Neo-Dada
Movement closing the gap between art and daily life.
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Neo-Dada brought together sound, image, and writing in ways that recalled the earlier Dada movement. Its playful, rule-breaking approach borrowed from popular culture and everyday materials to blur the line between art and life.
Barbara Rose helped popularize the term in 1960s America, where it mostly described work from that era and the 1950s. The movement also spread internationally, especially in Japan and Europe, laying groundwork for Fluxus, Pop Art, and Nouveau réalisme. Reacting against the emotional intensity of Abstract Expressionism, and following Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, Neo-Dada rejected traditional ideas of beauty.
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Trends
Interest in Dada followed documentary publications such as Robert Motherwell's The Dada Painters and Poets (1951) and German language publications from 1957 onward, to which some former Dadaists contributed. Several original Dadaists denounced the Neo-Dada label, especially in its U.S. manifestations, arguing the work was derivative rather than making fresh discoveries, that aesthetic pleasure was found in what were originally protests against bourgeois aesthetic concepts, and that it pandered to commercialism.
Many artists who identified with the trend later moved to other specialities, with only certain aspects of their early work identifiable with it. For example, Piero Manzoni's Consacrazione dell'arte dell'uovo sodo (Artistic consecration of the hard-boiled egg, 1959), signed with an imprint of his thumb, and his cans of shit (1961), priced to the value of their weight in gold, satirized the concept of the artist's personal creation and art as commodity.
An allied approach appears in collage and assemblage, as in Richard Stankiewicz's junk sculptures created from scrap, compared with Kurt Schwitters' practice; these objects are treated so that they become less discarded than found, objets trouvés. Jean Tinguely's fantastic machines, notably the self-destructing Homage to New York (1960), subverted the mechanical. Different terms were used for objects produced in the U.S. and Europe: Robert Rauschenberg labeled works such as Bed (1955) as combines; Arman called collections of dice and bottle tops accumulations and trash-bin contents encased in plastic poubelles; Daniel Spoerri created snare pictures (tableaux piège), with Kichka's Breakfast (1960) as the earliest, where meal remains were glued to cloth and mounted on a table-top affixed to the wall.
Poems
In the Netherlands, the magazine Barbarber (1958–71) was a home for poets like J. Bernlef and K. Schippers who turned the readymade idea into verse. They found poetry in ordinary things—a lost tortoise ad from a newspaper, a sheet used to test a typewriter. Another set of Dutch writers, including C.B. Vaandrager, Hans Verhagen, and the artist Armando, slipped into the Belgian experimental magazine Gard Sivik. They packed it with trivial bits of talk and demonstrations of verbal routines.
Critic Hugo Brems said these poets didn’t comment on reality; they picked out fragments usually seen as unpoetic. They were discoverers, not creators. The cold, impersonal style they aimed for was summed up by Jan Schoonhoven, the thinker behind the Dutch Nul group (which also included Armando). He explained that Zero means a fresh view of reality where the artist’s personal touch is kept to a minimum.
The Zero artist just chooses and separates pieces of reality—materials or ideas—and shows them as neutrally as possible, avoiding all personal feeling. This approach connects to Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme and marks a clear break from Expressionism. The roots of Concrete Poetry and text montage in the Wiener Gruppe have been traced back to Raoul Hausmann’s letter poems. Those methods might also owe something to H.N. Werkman’s typographic work in the Netherlands, which the Stedelijk Museum first exhibited in 1945.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Neo-Dada (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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