Unit 3: Art and the

Moving Image

Dada and Surrealism

Dada (Anti-Art)
 World War I scattered the writers and artists
who had been based in Paris, and while
away from Paris many involved themselves in
the Dada movement, believing that excessive
rational thought and bourgeois values had
brought the terrifying conflict of WWI upon
the world.
 The Dadaists protested with anti-rational
anti-art gatherings, performances, writing and
art works.
Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the
Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919,
collage of pasted papers, 90x144 cm, Staatliche Museum,

Berlin.
‘Its My Hobby…’
 According to its proponents, Dada was not art, it was "anti-art."
For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the
opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics,
Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities,
Dada was intended to offend. Through their rejection of
traditional culture and aesthetics the Dadaists hoped to destroy
traditional culture and aesthetics.
 As dadaist Hugo Ball expressed it, "For us, art is not an end in
itself ... but it is an opportunity for the true perception and
criticism of the times we live in."
 A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that
"The Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most
destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man.“
 Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, "in
reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than
an insane spectacle of collective homicide."
Zurich
 Dadaists groups existed in different countries
 Zürich 1916, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp and others
discussed art and put on performances in the Cabaret Voltaire expressing their
disgust with the war and the interests that inspired it. They used abstraction to
fight against the social, political, and cultural ideas of that time that they believed
had caused the war.
 At the first public soiree at the cabaret on July 14, 1916, Ball recited the first
manifesto Tzara, in 1918 also wrote one of the most important Dada manifesto
 ‘…Like everything in life, Dada is useless. Dada is without pretension, as life
should be. Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a
virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that
reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions’.
 After the cabaret closed down, activities moved to a new gallery, and Ball left
Europe. Tzara began a relentless campaign to spread Dada ideas. He
bombarded French and Italian artists and writers with letters, and soon emerged
as the Dada leader and master strategist.
 When World War I ended in 1918, most of the Zürich Dadaists returned to their
home countries, and some began Dada activities in other cities.
Berlin
 The groups in Germany were not as strongly anti-art as other groups.
Their activity and art was more political and social, with corrosive
manifestos and propaganda, satire, public demonstrations and overt
political activities. It has been suggested that this is at least partially due
to Berlin's proximity to the front, and that for an opposite effect, New
York's geographic distance from the war spawned its more theoretically-
driven, less political nature.
 George Grosz, together with John Heartfield, developed the technique
of photomontage during this period.
 The artists published a series of short-lived political journals, and held
the First International Dada Fair, 'the greatest project yet conceived by
the Berlin Dadaists', in the summer of 1920. As well as the main
members of Berlin Dada, Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Höch, Johannes
Baader, Huelsenbeck and Heartfield, the exhibition also included work
by Otto Dix, Francis Picabia, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Rudolf Schlichter,
Johannes Baargeld and others. In all, over 200 works were exhibited,
surrounded by incendiary slogans, some of which also ended up written
on the walls of the Nazi's Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937.
Photomontage George Grosz
New York – Marcel Duchamp &
‘readymades’.
 Like Zürich, New York City was a refuge for writers and artists from World War I. Soon
after arriving from France in 1915, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia met American
artist Man Ray. By 1916 the three of them became the center of radical anti-art activities in
the United States.
 The New Yorkers, though not particularly organized, called their activities Dada, but they
did not issue manifestos. They issued challenges to art and culture through publications
such as The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada in which they criticized the
traditionalist basis for museum art. New York Dada lacked the disillusionment of European
Dada and was instead driven by a sense of irony.
 During this time Duchamp began exhibiting "readymades" (found objects) such as a bottle
rack, and got involved with the Society of Independent Artists.
 In 1917 he submitted the now famous Fountain, a urinal signed R. Mutt, to the Society of
Independent Artists show only to have the piece rejected. First an object of scorn within
