DaDa

1
DaDa Surrealism

• by
• Gledis Caushaj

The Elephant Celebes By Max Ernst
2

• TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
• Take a newspaper.
• Take some scissors.
• Choose from this paper an article of the length
  you want to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Next carefully cut out each of the words that
  makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
• Shake gently.
• Next take out each cutting one after the other.
• Copy conscientiously in the order in which they
  left the bag.
• The poem will resemble you.
• And there you are - an infinitely original author
  of charming sensibility, even though
  unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

Tristan Tzara (1896 1963)
3
DaDa

• Dada is a art movement that began in neutral
  Zurich during WWI that ridiculed contemporary
  culture and traditional art forms. The movement
  was formed to prove the bankruptcy of existing
  styles of artistic expression rather than to
  promote a particular style itself. It was born as
  a consequence of the collapse during WWI of
  social and moral values which had developed to
  that time. Dadaists produced works which were
  nihilistic or reflected a cynical attitude toward
  social values, and, at the same time, irrational
  absurd and playful, emotive and intuitive, and
  often cryptic. Dadaists typically produced art
  objects in unconventional forms produced by
  unconventional methods. Some used the chance
  results of accident as a means of production.
  According to popular belief the name DaDa is a
  nonsensical word chosen at random from a
  French-German dictionary.

4
DaDa Artists

• Tristan Tzara
• Louis Aragon
• Hugo Ball
• Marcel Duchamp
• Johannes Baader
• Andre Breton
• Francis Picabia
• Hans Richter
• Kurt Schwitters
• Hans Arp etc.

Collage with Squares Arranged According to the
Laws of Chance by Hans Arp
5
Le coeur à gaz

• It is widely considered on of the most important
  moments in DaDa theater.
• A Play by Tristan Tzara written in 1921 but most
  famously played in 1923 in Théâtre Michel with
  costumes by Sonia Delaunay.

Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last
Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany by
Hannah Höch (1919)
6
Festival manifeste presbyte

• Perhaps the real highpoint in Dada theater
• A play by Francis Picabia that was put on stage
  at the Théâtre de l'OEuvre in 1920 and André
  Breton appeared as a sandwich man with a target
  and an impertinent text.
• Thematizes an act of violence directed at the
  performer by the audience.

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 By Marcel
Duchamp
7

• I consider America responsible for the shame of
  our age the glorification of work, that stupid
  ideology which has engendered the idea of
  material progress and the disdain of every utopia
  or poetry tending toward the perfection of the
  human soul... I cannot help opposing those
  influences... with the most violent lunge
  forward, the idea, and the most creative of
  actions, idleness.
• (Tristan Tzara)

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919. As if the
addition of mustache and beard weren't enough of
a poke at this most famous of paintings, the
letters Duchamp penciled L.H.O.O.Q. at the
bottom of his altered image are meaningless in
themselves, but when read aloud in French, make
the sound of "Elle a chaud au cul," meaning, "She
has a hot ass."
8
Andre Breton(1896 1966)

• Dictionary Surrealism, n. Pure psychic
  automatism, by which one proposes to express,
  either verbally, in writing, or by any other
  manner, the real functioning of thought.
  Dictation of thought in the absence of all
  control exercised by reason, outside of all
  aesthetic and moral preoccupation.Encyclopedia
  Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on
  the belief in the superior reality of certain
  forms of previously neglected associations, in
  the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested
  play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for
  all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute
  itself for them in solving all the principal
  problems of life.

9
Surrealism

• Surrealism is a cultural movement and artistic
  style that was officially founded in 1924 by
  André Breton. Surrealism style uses visual
  imagery from the subconscious mind to create art
  without the intention of logical
  comprehensibility.
• The movement was begun primarily in Europe,
  centered in Paris, and attracted many of the
  members of the DaDa community. Influenced by the
  psychoanalytical work of Freud and Jung, there
  are similarities between the Surrealist movement
  and the Symbolist movement of the late 19th
  century.
• Some of the greatest artists of the 20th century
  became involved in the Surrealist movement, and
  the group included Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray,
  René Magritte, Max Ernst and many others.
• The Surrealist movement eventually spread across
  the globe, and has influenced artistic endeavors
  from painting and sculpture to pop music and film
  directing.
• The greatest known Surrealist artist is the world
  famous painter Salvador Dali.

10
Surrealist Techniques

• Surrealist used techniques such as Automatism (in
  many areas such as writing, drawing and painting)
• Also they used collages, cut-up techniques and
  also outagraphy.
• Mostly this techniques were used in order for the
  art object that came as a result to be a product
  of the subconscious.

