Chapter IX - Nothings

“Your work is to discover you work and then with all your heart give yourself to it.”

– Prince Gautama Siddharta, Buddha

                Johnson did not align himself with any group.  While he may have agreed with certain Fluxus ideas he went about things in his own way.  His Nothings were generally less publicized than Fluxus events or Happenings.  His work was more intimate yet more intellectual.  He did not proclaim lofty ideas in manifestoes the way that George Maciunas did but he did have reservations about the way that the business of art was run.  He had his own ideas on how to get his artwork out to the public while at the same time making a gibe towards galleries and art dealers.  He spoke about it in a 1980 interview,

    
         "..you can buy my work in a gallery, and see it in many museums’

            famous collections as artworks in frames. My last show of portraits 

            sells from eight hundred to three thousand ... dollars, or, you can 

            get all this material from me by mail for free, if I decide to send it to 

            you. There was talk at one time of my undermining the whole art 

            economy by my ‘giving away’ That is you got a very beautiful 

               collage or drawing just mailed to you, so, I decree whether

                         I give this to you, or that I sell it to you."[1]

This was Johnson's way of making the existence of galleries and museums obsolete but he did it on his terms and without the attention-grabbing, ostentatious display of Maciunas.  He quietly injected his little digs towards the artistic establishment of museums, critics, galleries and collectors.  Johnson generally was not about loud protests, politics or strictly adhering to manifestos.  His protests were more personal and they always involved humor.

            In the documentary on Ray Johnson, How to Draw a Bunny, collector Morton Janklow tells the story of how Johnson offered to do his portrait, Johnson ended up doing twenty-six collage portraits from a profile tracing he took of Janklow.  Each collage was different but they all contained the profile tracing of Janklow which was sometimes not easily recognizable as it was completely incorporated in with various scraps of papers, sketched images and words.  What follows is a typical example of the absurd conditions Johnson would put into play when he dealt with the possibility of a sale of his work.  He offered to sell the portraits to Janklow for $42,400.  Janklow refused and they bartered back and forth with Johnson discounting the price yet subtracting certain pieces from the series.  Johnson would add to or remove certain parts of certain portraits and then send a letter to Janklow with new prices, all of which were refused.  At one point he wrote a letter to Janklow saying he had added portraits of Paloma Picasso to Janklow's portraits but would now have to charge him double the original price which Janklow had already been unprepared to pay.  He was playing with Janklow and this humorous negotiation process was as much a part of his artwork as the actual portraits were. 

Johnson was known as, "The most famous unknown artist in New York," a name given to him in article written by Grace Glueck in the New York Times in 1965.[2]  This was due to the fact that while he was no stranger to other New York artists of the time he was not well known among the public.  His impressive oeuvre consists of innumerable collages, pieces of mail art, and performances.  Performance art was what suited Johnson and his artistic ideals best.  In the early 1960s Johnson started to call his performances "Nothings".  His Nothings were about the ephemeral, the spiritual, transformation, the fact that everything is temporary and eventually there is nothing.  He was interested in what went unseen or unsaid.  In a 1968 interview he discussed his interests with Sevim Fesci.  Fesci asked, “Wherever you go are you always on alert for visual stimulants, because in your works, you know, there are so many different things, and you must have taken them from so many different sources.”  Johnson responded, "I'm interested in things and things that disintegrate or fall apart, things that grow or have additions, things that grow out of things and processes of the way things actually happen to me."[3]  The medium of performance emphasized the qualities of change, intangibility and impermanence and was well suited to express the perpetual transformation of life. 

Early on, during his years as a student at Black Mountain, Johnson painted abstract Albers-inspired squares on canvas but he later shredded his early paintings and recycled the fragments in his collages.[4]  He also burned some of his early collages in Cy Twombly's fireplace as a performance.[5]  The act of burning things as performance was something Johnson did more than once; in the 1950s he had also burned all of the notes he took while attending classes taught by Josef Albers.[6]  These acts exemplify what interested Johnson as an artist and what his performances were about; the transformation of one thing to another, the ending of a piece of art, the turning of something into nothing.  At the same time they seem a symbolic way of freeing himself from his immature artistic past and represented him truly finding his artistic self.  These performances also involve his paintings and work on paper as part of the performance which is important as Johnson considered all of his art as being interconnected.  In other words, his work was not to be sectioned off as performance, collage, painting, it was all incorporated and connected as one and his art always referred back to itself in some way.

