Dada, Politics, and the Concept of the Avant-garde

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 8: Narratives

Abstract

One aim of historical and historically situated reception is to affirm a certain continuity of the history of art, and to find that continuity as progressive. It is not designed to preserve immediacy and surprise but to nullify them. Dada is often taken as a moment that appears to be a denial of that continuity, to be an exception that further empowers those who want the history of art to preserve from the past what appears most positive in the present, most future-oriented, and therefore part of a progressive continuum. My focus in this talk is on what appeared in its first public moments as anti-art, though its attack on the "art-aura" can be and has been seen as an attempt to separate art from its purely "public" presence, and in that respect, to assert the significance of art to both aesthetics and politics, the former emphasizing immediacy and surprise. Dada presents works that are treated as a negative exception to continuity and as an insistent moment in which the essence of art is an issue. This talk should be understood as an introduction to Dada as art without the art-aura, therefore emphasizing the place of surprise in what seems to be moving toward a synthesis of art and politics and, therefore, the need to rethink our conceptions of culture, the autonomy of art, and consequently the neutrality of connoisseurship and curatorial reason.

Author

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