Research Catalog

Title

Shock and the senseless in Dada and Fluxus / Dorothée Brill.

Author

Brill, Dorothée.

Publication

Hanover, N.H. : Dartmouth College Press : Published by University Press of New England, c2010.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

vii, 243 p. : ill.; 24 cm.

Summary

This volume examines notions of shock and the senseless in Dada (Dada's intent was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, Dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature) and Fluxus (Fluxus presumes that all media and all artistic disciplines are fair game for combination and fusion. Objects and performances are characterized by minimalist but often expansive gestures based in scientific, philosophical, sociological, or other extra-artistic ideas and leavened with burlesque). This pairs two distinctly radical art movements that challenged the very notion and purpose of art. Laying out a genealogy of surrealisms, this work addresses the senseless in artistic production as a strategy toward shock -- generally considered to be characteristic of the historical "avant-garde."

Series Statement

Interfaces : studies in visual culture

Uniform Title

Interfaces, studies in visual culture.

Subject

• Dadaism
• Fluxus (Group of artists)
• Art, European > 20th century > Psychological aspects

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction: shock of the senseless -- The notion of shock in early twentieth-century Europe -- Shock and urbanity: Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel -- Shock and World War I: Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud -- Shock and tactility in Walter Benjamin -- Shock and the senseless in Dada -- Dada's notion of art and its sociocultural context -- Senselessness, the new, and the "shock of the unintelligible" -- The senseless in Walter Benjamin's concept of shock -- Shock and the senseless in Fluxus -- The sociocultural context of Fluxus -- From politics to a worldview: transforming the senseless -- Art as perception -- Shock and boredom: Fluxus's "senseless perception" -- Conclusion: communicating the void.

ISBN

• 9781584659020 (cloth : alk. paper)
• 1584659025 (cloth : alk. paper)
• 9781584659174 (pbk. : alk. paper)
• 1584659173 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2010023307

OCLC

607986515

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library