Dada and Surrealist Performance, Black Mountain, Fluxus and Happenings

1. Dada and Surrealist Performance, Black Mountain, Fluxus and Happenings

2. Dada • Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism."Marc Lowenthal Translator's Introduction to Francis Picabia's I AM A BEAUTIFUL MONSTER: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation (MIT PRESS 2007

3. Group of Dadaist form around the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich. Basically a gathering of people who disdained war. • As a movement Dada protested war and senseless slaughter. • In Tristan Tzara’s manifesto he called for the destruction of good manners, an end to logic, the destruction of memory, spontaneity and forgetfullness

4. Timeline • 1913 - Duchamp makes the first 'readymade' - a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool • 1916 - Cabaret Voltaire opens in Zurich on 5 February. It soon takes the name 'Dada' • 1917 - First issue of 'Dada' periodical published. Issues 1-4 of '391' periodical published by Picabia. Duchamp exhibits 'Fountain' in New York. • 1918 - Tzara published his first manifesto, in 'Dada' issue 3. Club Dada in Berlin starts to use photomontage • 1919 - 'Litterature' periodical edited by Breton published. Ernst and Baargeld found Cologne Dada. Kurt Schwitters makes the first Merz works. • 1920 - Tzara arrives in Paris. Club Dada tour of Germany. Ernst and others stage the 'Spring Awakening' exhibition in Cologne. • 1921 - 'New York Dada' periodical published, edited by Duchamp and Man Ray. Dada stages the trail of Barres and in doing so loses the support of Picabia. • 1923 - Duchamp finally stops work on The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even • 1924 - Breton publishes the first manifesto of Surrealism.

5. Marcel Duchamp

6. Hugo Ball 1886-1927 • It is necessary for me to drop all respect for tradition, opinion, and judgement. It is necessary for me to erase the rambling text that others have written. • The present does not exist in principles, but only in association. We live in a fantastic age that draws its decisions more from affiliation than from unassailable axioms. The creative man can do anything he wants with this age. It is, all of it, common property, matter. • Nature is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither good nor bad. It is fantastic, monstrous, and infinitely unrestrained. It knows no reason, but it listens to reason when it meets with resistance. Nature wants to exist and develop, that is all. Being in harmony with nature is the same as being in harmony with madness.

7. Hugo Ball Flight Out of Time

8. Ball Reciting Sound Poem in the Cabaret Voltaire

9. Hugo Ball performing Karawane

11. Café Odeon re-creation

12. Emmy Hennings 1885-1948 Dancer To you it's as if I was already Marked and waiting on Death's list. It keeps me safe from many sins. How slowly life drains out of me. My steps are often steeped in gloom, My heart beats in a sickly way And it gets weaker every day. A death angel stands in the middle of my room. Yet I dance till I'm out of breath. Soon lying in the grave I'll be And no one will snuggle up to me. Oh, give me kisses up till death.

14. Tristan Tzara Born Sami Rosenstock , Romanian, 1896-1963 After 1929 attempted to reconcile surrealism and marxism. Joined the French Communist Party in 1937. Fought in the French Resistance. Quit the communist party in 1956 over the russian repression of the Hungarian Revolution.

16. The beginings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art but of a disgust—Tristan Tzara • DADA is a virgin microbe DADA is against the high cost of living DADA limited company for the exploitation of ideas DADA has 391 different attitudes and colours according to the sex of the president It changes - affirms - says the opposite at the same time - no importance - shouts - goes fishing. Dada is the chameleon of rapid and self interested change. Dada is against the future. Dada is dead. Dada is absurd. Long live Dada. Dada is not a literary school, howl - Tristan Tzara

17. Gas Heart 1923

18. Costumes by Sonia Delaunay

19. Delaunay Designs

20. Sonia Delaunay (Sarah Stern) 1985-1979

21. Simultaneous Store 1925

22. Marcel Duchamp Fountain

23. Dada Cards

24. Man Ray Coat Stand

25. Kurt Schwitters

28. Surrealism

29. Au Rendez-vous des amis (1922) (First row) Crevel, Ernst, Dostoyevsky, Fraenkel, Paulhan, Péret, Baargeld, Desnos. (Standing) Soupault, Art, Morise, Raphael, Eluard, Aragon, Breton, de Chirico, Gala Eluard

30. Le Surrealist group 1924: Baron, Queneau, Breton, Boiffard, de Chirico, Vitrac, Eluard, Soupault, Desnos, Aragon. Naville, Simone Collinet-Breton, Morise, Marie-Louise Soupault

31. Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain

32. 1953 1957

33. Nocturnes 1956

34. Crisis 1960

35. Museum Event 1966

36. Event 1968

37. Rain Forest 1968

38. Second Hand 1975

39. Square Game 1976

40. John Cage 1912-1992

41. Cage and Fluxus • John Cage's 'Experimental Composition' classes from 1957 to 1959 at the New School for Social Research have become legendary as an American source of Fluxus, the international network of artists, composers, and designers. The majority of his students had little or no background in music, most of whom were artists. His students included Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, George Brecht, Alice Denham and Dick Higgins, as well as the numerous artists he invited to attend his classes unofficially. Several famous pieces came from these classes: George Brecht's Time Table Music, and Alice Denham's 48 Seconds—Wikipedia article on John Cage

42. Water Walk on TV Game Show 1960

43. Gutai Group • The aim of the Gutai group was to break with the past and blur the boundaries between art and life in post-war Japan, seeking a new beginning in order to put the horrors behind. • Yoshihara organized Gutai with the intent of renewing art by saving it from commerce and fetishism, and by allowing the material to express itself freely, unhindered by extraneous factors, non-material issues. The word Gutai was a composite of “gu” (tool) and “tai” (body). Yoshihara also took it as signifying “concreteness” and “embodiment.”5 In his Gutai Manifesto(1956), he denounced the way materials are “loaded with false significance by way of fraud, so that, instead of just presenting their own material, they take on the appearance of something else…the materials have been completely murdered and can no longer speak to us.” Consistently, Yoshihara added to this the caveat that nothing may be copied.

44. Atsuko Tanaka 1932-2005

45. Atsuko Tanaka Electric Dress 1956

46. In a related work, Stage Clothes, she made a dress that included other dresses so that as she undressed she stayed dressed, with ever more garments appearing magically to clothe her. There was no escaping, in modern culture, the surfaces a woman could reveal. And yet her art was not a gloomy meditation on authenticity. The power of fashion also represented the freedom to remake oneself again and again. • In Electric Dress, Tanaka seemed to fuse technology and the flesh. During the original performance, in fact, some people became concerned that she would electrocute herself; and in Japan, the light of Hiroshima, which X-rayed the body, quickly came to mind. But Tanaka’s fusion went well beyond academic commentary on technology and women’s issues. She became, in her dress, a kind of twinkling building on the horizon and, by extension, a symbol of the modern Asian city. She anticipated the delirium of light that is Tokyo. A city, like a woman in a dress, can be a mysterious object of desire. Tanaka’s light conceals as it reveals. • Mark Stevens, New York Magazine, Sept. 27, 2004

47. Yellow Cotton 1955

48. Bells 1955

49. "The material as the actual source of interest ... lost its importance as soon as the electricity was switched on; suddenly the sound of the bells were the work of art.“Akira Kanayama, Gutai artist and husband of Atsuko Tanaka

50. Work 1955