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Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social structure, dignity of man the end of causality Essential ideas: – Spontaneity Simultaneity (life appears as a muddle of noises, colors and rhythms) Bruitism (noise-music like a chorus of typewriters, kettledrums, rattles and pot covers) – Negation Everything is illusory Man is nothing Everything is equally unimportant – Absurdity
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Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Dec 21, 2015

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Page 1: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Dada (1915-1924)

• Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest

• Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social structure, dignity of man

• the end of causality• Essential ideas:

– Spontaneity• Simultaneity (life appears as a muddle of noises, colors and

rhythms)• Bruitism (noise-music like a chorus of typewriters, kettledrums,

rattles and pot covers)– Negation

• Everything is illusory• Man is nothing• Everything is equally unimportant

– Absurdity

Page 2: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Uses anti-bourgeois shock techniques (épater les bourgeois)

• Coarse language

• Gross simplifications and exaggerations

• Clowning and acrobatic feats

• Illogical structure and statements

• Contradictions

• Deliberate monotony

• Go to the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa

Page 3: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Tristan Tzara, Dada manifesto (1918)

“Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions, and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory…Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity…Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE”

Page 4: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Fountain by Marcel Duchamp

Page 5: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Surrealism

• Direct outgrowth of Dadaism

• André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924): “I believe in the future resolution of two states (in appearance so contradictory), dream and reality: a surreality”

• A reaction to the chaotic world seemingly bereft of values

Page 6: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Joan Miró, Dog Barking at the Moon (1926)

Page 7: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Max Ernst, The Kiss (1927)

Page 8: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Salvador Dalí, Illumined Pleasures (1929)

Page 9: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Surrealism• Aims:

– to explore the processes of pure thought, of the subconscious (Freud)– To release the energies that lie deep within us and that alone have

value– To obtain absolute freedom of the spirit: “Total liberty of being in a

world liberated” (Communism)• Features:

– A flow of pure thought uninhibited by reason– Non-conformity– Disinterestedness– Automatic writing– Spontaneity– Free association– Fragmentation– Violent juxtaposition of images– A poetic structure that creates and imposes its own inner structure

Page 10: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Luis Buñuel (1900-1983)

• Born in 1900 in Calanda, Spain

• Early education by the Jesuits

• Met Dalí and a number of important poets and writers during his college years (Residencia de estudiantes)

• Had to live most of his adult life outside of Spain (France, US, Mexico)

Portrait of Buñuel by Dalí

Page 11: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Buñuel

“I should like to make even the most ordinary spectator feel that he is not living in the best of all possible worlds”

Page 12: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Buñuel on Andalusian Dog:

“In the film are amalgamated the aesthetics of Surrealism with Freudian discoveries. It answered the general principle of that school, which defines Surrealism as ‘an unconscious, psychic automatism, able to return to the mind its real function, outside of all control exercised by reason, morality or aesthetics […] the characters function animated by impulses, the primal sources of which are confused with those of irrationalism, which, in turn, are those of poetry. At times these characters react enigmatically, in as far as a pathological psychic complex can be enigmatic. […] The film is directed at the unconscious feelings of man, and therefore is of universal value, although it may seem disagreeable to certain groups of society which are sustained by puritanical moral principles.”

Page 13: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

More Buñuel:

• “I do not want the film to please you, but to offend you. I would be very sorry if you were to enjoy it.”

Page 14: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

Forum

• In Andalusian Dog, Luis Buñuel widely uses the “process of dissociation” that is central to the surrealist vision of art. This is defined as “the fortuitous juxtaposition of two disparate realities creating an element of shock or surprise.” The most obvious example of this is the juxtaposition of the moon being divided by a cloud and the eyeball being cut; this contrasts a calm and reassuring scene with a violent and brutal one. Describe two or three other examples of this process and explain how it functions as well as your response to it.

• Amanda• Alexus• Alonna• Other?

Page 15: Dada (1915-1924) Reaction to the Great War: disgust, disillusionment, disinterest Loss of faith in everything: beauty, ethical values, rationality, social.

• Dreamlike elements?

• Anti-bourgeois elements?

• Recurring themes: sex and death

• A Freudian reading of the film (from Gwynne Edwards)