L'Ange du Foyer ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme by
Max Ernst
11
Alfred Jarry (1873 1907)

• A French writer whose play Ubu Roi (Ubu the
  King)(1896) is widely considered as a huge
  influence and forerunner to the surrealist
  theater of the 1920s and 1930s.
• He also wrote two other plays that are sequels to
  Ubu Roi, namely Ubu cocu (Ubu Cuckolded) and Ubu
  enchaíné (Ubu bound).
• Also known for inventing pataphysics and also for
  writing what is considered the first cyborg sex
  novel, Le Surmâle (The Supermale).

12
Ubu Roi

• Widely Acknowledged as a precursor to Absurdist,
  Dada and Surrealist plays.
• The play offers some parodic adaptations of
  situations from Shakespearean drama such as
  Hamlet, Richard III and MacBeth.
• The main character grew out of school legends
  about the imaginary life of a hated school
  teacher.
• At the premiere, Jarry opened with a long speech,
  much to the boredom of the audience, and after
  the first word of the play ("merdre" - the French
  word for 'shit', with an extra R some English
  translations use the spelling "shittr" or other
  variations), a riot broke loose. The performance
  of this play was forbidden after the first night.
  To avoid this problem, Jarry moved the production
  to a puppet theatre.

13

• Alfred Jarry's own woodcut of Ubu Roi, as shown
  on the cover of a popular paperback edition of
  the play, published in the 1960s.

Ubu Imperator, (1921) by Max Ernst
14
Guillaume Apollinaire

• One of the most acclaimed poets of the 20th
  century.
• He coined the word surrealism (coming from French
  and meaning greater than realism)
• In 1917 he wrote one of the first plays described
  as surrealist, Les Mamelles de Tiresias

(1880 1918 )
15
Les Mamelles de Tiresias

• Ecoutez, ô Français, les leçons de la guerre
• Et faites des enfants, vous qui n'en faisiez
  guère
• Cher public faites des enfants!
• (english translation)
• Heed, o Frenchmen, the lessons of the war
• And make babies, you who hardly ever make them!
• Dear audience Make babies!

16
Federico García Lorca
great art depends upon a vivid awareness of
death, connection with a nation's soil, and an
acknowledgment of the limitations of reason.

• El maleficio de la mariposa (The Butterfly's Evil
  Spell written 1919-20, first production 1920)
• Los títeres de Cachiporra (The Billy-Club
  Puppets written 1922-5, first production 1937)
• Mariana Pineda (written 1923-25, first production
  1927)
• La zapatera prodigiosa (The Shoemaker's
  Prodigious Wife written 1926-30, first
  production 1930, revised 1933)
• Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín
  (Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden
  written 1928, first production 1933)
• El público (The Public written 1929-30, first
  production 1972)
• Así que pasen cinco años (When Five Years Pass
  written 1931, first production 1945)
• Retablillo de Don Cristóbal (The Puppet Play of
  Don Cristóbal written 1931, first production
  1935)
• Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding written 1932,
  first production 1933)
• Yerma (written 1934, first production 1934)
• Doña Rosita la soltera (Doña Rosita the
  Spinster' written 1935, first production 1935)
• Comedia sin título (Play Without a Title written
  1936, first production 1986)
• La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda
  Alba written 1936, first production 1945)

17
Freudian Critique

• Freud initiated the psychoanalytic critique of
  Surrealism with his remark that what interested
  him most about the Surrealists was not their
  unconscious but their conscious. His meaning was
  that the manifestations of and experiments with
  psychic automatism highlighted by Surrealists as
  the liberation of the unconscious were highly
  structured by ego activity, similar to the
  activities of the dream censorship in dreams, and
  that therefore it was in principle a mistake to
  regard Surrealist poems and other art works as
  direct manifestations of the unconscious, when
  they were indeed highly shaped and processed by
  the ego. In this view, the Surrealists may have
  been producing great works, but they were
  products of the conscious, not the unconscious
  mind, and they deceived themselves with regard to
  what they were doing with the unconscious. In
  psychoanalysis proper, the unconscious does not
  just express itself automatically but can only be
  uncovered through the analysis of resistance and
  transference in the psychoanalytic process

18
Films by Surrealist

• Early films by Surrealists include
• Entracte by René Clair (1924)
• La Cquille et le clergyman by Germaine Dulac,
  screenplay by Antonin Artaud (1927)
• Un chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí
  (1928)
• LEtoile de met by Man Ray (1928)
• LAge dOr by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí
  (1930)
• Le sang dun poete by Jean Cocteau (1930)

Indefined Divisibility by Yves Tanguy
19
Thank You for your Attention!
The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali
20
Questions\Comments?
The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory
by Salvador Dali