| Abstrakt: |
This essay traces the revolution in the avant-garde text from the initial absolutist intentions of the Expressionists to the strategic use of the text by the Dadaists. Centering on the shortlived balance between the text as aesthetic activity and its employment in broader cultural criticism, the discussion most concerns itself with Berlin Dada. The author argues that the altered appearance of the text reflects changes in the avant-garde's perception of itself and, in particular, its role within the context of culture in general. With the disillusion of rationalism and teleology, artists rejected the concept of contexts shared with tis audience, ideas of a causal historical motion, and with them, the whole notion of progressive social change. Opposed to art's conventional social setting, the Expressionists sought their absolutes-the totality of experience-in art, an idealism that was perpetuated, at least in part, in Zurich Dada's appropriation and aestheticization of the text in their attempts to define an avant-garde, as opposed to establishment, art setting. In contrast, Berlin Dada turned to promotional and strategic uses of the text in their attempts to infiltrate the wider culture. Admitting a variety of influences from other, non-aesthetic, areas of culture (the press, entertainment, advertising, etc), their approach became more materialist and their texts more objectified. Their texts reflected their historical context and social positioning and, as a result, the texts operated on a level as concrete as did their counter-parts in other dimensions of culture. Their reconstructions betrayed their sources in both fragmentation and contradiction. Although wearing a public face, they continued to be evaluated in terms of their successes or failures, as the subjects of aesthetic criteria. Losing power with the stabilization of the Weimar Republic to even symbolize social subversion or significant alternatives the avant-garde text finally took its place as part of the new structure of modernism that it was instrumental in creating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
