Dada

Dada1916-1924

disrupting the institution of art

Dynamism of Dog on a Leash |Giacomo Balla, 1912

Nude Descending a Staircase | Marcel Duchamp | 1912

LHOOQ | Marcel Duchamp | 1919

Fountain | Marcel Duchamp | 1917

1960s Media ArtFluxus, the Situationists and the Society

of the Spectacle

George Maciunas

John Cage

Fluxus Manifesto

Yoko Ono, “Cut Piece,” 1964

Yoko Ono, Eyeblink, 1966

(you can see all of these films on UbuWeb – www.ubu.com/film)

The Situationists

– Situationist International magazine, 1957

– informed by Dada and Surrealism

– advocated the suppression of art

– critique of capitalist society and division of producers and consumers

– close to anarchists in disdain for bureaucracy and authoritarian structures

Guy Debord

Guy Debord

– wrote “The Society of the Spectacle” in 1967

– life has been reduced to spectacle

– we exist in a state of alienation

– modern capitalist society is a society of consumption and meaningless drudgery

– capitalist creation of “pseudo-needs”

– solution? Reinvent life!

Key terms:

derive

psychogeography

detournement

dérive

“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure

activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the

encounters they find there.”

– the flow of acts and encounters

psychogeography

“They look at the city as a special instance of repressed desires.”

detournement

“Ultimately, any sign is susceptible to conversion into something else, even its opposite.”

– re-routing events and images

– An artistic technique in which works of art or mass culture (comics, film, ads, etc.) are reworked or placed in new contexts to subvert their original

meaning.