"One need only utter a statement for the opposite statement to become DADA" -
andré breton
dada is well known as an (anti-)art movement from around world war 1, one of the more international modernist movements. there are a lot of funny and interesting things dadaists did in my opinion. they performed in funny
cardboard outfits. they did
sound poems and
cut-up poems. in general they used art to make a mockery of art
of couse the dada movement had a lot of historical particulars, but for me the spirit of dada is pretty basic and will live forever. the spirit of dada is to reject everything / destroy everything / make fun of everything / not stand for anything. "'Peace at any price' is the slogan of DADA in time of war, while in time of peace the slogan of DADA is: 'War at any price'" (
andré breton)
of course dada was an enactment of a certain extreme, which allowed it to become pretty iconic, and it has had pretty big effects. things like duchamp's fountain continue to provoke people to reconsider what we mean by "art." but i also think the dada spirit, or something similar, comes out in more subtle ways in almost all writing and art that i like
dada and zen buddhism
"We must cease to consider these dogmas: morality and taste." -
andré breton
"When you can do everything, whether it is good or bad, without disturbance or without being annoyed by the feeling, that is actually what we mean by 'form is form and emptiness is emptiness.'" -
shunryu suzuki
dada courage
the month i first read
tristan tzara's dada manifestoes was the month i committed myself to
veganism. i vaguely believed in the ideas of veganism for a long time before that, but i think reading about dada helped me solidify an aesthetic/worldview that encouraged me to reject mainstream opinions like "veganism is too extreme" or "veganism is too hard." it gave me an aesthetic that encouraged me to just do things that other people were too lazy or afraid to do
up through today i think the most distinctive aspects of my online writing project have been possible because of this foundational courage. after a certain point i felt empowered and confident enough to say all my writing would be
free online and in the public domain. at an even later point i had the courage to
forego publishers all together and try to use
social media almost exclusively as my means of distribution
poetry as an argument against formulas for poetry
one year of my high school i engaged in a long campaign where my art teacher insisted "no satanic artwork babie!" while she allowed other religious content. in protest, every week i turned in drawings with "666" and pentagrams, not because i actually believed in it but because i wanted people to be free to believe in it (solidarity?), or just free to have fun drawing what they want
i think that push toward freedom is often the kind of motivation behind dada. it looks meaningless maybe, but i think the fact that some of an era's most talented writers would choose to create "meaningless" texts is its own kind of meaning
confusing other people + guerilla surrealism
in spring 2009 i took a literature class where a lot of my classmates made claims about what poets should do and what poems need to do, and my fire became kind of rekindled for dada. this was when i started hanging fliers around my campus that had single words or phrases like "corn" in 200-point font
i also participated in a couple
flashmobs at my school and did some other things like placing foreign objects in grocery stores such as a land-line phone receiver
on twitter, present day, i often
tweet lines that i
took from
search results or other twitter profiles. a lot of people misread my flarf tweets as honest communication and respond to them, and sometimes i retweet them. i created a
justin bieber fan twitter account with poncho peligroso,
2011 poet laureate, largely so i could do
one-off tweets that shock and perplex my core belieber fanbase
dada and e.e. cummings + being a nonconformist
e.e. cummings wrote aggressively about being different from "mostpeople," and he was the first poet i ever liked and the only poet i liked for quite a while. this is the introduction to his 1938
collected poems (written by him):
The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople --it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs.
for me that same dynamic is there through cummings's whole body of work, with his emphasis on individual freedom and his rebelliously playful typography, and that was really valuable for me and maybe what originally attracted me to his poetry
dada and walt whitman + worldviews with less emphasized hierarchy + aesthetics that encourage non-attachment
"I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles." -
tristan tzara
"Great is goodness; / I do not know what it is any more than I know what health is . . . . but I know it is great. // Great is wickedness . . . . I find I often admire it just as much as I admire goodness" -
walt whitman
dada pushes against everything including even themselves ("the true dadas are against dada" -
tzara). and walt whitman thinks everything is great including even death. these are opposite yet really similar positions to hold because in either case, the hierarchy of one thing being better than another is torn down. in a sense, there is no better/worse art or better/worse morals for whitman, or for dada (or for
tao lin, more on him below); everyone/everything is equal
of course these are not very realistic worldviews to consistently have in your life. in some sense, at least, i love my friends and my family more than i love strangers. and in some sense at least, i would be more resistant to mocking veganism than some other ideologies, because i actually think
veganism will help society the more it spreads
but i think being able to engage with these worldviews playfully, even enthusiastically at times, can be helpful for achieving a healthy detachment. compare the walt whitman and dada quotes with
this by shunryu suzuki (bolding is mine)
Dogen-zenji said, "Although everything has Buddha nature, we love flowers, and we do not care for weeds." This is true of human nature. But that we are attached to some beauty is itself Buddha's activity. That we do not care for weeds is also Buddha's activity. We should know that. If you know that, it is all right to attach to something. If it is Buddha's attachment, that is non-attachment. So in love there should be hate, or non-attachment. And in hate there should be love, or acceptance ... We should accept weeds, despite how we feel about them. If you do not care for them, do not love them; if you love them, then love them.
dada freedom and tao lin
tao lin seems pretty free about what he writes. i really liked reading
eeeee eee eeee by tao lin. tao lin has said that he consciously decided to "ruin"
eeeee eee eeee by putting nonhuman animals in it. i really liked that and i think that's funny
i laughed out loud on the train reading scenes of the book where nonhuman animals appeared and disappeared without any real explanation or (that i could see) connection to other aspects of the book. it is exactly the kind of writing that teachers and books tell you not to do, and i think that's why it feels so good when somebody does it. it might seem immature, but i think it means we're free, and it means there is more possibility than we thought before
conclusion = dada rulez
"When you study Buddhism, you should have a general house cleaning of your mind. You must take everything out of your room and clean it thoroughly. If it is necessary, you may bring everything back in again. You may want many things, so one by one you can bring them back. But if they are not necessary, there is no need to keep them." (shunryu suzuki)
"there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean." (tristan tzara)
related posts /
+
writing style in relation to buddhism and veganism
+
aesthetics and identity
fashion / tao lin lookbook photo
eight days ago i launched the tumblelog 
