Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century. By Jed Rasula. Basic Books; 365 pages; $29.99.
DADA was arguably the most revolutionary artistic movement of the 20th century. From its birth in the grim wartime winter of 1916, over the course of a few raucous performances at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, it stretched the boundaries of aesthetic possibility to breaking-point, elevating randomness, cacophony, insult and plain silliness into legitimate forms of artistic expression. The experimental nightclub created by Hugo Ball and his mistress Emmy Hennings introduced many of the techniques that would be deployed by later innovators, from pop appropriation to hip-hop-style sampling, from photomontage, installation, assemblage and other non-traditional mixed-media mash-ups, to performance art and art that consisted of nothing but pure idea.
As Jed Rasula, of the University of Georgia, reveals in an eloquent new history, Dada’s legacy was as much a chronicle of failure as triumph. For those who congregated at the Cabaret Voltaire and then went on to spread the “virgin microbe” across the globe, the goal was not to rejuvenate art—which most rejected as the product of a bourgeois culture they despised—but to remake the...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Gjec97
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