the arts community, the Fountain has since become almost canonized by some. The
committee presiding over Britain's prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, for example, called it
"the most influential work of modern art."[15] In an attempt to "pay homage to the spirit of
Dada" a performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli made a crack in The Fountain with a
hammer in January 2006; he also urinated on it in 1993.
 By 1921, most of the original players moved to Paris where Dada experienced its last
major incarnation.
Marcel Duchamp – Fountain
1917
Paris
 The French avant-garde kept abreast of Dada activities in Zürich with
regular communications from Tristan Tzara who exchanged letters, poems,
and magazines with Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Max Jacob etc
 Paris had arguably been the classical music capital of the world since the
advent of musical Impressionism in the late 19th century. One of its
practitioners, Erik Satie, collaborated with Picasso and Cocteau in a mad,
scandalous ballet parody called Parade.
 Dada in Paris surged in 1920 when many of the originators converged
there. Inspired by Tzara, Paris Dada soon issued manifestos, organized
demonstrations, staged performances and produced a number of journals
 The first introduction of Dada artwork to the Parisian public was at the
Salon des Indépendants in 1921. Jean Crotti exhibited works associated
with Dada including a work entitled, Explicatif bearing the word Tabu. In the
same year Tzara staged his Dadaist play The Gas Heart to howls of
derision from the audience. When it was re-staged in 1923 in a more
professional production, the play provoked a theatre riot (initiated by
André Breton) that heralded the split within the movement that was to
produce Surrealism.
Automatic Writing – Open
interpretation
 Back in Paris, Breton joined in the Dada activities and also
started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon
and Philippe Soupault.
 They began experimenting with automatic writing—
spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and
published the "automatic" writings, as well as accounts of
dreams, in Littérature. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into
automatism and wrote The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs
Magnétiques) in 1919. They continued the automatic writing,
gathering more artists and writers into the group, and coming to
believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change
than the Dada attack on prevailing values.
Eggeling and Richter
 Hans richter and Viking Eggeling both began to study
the art of movement during the period of Dada and
Surrealism
 Film was the best medium for them to articulate their
methods, often drawing out their movements on long
scroll like papers. Richter in particular used the
medium to develop abstract and experimental works.
 It took many years for art movements to filter into film
and it is not until the works of Man ray and Rene Clair
that examples of Dadaism can be seen.
Rene Clair
 Rene Clair Entr'acte 1924
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2duAZH_-54
 Documentary on DADA
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqkIJ0odFxA
Art techniques developed
 Collage -The dadaists imitated the techniques developed during the cubist
movement through the pasting of cut pieces of paper items, but extended their
art to encompass items such as transportation tickets, maps, plastic wrappers,
etc. to portray aspects of life, rather than representing objects viewed as still life.
 Photomontage - The Berlin Dadaists - the "monteurs" (mechanics) - would use
scissors and glue rather than paintbrushes and paints to express their views of
modern life through images presented by the media. A variation on the collage
technique, photomontage utilized actual or reproductions of real photographs
printed in the press.
 Assemblage - The assemblages were three-dimensional variations of the
collage - the assembly of everyday objects to produce meaningful or
meaningless (relative to the war) pieces of work.
 Readymades - Marcel Duchamp began to view the manufactured objects of his
collection as objects of art, which he called "readymades". He would add
signatures and titles to some, converting them into artwork that he called
"readymade aided" or "rectified readymades". One such example of Duchamp's
readymade works is the urinal that was turned onto its back, signed "R. Mutt",
titled "Fountain", and submitted to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition
that year.
Man Ray and the beginnings of
Surrealism
 Man Ray’s first films reflect his position between Dada and
Surrealism. They can be distinguished by;
 A rejection of experimenting with vision, rapid- editing and
abstraction
 Experimental film under Surrealism became more critical.
 The aesthetic and visual became more complex
 Connections between images are deliberately obscured
 Sense and meaning are questioned
Man Ray
 Return to Reason 1923
 The title reflects a parody of the Enlightenment
 Uses film like a photographic Photogram
 Encourages Imagery and looking through the use of the nude
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xzpQvZu5BI

