Seth M - Dada

In these four articles, I began to find it easier to understand the deeper thought process behind the Dada movement and perhaps even began to respect it a little more. An awful lot of it still seemed rather pretentious in its own right, though I do understand that Dada artists like Picabia and Arp were something like The Sex Pistols of their time or maybe even something that could have evolved from the rebellion of impressionists long before. Picabia's "Hiss, shout, kick my teeth in, so what? I shall still tell you that you are half-wits. In three months my friends and I will be selling you our pictures for a few francs." definitely aligns itself with the punk rock comparison in the music industry. Still, the one quote throughout all of these readings that really shed a lot of light on not only what Dada was but who Dada artists thought there were, was in the very first reading. Huelsenbeck wrote, "The Dadaist is an atheist by instinct. He is no longer a metaphysician in the sense of finding 'thou shalt'; for him the cigarette-butt and the umbrella are as exalted and as timeless as the 'thing in itself.'" that's something that I could really feel when looking at Dada art. I don't think "pretentious" is exactly the word I'm looking for, Dada seemed to be more like a sort of self-awareness. Present in all of these excerpts is a focus on who the Dada artist is and how they are living outside of society, almost like a set of rules or a way of life. It's definitely present in their work as well and it is elaborated further in Arp's comments on "meaninglessness." I think it's interesting that they were so quick to dismiss the illogical, especially given Schwitters' work; however, perhaps that was more to give the nonsense meaning by calling it meaningless.