Tuesday, July 21, 2009
The beat generation seems to have borrowed heavily from the unconventional forms that have appeared through Dada. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Kerouac's stream of consciousness stylings achieve some of the functions of Dada in that they are departures from what is accepted by the academia, and that they can be provoking to their audiences. Both the beat and Dada movements share the war induced angst and turned it outward in an attempt to change the social norms of several societies, so that they may provoke an emotional response against the power of institutionalized control of capitalist war mongering. Despite their avant garde beginnings, the changes to the norms they sought to break have become internalized and accepted as legitimate, resulting in the assimilation of their former counter culture into the dominant culture. With time, what they considered anti art has become the foundations of celebrated contemporary art; thereby, reducing what they've done to what they hated.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I find that during the times of the creation of Dadaism, War was its influence. People were trying to express and make since of what was going on even though there was none to be found. This form of expression has been accepted and has been used in many forms of multi media art that we see and experience today. I believe the Dada movement was a way for people, consciously or not deal with the inhuman reality that they faced. Nowadays it seems that we are always trying to come up with the "new" expression but what we don't realize is that we will always build off of what we know and have experienced. Its in the history books.
ReplyDeleteRebecca,
ReplyDeleteI agree with your post. I think it is a good thing that people try to be creative and innovative in their artistic expressions, but I believe it is impossible to create something that is completely original. We are constantly being challenged and inspired (i.e. influenced) by other people. We soak up (consciously or otherwise)other people's ideas, which we then express as our own. Even if we are reacting against someone else's views, we are still influenced by him or her to the degree that we would not have reacted had he or she not existed. The same is true of the Dadaists. There would be no Dadaist counter-culture had there not first been a culture to counter, no anti-art had there not first been art.
Dalton, the point you raise about how institutionalization compromises the force of Dada's original thrust is a central one in many discussions of avant-garde movements in general. One of the best treatments of this issue is Paul Mann's book The Theory-Death of the Avant Garde. It's a little dense, but it's a very intelligently handled attempt to avoid simplistic reductions on either side of the argument.
ReplyDeleteExtremely interesting point. Culture has a way of sneaking into our lives and becoming "accustomed to".
ReplyDelete