Dada

At first glance, many dada works seem impervious to critical analysis. For one thing, they contain an irrational streak that was intensified by the war and by the accompanying decay of social values. For another, their aesthetic strategies exploit the calculated misuse of convention. Employing the techniques of subversion, distortion, and disruption, dada compositions are fervently antilogical. Rejecting bourgeois values in life and in art, the dadaists considered logic to be a correlative of traditional authority. Like the latter, it was reviled for confining and debasing mankind. Because the dadaists deliberately cultivated scandalous behavior, their readers and viewers tended to react to them with hostility. Like the hapless members of the audience, contemporary critics assumed that the dada movement was a hoax. Dada was a purely destructive phenomenon, they declared, whose sole virtue was to have prepared the way for surrealism.

By contrast, the 1960s witnessed an enthusiastic neo-dadaist revival that permeated art, literature, music, and the theater. Inspired by the Cabaret Voltaire and similar ventures, performance artists invented a new postmodern genre: the happening. The latest in a long series of dada derivatives, including the Theater of the Absurd and abstract expressionism, the neo-dada movement shows no signs of abating. While current audiences have grown used to pop, op, and kinetic art, they continue to be scandalized by sound poets like Henri Chopin, visual poets like Fabio Doctorovich, junkyard sculptors like Robert Rauschenberg, aleatory composers like John Cage, and experimental choreographers like Alwin Nikolais. With the rediscovery of dada in a sympathetic light, the movement's positive aspects have become more apparent. The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have witnessed a steadily increasing interest in dada and a series of benchmark studies by scholars such as Mary Ann Caws, J. H. Matthews, Michel Sanouillet, and Henri Béhar. Although the movement is as resistant to logical analysis as ever, it has acquired a certain respectability that threatens, ironically, to undermine its basic premises.