Johnson was an intensely private individual and this need for privacy and the unwillingness to allow people to ever truly know him spilled over into his work.  In his performances he would often incorporate the viewer as part of his piece but he never handed control over to the viewer; he kept control and kept the viewer at arm’s length.  He never let anyone have total access and there was no raw emotion in his work.  It was always cerebral; people had to think when they were involved in a piece by Johnson.  Things were always done on his terms.

Johnson’s Nothings were not as planned out or scripted as Happenings or many Fluxus performances and sometimes his pieces were completely unscripted with no planning at all.  There was a minimalist quality to Johnson’s performances and he used the element of chance more often than Happenings or Fluxus artists did.  He would sometimes perform spur of the moment for whoever was around, even if it was only one person.

In my email correspondence with Coco Gordon she recounted one of Johnson's intimate, spontaneous, performances.  While she was on a ladder installing one of her pieces at the Central Hall Gallery in SOHO in 1982 for John Cage's 70th birthday celebration, Ray climbed up the ladder behind her and instructed her to not look right then but he had just put down her back his, "most important nothing."  He then instructed her to look at it when she got off the ladder and to, "keep it, take care of it."  When she looked she discovered a, "hand torn piece of paper about six by seven inches that had the word Nothing scribbled in his writing, rearranged to read "noihtng."[7] [sic]  This small and intimate Nothing shows just how personal some pieces were with Johnson.  He did not need large, publicized events in order to do a piece that he considered an important work.  In this case it was a shared artistic experience that involved only the artist and one viewer, yet it is still a performance by Ray Johnson.  It is just as relevant as any other one of his performances. 

Johnson’s Nothings were an answer to Happenings; however Johnson considered his art to be more of an “attitude as opposed to a happening."[8]  This is because Johnson’s art never stopped and if he was performing a Nothing he was simply using a different attitude than he would in other areas of his art.  His life was his art and he made no distinction between the two.  Almost every friend or acquaintance of Johnson’s to whom I spoke made it clear to me that there was no separation for Johnson between his art and his life.  It was all one, everything he did was art.  Every action, word or deed that made up his life made up his art as well.  Johnson’s intimate companion Richard Lippold said of him, "It would be very hard for me to separate him as a person from his work; I don't think I could do that."[9]  Johnson took the ideas of Duchamp, Cage and Fluxus a step further; anything and everything could be art including the entire life of a person.  Coco Gordon, artist and close friend of Johnson, shared her feelings on him, "I honestly really felt he didn't, never ate food…one of these people that train themselves to live on nothing."[10]  It was as if he had reached such a state that he fused into one with art in such a spiritual way that food was no longer necessary.  He had become art. 

---

[1] "Ray Johnson (Conversation with R. Pieper)”, Mail, Etc. Art, (University of Colorado, Tyler School of Art) 1980.

[2] Grace Glueck, “What Happened? Nothing,” New York Times, 11 April 1965, sec. Art Notes.

[3] Fesci, 19.

[4] De Salvo, 1999, 18.

[5] Watson, 2001,134.

[6] De Salvo, 1999, 17.

[7] Email from Coco Gordon, May 29,2007.

[8] William S. Wilson, Muffet Jones, Ray Johnson: En Rapport, (New York: Richard L. Feigen & Co.), 11.

[9] Walter, Moore, DVD.

[10] Walter, Moore, DVD.

Chapter VIII - Happenings

 Fluxus was not the only group staging performance pieces during the late 1950s to early 1960s, there were also other types of performances going on which came to be known as Happenings.  Happenings emerged from the Rutgers University campus in New Jersey and included artists who would later be known as the ‘Rutgers Group’ such as Allan Kaprow, George Segal, Robert Watts and George Brecht.[1]  The first Happening was done by Kaprow at Rutgers University in 1958.[2]  Happenings differed slightly from Fluxus performances and generally were more complicated and scripted, like a theatrical work that involved the audience.  Artist Allan Kaprow is credited with coining the term Happening.[3]   There were also performances and installation pieces that involved performance art called "events" or "situations" that today are often considered interchangeable with Happenings. 

