http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1822027221

Dada 1916 in theory : practices of critical resistance

"Dada formed in 1916 in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion - in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, at the core of Western art. This book sets out new coordinates in revision of a formation that art history routinely exhausts by its characterisation as a 'revolutionary movement' of anarchic cultural dissent, in order to contest perpetuated assumptions that underlie the popular Dada myths. Dada is difficult, and the response to Dada is not easy. What emerge from the theoretical readings developed here are profoundly rational bases for the non-sense that was pitted against a self-proclaimed civilisation, critically and implicitly to propose that what coursed in 1916 continues as vitally today. Given as art-historically identifiable along a trajectory of sustained ruptures and seizures, this book proposes not a history of Dada in Zurich but theoretical engagements with the emergencies of 1916-19, from laughter to 'lautgedichte', masks to manifestos, chance to chiasmata, rounding on the permanent Dada that drives against the closure of culture"--Back cover.

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