Neo-Dada was a movement with

audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound *Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum *Digital audio, representation of sound ...

, visual and literary manifestations that had similarities in method or intent with earlier Dada artwork. It sought to close the gap between art and daily life, and was a combination of playfulness, iconoclasm, and appropriation. In the United States the term was popularized by

Barbara Rose Barbara Ellen Rose (June 11, 1936December 25, 2020) was an American art historian, art critic, curator and college professor. Rose's criticism focused on 20th-century American art, particularly minimalism and abstract expressionism, as well as S ...

in the 1960s and refers primarily, although not exclusively, to work created in that and the preceding decade. There was also an international dimension to the movement, particularly in Japan and in Europe, serving as the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau réalisme. Neo-Dada has been exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast. It was a reaction to the personal emotionalism of

Abstract Expressionism Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...

and, taking a lead from the practice of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, denied traditional concepts of aesthetics.

Trends

Interest in Dada followed in the wake of documentary publications, such as Robert Motherwell's ''The Dada Painters and Poets'' (1951) and German language publications from 1957 and later, to which some former Dadaists contributed. However, several of the original Dadaists denounced the label Neo-Dada, especially in its U.S. manifestations, on the grounds that the work was derivative rather than making fresh discoveries; that aesthetic pleasure was found in what were originally protests against

bourgeois The bourgeoisie ( , ) is a social class, equivalent to the middle or upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with, the proletariat by their affluence, and their great cultural and financial capital. They ...

aesthetic concepts; and because it pandered to

commercialism Commercialism is the application of both manufacturing and consumption towards personal usage, or the practices, methods, aims, and distribution of products in a free market geared toward generating a profit. Commercialism can also refer, positivel ...

. Many of the artists who identified with the trend subsequently moved on to other specialities or identified with different art movements and in many cases only certain aspects of their early work can be identified with it. For example, Piero Manzoni's ''Consacrazione dell'arte dell'uovo sodo'' (Artistic consecration of the hard-boiled egg, 1959), which he signed with an imprint of his thumb, or his cans of shit (1961) whose price was pegged to the value of their weight in gold, satirizing the concept of the artist's personal creation and art as commodity. Basel Fasnachtsbrunnen Jean Tinguely

An allied approach is found in the creation of

collage Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ...

and assemblage, as in the junk sculptures of the American

Richard Stankiewicz Richard Stankiewicz (1922–1983) was an American sculptor, known for his work in scrap metal. Stankiewicz was born in Philadelphia, but spent his formative years in Detroit. He began painting and sculpting while in the United States Navy, in ...

, whose works created from scrap have been compared with Schwitters' practice. These objects are "so treated that they become less discarded than found, ''objets trouvés''." Jean Tinguely's fantastic machines, notoriously the self-destructing ''Homage to New York'' (1960), were another approach to the subversion of the mechanical. Although such techniques as collage and assemblage may have served as inspiration, different terms were found for the objects produced, both in the U.S. and in Europe.

Robert Rauschenberg Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines (1954–1964), a group of artwor ...

labeled as "combines" such works as "Bed" (1955), which consisted of a framed quilt and pillow covered in paint and mounted on the wall.

Arman Arman (November 17, 1928 – October 22, 2005) was a French-born American artist. Born Armand Fernandez in Nice, France, Arman was a painter who moved from using objects for the ink or paint traces they leave (''cachets'', ''allures d'objet'') to ...

labeled as "accumulations" his collections of dice and bottle tops, and as "''poubelles''" the contents of trash-bins encased in plastic. Daniel Spoerri created "snare pictures" (''tableaux piège''), of which the earliest was "Kichka's Breakfast" (1960), and in which the remains of a meal were glued to the cloth and mounted on the table-top affixed to the wall.

Poems

In the Netherlands the poets associated with the 'magazine for texts', ''Barbarber'' (1958–71), particularly

J. Bernlef Hendrik Jan Marsman (14 January 1937 – 29 October 2012), better known by his pen name, J. Bernlef, was a Dutch writer, poet, novelist and translator, much of whose work centres on mental perception of reality and its expression. He won numerous ...

and

K. Schippers Gerard Stigter (6 November 1936 – 12 August 2021), known by the pseudonym K. Schippers, was a Dutch poet, prose writer and art critic. Credited with having introduced the readymade as a poetic form, the whole of his work is dedicated to looking ...

, extended the concept of the readymade into poetry, discovering poetic suggestiveness in such everyday items as a newspaper advert about a lost tortoise and a typewriter test sheet. Another group of Dutch poets infiltrated the Belgian experimentalist magazine ''Gard Sivik'' and began to fill it with seemingly inconsequential fragments of conversation and demonstrations of verbal procedures. The writers included

C.B. Vaandrager Cornelis Bastiaan Vaandrager (26 August 1935, in Rotterdam – 18 March 1992, in Rotterdam), who generally published with only his initials as C. B. Vaandrager, was a Dutch writer and poet who lived and worked in Rotterdam. Later he came to be ...

