The Joy of Anti-Art: Subversion through Humour in Dada

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.

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.

2006

Note on Quotations and Translations 8 Firstly, I would like to pay tribute to, and remember, Professor Dietrich Scheunemann, my principal supervisor from October 2002 until his retirement in September 2004, and second supervisor until his death in June 2005. Without him, I would not have embarked on a PhD. I would also like to thank Professor Sarah Colvin, my supervisor from October 2004, who encouraged me to follow up my ideas, to develop my arguments, and above all to write more boldly. The staff at the following libraries and museums have been consistently helpful: The

This is a paper about the transgression of the boundary between art and everyday space. It traces the development of a practical and theoretical critique of this divide from Dada and surrealism to situationism and postmodernism, whilst showing how these movements have themselves often perpetuated a specialized notion of cultural production. The ultimate failure of these movements, with the exception of situationism, to develop a coherent and effective challenge to the dualism art—everyday space is related to their reliance upon the artistic ideologies of antiart, indifference, and spontaneism.

Abstract: This paper examines, from the interdisciplinary perspective of cultural analysis, the ways in which several artists belonging to the so-called “Cluj School,” such as Adrian Ghenie, Victor Man and Mircea Cantor, share a common need for recontextualizing the “aura” of Dada in their paintings, performances and installations. An apocalyptical reappraisal of the Dada movement is to be found in Ghenie’s famous paintings Dada Is Dead and Duchamp’s Funeral I and II, as well as in his immersive installation The Dada Room, while some of Victor Man’s paintings and installations and Mircea Cantor’s film Deeparture revive the Neo-Dada artistic subversion of Fluxus and Joseph Beuys’s ironic pedagogical performances. Following a conceptual scheme that blends art theory, cultural criticism and anthropology, I resort to Bruno Latour’s notion of “composition” and to his method of “compositionism,” conceived as an alternative to critique, in order analyze how the “Cluj School” approaches the Avant-garde’s paradoxical legacy. Keywords: archive, Dada, Fluxus, Bruno Latour, composition, Adrian Ghenie, Victor Man, Mircea Cantor

2014

Humour is a pleasurable and productive strategy for feminist artists; however, its role within feminist practice has received limited scholarly attention in the last two decades. The most recent study on the role of humour in feminist art is Jo Anna Isaak’s book Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (1996, Routledge), which frames feminist subversive laughter through the carnivalesque. Arguing that Isaak’s theory does not account for subsequent paradigm shifts in practice and ideology, this thesis aims to develop a conceptual framework that can explicate the forms and effects of humour currently emerging in contemporary feminist art. To develop this conceptual framework I draw upon art theorist Amelia Jones’ concept of ‘parafeminism,’ which suggests that contemporary feminist art is engaging in a revision of second wave methodologies: assessing and building upon earlier strategies by rejecting coalitional identity politics and reworking feminist visual politics of ‘the gaze.’ I interpret Jones’ theory by returning to Linda Hutcheon’s notion of parody, in order to frame three significant shifts in feminist practice: intimate corporeal preoccupations, phallocentric modes of spectatorship, and historical re-appropriation. To give focus to the influence of these changes in artists’ practice over the last three decades, I apply my framework of parafeminist parody to two major Euro-American case studies: an early Pipilotti Rist video, entitled Pickelporno (1992), and a more recent example, Mika Rottenberg’s video installation Mary’s Cherries (2004), as well as to a selection of works that traverse both video and performative modes of practice by three Australian artists (and collectives): Brown Council, Catherine Bell and the Hotham Street Ladies. Drawing upon writings from Freud, affect theory and corporeal semiotics, I extend Jones’ theory to this wider range of artworks thereby identifying ‘parafeminism’ as a greater phenomenon than previously proposed. To summarise, I aim to identify and develop a theoretical approach that will enable deeper understanding of humorous elements in contemporary feminist art.

Modernism/modernity (Johns Hopkins University Press), 2023

Nordlit, 2007

The Rodopi series Avant-Garde Critical Studies not only publishes books on neo-avant-garde but also studies of diverse aspects of the avant-garde in general. This new volume (no. 18), for example, is entirely dedicated to one of the most far-reaching avant-gardes in history, namely Dada. Although one cannot on the whole claim that a new book on Dada fills a gap, given that an enormous amount of research has been published over the years, nevertheless every contributionpresenting a new and clear view on the subject is welcome. In this book the focus is on the contemporary (theoretical) engagement with Dada, in an effort to show the actuality of the movement itself. Given the subtitle "Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde", however, it becomes relevant to note the problem inherent in such a formulation: a book on Dada contains critical texts on one avant-garde, but not on the avant-garde, a fact that is all the more conspicuous since David Cunningham points out in the concludin...

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.