Neo-Dada

Neo-Dada was a movement with audio, visual and literary manifestations that had similarities in method or intent with earlier Dada artwork. In the United States the term was popularized by Barbara Rose 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 was exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast. It was a reaction to the personal emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism and, taking a lead from the practice of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, denied traditional concepts of aesthetics.

The term Neo-Dadaism includes a combination of the early tendencies of American Pop Art to deal with the world of consumerism, as well as the attempts of the French Nouveau Réalisme to combine art and life by bringing materials of everyday life into their lives Art production and tried to create a “sociological reference” in their works. A special expression of the effort to harmonize art and life is the staging of reality in action art. Especially in the development of this art form, there was a partial cooperation between the artists of both continents.

The neodadá paves the roads that lead to pop art; artists whose perception makes a different art and opposed to abstract expressionism, although without being a cold and depersonalized art like Andy Warhol’s pop; the neodadá continues the principles of surrealism but taken to another scale, to another level and artistic language.

The most representative artists of this movement are:

Robert Rauschenberg (born 1925), with his mundane materials like old bedspreads or fabrics mixed with papers that give a different texture and with new nuances, a completely different work very singular. Rauschenberg collects the elements that he has around him, like a can of beer or a bottle of coca cola, a tire, etc; as well as his work whose elements are a goat and a tire, also as a compositional game.
Jasper Johns (born in 1930), the artist who uses encaustic, a mixture of resin with virgin wax and pigment, to give textures to his works of targets and flags.
The neodadaist movement innovates with other materials, hitherto rare in an artistic field; note the work of soft sculptures by Claes Oldenburg, the main precursor of pop art.

Claes Oldenburg “manufactures” junk food with materials such as plaster or plaster, but will evolve to giant objects in the midst of large American cities, like a large spoon like a bridge and at its tip contains an immense red cherry.

Finally, with Joseph Beuys, Neo-Dada’s claim to combine art and life came up in an ” expanded concept of art ” of social sculpture. The forms of expression further developed in the Neo-Dada include Object Art, Environment, Assemblage, Combine Painting, Happening, Fluxus.

In 2002, the Fondation Kroesus group occupied the vacant Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Spiegelgasse 1, the birthplace of Dadaism. There they organized three months of happenings, concerts, open stages, Dada fairs, readings, workshops and Dada festivals until the police clearance.

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 aesthetic concepts; and because it pandered to commercialism.

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.

An allied approach is found in the creation of collage and assemblage, as in the junk sculptures of the American Richard Stankiewicz, 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 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 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 and K. Schippers, 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 (1935-92), Hans Verhagen and the artist Armando. 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 have also been referred back to the example of Raoul Hausmann’s letter poems. Such techniques may also owe something to H.N. Werkman’s typographical experiments in the Netherlands which had first been put on display in the Stedelijk Museum in 1945.

Artists linked with the term
Genpei Akasegawa
Joseph Beuys
Jaap Blonk
George Brecht
John Cage
John Chamberlain
Jim Dine
Dick Higgins
Kommissar Hjuler
Jasper Johns
Allan Kaprow
Yves Klein
Alison Knowles
George Maciunas
Piero Manzoni
Yoko Ono
Robin Page
Nam June Paik
Robert Rauschenberg
Ushio Shinohara
Wolf Vostell

Neo-Dada in Italy
After the Second World War, in Italy, there was a certain interest in the poetics of the object, even within that informal art denigrated by pop artists. Just think of the sacks of which Alberto Burri used in his paintings, the fragments of stones and glass of Fontana, the iron pieces reworked in the creations of Ettore Colla and also the collages and assemblages of Enrico Baj and Brajo Fuso.

However, only thanks to the artists Pino Pascali and Piero Manzoni can one speak of an effective affirmation of Italian neo-Dadaism. Unlike the American artists, however, in them all the irony of historical Dadaism is concentrated, together with the taste for the game. In support of this are the boxes of Merda d’artista (1961) by Piero Manzoni, with which he refers to the transformation of the artistic work into consumer goods, ready to be placed on the shelves of a supermarket and sold.

Art is immediate and exhaustible, like the hard- boiled eggs that Manzoni signs in 1959 with an imprint of his thumb (Consecration of the art of hard-boiled egg), or the models that become living sculptures, or the lines wrapped in cylinders of cardboard and sold at a time by the meter.

If Manzoni thinks with an amused tone at the commercialization of art and on the role of the individual artist, Pascali, on the contrary, is convinced that between art and play there is a reciprocal complementarity. Realize as miniature reptiles and dinosaurs canvas, silkworm silk through plastic brooms (Silkworms bristle, 1968), tarantulas of acrylic and weapons with scrap metal. Even his paintings, like Primo piano labbra (1964), undergo a process of objectisation, making them look like big and mysterious toys.

Source from Wikipedia