There was a cross-over effect with Fluxus and Happenings artists, they often participated in the same venues and they were certainly aware of each other.  Maciunas’ Flux-Mass of 1970, which will be discussed later, took place at Voorhees Chapel on the Rutgers campus and Allan Kaprow and George Brecht flowed in between both movements.  It is therefore difficult to definitively categorize them as two absolutely separate entities. 

Happenings and Fluxus continued into the later sixties and seventies.  Performance art became more accepted and even the preferred form of art for the time.  The art world paralleled the changing American society and became more rebellious and insistent upon change.  The civil rights movement, feminists and the counterculture youth movement became more radical as the sixties went on and America headed into the Vietnam War and enforced the involuntary draft.  The harder the government tried to crush the youth movement the stronger the counter movements fought back and even the chaplain of Yale University, William Sloane Coffin, encouraged students to dodge the draft.[4]  Art historians and critics followed slightly behind the discourse and by the seventies were caught up in a rebellion of their own against formalism and for a more sociological context in art criticism.  It was against this background that there existed Fluxus, Happenings and Ray Johnson.

1 Joan Marter, Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 1.
2 Ibid., 8.
3 Geoffrey Hendricks, Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958-1972, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), i.

 4 Judith G. Coffin, Robert C. Stacey, Robert E. Lerner, Standish Meacham, Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002) 1091.

Chapter VII - Fluxus

                        “The misunderstandings have seemed to come from comparing 

                                  Fluxus with movements or groups whose individuals seem to 

                                  have some principle in common, or an agreed upon program.”

                                                                – George Brecht

            America in the 1950s was very conservative and there was pressure to conform to society’s norms.  There was a strong economy with vast consumer spending going on.  There were also changes going on in the home and workplace as it became increasingly normal and even expected to have new technological conveniences such as refrigerators, vacuums, televisions, etc.  Underneath all the consumerism and emphasis on projecting the ideal family image there were rising counter movements.  Civil rights groups were forming and protesting racism and the feminist movement was beginning to take root.  There was also the beat generation, a group of non-conformists, which originated in the late 1940s around the writers Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, who had taken up residence in New York City. 

            By this time New York had claimed the title of art capital of the world and had a clustering of artists, writers and intellectuals.  The leading artistic movement, as well as the first internationally accepted American art movement, was Abstract Expressionism.   Art critic Clement Greenberg led the way for the Abstract Expressionists and many were influenced by his famous essay, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, published in the Partisan Review in 1939.  His essay discussed the avant-garde removing itself from society to raise art to a higher level.  He went on to say that the uncultivated, middle class masses would not likely be able to understand this art and could only appreciate things on a superficial level such as mass produced popular culture “kitsch” items.  Greenberg called for a “pure” art which should not refer to the outside world and should be art for art’s sake.  By pigeonholing art in this way, Greenberg was actually bringing the avant-garde a step back from what the Futurists and Dadaists sought to do.  He was actually calling for art to be elitist and his attitude appeared condescending and pretentious as he spoke of the masses not having the education or cultivation to understand ‘high art’.  The art world would react just as society in general would react when there is pressure to conform, there would be a rebellion.     

            One manifestation of that rebellion came in the form of Fluxus.  Fluxus was a loosely organized group of artists that spanned the globe but it had an especially strong presence in New York City.  Their main focus was on performance art.  George Maciunas is considered the primary founder and organizer of the movement.  He was a Lithuanian born artist who immigrated to America in 1948.[2]    He aptly described Fluxus as “a fusion of Spike Jones, gags, games, vaudeville, Cage and Duchamp.”[3]  The recognition of the importance of Duchamp and Cage to Fluxus seemed to be a general consensus and was echoed in a statement by Ben Vautier, “Without Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Dada, Fluxus would not exist.”[4]  The artists that were part of the initial formation of Fluxus were, Allan Kaprow, Walter de Maria, Robert Morris and Simone Morris, all of whom were included in plans for an early Fluxus publication.[5]  Other artists that were associated with Fluxus at one time or another were, Claes Oldenberg, Dick Higgins, Jon Hendricks, Geoffrey Hendricks, Alison Knowles, Jim Dine, George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, Henry Flynt, Al Hansen, Ben Vautier, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman and Ray Johnson, although some, including Johnson, never considered themselves part of Fluxus.  

