Modernism in Art: An Introduction; Dada and Surrealism

MODERNISM IN ART: AN INTRODUCTIONDaDA & ?@$ SuRREAl:sm

Questions from last week

Kasimir Malevich (1915) Black Square and Red Square

Theo Van Doesburg (1917) An object aesthetically tranfigured, right, Cow

Nelly Van Moorsel as I K Bonset [Doesburg’s Dada Personna]

Questions from last week

Paul Hindemith in 1923, composer of music of Triadic Ballet

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

Last week, activity

1. Think of ideas for your own Utopia. What would it be like? What role would artists have in designing this Utopia and what might it look like?

2. Create an Ism to reflect some of your ideas. What would your manifesto state?

MODERNISM IN ART: AN INTRODUCTIONDaDA & ?@$ SuRREAl:sm

Subversive and irreverent, Dada, more than any other movement, has shaken society's notions of art and cultural production. It was fiercely anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical, Dada questioned the myth of originality, of the artist as genius suggesting instead that everybody should be an artist and that almost anything could be art.

Surrealism, Constructivism, Lettrism, Situationism, Fluxus, Pop and OpArt, Conceptual Art and Minimalism: most twentieth-century art movements after 1923 have roots to Dada. As we have seen over the past few weeks, a succession of avant-garde movements, for Impressionism and its aesthetic ideas, accelerated at the beginning of the 20th century and culminated in the collapse of the absolute principles of Art, discrediting the academies, and ultimately questioning the usefulness and legitimacy of Art itself. All these were elements that fed Dada’s negation.

DaDA & ?@$ SuRREAl:sm

Give you an insight in to the reasons motivating anti-art attitudes, irrationality and the assault on culture and communication integral to Dada and Surrealism.

Introduce the key artists and ideas of Dada and Surrealism.

Allow you to explore the possibilities for chance and nonsense within creative practices.

This lecture should:

Zurich, 1915 -

Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings

Cabaret Voltaire

Marcel Janco (1919) Mask

Hans Arp (1916)Collage Made According to the Laws of Chance

Sophie Taeuber (1918)Dada Head (portrait of Hans Arp)

Anti-Art used shock, provocation, and irrationality as a weapon

against the Establishment it asked the question: what kinds of culture would

condone the industrialized murder of WWI it mocked the ‘seriousness’ and sanctity of traditional art it believed that traditional art had been purged and that

this new movement was going to start culture from scratch

it was created in a ‘child-like’ manner; it believed that the value of art was located more in the act of making than in the work produced

Manifestos“What we are celebrating is at once a buffoonery and a requiem mass [...]”

“The Dadaist fights against the death-throes and death-drunkeness of his time. Averse to every clever reticence, he cultivates the curiosity of one who experiences delight even in the most questionable forms of insubordination. He knows that this world of systems has gone to pieces, and that the age which demanded cash has organized a bargain a bargain sale of godless philosophies. Where conscience begins for the market-booth owners, mild laughter and mild kindness begin for the Dadaist.”

Hugo Ball (1916) Dada Fragments

Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963)

“Dada means nothing”

“There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us [...] to the opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think that by a minute refinement of logic he had demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of these opinions? Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease.”

“I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order [...] I am against systems, the most acceptable system ... Is to have none.”

Dada Manifesto 1918

Dada: sought to liberate art from authority and

institutions, definitions and philosophies vehemently opposing conformity, banality

and logic encompassed literature, music, drama,

photography, and other mediums was a sweeping force that disturbed not

only the art world but also the world at large

New York

Marcel Duchamp (1912) Nude Decending a Staircase

Francis Picabia (1915)Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz

Marcel Duchamp (1915-23) The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

Marcel Duchamp (1914) Bottle RackMarcel Duchamp (1913) Bicycle Wheel

Marcel Duchamp (1917)Fountain

Man Ray (1919)Admiration of the Orchestrelle for the Cinematograph

Berlin Dada

George Grosz, left: (1920) The Engineer Heartfeld. Right: (1917-18) Homage to Oskar Panizza

Huelsenbeck’s Manifesto“The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousand fold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its libs after yesterdays crash. The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life...”

