IDM Mailing Archive

The statement in question:

quoted 3 lines " DADA is art with neither slippers nor parallels; it is against and for

> > " DADA is art with neither slippers nor parallels; it is against and for > > unity and is decidedly against the future." > > Tristan Tzara

quoted 1 line couldn't the statement be inferrred to mean that dada wasn't a dainty,

> couldn't the statement be inferrred to mean that dada wasn't a dainty,

cautious movement

quoted 1 line (wearing slippers), had no contemporary or historical "parallel," favored

> (wearing slippers), had no contemporary or historical "parallel," favored

anarchy, and was

quoted 3 lines opposed to future=progress propaganda?

> opposed to future=progress propaganda? > does everything illogical really mean nothing? > -jr

I'll quote myself: "That doesn't mean it doesn't mean anything." What I meant by that is exactly what you're implying. I'm not going so far as to actually break the dada statement down into meaningful things, after all, it is a totally metaphorical sentence. As far as sentences go, it is an illogical proposition. Which is fine. No problem there, we can read it as poetry instead. And your reading is certainly one way of looking at it. My take is more or less that "DADA" compares to nothing else and only means what it means for the moment. The criteria for this would be, as I interpret it, to deny meaning (you can't define what compares to nothing else, and if it's strictly for the moment, then once the moment is past, well..). I think the difficulty is that Western thought is so used to defining and categorizing in a dialectic manner, recognizing one and "the other". I think what is so tricky and interesting about Dada is that you have a group of artists playing off of their own work, saying yes and no at the same time (to use a metaphor :). They're great tricksters in an age of atomism. Rather than running away from the dialectic, they use it, play up both sides, say everything/nothing at once. It's better than punk, better than Marxism. Punk needed authority to rail against it, Marxism needed Capitalism to define it. And just to kill another thread, ideas certainly *do* inform music. To quote the website, http://www.fastpromotion.com/techno/html/history.html: "As standard means of their rebellion, the Dada create music based on newly-formed industrial noises. Compositions by Kurt Schwitters, such as `An- na Blume` (1919) & `Ursonate` (1923) seem to have formed a basis for the de- velopment of abstract music in the 20th century. Dada`s main inspiration, though, seems to have been Luigi Russolo, an Italian Futurist artist & composer who has designed a series of noise-producing machines i.e. The Noise Intoners (`Intonarumori`) in 1912, instruments which have been hi- ghly used even by some famous composers like Stravinski, and which used to depict sounds from nature on various frequencies." The Dadaists created some music based on their ideas, to be sure. And I consider Russolo's machine to be both Futurist and very Dada, as some of the machines tended to fall apart and self-destruct as they created some incredible sounds. The first industrial "music". You'd also have to be on an island to not be influenced by ideas like Deleuze. It doesn't matter whether you've read a word or not, it's being read and absorbed at different levels in our culture; it becomes part of our cultural subconscious, just as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle or Einstein's Theory of Relativity have. And I doubt that many of us have actually read the primary sources of either. I think I've blathered on enough. __________________________________________ Christopher Sorg Multimedia Artist and Instructor The School of the Art Institute of Chicago http://csorg.cjb.net csorg@artic.edu --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.314 / Virus Database: 175 - Release Date: 1/11/02 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org