            Fluxus artists opposed the ideals of Greenberg and the Abstract Expressionists.  Like the Futurists and the Dadaists they did not agree with the authority of the established museums over the world of art nor did they believe that one must be educated to view and understand a piece of art.  Maciunas wanted to tear down the elitist world of art critics, museums and galleries, literally.[6]  He had very definite ideas, which he recorded in manifestos, that fine art and, "at least its institutional forms,” should be, "totally eliminated."[7]  He proposed the obstruction of traffic and subway systems in New York focusing on areas that would affect museums and galleries.[8]  Fluxus musician, Henry Flynt launched an anti-museum campaign and picketed outside of The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1963, with signs that read, "Demolish art museums," and, "Demolish serious culture."(fig.6)[9] 

            With art taken out of museums it would be part of everyday life, it would be everywhere and accessible to everyone, anyone could make it, it would be no more important than a trip to the supermarket, putting your socks on or taking out the trash.  This descends from Cage’s idea that everyday life is more interesting than celebrated forms of art as well as Duchamp’s view on conceptualism.  Fluxus would translate this into the use of everyday objects being presented as art as well as a person’s actions and reactions also being considered art.  Maciunas also wanted to remove the artist's ego from the works of art and even suggested that all works simply be signed - Fluxus - instead of being signed by the artist that created the work.[10]  That way the artist was not elevated from anyone else and any art created by anyone would be equal. 

Fluxus events included audience participation as a way of involving the masses in the making of art.  Such was the 1970 "Fluxfest Presentation of John Lennon and Yoko Ono," where Maciunas made paper masks of John Lennon and Yoko Ono for the audience to wear so they could impersonate Lennon and Ono.[11]  Maciunas involved the audience in the work and made them become the performers.  The use of the audience and masking their real identities spoke about his ideas on taking the ego of the artist out of the piece as well as playing into these thoughts that, "anything can substitute for art and anyone can do it...the value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, mass-produced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all."[12]

            Maciunas wrote the Fluxus manifesto in 1963 with the proclamations to,

                "Purge the world of bourgeoisie sickness, “intellectual,” 

                 professional and commercialized culture, Purge the world of 

                dead art, imitation,  artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, 

                mathematical art, - PURGE THE WORLD OF “EUROPANISM!” 

                PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART , 

                  promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART 

                 REALITY  to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics, 

                 dilettante and  professionals,"

However, not al Fluxus artists agreed with Maciunas on everything.  Artist Jackson Mac Low wrote the following in 1962 in response to some ideas Maciunas had put forth against culture and museums,

                  “I’m not opposed to serious culture – quite the contrary. I’m all 

                   for it & consider that my own work is a genuine contribution to 

                   it….I’m not against art or music or drama or literature, old or new. 

                   I’m against the overbalance of museum culture…as present-minded 

                   and presently “useful” cultural activities and would certainly like to 

                 see the balance tipped the other way, but I would not want to eliminate 

                                        museums (I like museums).”

It was this type of dissent that caused Maciunas to invariably expel individuals from Fluxus.  In 1963 Maciunas expelled Jackson Mac Low from Fluxus and the following year added Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, and Nam June Paik to that list due to disagreements over what venues these artists were performing in.[15] 

There are other aspects to Fluxus, as Hannah Higgins, daughter of Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, points out in an interview that Fluxus artists, “who came in through contact with John Cage….are going to have a more Zen or experiential sense of the group, which also has a place in Dada…”[16]  Therefore, although there was a group of artists who were all considered to be part of Fluxus they did not all agree on the same ideals and viewed Fluxus in different ways.  As George Brecht put it, “In Fluxus there has never been any attempt to agree on aims or methods; individuals with something unnamable in common have simply coalesced to publish and perform their work.”[17]




1  Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience, (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 69.
2 Jon Hendricks, Fluxus Codex, (Detroit: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1998) 21.


