but more precisely of the location of Dada culture. Ten critical essays – by Cornelius Partsch, John Wall, T. J. Demos, Anna Schaffner, Martin I. Gaughan, Curt Germundson, Stephen C. Foster, Dafydd Jones, Joel Freeman and David Cunningham – are supplemented by the critical bibliography prepared by Timothy Shipe, which documents the past decade of Dada scholarship, and in so doing provides a valuable resource for all those engaged in Dada studies today.

Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada sheds new light on Paris Dada's role in developing the anarchist and individualist philosophies that helped shape the cultural dialogue in France following the First World War. Drawing on such surviving documentation as correspondence, criticism, periodicals, pamphlets, and manifestoes, this book argues that, contrary to received wisdom, Dada was driven by a vision of social change through radical cultural upheaval. The first book-length study to interrogate the Paris Dadaists' complex and often contested position in the postwar groundswell of anarcho-individualism, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada offers an unprecedented analysis of Paris Dada literature and art in relation to anarchism, and also revives a variety of little known anarcho-individualist texts and periodicals. In doing so, it reveals the general ideological diversity of the postwar French avant-garde and identifies its anarchist concerns; in addition, it challenges the accepted paradigm that postwar cultural politics were monolithically nationalist. By positioning Paris Dada in its anarchist context, this volume addresses a long-ignored lacuna in Dada scholarship and, more broadly, takes its place alongside the numerous studies that over the past two decades have problematized the politics of modern art, literature, and culture.

Any understanding of Dada requires a serious consideration of its reception, most discernable through the press. To the degree that Dada entered and engaged the dominant cultural discourse of the period and amounted to something more significant than the mere assertion of its agendas, Dada was required to, and made an enormous effort to, engage its potential public. Dada also fully understood that there is no such thing as a one-sided discourse and courted the attention and response of majority culture. Volume nine goes far in describing and measuring the strategies and effectiveness of Dada's confrontation of establishment society. Enormous evidence is brought to detailing and defining the positions of those responsible for Dada's critique and the reactions of both Dada's advocates and enemies. As one of the most exhaustive studies of reception to date, this volume helps to fill a serious gap in the literature of cultural history.