Maria Stavrinaki

Dada Presentism (eBook, ePUB)

An Essay on Art and History

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Dada is often celebrated for its strategies of shock and opposition, but in Dada Presentism, Maria Stavrinaki provides a new picture of Dada art and writings as a lucid reflection on history and the role of art within it. The original (Berlin-based) Dadaists' acute historical consciousness and their modern experience of time, she contends, anticipated the formulations of major historians such as Reinhart Koselleck and, more recently, François Hartog. The book explores Dada temporalities and concepts of history in works of art, artistic discourse, and in the photographs of the Berlin Dada movement. These photographs—including the famous one of the First International Dada Fair—are presented not as simple, transparent documents, but as formal deployments conforming to a very concrete theory of history. This approach allows Stavrinaki to link Dada to more contemporary artistic movements and practices interested in history and the archive. At the same time, she investigates what seems to be a real oxymoron of the movement: its simultaneous claim to the ephemeral and its compulsive writing of its own history. In this way, Dada Presentism also interrogates the limits between history and fiction.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 120
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. April 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780804798150
• Artikelnr.: 48420348

Autorenporträt

Maria Stavrinaki is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University.

Inhaltsangabe

I: Posthistory and Prehistory
II: The Present as Reproducible Time
III: Art's Efficacy or Dada's Use-Value
IV: The Moment of Decision: The Future-from-Now
V: The Paradigm of Immaculate Conception: Between Fiction and History

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Contents and Abstracts
I: Posthistory and Prehistory
chapter abstract
The introduction of the book is a submersion into the semantics of history
according to Dada at the end of the First World War. On the one hand, it is
about the transitions and ruptures between several other avant-garde
movements and Dada. On the other hand, this semantic introduction tries to
demonstrate the apparently contradictory, but profoundly coherent character
of Dada, oscillating between eclecticism and primitivism, between the sense
of a fossilized history and the sense of a second prehistory.
II: The Present as Reproducible Time
chapter abstract
This chapter is a careful analysis of some significant Dadaist artworks,
the most important of which (a photograph of a Dada exhibition) is usually
examined as a simple historical document. Exploring the analogies between
photography and history, analyzed in 1927 by Siegfried Kracauer, this
chapter aims to show that presentism was also imposed to Dada by the new
means of production and consumption of images. Defining the various modes
of the analogies between photography and history in the work of Dada
artists, this chapter proposes a twofold ramification: the device of
montage such as used in its critical function by Georg Grosz and John
Heartfield is thus opposed to the profound ambivalence of reproducibility
in the work of Johannes Baader, oscillating between nothingness and God.
III: Art's Efficacy or Dada's Use-Value
chapter abstract
One of the aims of Dadaist presentism was to show the plus-value gained by
the past and the future within capitalized history. If classical past was
anachronistic according to Dada, its effects were profoundly present. Dada
established a semantic equivalence between German idealism, Weimar
classicism, parliamentary democracy and socialistic evolutionism. It's
antiphrastic formal devices aimed to expose the mechanism and the effect of
this semantic equivalence, namely the repetition of the same "nightmare of
history", the plus-value of eternity. Chapter keywords: Plus-value,
Eternity, cultural heritage, Marxism, political efficiency
IV: The Moment of Decision: The Future-from-Now
chapter abstract
Dadaist decisionism invested a horizontal, decentered ontology of the
subject and of art. Renouncing to the autonomy of art - the exact meaning
of the "death of art" - they either put it to the service of the communist
Revolution, or to a more ambivalent, anarchic vision of reality, considered
as a complex of constantly changing relations.
V: The Paradigm of Immaculate Conception: Between Fiction and History
chapter abstract
This last chapter explores the non genetic Dadaist conception of history,
whose paradigm is to be found in the process of mechanical reproduction as
well as in the theme of immaculate conception. It also explores a profound
ambiguity of Dada created by its obsession with ephemeral temporality and
its not less obsessive writing of history. Dada artists were their own
historiographers. Accepting though the facticity of history, they
cultivated a systematic ambivalence between facts and legends. Past
remained thus open to all the following presents - and this was an ultimate
aspect of Dada presentism.