3 Robert Silberman, “In the Spirit of Fluxus, Minneapolis” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 135., No. 1083, (June 1993), 432. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.montclair.edu:2048/stable/885685?&Search=yes&term=fluxus&term=dada&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Ddada%2Band%2Bfluxus%26gw%3Djtx%26prq%3Dblack%2Bmountain%2Bcollege%26Search%3DSearch%26hp%3D25%26wc%3Don&item=5&ttl=127&returnArticleService=showArticle, (accessed January 15, 2008).
 4 Smith, 19.

5 Ibid., 129.

6 Smith, 25.

7 Clive Phillpot, Jon Hendricks, Fluxus: Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 15.

8 Michael Orin, "Anti-Art as the End of Cultural History," Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, (May 1993), 6. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.montclair.edu:2048/stable/3245708?&Search=yes&term=anti-art&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Danti-art%26wc%3Don%26x%3D12%26y%3D17&item=3&ttl=595&returnArticleService=showArticle

9 Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1998), 5.

10 Ibid., 12.

11 Smith, 206.

12 Phillpot, Hendricks, 13.

13 Phillpot, Hendricks, 2.

14 Higgins, 77.

15 Ibid., 78.

16 Janet A. Kaplan, Bracken Hendricks, Geoffrey Hendricks, Hannah Higgins, Alison Knowles, “Flux Generations,” Art Journal, Vol. 59, No. 2. (Summer 2000), 9,  http://www.jstor.org/pss/778097. (accessed March 25, 2008).

  

            17 Higgins, 70.

Chapter VI - John Cage

VI. John Cage: 

                        “One of the liveliest lectures I ever heard…was called Zen Buddhism 

                                  and Dada. It is possible to make a connection between the two, 

                                  but neither dada nor Zen is a fixed tangible.” -  John Cage

John Cage was an experimental composer and as mentioned earlier he taught at Black Mountain College.  He is known for using everyday sounds that are not usually thought of as music in his compositions.  This idea was directly influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s use of everyday objects as art.  Cage was quite aware of Duchamp and his ideas and the two met in the late 1940s.[2]  The second influence that dominated Cage’s work was the teachings and philosophies of Zen Buddhism.  He studied Zen in the mid 1940s and it deeply affected his outlook on life and music.[3]  Cage explained his beliefs, "The attitude that I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration [art] when we become aware of it..."[4]  To him, art was everywhere, everyday life was art and every sound we hear was music or had the potential to be and these daily sights and sounds were more interesting to him than the accepted forms of art and music.  Cage thought that art should be concerned with equivalency of values instead of elevating artistic experiences from everyday experiences - "in this way art becomes important as a means to make one aware of one's actual environment."[5]  This comes directly from Buddhist teachings on the importance of being aware of every moment and present in every moment in life.  Every second is significant and one should always have the awareness of that.  When this is applied to art or music then one is always aware of the potential of every object, act or sound potentially being art.  This also pertains to the teaching philosophy at Black Mountain of art and learning continuously taking place as part of everyday life.  Cage undoubtedly played some part in implementing that concept.

Cage staged a performance at Black Mountain College in 1952 that is considered by some to be the first Happening.[6]  The piece held significant importance to Fluxus and Happenings artists.  It was called, “Theatre Piece 1.”  The piece included the reading of poetry by M.C. Richards, an exhibition of paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, piano playing by David Tudor and dancing by Merce Cunningham.[7]  It was a loosely outlined event that incorporated chance and was very similar to events that took place at the Cabaret Voltaire.[8]  After Cage’s involvement at Black Mountain College he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York in the late 1950s.[9]  Among his students were future Fluxus artists George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low and Dick Higgins.[10]

1 John Cage, Silence, (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), xi.
2 Owen Smith, Fluxus: The History of an Attitude, (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1998), 20.
3 Ibid. 21.
4 Ibid., 22.
5 Ibid., 21.
6 Zommer, DVD.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Smith, 23.
10 Ibid.

Chapter V - Dada

“So DADA was born of a desire for independence, of a distrust of the community.

                 Those who belong to us keep their freedom. We don't recognize any theory. We

                  have had enough of cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas.

