Dada and Existentialism: the Authenticity of Ambiguity
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 19299353
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- ISBN
- 978-1-137-56368-2
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The monograph stems from 5 years’ research (extended study), beginning in 2011 and lasting until the publication of the text in 2016. The work is built upon an analysis of an extensive body of primary works. The comparative analysis of Existentialist theory and Dada primary works and events involved complex and extended creative investigation. The output is in a longer form (monograph). Some of the works were difficult to access (film, literary work).
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Through a thematic exploration of choice, alienation, responsibility, freedom, and truth in Dada and Existentialist texts, the monograph raises and discusses three overarching questions: How can we use Dada and Existentialist ideas to not only critique but also to improve the human condition?; given the total revolutionary approach adopted by the two movements, are they rebelling for rebellion’s sake?; and how do the ideals and aims of the nature of revolt in these two movements compare to the outcomes?
The research responds to a provocation by one of the original Dadas, Richard Huelsenbeck, whose short essay ‘Dada and Existentialism’ introduced the concept of their convergence. Previous scholarship had not sought to pick up this dropped thread, and this study represents the first extended analysis, using an Existentialist methodology, to evaluate and understand the role of rebellion, absurdity and otherness within the Dada movement.
Dada is inherently an extremely interdisciplinary movement, and this is reflected in the works chosen for the study: plastic art, film, literature (across a spectrum of fictionality), performance art and events, and theatre. As the book uses an Existentialist methodology, it introduces the fields of philosophy and ethics to an analysis that already spans art history, cultural studies, and modern languages.
The monograph offers sustained study of Dada and Existentialism, and has been able to elucidate a number of compelling comparisons of Dada gestures with Existentialist texts that demonstrate the interchangeability of fiction and reality, particularly within what we might understand as (to use the Debordian term) the ‘society of spectacle’ (review in Modernism/Modernity). The study has been internationally influential in a variety of disciplines, including visual art and literature, and also interdisciplinary studies of absurdism in law and in electronics, artificial intelligence, and in historical research of emigrant Dadas.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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