dada and surrealism - book - 1977 - A Cavalier History of Surrealism

A Cavalier History of Surrealism
Raoul Vaneigem (J-F Dupris)
translated by Donald Nicholson Smith
AK Press
1977 (eng translation: 1999)
131 pages

Raoul Vaneigem is perhaps the second best known member of the Situationist International, a small group of French (for the most part) radical philosophers and artists who, along with a number of student leaders such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, were at the centre of the May ‘68 uprisings in that country.  Vaneigem is the author of The Revolution of Everyday Life, which, along with The Society of the Spectacle, is one of the major texts of the SI.

A Cavalier History of Surrealism is not so much a history, as it is a critique of the Surrealist movement. While it does move through discussions of the different phases that the Surrealist movement had taken in its thirty years, Vaneigem criticizes the movement as being inferior to its immediate historical predecessor, Dada. Vaneigem is especially critical of the Surrealist turn towards Communism which went as far as involving an official affiliation with the Communist Party that attempted to mandate Surrealist activities, and also a later turn towards mysticism/occultism. Surrealism is so often identified by artists, critics, and art historians as Dada all grown up that it is exciting for someone like me (who’s far more enthusiastic about the Dada movement) to see a well known revolutionary theorist praise the earlier art movement above the latter.

I should note that Vaneigem's SI Comrade Guy Debord was critical of both Surrealism and Dada. Debord saw both groups as characterized by a failure to give their artistic revolutions any relevance to life as it was actually lived by people.
(available to read online here)

dada - book - 2006 - Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire

Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire
Tom Sandqvist
The MIT Press
2006
434 pages

Dada, the group of WWI-era anarchistic anti-artists was, in essence, an international art movement when so many other modernist movements were based in a specific country (and often a particular city/region), and it was the shock of the first world war that induced the waves of migration that led to the coalescence of the Dada movement in a neutral European centre.

Many of the original members of the Dada movement in Zurich were from Romania, including the Janco brothers (Marcel, Georges, and Jules) Arthur Segal, and Tristan Tzara (one of the movement's core members).  These individuals were highly involved in the formation of Dada (Marcel Janco constructed masks for the group’s performances), Tzara made numerous innovations on performance, bringing a sense of chaos and absurd humor to the performance events he led.  These artists that Sandqvist (a professor of art history at the University College of Arts, Crafts, and Design in Stockholm Sweden) takes as his focus.


 

Many of the great Romanian artists of the modernist period, such as Constantin Brancusi, are known to us because they made their career in Western Europe, and this includes the Romanians of the Dada movement.  The relevance of Sandqvist’s book is not simply that he focuses on some of the members of the movement that have largely been pushed to the margins by history (such as the Janco’s) but also that he investigates the cultural influences that played upon the Dadaists before they ever left their home.  An already vibrant Romanian avant-garde scene had a heavy influence upon the young artists, as did the culture of the Jewish communities these artists grew up in.  Sandqvist’s text includes lots of information about this overlooked aspect of the Dada movement, and lots of images of Urban Romania circa 1910s.

avant-garde - book - 1985 - The Dada & Surrealist Word Image

The Dada & Surrealist Word Image
Judi Freedman & John C. Welchman
The MIT Press
1989
141 pages

The Dada & Surrealist Word Image is a hardcover catalogue for a travelling exhibition of Dada and Surrealist works of art.  The exhibition’s first location was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where it was shown from June 15-August 27, 1989 before being transported to other locations around the United States and Europe.  

I think that the title of the catalogue makes its content, and the theme of the exhibition, quite clear.  Play with language featured prominently in the programs of the Dada and Surrealist movements who sought to unlock the liberatory potential of nonsense and incongruity in written and visual creative work.  The Dadaists focus on language is driven by a desire for nonsense and a will to break down the structures of control that edify culture.  The ‘word salad’, jumbles of words juxtaposed with jumbles of images, often in the photomontage, became the primary Dadaist mode of representing language in visual art.  Raoul Hausmann was a particularly strong proponent of this kind of work.