                    Do you practice art to earn money and fondle the middle class?”

                                                                                                              -Tristan Tzara

Dada started in Zurich, in the spring of 1916 during a time of great upheaval and turmoil in Europe.  World War I was drastically changing the lives of everyone throughout the continent and it was hard for anyone to make any sense of the horrific accounts of violence that were being reported.  Many artists, writers and intellectuals who were morally opposed to fighting in the war fled to neutral Switzerland.[2]  The congregation of these artists and writers in Zurich set the stage for nonconformist ideas to flourish.  It was from this group that included Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck that Dada emerged. 

The Dada artists believed that a contributing factor in the war was bourgeois logic and reason.  Therefore, Dada artists took the opposite route from socially accepted logic and reason; they sought nonsense, chaos and humor as an alternative ideology to what had existed up until then.  They saw that society had striven for orderliness, seriousness and rigidly structured lifestyles and it had only led the world into a senseless and massively destructive war, so abandoning logic seemed to be the best alternative.  Hans Richter described Dada in the following;

           

                   “Dada was not an artistic movement in the accepted sense; it broke over the 

                     world of  art as the war did over the nations. It came without warning, out 

                     of a heavy brooding sky, and left behind it a new day in which the stored-up 

                     energies released by Dada were evidenced in new forms, new materials, 

                                   new ideas, new directions, new people – and in

                                   which they addressed themselves to new people.”

Dada originated at the Cabaret Voltaire, a small bar set up by Hugo Ball and his wife, Emmy Hennings where artists, writers and poets could assemble to play music, recite poetry, show artworks and dance.[4]  Ball made requests to his artist friends for paintings, etchings and drawings to display at the Cabaret Voltaire.[5]  Tristan Tzara, poet and friend of Ball, organized poème simultané, where three or more people sang, spoke or made various noises at the same time to be performed at the cabaret.[6]  Ball stated, “When I started the Cabaret Voltaire, I was sure that there must be other young men in Switzerland who, like myself, wanted not only to enjoy their independence, but also to give proof of it.”[7]  And he was right.  The Cabaret Voltaire drew in artists and writers who wanted to put forth their ideas on the events of the day and create something new and independent.   They wanted to distance themselves from the abominations that were occurring outside of Switzerland’s borders.  As Jean Arp put it,

                            “We had no interest in the abattoirs of the World War and devoted 

                              ourselves to fine art.  While the thunder of artillery rumbled away in 

                              the distance we were putting collages, reciting, writing verse, and 

                               singing with all our hearts.  We were looking for an 

               elementary type of art that we thought would save mankind 

               from the raging madness of those times.”[8]

Dada continued on with certain Futurist ideas and sought to combine all areas of fine art, such as painting, sculpture, poetry, music and dancing.  However, Dada did not agree with the politics of the Futurists.  They often used humor in place of the confrontational attitude of the Futurists.  At the Cabaret Voltaire there were “cabaret shows” showcasing these arts and ideas.  Ball described one of the early shows at Cabaret Voltaire, “Mme. Hennings and Mme. Leconte sang in French and Danish. Mr. Tristan Tzara read some of his Roumanian [sic] poetry.  A balalaika orchestra played popular tunes and Russian dances.”[9]  Dada was, as put by Huelsenbeck, "a rallying point for abstract energies and a lasting slingshot for the great international artistic movements."[10] 

            The Dada movement flourished in several cities besides Zurich such as Berlin and Paris.  Paris Dada focused more on the literary than on the visual arts.  Berlin Dada was more political.  In New York, Dada developed independently and differently from European Dada and centered on the circle of artists involved with Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery.[11]  America was not yet in the war when New York Dada formed in 1913 and New York did not have the geographical or personal closeness to the war that Europeans had.  The New York Dadaists were rebelling against the established art world for different reasons than European Dadas.  One reason for the latest artistic rebellion was photography.  Stieglitz and fellow photographer Edward Steichen were seeking to establish photography as an accepted form of modern art.  This was not an important aspect of European Dada.  News from the European art scene was filtering through to America and was introduced at the Armory Show of 1913 which displayed over one thousand pieces of artwork by modern European artists.  Included in this show was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.  The Armory show introduced American artists to a new way of thinking about art.  This new way of thinking would eventually open up the doors for everything from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art to Fluxus and to Ray Johnson.

