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 Tzaraquoted 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
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