Hans Verhagen Hans Verhagen (3 March 1939 – 10 April 2020) was a Dutch journalist, poet, painter and filmmaker, born in Vlissingen. He gained the P. C. Hooft Award in 2009 "for his humour, his engagement, his poetic daring and whimsy."Armando Armando may refer to: * Armando (given name) * Armando (artist) (1929–2018), the name used by Dutch artist Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd * Armando (producer) Armando Gallop (sometimes written as Armando Gallup) (February 12, 1970 – December 17, ...

. On this approach the critic Hugo Brems has commented that "the poet's role in this kind of poetry was not to discourse on reality, but to highlight particular fragments of it which are normally perceived as non-poetic. These poets were not creators of art, but discoverers." The impersonality that such artists aspired to was best expressed by Jan Schoonhoven (1914–94), the theorist of the Dutch Nul group of artists, to which Armando also belonged: "Zero is first and foremost a new conception of reality, in which the individual role of the artist is kept to a minimum. The Zero artist merely selects, isolates parts of reality (materials as well as ideas stemming from reality) and exhibits them in the most neutral way. The avoidance of personal feelings is essential to Zero." This in turn links it with some aspects of Pop Art and Nouveau Réaliste practice and underlines the rejection of Expressionism. The beginnings of Concrete Poetry and text montage in the

Wiener Gruppe The Wiener Gruppe (''Vienna Group'') was a small and loose avant-garde constellation of Austrian poets and writers, which arose from an older and wider postwar association of artists called Art-Club. The group was formed around 1953 under the influ ...

have also been referred back to the example of Raoul Hausmann's letter poems. Such techniques may also owe something to

H.N. Werkman Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman (commonly called H. N. Werkman; 29 April 1882 – 10 April 1945) was an experimental Dutch artist, typographer, and printer. He set up a clandestine printing house during the Nazi occupation (1940–1945) and was shot by ...

's typographical experiments in the Netherlands which had first been put on display in the

Stedelijk Museum The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (; Municipal Museum Amsterdam), colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

in 1945.

Artists linked with the term

Genpei Akasegawa was a pseudonym of Japanese artist , born March 27, 1937 – October 26, 2014 in Yokohama. He used another pseudonym, , for literary works. A member of the influential artist groups Neo-Dada Organizers and Hi-Red Center, Akasegawa went on to ma ...

* Joseph Beuys * Jaap Blonk * Lee Bontecou * George Brecht *

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...

* César * John Chamberlain * Christo * Merce Cunningham * Jim Dine * Jacques Halbert * Dick Higgins *

Kommissar Hjuler Kommissar Hjuler (born Detlev Hjuler; 1967) works as a sound recordist in the field of Noise and Post-industrial music, visual artist, film maker and police officer at Flensburg, a town on the German border with Denmark. He often works together wit ...

* Jasper Johns * Allan Kaprow * Yves Klein * Alison Knowles * George Maciunas * Piero Manzoni *

Neo-Dada Organizers , often shortened to , was a short-lived but influential Japanese Neo-Dadaist art collective formed by Masunobu Yoshimura in 1960. Composed of a small group of young, up-and-coming artists who met periodically at Yoshimura's "White House" atelier i ...

* Claes Oldenburg * Yoko Ono *

Robin Page Robin Page (2 November 1932 – 12 May 2015) was a British painter. He was one of the early members of the Fluxus art movement. Biography Page was born in England in 1932. His father, Peter Carter-Page, was a humorist and cartoonist who worked ...

* Nam June Paik *

* Niki de Saint Phalle *

Ushio Shinohara Ushio Shinohara (篠原有司男, ''Shinohara Ushio'', born January 17, 1932), nicknamed “Gyū-chan”, is a Japanese contemporary painter, sculptor, and performance artist based in New York City. Best known for his vigorously painted, large- ...

* Daniel Spoerri *

* Jean Tinguely *

Jacques Villeglé Jacques Villeglé, born Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé (27 March 1926 – 6 June 2022) was a French mixed-media artist and affichiste famous for his alphabet with symbolic letters and decollage with ripped or lacerated posters. He was a membe ...

Wolf Vostell Wolf Vostell (14 October 1932 – 3 April 1998) was a German painter and sculptor, considered one of the early adopters of video art and installation art and pioneer of Happenings and Fluxus. Techniques such as blurring and Dé-coll/age are ch ...

Masunobu Yoshimura , was a Japanese visual and conceptual artist associated with the Neo-Dada movement. In 1960, he was the founder and leader of the short-lived but influential artistic collective Neo-Dada Organizers, which had as members several young artists who ...

References

Bibliography

*Dorothée Brill, ''Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus''
Dartmouth College 2010
*Catherine Craft, ''An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism''
University of Chicago 2012
*Susan Hapgood, ''Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958–62'', Universe Books and American Federation of Arts (1994) *David Hopkins, ''Neo-avant garde''
Amsterdam, New York 2006
*Cecilia Novero, ''Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art'', University of Minnesota 2010 *Owen Smith, ''Fluxus: The History of an Attitude'', San Diego State University 1998

External links