NEO-DADA

The term Neo-Dada was applied to the works of artists such

as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Allan Kaprow who
initiated a radical shift in the focus of modern art during the 1950s.
Neo-Dada artists are known for their usage of mass media and
found objects, as well as a penchant for performance. These artists
rebelled against the emotionally charged paintings of the Abstract
Expressionists that dominated the art world in the 1950s. By
introducing mundane subject and emphasizing performance, the
Neo-Dada artists ushered in the radical changes modern art
underwent during the 1960s and paved the way for Pop
art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism.
Salient Features:

• Unlike the militant declarations of Dada artists, Neo-Dada artists

provoked through covert strategies more suitable to the cold
war climate. Neo-Dada simultaneously mocked and
celebrated consumer culture, united opposing conventions of
abstraction and realism, and disregarded boundaries between
media through experimentation with assemblage,
performance, and other hybrid fusions.
• Neo-Dada artists often encouraged viewers to look beyond
traditional aesthetic standards and interpret meaning through
a process of critical thinking generated by contradictions,
absurd juxtapositions, coded narratives, and other mixed
signals, rather than the internal emotions the action painters
referenced in their abstract works.
• Neo-Dada artists adhered to Marcel Duchamp's premise that
works of art are intermediaries in a process that the artist begins

1
 and the viewer completes. In the historical context, Neo-Dada
revived this long dormant theoretical framework and provided
the foundation for many of the contemporary art movements
that followed.
• Encouraging the shift toward the viewer as part of the artwork,
many Neo-Dada artists adhered to a notion that the viewer's
interpretation of a work - not the artist's intent - determined its
meaning. This was emphasized through the use of chance,
found objects, and mass media, which helped eliminate the
artist's predetermined significance and instead placed the
focus on the viewer's reading of the piece.

BEGINNINGS OF NEO-DADA

The Neo-Dada movement was initiated by the composer John

Cage, artist Robert Rauschenberg, and the dancer and
choreographer Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College in
North Carolina in 1952. At the school, Cage lectured about
embracing aleatory processes - the role of chance - and Eastern
philosophies like Zen Buddhism in the creation of art and in daily life.
A student in Cage's classes, Rauschenberg began working in less-
traditional artistic processes, like using an automobile tire to create a
print or painting a canvas pure white so that it would reflect its
surroundings as the main subject matter. In the same context,
Cunningham focused on synthesizing aspects of modern dance and
classical ballet with his own natural ability and "animalistic" grace,
aligning dance with performance art. While many individual works
and moments contributed to the definition of the Neo-Dada
aesthetic, Cage's "The Event," or Theatre Piece No. 1 (1952),
performed at Black Mountain College, summarized the movement's
2
interests in the emphasis on chance, individuality, interaction with
the audience, and multiple media all combined into a singular work.
After moving to New York City, Rauschenberg and Johns were
neighbors and often discussed their ideas about artistic practice in
their studios, further refining the aesthetic, particularly the idea that
the artist's intent should not be legible or present in the final work.

The label Neo-Dada was first used in 1957 by art critic Robert
Rosenblum and then the following year by Thomas B. Hess, director
of ARTnews magazine. The critic and art historian Barbara
Rose defined Neo-Dada as a broader movement in 1962, by which
time the East Coast branch of the movement was largely considered
to be over and Pop art began to captivate New York.

The Dada Tradition

Neo-Dada as a movement shares a great number of similarities with

the earlier Dada movement in Europe, but as the "neo" implies, the
artists reinterpreted the goals of the original movement in the
context of mid-20th-century America. The original Dada artists - in
Berlin, Zurich, Cologne, and Paris - mounted an assault on bourgeois
culture in response to the horrific destruction of an entire generation
of men during World War I. They were unified less by a specific style
than by their adoption of particular strategies in which art became a
tactic against contemporary culture. The Neo-Dada artists adopted
similar strategies in their art, namely collage, performance, and the
incorporation of chance. However, the artists of the Neo-Dada
movement viewed their varied methods and mediums as a way to
expand the boundaries of fine art, while the original Dadaists sought
to deconstruct modern society and culture through their art.

