I’m reading Tuesday, 11/16, at 7 p.m. ET with 16 other writers and artists published in Maintenant 15: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing & Art. Published by Three Rooms Press, a fabulous, “fiercely independent New York-based publisher,” Maintenant has been featured and sold in museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the BELvue Museum in Brussels.
This is the fourth, and final, reading associated with Maintenant 15 and includes makers from Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and rural and urban pockets across the U.S. I’ve tuned in to some of these and we’re a quirky, wild lot driven by TRP publishers Peter Carlaftes and Kat Georges.
It’s broadcast live on Facebook (Facebook.com/groups/threeroomspress) and YouTube (bit.ly/dadafestival-nov16-americas2). The platform they use keeps the readers in a separate “room” until we show up for our bit of 3 to 4 minutes. I’m about halfway through, whatever that means.
I wish I could tell you I’m some kind of Dada expert, that I’ve had a long and deep affinity with and interest in—or that I even studied—the Dada movement at some point that I can recall. All of that is not so, and so here’s a quick entry…
Early in the twentieth century, Dada developed as a reaction to the rise of capitalist culture and World War I, adopting nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. In considering the definition of art, they often experimented with laws of chance and the found object. Although humor was a part of their art form (music, literary, and visual), they were asking serious questions. Dada declared war against war. According to Merriam-Webster’s, it is “a movement in art and literature based on a deliberate irrationality and negation of traditional artistic values.”
It influenced much that followed, including avant-garde music, surrealism, and pop art. It’s often characterized by humor and whimsy, tending toward the absurd, celebrating luck, not logic, and irrationality, not calculated intent—with high value placed on the experimental.
This is the first time any of my artwork has been published. I’ll be reading too—with, among others, Lisa Panepinto and Andrei Codrescu.
NOTE: To all you subscribers, big thanks! Plus a heads-up that I’m making some long-overdue adjustments to content on my site. I assumed (not being very IT savvy) that when I put an essay in the Selected Works section nothing would be sent to you. But…I was wrong. Yesterday I flowed in cut-and-pasted text from a PDF, and there were some relic hyphens hanging. I thought I had caught them all, it had been a long day at the screen, and I figured I’d revisit today. It was sent to you, and one of you caught the lingerers and let me know before I had a chance to recheck. Big thanks. And apologies—there may be more in your inbox besides my normal sparse blog postings. But trust me, it will return to my normal.
