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During World War I, an international group of
young
artists and writers fled to Zurich, in neutral Switzer-land. In
reaction to the horror of the war and the on-slaught of new technology,
as well as to the suffoca-ting aesthetics of futurism and cubism,
these artists began to create a new kind of art-art that was anti-logical,
anti-aesthetic, anarchistic, confrontational,
shocking. Performing and exhibiting at the famous
Cabaret Voltaire, these artists called the new art "Dada."
Dada soon exploded on the scene in other art capitals of the world:
Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, Paris, even New York. Participants in
the Dada movement included some of the most influential artists
of the twentieth century. Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber Arp, Hans Richter,
George Grosz, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, Francis
Pica-bia, Man Ray, Raoul Hausmann, Marcel Duchamp, and others
alarmed critics, incited outrage, and generally tried to throw
into Question every possible preconceived notion about art and
life.
From the point of view of many scholars, it was
Berlin Dada that most directly engaged and critiqued
modernity and the hierarchies of World War I esta-blishment culture.
Rejecting pyramidal concepts of culture in favor of relational
and operational "configu-rations" of culture, Berlin
focused on the very facts of culture and culture-making. Perhaps
best projected through its photomontage, Berlin's radicalism lay
in its recreation of art as an instrument of cultural politics
and social revolution. Johannes Baader, Raoul Hausmann, George
Grosz, and John Heart-field, among others, radically redescribed
the cogni-tive space of culture, the revolutionary strategies
it entailed and the constituting means it both uncovered and deployed.
In this volume, Hanne Bergius' careful analysis of Berlin Dada
richly textures what must be reckoned one of the most defining
moments of early twentieth century cultural history.
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