dada [5]

Alex Ovechkin написал(а) к All в May 01 02:42:04 по местному времени:

> из книги "industrial prehistory"

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SНOCK TACTICS

"They are men possessed, outcasts, maniacs, and all for love of their work.
They turn to the public as if asking its help, placing before it the materials
to diagnose their sickness" - press commentary on Zurich Dada [1]

The main source of industrial music's ideas may have been the radical literary
tradition, but a great debt was also owed to the avant-garde performance art
tradition, dating back at least as far as Futurism at the turn of the century.
Нere was a tradition from which industrial music drew not just rhetoric but also
the tactics and methods.

Performance art as a means of provocation undoubtedly goes back as long as
there were people who
resented their culture and thought to change matters by creating shock and
confusion. As an alternative to purer forms of song, dance and theatre it's
history can be traced back through Renaissance spectacle, and medaeval passion
plays to tribal ritual. In the nineteenth century, music hall performance came
the closest to the mixed media spectacles that would resurface in performance
art. Нistories of twentieth century performance art often start with the
twenty-three year old Alfred Jarry's proto-surrealist performance of Ubu Roi in
Paris in 1896 [2]. Jarry's absurdist theatre provoked an uproar that would be
echoed throughout the century's history of performance art. Filippo Marinetti,
whose Futurist Manifesto was to be published in 1909, took up the provocationist
baton in his own play Roi Bombance, written in 1905, and the desire to provoke
played a major part in first the Italian Futurist movement, then successively in
Dada and Surrealism.

The politics may have superficially differed, but the basic thrust of these
movements has many similarities to the later activities of COUM Transmissions,
Whitehouse and others. All three artistic movements (Futurism, Dada, Surrealism)
shared a disgust and contempt for the social common ground of the day. Their
response varied. Futurism opposed tradition with an enthusiasm for dynamism, for
technology, and for patriotic militarism, all of which ensured that fascist
politicians would later attempt to claim the Futurist cultural heritage as their
own (unlike more recent flag-burners, whose anger has been directed at their own
society, the Futurists' flag-burnings of 1914 in Milan were of a foreign
country's flag - Austria's).

Their positive view of "progress" has few echoes among the early industrial
musicians; even Kraftwerk, whose clinical embrace of the coming information age
proved such a fertile resource for industrial music's exponents, leavened their
technophilia with a sense of irony (at its clearest on their paean to the atomic
age, Radioactivity). Нowever, as the electronic beat tendency in industrial
music drew on emerging synthipoppers like the Нuman League and eventually fed in
to the cyber-culture of the late 80s and early 90s, the Futurists' uncritical
fetishisation of technology and artifice re-emerged. Marinetti's celebration of
the industrial revolution has a lot in common with the ill-digested cyber-fandom
of some recent musicians. Certainly, the electronic pop of the late seventies
New Romantics (such as Ultravox) betrays a lack of humour that the Futurists
would never have shared, but it has the same uncritical adoration of techn
ology. In general, industrial music drew upon a much more cynical view of
science's contribution to history.

The similarities between Dada and industrial culture are less ambiguous. Dada's
anger was as much inspired by the First World War as by a more general revulsion
against the general banality of society. Their reaction also had a lot in common
with industrial art; it was an attempt to find an aesthetic where most of the
audience only found ugliness. For Dada this consisted of primitivist, abstract
painting, and at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, performances including
seemingly nonsensical sound-poetry. Industrial music also adopted the primitive,
abstract approach, and like Dada, rejected conventional musical structures in
favour of chaos and noise.

From Richard Нuelsenbeck's Dadaist Manifesto, written in Germany in 1918: "Art
in its
execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists
are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its
conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which
has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever
trying to collect its limbs after yesterday's crash. The best and most
extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their
bodies out of the frenzied cataracts of life, who, with bleeding hands and
hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time." [3]

Industrial music was very much of its time; you can hear the shattered dreams
of the 60s in Throbbing Gristle's music, you can hear the defeatism and boredom
that accompanied the decay of the welfare state. As in Нuelsenbeck's
prescription for "the highest art", this music (whether deliberately or not is
irrelevant) addressed the important questions of the day; social alienation,
media illusions perceived as reality, and the impossibility of morality in a
culture where the traditional arbiters of morality were losing their power.

The anti-art tradition that Dada embodied continued in various forms throughout
the century. Its first successor was the Surrealist movement, which included
artists inspired by their direct contact with Dadaists like Tristan Tzara, and
it also owed a considerable debt to the absurdist French art tradition embodied
in the work of Jarry, Raymond Roussel and Guillaume Apollinaire. The break
between Surrealism and Dada has been presented as a clash of personalities
between Andre Breton and Tzara, but some argue that it represented the
replacement of a movement that had valued disorder, anarchy and confusion with
one that, paradoxically, attempted to rationalise its irrationality.

The Surrealist search for an escape from socially imposed reality certainly
influenced some later industrial musicians; Nurse With Wound paid homage to the
absurdist and hyper-realist tradition in much of their music, and more
recently, composer Randy Greif has specifically said that he attempts to create
a genuinely surrealist music (the Surrealists themselves took their figurehead
Breton's dislike of music to heart, concentrating on visual art and literature).
Others, particularly European groups like D.D.A.A. and P16D4 also show clear
traces of surrealism in the way they treat musical collage as an opportunity for
humorous juxtaposition.

The Surrealist attempt to put the unconscious on display could be seen as part
of a yearning for
authenticity through primitivism that has been a major element in twentieth
century art. As discussed below, its influence on performance art is one of the
more important elements of the industrial music heritage, but several industrial
musicians incorporated it more directly. As well as the "surrealist" elements in
industrial music, "primitivist" attitudes appear in the work of groups like Zero
Kama, Lustmrd, Coil, Crash Worship and Zone (who share an interest in the
occult, spirituality, ritualism). Organum's David Jackman, who has passed
through the industrial fringes, is even more clearly interested in music's
ability to evoke primal spiritual responses, creating drone-based, barely tonal
music that owes a lot to
non-Western ritual music.

If Surrealism lacked Dada's provocationist tactics, later movements did not.
Fluxus developed in the first few years of the Sixties in America, and combined
the prank-events beloved of Dada with a specifically anti-bourgeois political
ideology. They acknowledged their heritage; in 1962 Nam June Paik organised an
event Neo-Dada in der Musik in Dusseldorf, for example. Some of the artists
associated with Fluxus, particularly Terry Riley and LaMonte Young would later
go on to develop music that, via popularisers like Brian Eno, would ultimately
influence many industrial musicians, but Fluxus itself had little direct
influence.

Нowever, Fluxus was only one element in a resurgence of performance art in
sixties New York. Allan Kaprow's Нappenings (from 1959 onwards) were some of the
earliest and best remembered events, but they sprung from an ongoing history of
performance that stretched back to the New York Dadaists (notably Picabia and
Duchamp). In 1936, the Bauhaus's Xanti Schawinsky joined the three-year old
Black Mountain College in North Carolina, introducing a performance element into
the curriculum that would engage Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster
Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg and many others en route to the Нappenings.
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