ENCODING ART WITH FRAGMENTS OF TIME

Deliberately difficult, intentionally irritating, Dada exploded into the world as a reaction to the horrors of modernity within war-torn Europe, and is often written off as nihilistic, destructive, or mad. Despite its frequent association with negativity, Dada's unrivalled energy and complex relationship to mindsets continue to fascinate, demonstrable by the movement's enduring position as a subject of academic research, and its constant presence at exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide.

one-day symposium considering the legacies of Dada in the centenary year exposed some of the current trends in Dada research. Organised jointly by the University of Glasgow and Royal Holloway, University of London, it included contributions from established researchers in the field of Dada studies and from a new wave of academics and PhD students who are working across the spectrum of Dada-related studies. The symposium offered a plethora of new research as well as extensions and strengthening of ongoing research, and presentations of a mix of inter-disciplinary perspectives. I myself was scheduled to give the first paper, entitled 'Anti-Dada, Anti-Art, Anti-Legacy: Kurt Schwitters and Anna Oppermann', in which I explored the notion that Schwitters was not a legacy of Dada. Instead, I suggested that he was an anti-legacy of the Dada movement(s) and that despite critical pigeonholing, the German conceptual artist Anna Oppermann (1940-93) was an anti-legacy of Schwitters. It was my assertion that while many critics have compared Opper-mann's Ensembles to the aesthetics and installatory quality of the Merzbau, I have instead suggested that Oppermann's compositions were more in line with the collecting and collating of Schwitters' collages. I used Mira Schor's argument for the need of a matrilineage in favour of a patrilineage, and instead suggested that we need neither, but rather a more fluid understanding of art without gender, and thus an alternative to the word legacy. Legacy is bound by its connotations of heritage and inheritance, and therefore is directly linked with notions of patriarchy. I considered the feminist replacement of the use of seminal with germinal to discuss the inaugu-al or most important works of women artists and writers. However, I maintained that legacy does have a direct opposite which expresses the same sentiment in the same way that seminal and germinal do. This paper therefore represented an attempt to think through some of the linguistic challenges facing those art historical narratives which tend to focus on the historical and the visual and ignore the textual/linguistic aspects, particularly in the case of Oppermann and Schwitters, whose artworks are very much engaged with the textual as well as the visual. The second paper was given by another PhD student, Josh Bowker (Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh). His paper, 'Overcoming and Modernity: Nietzschean Legacies in Dada' discussed some of the Nietzschean qualities inherent in Dadaistic rituality and artists' positions as simultaneous creators and destroyers. Bowker charted the philosophical writings of Nietzsche and plotted correlations with Expressionist, Futurist and Dadaistic ideologies, considering the notions of morality, spirituality, and art as they relate to Dada's deployment, circumvention and appropriation of religion and ritual as subversive tools (particularly in the case of Hugo Ball). He then considered the notions of morality. He went on to discuss the ideas of decadence, the Neue Mensch, the Übermensch, and the journal Neue Jugend, and concluded that it was easy to misappropriate Nietzschean morality and, as he proposed, for it to be misunderstood as immorality. Therefore the Dadaists were misunderstood as immoral artists when in fact they were reacting to the immorality suffered by their fellow countrymen mid/post-World War I. Bowker's paper ruminated on some of the current discussions about morality and immorality and the dysfunct-ion and breakdown of societal norms that the United Kingdom, mainland Europe and the United States are all experiencing, with rapid rises of conservative and right-wing sympathisers to political power. Like the Dadaists who reacted to fascism in their own countries and abroad, we find ourselves calling for a similar call to arms from artists; to heed the warnings of our predecessors in the face of angry white men (and women) stomping their feet and proclaiming