Raoul Hausmann - Elasticum (1920) 

More specific to this catalogue however, are detailed analyses of two of the most famous word/image works of these two movements.  Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., from 1919:

Marcel Duchamp - L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)

a postcard reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa featuring a hand-drawn moustache and goatee over the famous portrait, and the letters LHOOQ written at the bottom, which, when pronounced out loud in French, are meant to sound as: "Elle a chaud au cul" which translates to English as, "She has a hot ass."  Duchamp was intentionally bringing bathroom stall humour to the eminent High Renaissance portrait.  

The other work of great importance to this exhibition was The Treachery of Images, the famous “this is not a pipe” painting of 1928 by the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte (side note: Magritte is heavily represented in this text!).  This is the work that inspired Michel Foucault to investigate relationships between written language and its visual referrents, and is perennially used as a background or an introductory image to semiotic lectures and academic discussions on representation and reality.

Rene Magritte - The Treachery of Images (1928)

While the written component of this catalogue focuses on these particular works of art, or on the overarching concepts and strategies that these movements were working with, the actual catalogue component shows a variety of images from a wide swath of the Dada/Surrealism ranks.  Max Ernst, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, Jean Crotti, Francis Picabia, and many more are represented.  There are also a number of works by figures such as Jean Cocteau, who were only tangentially connected to Surrealism, but whose visual works bear the influence of that movement’s ideas.  All of the images are in black and white, which isn’t so bad, since many of the works are drawings.  Also, the catalogue includes an interesting essay about Joan Miro and Magritte and critical theory (mostly Julia Kristeva’s) by University of California, San Diego professor John C. Welchman.

dada - book - 2010 - Mimi's Dada Catifesto

Mimi’s Dada Catifesto
Shelley Jackson
Clarion Books
2010
45 pages

Hi there, I picked up a copy of Mimi’s Dada Catifesto from Raven Used Books, in Northampton, Massachusets.  

Mimi is a poor alley cat living in a top hat in an unnamed European city (presumably Zurich during WWI).  Mimi has companionship in her life, her best friend is a pigeon named Lazlo, and she shares the top hat with newlywed cockroaches.  Mimi’s dream, however, is to find an owner and a home, albeit one that suits her particular creative sensibilities.

Mimi stumbles, one evening, into a cafe (something like the Cabaret Voltaire) where there’s a raucous performance being given by the Dada artists. This cat immediately became attracted to the Dadaist’s anarchistic attitude, ethos, and approach to art.  Mimi had particularly come to admire Mr. Dada, the most extreme and outrageous of the Dadaists, and likely intended by Jackson as a representation of Tristan Tzara (or could be a composite of a number of those artists).  The book then follows Mimi’s attempts to appeal to Mr. Dada, in the hopes of becoming his pet, through strewing trash around his flat as a series of readymade sculptures, through loudly screeching as a poetic performance,

 

and through incessantly strange behavior.  Mr Dada rejects Mimi at first, but overtime he acknowledges the cat as a consummate Dadaist via the realization of how relentlessly irritating she was.  The final page of Jackson’s narrative displays Mr. Dada snuggling with Mimi after adopting her as his pet.

Mimi’s Dada Catifesto is a children’s book about the Dada movement (one of my favourite topics in counterculture).  It presents to children a simple narrative which encapsulates all of the basic ideas of the interwar avant-garde art movement.  Each page is covered by full-page illustrations in pastiche of the various Dada styles, and thus the book also encapsulates all of the Dada’s aesthetic forms.  Some illustrations emulate George Grosz particular drawing style:

Many of the illustrations recall the photo-montage or collage styles of Raoul Haussman and Hannah Hoch:  

While Mimi is often adorably represented as a realistic tabby cat, rendered in a quasi-expressionist style.

Jackson also inserted activities into the book to teach children about high modernist art, and especially about the chaos of Dada.  The book recalls how Dada historian Richard Sheppard put the art of children as an influential factor on the original Dada movement, but it also plausibly makes the cat into the quintessential Dadaist.