Since there were numerous groups of Dada artists spread across Europe and in New York, it is difficult to pinpoint one set of specific ideals that was incorporated into the Dada movement.  There were often widely varying thoughts on what it should be depending on the city and group of artists involved at the moment.  Generally, they were against the usual bourgeois lifestyle and way of thinking as well as the then accepted aesthetics and theories on art.  Dada artists incorporated chance, humor and nonsense into their pieces.  Tzara, perhaps, best defines the overall feel of the movement in his Dada Manifesto of 1918:

          

                                So DADA was born of a desire for independence, of a 

                                          distrust of the community.  Those who belong to us keep 

                                           their freedom. We don't recognize any theory. We

                                          have had enough of cubist and futurist academies: 

                                           laboratories of formal ideas. Do you practice art to earn

                                             money and fondle the middle class?[12]

Thus, the basic tenets of Dada were freedom, independence and nonconformity to theory and even to society.  It was the continuation of the artistic revolution. 

The most significant contribution by Dada was the readymade.  Anything and everything could be art according to the intention of the artist and the context in which the object was placed.  Art could be made of anything; words, newspapers scraps, sounds, urinals, even entire houses and art should not have to conform to the established art world’s galleries and museums.  Marcel Duchamp is the artists most associated with readymades today.  Duchamp’s ideas that the concept is what is important in art put him in the position of being considered one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.  His readymade pieces such as Fountain or In Advance of the Broken Arm were everyday objects, a urinal and a shovel respectively, but the naming of those objects and the placement of them in an exhibition transformed them into pieces of art based on the concept alone, not on the actual object. 

Kurt Schwitters, another artist associated with Dada, was interested in blurring the boundaries between the arts.  His ideas were as follows,

                   “My aim is the total work of art, which combines all branches of art

                     into an artistic work…First I combined individual categories of art. 

                     I have pasted poems from words and sentences so as to produce a 

                    rhythmic design. I have on the other hand pasted pictures and 

                     drawings so that sentences could be read in them. I have driven

                     nails into pictures so as to produce a plastic relief apart from the 

                    pictorial quality of the paintings.

                     I did so as to efface the boundaries between the arts.”[13]

Schwitters put his ideas into play with his Merzbau.  This was the transformation of Schwitters’ actual house into a piece of artwork and he described it as, “building an abstract sculpture into which people can go.”[14]  He used found objects and attached them to the existing architecture of his home as well as altering the existing architecture of the house.  It was an ongoing installation piece that Schwitters actually lived in.  A step into the realm of erasing the borders between art and life, he wanted to actually live in his artwork.

            Another element of Dada that would be important to Fluxus artists and Johnson was the element of chance.  Dadaists incorporated chance into their art and there would often be entire works with no aesthetic planning.  In Marcel Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages, he dropped three meter long threads onto three canvases and fixed them there.  These canvases were then adhered to glass panels.  Duchamp then placed these in an open wooden box along with three pieces of wood cut into the same shapes that the strings had made when they landed on the canvases.  Artist Jean Arp used a similar method in his collages when he would drop paper shapes onto another paper and glue them down without planning out the composition.  Arp would just let the chance of the way they fell decide the placement.  

            Dada concepts such as the promotion of absurdity and humor, the use of chance to create art, the combination of arts and especially Duchamp’s ideas on conceptualism would be the catalyst for the formation of Fluxus and Happenings.  They would also play major roles in performances composed by John Cage that were executed at Black Mountain College and in the performances of Ray Johnson.


1 Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), xxiv.
2 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 1997), 9.
3 Ibid., 12.
4 Motherwell, xxv.
5 Richter, 30.
6 Motherwell, xxv.
7 Marc Dachay, Dada, the Revolt of Art, (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 2006), 12.
8 Motherwel, xxv.
9 Ibid., 24.
10 Richter, 81.
11 Tzara, 125.
12 Elizabeth Burns Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau: the Cathedral of Erotic Misery, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 25.
13 Schwitters, xvii.