Nottingham French Studies (62: 2), 2023

In Kathryn Brown and Erica O'Neill (eds), Attention! Paris Dada, special issue of Nottingham French Studies, 62: 2 (July 2023), 210-226. Pre-publication PDF. There is an obvious premier degré contradiction in commemorating Dada centenaries. The movement was famously against permanence and yet Dada has become enshrined in popular culture, exhibitions, catalogues, and indeed academic research. To paraphrase a Dada slogan, perhaps the true Dada researcher should be against research into Dada. But let us not be too fetishistic or precious about Dada. To borrow from Delia Ungureanu’s magisterial comparative study of surrealism, where is Dada in the 21st-century, and what does it mean to understand that question not so much in terms of conscious practice (such as contemporary performance art) but in relation to the pan-human, pan-historical phenomena cherished by Dadaists and which can be forgotten in the rush to eulogise Dada nihilism, such as ethics and peace, radical humanism, socio-political engagement, and the question of how to live well with oneself and with others? The world is on fire, and Dada is both dead and all around us. Il y a une contradiction de premier degré dans l’acte de commémorer le(s) centenaire(s) de Dada. Le mouvement était connu pour son opposition à la permanence, mais malgré cela, Dada a été consacré dans la culture populaire, les expositions, catalogues, sans oublier la recherche académique. Pour paraphraser un slogan Dada, peut-être le vrai chercheur Dada devrait etre contre la recherche sur Dada. Mais ne soyons pas trop fétishistes ou intransigeants envers le souvenir de Dada. Pour emprunter l’étude comparative magistrale de Delia Ungureanu sur le surréalisme, où est Dada au 21ème siècle ? D’ailleurs, qu’est-ce que cela signifie que de comprendre cette question, pas tant comme pratique consciente (tel que l’art performatif contemporain), mais plutôt en relation avec les phénomènes inter-humains, inter-historiques adorés des dadaistes – et qui risquent d’étre facilement oubliés dans notre ruée à faire l’éloge du nihilisme Dada – tels que l’étique et la paix, l’humanisme radical, l’engagement socio-politique, et la question de savoir comment vivre bien avec soit-même et avec les autres ? Le monde est en feu, et Dada est à la fois défunt et tout autour de nous.

2016

Dada & The Revolution (dir. Paola Bozzi), Milan, Ledizioni, 2021

This article is an inquiry into Richard Huelsenbeck’s definition of Dadaism as "love of movement". I consider poetic texts, novels, manifestos and leaflets written by a panel of Dadaists from Zurich, Paris, and Berlin, to analyze how Dada invented—or more precisely, intensified—a specific kind of subjectivity, inherently linked to the question of “movement”. Second, I show that this particular subjectivity is correlated with contemporary revolutionary politics. Far from being a nihilistic and frivolous movement, Dadaist’ critical teachings prefigure Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of form-of-life and inoperativity. I start by analyzing the Dadaist conception of life and subjectivity; I thus historicize this conception and emphasize Dadaism’s historical originality; in the last part, I link these findings to Agamben’s political theory. I conclude by reconsidering the link between Dadaism and politics: the article suggests that the Dadaists were all engaged in revolutionary politics, not just the members of the Berlin group.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2023

Dada’s Subject and Structure argues that Dadaist praxis was far more theoretically incisive than previous scholarship has indicated. The book combines theoretical frameworks surrounding ideological subject formation with critical media and genre histories in order to more closely read Dadaist techniques (e.g. montage, irony, nonsense, etc.) across multiple works. These readings reveal both Dada’s preternatural focus on the discursive aspects of subject formation—linguistic sign, literary manifesto, photographic image, commodity form/aesthetics, which comprise the project’s chapters—and on Dada’s performative sabotage and subversion of them. In addition to highlighting commonalities between Dadaist works, artists, and chapters previously imagined disparate, the book shows how Dada simultaneously prefigured structuralist theories of subject formation and pre-performed post-structuralist critiques of those theories.

2016

Elizabeth Legge, "Nothing, Ventured," Iin A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, pp. 89–109). , 2016

Paris Dada is liable to be seen as an interregnum between defined movements-Cubism and Surrealism-or as an avant-garde piracy of self-excluding artists and writers, sailing under a flag of convenience. Given the particular situation of France after World War I, Tzara's call for "demoralization," a technique of wartime propaganda to enfeeble resistance, seemed to constitute a fair manner of proceeding in the cultural circumstances. Littérature was established with Tzara's demoralization in mind, wrote Breton, because it "has nothing to do with art". This was skeptical exhaustion with political and cultural systems, given a war for which any explanation of the causes, tactics, or outcomes-a devalued franc, polarizing politics, waves of strikes, faltering allies, and uncertainties about reparations and borders-seemed occluded and inadequate. Paris Dada took up Tzara's Nietzschean call "to sweep, to clean": no more painters, writers, musicians, sculptors, religions, republicans, royalists, imperialists, anarchists, socialists, Bolsheviks, politicians, proletarians, democrats, armies, police, nations; "no more of these idiocies, no more, no more, no more, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING." Dada insistence that "dada" was and meant nothing made it an infinitely substitutable term for any abstractions (patriotism, fidelity, and truth) deployed for political, moral, and administrative purposes.