Around this time, Marcel Duchamp lived in New York, and his art and
his ideas were highly respected. Commenting on the anti-art nature
3
of his work Duchamp wrote in a letter to the artist Hans Richter in
1962: "When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage
aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and
found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the
urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for
their aesthetic beauty." This statement is a reminder that sometimes
art sets out with certain goals, which are, with the passage of time,
often redefined.

Beyond The Shadow of Abstract Expressionism

In the early 1950s, Abstract Expressionism held the mantle of the

American avant-garde, and the collective of artists associated with
it, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark
Rothko, and others, continued to capture the art world's fascination
with their exercises in abstraction and their often testosterone-fueled
lifestyles of drinking and womanizing. By the time the artists that
came to be associated with Neo-Dada began working, Abstract
Expressionism had been the primary American modern style of
painting for over a decade. In 1949, the Abstract Expressionist
movement was so ubiquitous within American culture that Pollock
graced the pages of Life magazine. By the 1950s, second and third
generations of Abstract Expressionists created works in a style that
successfully penetrated all aspects of art education and production
in America. When Rauschenberg erased the lines drawn by an
Abstract Expressionist master in Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953),
he symbolized the desire of all Neo-Dada artists to obliterate the
psychological trappings embedded in the formalist aesthetics of the
preceding style.

4
NEO-DADA: CONCEPTS, STYLES, AND
TRENDS

Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, John Cage, Merce

Cunningham, and Allan Kaprow were all crucial to the Neo-Dada
aesthetic. All of these artists lived and worked in New York City,
exhibiting and performing in the same galleries and alternative
venues, yet each developed an individual style that drew on the
objects and acts of everyday life to create art. In addition to the
New York City artists, there also were many artists, like Edward
Kienholz, that worked in California in what came to be known as a
"Funk" art style, which also utilized found objects as art, often in order
to critique society.

Robert Rauschenberg and Combines

Soon after the Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Rauschenberg

created a new form of assemblage that bridged multiple mediums.
The "Combine" or "combine painting" was conceived by
Rauschenberg in 1954 and incorporated found objects, paint, print,
and sculpture into a multimedia object that transcended traditional
divisions between mediums. While some Dada and Surrealist
predecessors such as Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and Joseph
Cornell had experimented with assemblage in many forms,
Rauschenberg's Combines incorporated cast-off pieces of
ephemera within the paintings themselves, leaving viewers to
question and interpret the painting's intent. The resulting effect of the
Combines was a jarring juxtaposition that broke down the lines that
traditionally separated mass culture from fine art. Rauschenberg
ushered in a postmodern sensibility in which the focus of art shifted
from the psyche of the artist to the spontaneous amalgamation of

5
objects and art mediums into a work that dissected contemporary
life.

Jasper Johns and Semiotics

In 1958, after Johns' wildly successful first solo exhibition in New York,
critics seized on the way he utilized commonplace materials to
create aesthetically driven images. He aimed to work with "things
the mind already knows," such as targets, flags, letters and numbers,
that he rendered using newsprint and magazines dipped in
encaustic, a type of molten wax, to create the individual marks, or
"brushstrokes," that built each image. By using newspapers and other
media as the basis of the flags, targets, letters, and numbers, Johns
emphasized the bombardment of symbols in contemporary mass
media, heightened by the discord between the legibility of the well-
known symbols and the illegibility of the embedded words and
images within the encaustic. His choice of medium quoted the
gestural brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists, with each
movement and mark frozen in time. Through his re-presentation of
familiar things, Johns abstracts the surroundings of everyday life,
simultaneously criticizing Abstract Expressionism for its inattention to
anything but the artist's psyche while also commenting on the
inundation of the mass media within Americans' daily lives in the
modern world.

