It began with an ironic and anarchic temper with origins in eighteenth century skepticism which was subsequently absorbed into the culture of urban and metropolitan thought processes through Baudelaire and Manet among others and it all came to a scrappy yet mystical climax in Dada.
Kurt Schwitters
The Dadaist method of assemblage is inconceivable without dada’s negativisim, for the pre-condition of assemblage is of necessity a seemingly total randomness, hazard, coincidence and disassociation: like a scavenger walking among ruins there is both discovery of order and accident.
Baargeld: The Red King, 1920. Pen and Ink on wallpaper (MOMA)
If we cast aside the tendency and temptation to nihilism, that path of least resistance, we are in the realm of an atmosphere without conditions, and alternating impulses in which hierarchies, order and disorder, good and bad, the beautiful and the ugly are interchangeable or totally fictive.
Jean Arp. source:WIKI
This random assemblage of the modern world meant that people were thrown together in often tragic but ludicrous, but fertile and dynamic disarray: an immense multiple collision of values, forms and effects among which we live and of lives lived and formed mediated and informed by images.
COMMENTS