 Man Ray L'Etoile de mer 1928

 Features a distorted (Stippeled) Lens denying the viewers look
 Editing draws out the disjunction between images
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQJ-JHZ84LM
 Other films include Emak Bakia (1927) & Les Mysteres du Chateau de
Des (1928) Both similarly reject clear readings and continuity editing.
Surrealism
 Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s.
 Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected
juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists
and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical
movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact.
 Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism
was above all a revolutionary movement.
 Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities of World War I and
the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the
1920s on, the movement spread around the globe, eventually
affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music, of many
countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice,
philosophy and social theory.
Andre Breton – Open Arrangement of
ideas
 During the war André Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a
neurological hospital where he used the psychoanalytic methods of Sigmund Freud with soldiers
who were shell-shocked. He also met the young writer Jacques Vaché came to admire the young
writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition.
 Back in Paris, Breton joined in the Dada activities and also started the literary journal Littérature
along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault.
 They began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their
thoughts—and published the "automatic" writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in Littérature.
 They continued the automatic writing, gathering more artists and writers into the group, and
coming to believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada attack
on prevailing values.
 As they developed their philosophy they felt that while Dada rejected categories and labels,
Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and
important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination
according to the Hegelian Dialectic. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of
such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse.
 Freud's work with free association, dream analysis and the hidden unconscious was of the
utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination.
 The group aimed to revolutionize human experience, including its personal, cultural, social, and
political aspects, by freeing people from what they saw as false rationality, and restrictive
customs and structures.
 In 1924 they declared their intents and philosophy with the issuance of the first
Surrealist Manifesto. That same year they established the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and
began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste.
Surrealist Film
 Surrealism is often seen as a search for excessive and
spectacular imagery (Dream sequences for example
see Hitchcock Spellbound 1954)
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzxlbgPkxHE
 Its origins lie in finding the extraordinary in the banal
 Their technique of watching film (leaving and watching
another film half way through) is also famous
 Surrealists own films rarely suggest the high-grade
illusions of later filmmakers (Terry Gilliam, David Lynch,
The Quay Brothers).
Hallmarks of early Surrealist
Film
 Critical Documentary eye
 Trick effects (In admiration of early cinema)
 Avoidance of montage rhythm
 Encoding of Post-Freudianism
 Non-triumphalist views of Masculinity
(Castration/loss/disempowerment)
 Resist the dominant male look inherent in Hollywood
film
Marcel Duchamp - Anemic
Cinema 1926
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXINTf8kXCc
 Duchamp both evokes and subverts abstract film in his ironically titled film
 Denies traditional ways of looking – features slowly turning spirals that imply
sexual motifs. These images are intercut with near-indecipherable puns
(incest or family passion , with too much stroking)
 Man Ray’s films similarly oppose passive watching.
 Emak Bakia (1926) – montage is used to slow downor to repeat actions
and objects which both invite an defy thematic connections (Spirals, words
and phrases, revolving doors and cartwheels).
 Frustrating narrative and viewer expectations.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ukDpmTu4sc
Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel
 Salvador Dali (1904 –1989) was a Spanish Catalan surrealist
painter born in Figueres. He was a skilled draftsman and self
promotor best known for the striking and bizarre images in his
surrealist work.
 In 1929, Dalí collaborated with surrealist film director Luis Buñuel
on the short film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog).
 The film has no plot, in the conventional sense of the word. The
chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial "once
upon a time" to "eight years later" without the events or
characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in narrative
flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian
free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqdhsrKkck8
Cult Value

 Surrealism has gained a commercial and cult

following. Its ideas and aesthetic are
continually popular and can be seen in a
variety of media from advertising to feature
film.
 David Lynch advert for Michael Jackson’s Dangerous tour
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdlf1DzX0iQ