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Abstract
This paper examines how Dada reinterpreted the figures of androids, cyborgs, Dandies, robots and automatons first conceived of within the Decadent imagination of the fin-de-siècle. First and foremost, however, it looks at how these literary and artistic figures became increasingly provocative within avant-garde production, especially from the point of view of gender. Works that transgressed conventional boundaries of gender and that interrogated power relations took on a subversive cast within Dada, forming as it were a prelude to the postmodern and post-humanist variations on these themes that have come to dominate recent and current discourse. The essay begins with Western examples before offering an overview of the Hungarian avant-garde as a case study. The Hungarian avant-garde, like other modernist experiments in the region, did not commit itself to Dada exclusively. Rather, it incorporated certain techniques drawn from Dada into its artistic practice, often blending Dada with other artistic movements, for example Constructivism. Accordingly, the puppets, robots and machines of Hungarian Dada differ from the Dada humanoids of Western art history.
Abstract
This article seeks to trace the complicated itinerary of Dadaist influence over the Romanian avant-garde against the backdrop of the centre-periphery dichotomy. To this end, I will argue that, albeit that one of the leaders of the international Dada movement was Tristan Tzara, a Jewish Romanian émigré, the impact of the movement on the Romanian avant-garde is not exclusively due to the unmediated contact through one of its co-founders, but also to the international connections developed throughout the East-Central European avant-garde network. A central element illustrating this two-pronged connection is to be found in the Dadaist techniques assimilated by Romanian Avant-gardists during the 1920s. Such artistic devices permeated Romanian culture largely through a network built on Constructivist affinities shared with other regional avant-gardes (such as the Hungarian, Czech, and Polish groups) than through direct association with leading Dada artists. In demonstrating this lateral assimilation of the Dada movement, I will set out to identify traces of inter-peripheral influence manifest through Romanian Dadaist collages and manifestos found in Constructivist magazines such as Contimporanul or 75 HP .
Abstract
The present article has two primary aims: first, to reintegrate Céline Arnauld into our memory of the avant-gardes by reconstructing the local histories in which she participated and which were shaped by her work and her activities. The second priority is to analyze the existing histories of the avant-gardes in order to show the limits of their national frameworks as well as the shortcomings of the concepts of ‘transnationalism’ and ‘internationalism’ used in avant-garde scholarship during the last few decades. By doing so, I argue for a new, more integrative concept of transnational avant-garde movements in the first half of the twentieth-century.
Abstract
By tracing the life and work of the Hungarian writer, painter, editor and art critic Emil Szittya through its shifting geographic, linguistic and artistic contexts, this paper seeks to portray the Dadaist outlook par excellence, as described by Tristan Tzara. Moreover, the paper connects this outlook to Szittya’s strategy of artistic self-realisation based on transgression: on crossing borders as much as breaking professional codes and norms. The first part of the paper lays out Szittya’s praxis as such that was prone to be channelled into the international avant-garde movement of the time. It shows how he cultivates a vagrant persona set out to devour all the streets and all the lives, and distil the acquired experiences on the road into his art. The second part narrows the focus to Szittya’s writings that can be directly tied to the Zurich phase of the Dada movement.
Abstract
The avant-garde movement Dada emerged in the middle of the Great War in a neutral state and was created most notably by refugee artists fleeing the countries at war. Dada was a militantly anti-war artistic movement breaking as many of the aesthetic and cultural rules established by the societies responsible for the war as possible. The Hungarian Avant-gardists around the magazine Ma adapted some of the artistic principles of Dada, using the elements of modernistic styles like Expressionism as well as features of other avant-garde movements such as Futurism or Constructivism. Despite the resultant stylistic pluralism and the specific versions of Dada developed by Sándor Barta or Tibor Déry, for instance, the label Dada was long held by critics from the 1920s onwards to disqualify the Hungarian avant-garde. This article inquiries into the meaning of the term dada by examining contemporary texts by Béla Balázs (1920), Tibor Déry (1921) and Iván Hevesy (1923). Here Dada became a name not only for chaos, but for disrespect regarding leftist values like solidarity, class struggle, and consequent political work. Dada became a label for those who betrayed the left.
