Leah Dickerman on Dada: review notes

Modern Shock: The Great War (pp. 2-7)
- technological innovations
- disjunctive time frames (nonsynchronicity): ex. Horses + machine guns
- 10 million dead, 20 million wounded
- body mutilations: prostheses
- psychic wounds (shell shock)
- obscure rationale – collapse of confidence in rhetoric
- official attempts to contain trauma through celebation of honor, glory
- cynicism and detachment

“Dadaism was born of this crisis of disillusionment. . . .” (p. 6)

Other modern factors:
- mechanized industrialization
- abstract modes of finance
- commodity culture – marketing
- new forms of transportation
- new public culture “broader in geographical scope, but in which relations between people were increasingly abstract and attenuated”
- modern media culture
- communication technologies
public broadcasting
newsreels
commercial film industry
printing technologies – printing of photographs

“How to reimagine artistic practice. . . A refusal of both transcendence and sublimation. . . . the rejection of art as illusionistic, conjuring imaginary worlds” (p. 7).

Dada tactics (pp. 7-9)
Set of strategies
- abstraction
- collage
- montage
- the readymade
- incorporation of chance
- incorporation of forms of automation
- debunking of ideals of skill, technique, individual subjectivity
- violation of traditional artistic categories
- art assembled from stuff of modern life
- performance, pranks, installation works
- transfiguration of audience relationships: new form of spectatorship
“useless for contemplation” (Benjamin)


Dada diagnostics (pp. 9-14)
- sensitive to historical shifts
- “exploded mimicry”: adoption of structures of modernity in hyperbolic or transformed ways
- engagement with the public sphere (vs. surrealism)
- new forms of consciousness
“new men” but seems almost parodistic
adoption of alter egos (personas)
- transfiguration of forms of public speech
- performance of what is generally held to be private (a mode of resistance)
- geste gratuit
- skepticism about collective judgment
- nostalgia for older forms of community: “loss of community . . . haunts Dada”