“The word Dada symbolizes the most primitive relation to the reality of the envirnonment; with Dadaism a new reality comes into its own. Life appears as a simultaneous muddle of noises, colours and spiritual rhythums, which is taken unmodified into Dadaist art...”

Huelsenbeck 1918

Raoul Hausmann (1919-20) The Art Critic

Hannah Hoch (1919) Cut with the Knife

“The Dadaists response to the horrors of war was a profound disillusionment with the patriotism, religion, modern education, and technology that brought about and justified the war” (Stokes, p. 117).

Hanover

Kurt Schwitters (1919) Construction for Noble Ladies and Merzbaum, begun in 1923, destroyed in 1943

Cologne

Max Ernst (1921) Celebes

Paris

Francis Picabia (1921) The Cacodylic Eye

Literature Group

Andre Breton (1896- 1966)

Game - The Exquisite Corpse

Andre Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Yves Tanguy (1938) Cadavre Exquis

Breton’s Manifestos

“Surrealism: Psychic automism in its pure state by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” Manifesto, 1924

“...it was then, and still is today, a question of testing by any and all means, and of demonstrating at any price, the meretricious natures of the old antinomies hypocritically intended to prevent any unusual ferment on the part of man [...] Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination [...] The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” Second Manifesto, 1930

Andre Masson (1925) Furious Suns

Andre Masson (1926) Battle of Fishes

Surrealism

Joan Miro (1938) A Star Caresses the Breast of a Negress (Painting Poem)

Man Ray: above, (1929) The Primacy of Matter over Thought, right, (1922) Rayograph

(1856- 1959)

The information psychoanalysis aims to retrieve from a patient is

very intimate. For this information concerns what is most intimate in his mental life, everything that, as a socially independent person, he must conceal from other people, and, beyond that, everything that, as a homogenous personality, he

will not admit to himself.

Two of the hypotheses of

psychoanalysis are an insult to the entire

world and have earned its dislike.

One of them offends against an intellectual prejudice, the other against an aesthetic

and moral one.

First... Psychoanalysis declares that mental processes are in themselves unconscious and that all of all mental life it is only

certain individual acts and portions that are conscious.

In saying this psychoanalysis has from the start frivolously forfeited the sympathy of every friend of sober scientific

thought.

Second ... Is an assertion that instinctual impulses which can only be described as

sexual ... Play an extremely large and never hitherto appreciated part in the

causation of nervous and mental diseases. It asserts

further that these same sexual impulses also make

contributions that must not be underestimated to the highest

cultural, artistic and social creations of the human spirit.

Yves Tanguy (1927) Extinction of Useless Lights

Rene Margritte (1928) The Reckless Sleeper

Salvador Dali (1936) Autumnal Cannibalism

Lindsay Seers (2011) It has to be this way2, at the BalticRosemarie Trockel , Talbot Rice Gallery

References Ades, Dawn and Simon Baker (eds.) (2006) Undercover Surrealism. London, Hayward

Gallery Publishing. Alexandrian, Sarane (2001 [1970]) Surrealist Art. London, Thames & Hudson. Ball, Hugo (2001 [1916]) Dada Fragments. In Harrison, Charles and Paul Wood (eds.)

(2003) Art in Theory: 1900 – 2000. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. Bradley, Fiona (1997) Surrealism. London, Tate. Breton, André (2000) Manifestos of Surrealism. United States, The University of

Michigon Press. Dickerman, Leah (ed.) (2005) The Dada Seminars. Washington, National Gallery of Art. Elliot, Patrick (2010) Another World: Dali, Margritte, Miro and the Surrealists. Belgium,

Trustees of National Galleries of Scotland. Freud, Sigmund (1986) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Middlesex, Penguin

Books. Gale, Matthew (1997) Dada & Surrealism. London, Phaidon Press Limited. Huelsenbeck, Richard (2003 [1918]) First German Dada Manifesto. In Harrison, Charles

and Paul Wood (eds.) (2003) Art in Theory: 1900 – 2000. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. Richter, Hans (2004 [1965]) Dada: Art and Anti-Art. London, Thames & Hudson. Stokes, Charlotte and Stephen C. Foster (eds.) (1997) The History of Dada: Dada

Cologne Hanover. Gale Group.