Abstract
During his three years of Dadaist activities, Dragan Aleksić determined the course and identity of the Dada movement in Yugoslavia. He continued the development of avant-garde concepts, gradually altering the form but maintaining the critical acuteness associated with Avant-gardism. Showing more versatility than the rest of the leading Dada artists, Aleksić introduced numerous forms of Dadaist discourse. He published journals, invented a special Dadaist language and terminology, wrote manifestos, poetry, plays, engaged in art criticism, participated in performances, made films, created a specific Dadaistic visual expression, and was responsible for the apocryphal history of the origin, development, results and the termination of Yugoslav Dadaism. He was engaged in an effective cooperation with a number of avant-garde artists from Zagreb, Belgrade and Novi Sad, and also established contacts with the most prominent Dada artists from Prague, Budapest and other leading European cultural centres. Intensive Dadaist activities and effective communication enabled Yugoslav Dadaism to profile itself as an authentic avant-garde movement. The aim of this study is to highlight certain aspects of Dragan Aleksić’s Dadaist work and to establish the position of “Yougo Dada” within the European and East-Central European avant-garde context.
Abstract
From Tristan Tzara’s titular parodic affirmation to Marcel Duchamp’s faux advertorials, the engagement of Dada with commerce and popular culture is often shown to be critical and satirical. Such a reading supports an exclusionary definition of the avant-garde, perceived as an ‘authentic’ endeavour that critiques the mercantile and considers commercial artistic ventures as frivolous, theatrical acts. Similarly, the avant-garde credentials of artists active in Bucharest have often been questioned due to their connections to urban commodity culture. Instead, this essay reframes their interest as a gesture of resistance. Using a theoretical framework drawn from performance studies, the essay argues that embracing the performative and construing it as both transgressive and liminal can help to normalise marginalised forms of avant-garde artmaking. In the case of post-World War I Romania, nationalist discourse hailed rural areas as repositories of an ‘authentic’ local culture in contrast to urban spaces inhabited in large proportion by ethnic minorities. Thus, when Marcel Iancu, Victor Brauner, M. H. Maxy and their avant-garde peers embraced the performative spaces of the city, from neon advertising to shop windows and the latest Hollywood cinematic productions, they were carving out a space in which they could exist as Jewish-Romanians. The Bucharest avant-garde’s embrace of consumer culture and its theatrical potential functioned as a disruptive tool in the manner of Dada.
Abstract
This essay uncovers how linguistic belonging shaped the identities and creative paths of the two prominent Dadaists, Tristan Tzara and Raoul Hausmann, examining the importance of the French language in their parallel destinies. The focus is on the languages in which they wrote and spoke, including personal correspondence, seen as a response to their respective experiences of exile. Hausmann, frequently perceived as German, was born in Austria-Hungary and was, for at least two decades of his life, a citizen of Czechoslovakia, before being made stateless at the end of the Second World War, while living in France. Meanwhile, Tzara, stateless by birth, desired to be French but remained identified as a Romanian Jew despite his lack of Romanian citizenship. This essay situates Hausmann’s non-German and Tzara’s non-Romanian identity (and both of their ambivalent Jewish identities) at the centre of their linguistic dilemmas. Our analysis offers a new understanding of how exile shaped the context in which these avant-garde artists were obliged rather than chose to operate, challenging many aspects of secondary scholarship’s long association of Dada with supra-national, polyglottal linguistic strategies.
Abstract
Moholy-Nagy first encountered Dada techniques in the work of Kurt Schwitters at Der Sturm Gallery in April 1920. Puzzled, and therefore challenged by this body of work, he entered the ambient of the Malik-Verlag, Erwin Piscator’s theatre, and the Berlin Dadaists, forming friendships with Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, as well as, eventually with Schwitters himself, and adopting their collage techniques in earnest. Early in 1921, in tandem with his fellow Hungarian Activists, Moholy-Nagy’s art emerged from a period of eclectic experimentation into full-blown Mechano-Dada. But this was also the time when he deepened his engagement with the Biocentrism of the German Youth Movement he encountered through Lucia Schulz, an earnest type of proto-environmentalist worldview seemingly at odds with the political and satirical tendencies of Berlin Dada (Dáda, using Schwitters’ terminology). Instead, he passed through a playful, Dada-inflected phase in his art thematizing technology in nature (“Dadá” in Schwitters’ terms), and this work was championed by Lajos Kassák on the pages of Ma. Moholy-Nagy forged a unique brand of Dada art that resulted in an important series of Mechano-Dada paintings and works on paper – until he encountered Russian Constructivism in early fall, 1921, engendering a decisive turn in his practice, one that would determine the course of his subsequent career.