The Critical Practice of the Dada Art Avant-Garde

• In Event: 4166 - Section on Marxist Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 1. Et tu, Art? Art as a Capitalist and Imperialist Tool

Abstract

What is the relationship between revolutionary politics and modernist or avant-garde art movements? Roland Barthes described the failed Revolution of 1848 as the event in which ideas of universal emancipation were seen as bourgeois ideology to be resisted. From that point on, reason, taken-for-granted language and images would be the site of contestation by radical avant-garde writers and artists, such as Rimbaud and Baudelaire. In its turn, the Dada art avant-garde, from its founding in Zürich to its later development in Berlin, Paris, and New York, was involved in a critique of the dominant ideology though words and images. This paper explores the various Dada practices of collage, montage, shock, chance or separation of activity from goal. These practices go far to dislodge the object from its setting, inducing doubt in the inevitability of normal subject-object relationships. What the Russian Formalists called defamiliarization, what Bertold Brecht described as Verfremdung, the alienation or distancing effect, and what Bakhtin’s writing on the uses of humor refers to are all techniques to delegitimate the dominant ideology. Shock is eventive and immanent to sociality. At the same time there is an attempt to present the unity of art and life in order to integrate art and social praxis. Examples from the Dada soirees will be presented. Finally, the dada movement was seminal in its influence on successive waves of avant-gardes, such as Surrealism and Fluxus, and the question of “whither the avant-garde today?” is raised.

Author

• Jeffrey A. Halley, University of Texas-San Antonio