John Cage and Chance

During his work as a professor at Black Mountain College, John Cage

cemented certain ideals that came to define Neo-Dada,
particularly the role of chance in making art, as well as the artist's
control over the definition of art and its creation. In 1952, Cage
released his controversial 4'33" (Four minutes, thirty-three seconds), a
three-movement composition that required a sole musician be
6
present with any instrument and sit in absolute silence for the full
duration, allowing the sounds of nature and the audience members
to create the music. If nothing else, this paradoxical and utterly
spontaneous work of art was a direct challenge to the status quo of
music, composition, and performance. In this regard, 4'33" follows in
the tradition of Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, whose artistic practices
were altogether satirical, ironic, self-effacing, and above all free
from the formal criteria of "traditional" avant-garde art. John Cage
continued throughout his career to create compositions and
performances that relied on external forces and controlled chance,
effectively shifting the focus of the artwork from the creator's
emotional intent to the surrounding, external world.

Merce Cunningham and Dance as Performance

Merce Cunningham's work with various artists, composers, dancers,

performers, and musicians throughout his career set a precedent for
the development of a performative art that transcended the
boundaries of dance, theater, art, and music. He founded the
Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Black Mountain College in
1953, with John Cage occupying the roles of composer, conductor,
and musical director. The prior year, Cage staged "The Event" (1952),
or Theatre Piece No. 1, through an important collaboration with
Cunningham; Cunningham's signature style of individual muscular
grace was integral to the work's destruction of the boundaries
between audience and performance, as he danced amidst the
audience bringing them into the heart of the event. Like Cage,
Cunningham avidly employed programmed chance as a
determining factor in his works, allowing the structured chaos to
shape his choreography. Rauschenberg was the company's first
artistic director, followed by Johns, who throughout his long tenure
with the company incorporated the designs of artists like Andy
7
Warhol, Bruce Nauman, and Frank Stella into the company's
productions. Through Cunningham's innovative choreographies
exploring movement and duration, creative partnerships, and
radical methodologies, he revolutionized modern dance as well as
performance art.

Allan Kaprow and Happenings

Much like Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow was heavily influenced by

John Cage and was also a great admirer of the Abstract
Expressionists. In line with the majority of the Neo-Dada artists,
Kaprow sought new ways of combining art and life within his work,
particularly by attempting to extend the intentions of the action
painters beyond the canvas, into life. In his 1958 essay, "The Legacy
of Jackson Pollock," Kaprow described his desire for a concrete art,
calling for an end to permanent works of art in favor of ephemeral
materials and events. This essay also outlines how these events could
move the legacy of the action painters into a new form of art that
emphasized the performative act and the audience's reception
over the artist's intent, as was typical of the Neo-Dada movement.
This call for a radical shift in modern art manifested itself in the late
1950s and early 1960s with the development of Kaprow's iconic
"happenings," a mode of quasi-improvised performance art often
guided by an idea that relied heavily on audience participation as
well as an environment filled with seemingly random objects, smells,
actions, and sounds. The happening was an immersive experience,
for artists and audience alike, that was specific to a singular
occasion and could not be recreated. Kaprow was not only driven
by the notion of a performance of daily life, but he also aimed to
refute the notion of the art object as a commodity. After the
Abstract Expressionists gained immense fame and financial success
from their paintings, Kaprow sought to create works that could not
8
be bought and sold, but only experienced. Other key artists of this
period who were integral to the development of happenings
included Red Grooms, Jim Dine, Robert Whitman, David Tudor,
and Yves Klein, among others.

Edward Kienholz and West Coast "Funk Art"

The founder of the two top avant-garde galleries in Los Angeles,

Edward Kienholz was at the forefront of the Beat, or Funk, art
movement in California. Although he lacked a formal art training,
Kienholz had produced art since his teens, and began creating his
signature installation assemblages in the early 1960s. Works like The
State Hospital (1964-66) incorporate a vast amount of found objects,
including hospital beds, fiberglass, and fluorescent tubing, to create
an immersive environment that captures the mood or idea - in this
case the cruel treatment of patients in a state psychiatric institution.
In addition to Kienholz, other artists working in California, like Jay
DeFeo, Wally Hendrick, and Bruce Conner, also created
assemblages that broke down the lines between sculpture, painting,
and mass culture. These artists often included political subtexts in
their works that were largely absent from the art of their East Coast
cohorts who strongly objected to any implication that the artist's
intent dictated the meaning of a work of art. Kienholz co-founded
the Ferus Gallery, which was an integral venue for the California
artists, and exhibited work that the established New York galleries
deemed too risky to show - this included Andy Warhol's Campbell's
Soup Cans (1962). The newness of the art world in California allowed
artists greater freedom than the highly competitive and formalism-
dominated scene in New York City. This freedom was translated into
artworks that made social, cultural, and political commentaries,
incorporated unconventional mediums, and helped redefine what
constituted fine art.
9
LATER DEVELOPMENTS - AFTER NEO-DADA

