![]() Its reiteration, the skeptical “da-da,” intended to end the dialectical march of war-bound European thought and recover the human scale from the grand syntheses of philosophy and propaganda. ![]() “Da” means “yes” in Tzara’s native Romanian. What is Dada? “The true dadas are against DADA,” Tristan Tzara wrote in the “Dada Manifesto.” “In principle I am against manifestoes, as I am against principles.” Dada was a big no, a radical negation of art and reason, the partisan of a resolute Nothing. The only avant-garde that escaped the zombie line is Dada. The art market embraced the products of every “ism” as soon as it recognized its distinct style. This has made them convenient and marketable, while draining away their revolutionary content. The ordering by art critics of 20th-century avant-garde movements has required that they be both recognizable and dead. Jed Rasula’s history of Dada, “Destruction Was My Beatrice,” dispenses with a few old chestnuts of art history, chief among them the chronological fixation on Dada as a precursor to Surrealism, or a younger sibling of Futurism. ![]()
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