Where's My Dada?

"Where's My Dada?: Reflecting on Gardiner’s “Dada and Surrealism: Poetics of Everyday Life”

As I read the Michael Gardiner’s essay about the Dada and Surrealist movements, I was struck by the intellectual, creative, and political motivations of the artists, writers, and others in the arts of the early part of the twentieth century, and how they felt the urgent need to respond to a world they believed to be bankrupt of individuality, “men without qualities.” I reflected on the idea that in today’s society, we have lost our interest in trying to change society through art. As creative individuals, we seem to have finally succumbed to market success as the most important goal to achieve, a concept that has developed most significantly since the early 1980s. Or perhaps we have come to believe that such avant-garde practice is futile, given our understanding that historically such movements eventually fell apart or succumbed to the lure of the market, so why not omit the “middle man” and go straight for the fortune and fame? Other than a few notables, many of whom were spawned in the generation of multi-culturalism, it appears that most artists prefer to act as private individuals with their own “art for art’s sake” agenda. They do not create manifestos, create their art acknowledging the politics that shape who they are as individuals or a society, nor do they congregate in any significant way for artistic discourse. The concept of the Cabaret Voltaire seems to have ended with the surge of activity in 1960s when performance art and earth art took art out of the market place and into the hands of artists and viewers in a direct exchange of creativity hand response.

The Dada and Surrealist movements are considered to be two of the most significant and influential avant-garde cultural movements of the twentieth century. Yet the radicalism of those movements has been lost on today’s society that only knows of them through appealing photo-montages and graphic design as well as the entertaining stereotypes of artistic radicals and Salvador Dali theatrics with his melting clock images as depicted in contemporary cinema. We do so little to tell the story of the history of art as it relates to social, political, and cultural change in general education that such movements are relegated to mere footnotes in our culture and known by only scholars, intellectuals, and the few artists who look to the past in order to help shape the present. The Dadaists and Surrealists were prompted by the atrocities of World War I to respond to the moral failings of bourgeois society.

Given the tenor of contemporary events that encompasses everything from the threat of global warming to the current crisis of total economic collapse, it is surprising that similar or new approaches to radical artistic activity are not being generated by today’s artistic youth. It recalls why there are not more protests over the Iraq war by students—they are not motivated to act, because they are not being called upon to serve—that honor is bestowed on minorities and the economically disadvantaged who enlist as a way to rise above their situations. If there is not imminent threat to ones immediate happiness, there is no reason to act in a way that sparks controversy and attention. While the youth vote perhaps contributed significantly to the change in our government as evidenced in the election of a new president, it is still a passive action when it comes to the potential outrage that artists could have shown in the last eight years. Yet for the most part, artists in recent years have chosen not to make a significant stance in favor of personalized expressions that as of yet have not been fully analyzed for how they speak of a generation.

The idea that autonomous action and creative self-expression was being squandered in favor of the pursuit of material wealth and social status is as serious a concern today as it was during the time of the Dadaists and Surrealists. Gardiner’s identification of honor, discipline, family, country, and capital as the “series of rarefied abstractions” that bourgeois morality dictates as a necessary replacement for personal happiness sounds eerily like the Bush administration’s appropriation of such terms for political means. Just as the artists of the Dada and Surrealist movements (and subsequent artists of the Lettrist movement, Situationist International, and 1960s performance-based art) looked to staged provocations and the reconstruction of everyday existence along more imaginative lines, so too must artists of today wrench themselves from the complacency of their artistic practice to say something more profound that reflects the seriousness of our times. We are facing, just as Gardiner reflects on what led up to the activities of the Dada and Surrealist movement, a similar unrest in the way of domestic dissatisfaction related to military activities, a resurgence in the fears of a nuclear war, and a growing realization that the world’s environment is deteriorating at an alarming rate.

Perhaps the United States is not the country to launch a new avant-garde movement that critiques modern life in its totality, because it is not the neutral Switzerland that can be objective. We are in fact much of the cause of the declining state of the world, so perhaps such radical activity in the arts must come from an outside place that is not complicit in what contributes to the modern ills of today’s society. The problem, then, is that there is no apparent country supporting a critical mass of artists that is not complicit in such capitalist and bourgeois activity and no one seems to want to rock the boat by addressing the trajectory we are on. Unless artists feel the urgent need, indeed outrage, to return to self-critical expressions and risk the gains they could make in the marketplace, they will not find expression in the everyday. Instead, fed by the media’s obsession with glamour and the instant fame of reality television (masked as expressions of the everyday), artists will continue to operate outside of the mundane world as a “privileged site of revelation.” Perhaps we are finally living in a time (expounded by Andre Breton as Surrealism’s primary goal), at which “life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions,” and this surreal life focused on the mundane has caused our art to be just that—mundane. -Julie Sasse