DADA

- Man Ray

DADA RULES
DADA HAS NO RULES
RULES DADA
RULES HAS NO DADA



















- Duchamp

one of my favorite books is "Flight Out of Time: The Autobiography of Hugo Ball". HB was the founder of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich/the real Dad of Dada/author of I ZIMBRA (Talking Heads)...and an inspirational figure.

found the book for a buck or two at The Strand in the late '70's, and it's a wonderful description of how a bunch of malcontent WWI draft-dodgers started the most powerful and influencial art movement of the 20th Century.

this book is also the lyrical source for the song i wrote for The Waitresses called "Make The Weather". HB was leading a discussion group where a bunch of artists and workers were recalling their feelings of powerlessness, and HB asked them to say what they would want to do/invent to cure this. "make a button"/"make a button to push all the other buttons"/"make the weather" someone said. great, great line...











- Arp

(aside: Zurich in this time period is the setting for Tom Stoppard’s play “Travesties”, where Lenin, Joyce, Stravinsky, Tzara were all exiled and you know…puttering around while they were all there AT THE SAME TIME with a few minor ideas that really didn’t go any where in the fields of literature, politics, music and visual art.

“I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might has well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary. I forget the third thing.

-- Henry Carr/”Travesties”)

(aside2: just saw the Dada Exhibit at MoMA. phew. it is beyond anything imaginable, in terms of how 'old' modernism is, and how cool 'cool' can be.

MOMA EXHIBIT blerb:











Responding to the disasters of World War I and to an emerging modern media and machine culture,, Dada artists led a creative revolution that boldly embraced and caustically criticized modernity itself. Proposing innovative strategies of art making, including collage, photomontage, chance, Readymades, performances and media pranks, the movement created an abiding artistic legacy for the century to come. Defiantly international relative to the pervasive nationalism of its day, Dada – active in Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, New York, Paris and Zurich – was the first avant-garde movement to self-consciously position itself as an international network crossing countries and continents.)


http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2006/dada/index_f.html


NP: WNYC NPR news...trying to catch if the NJ legislature has resolved its budget crisis, which will determine whether or not i have court on Tuesday.

PEEVE DE JOUR: my pal & TSPIK got shitcanned from her dayjob. i am probably more pissed than she is. poor baby, trying so hard...

ROSATTI'S FLAVOR-OF-THE-DAY:

(June 9th)

Higbees
Chocolate Malted

OR

Chocolate Chip

cb...where are you?






NEW JERSEY