Although loosely associated as a movement by art critics, the artists

labeled Neo-Dada never recognized this designation and never
really saw themselves as a part of a uniform avante-garde style. By
1962, when Barbara Rose officially defined the movement, all of the
principal players had already achieved fame and critical admiration
within the art world. As the 1960s moved forward, Neo-Dada's turn
toward the external world of mass culture as material for fine art
paved the way for Pop art's specific focus on consumer objects and
popular images. As artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy
Lichtenstein captured the public's imagination with their soup cans
and comic book images, the art world's focus shifted to Pop art.
However, both Rauschenberg and Johns continued to paint and
create prints for several decades, always using their art to engage
with their contemporary contexts. Cunningham was immensely
influential in modern dance and many of his collaborators and
dancers, like Viola Farber, Paul Taylor, and Carolyn Brown, went on
to create their own successful performances and companies.
Kaprow's happenings paved the way for the
international Fluxus groups' actions and the general performance art
movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, and also set a standard of
interactivity, multimedia, and an art of everyday life that was a huge
influence for later contemporary art. Strains of Neo-Dada persisted
throughout the 1960s, and even longer in various international
movements. For example, Arte Povera was a movement founded in
Italy that maintained a disdain for corporate culture and
conventional art, while the French Nouveau Réalisme artists favored
the depiction of real objects over pure abstraction and sought to
merge art and life.

10
ARTWORKS AND ARTISTS OF NEO-DADA

Theater Piece No. 1 (1952)

Artist: John Cage

Artwork description & Analysis: Cage's Theater Piece No. 1, also

known as simply "The Event," was a seminal performance for the
evolution of Neo-Dada, paving the way for the movement's
signature collaborations and multimedia basis. Conceived by Cage,
the piece involved several simultaneous, unscripted performance
components including a poetry reading, music, dance,
photographic slide projections, film, and four panels of Robert
Rauschenberg's White Paintings (1951) suspended from the ceiling in
the shape of a cross. While Cage set certain guidelines for which
medium each performer used, he let each individual artist
determine the specifics of their role within the performance,
emphasizing the function of chance in determining the course of the
event. The aspects were all integral to the development of the Neo-
Dada aesthetic as well as later performance art, and were
encapsulated within this one work in which many of the key artists
within the Neo-Dada movement played integral roles.

Multimedia performance event - Performed at Black Mountain

College

Flag (1954-55)
Artist: Jasper Johns

Artwork description & Analysis: Johns' use of newspaper and other

media dipped in encaustic made each mark distinct and visually
linked his work with the Abstract Expressionists, despite the very
different processes that were involved. Rather than creating an

11
abstract work like the action painters before him, Johns relied upon
the images and signs common to American culture. He shifted the
focus from the artist's mark to the interplay of emblems, language,
and the media through his use of found objects embedded within
the hardened wax "brushstrokes" that constitute the larger image of
the American flag.

Furthermore, Johns emphasized his interest in semiotics through his

use of this familiar symbol and relied upon the viewer's familiarity with
the flag to imbue the work with meaning. Johns, who has referred to
his paintings as "facts," does not provide an interpretation or critique
of the media, language, or signs he paints - he instead relies upon
the viewers to derive their own analyses. Through his revolutionary
use of mass media and his focus on familiar signs, Johns moved the
course of modern art away from formalist abstraction and towards
Pop's attention to mass-produced objects, Conceptual art's focus on
language, and, ultimately, to postmodernism's deconstruction of
language.

Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, three

panels - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Suite for Five (1956-58)

Artist: Merce Cunningham

Artwork description & Analysis: In Suite for Five, Cunningham

emphasized the movements of dancers in groups, specifically a
duet, a trio, and a quintet. The program for the original performance
introduced the work by stating, "The events and sounds of this ballet
revolve around a quiet center, which though silent and unmoving, is
the source from which they happen." The evolving contrasts
between sound and silence, movement and stillness created a

12
dynamic tension that guided the course of the performance. John
Cage's Music for Piano was the score for the piece, and relied upon
the composer's use of a prepared piano with felt, screws, and
woodblocks fitted in and around the strings. Robert Rauschenberg
created the costume designs, which consisted of earth-toned
leotards. Both Cunningham and Cage relied heavily upon chance in
the creation of this work, citing that both the score and the
choreography were determined by random operations like counting
the imperfections in a piece of paper. Cunningham's emphasis on
choreography as an art form in its own right was highlighted through
his development of the dance elements outside of the score,
costumes, and stage set. This focus also underscored the importance
of the individual movement of the artist/dancer, which initiated the
evolution of performance art that directed the viewer's attention to
the body of the performer rather than the narative or the
theatricality of the dance.

Bed (1959)
Artist: Robert Rauschenberg

Artwork description & Analysis: In this particular work, Rauschenberg

took a worn pillow, sheet, and quilt, scribbled on them with pencil,
applied layer upon layer of oil paint, toothpaste, and fingernail
polish, quoting Jackson Pollock's drip technique in the application of
each, and finally framed all of these elements within wood supports.
Although this work is neither specifically a "readymade" nor
necessarily an action painting, Rauschenberg references both Dada
and Abstract Expressionism in his usage of found objects as well as
the application of the paint to those objects. Rauschenberg
effectively broke down the separations between painting and
sculpture, and asked the viewer to look at modern art in a wholly
13
new way. Through his revolutionary combination of disparate
elements into a new medium that drew its subject from the
surrounding world, Rauschenberg helped solidify the Neo-Dada
aesthetic.

Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports - Museum
of Modern Art, New York

The State Hospital (1964-1966)

Artist: Edward Kienholz

Artwork description & Analysis: With the whole sculptural

environment encapsulated within a shipping crate, Kienholz created
a self-contained tableau that incorporated diverse materials such as
fish tanks, plaster casts, fiberglass, hospital beds, bindings, a bedpan,
and neon tubing for this particular installation. With these found
materials, Kienholz presents the viewer with two emaciated figures
bound to their beds, sharply recreating a scene he witnessed as an
orderly in a psychiatric ward. Unlike the New York Neo-Dada artists,
Kienholz did imbue his works with a pre-determined meaning, which
always related to his critiques of contemporary society and culture.
However, through his use of found materials and his emphasis on the
viewer's experience of, and dialogue with, the artwork, his
connection to the Neo-Dada aesthetic and its emphasis on the
surrounding world is clear.

Diverse material, environmental tableau - Moderna Museet,

Stockholm, Sweden

14
18 Happenings in Six Parts (1959)
Artist: Allan Kaprow

Artwork description & Analysis: In this piece, Kaprow divided the

gallery into three connected spaces. Over the course of ninety
minutes, Kaprow and the other performers enacted simple
movements like bending over, bouncing a ball, and playing records
while lights and slides flicked on and off in pre-determined
sequences. The audience was instructed to move from room to
room at intervals throughout the work - no longer separated from the
performers - they experienced the same sights and sounds as those
performing. The first official happening performed within a gallery, 18
Happenings bears the diverse set of influences typical of Neo-Dada.
Through the emphasis on the artist's movement as a performance,
the happenings referenced the action painting of artists like Jackson
Pollock, but, in this case, the movement itself became the work of
art. And by allowing the happening to occur in a largely unscripted
manner, Kaprow embraced Cage's notion of allowing chance to
dictate the composition of an artwork.

Happening - Performed at the Reuben Gallery, New York

15