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Dada is often celebrated for its strategies of shock and opposition, but in Dada Presentism, Maria Stavrinaki provides a new picture of Dada art and writings as a lucid reflection on history and the role of art within it. The original (Berlin-based) Dadaists' acute historical consciousness and their modern experience of time, she contends, anticipated the formulations of major historians such as Reinhart Koselleck and, more recently, François Hartog. The book explores Dada temporalities and concepts of history in works of art, artistic discourse, and in the photographs of the Berlin Dada movement. These photographs—including the famous one of the First International Dada Fair—are presented not as simple, transparent documents, but as formal deployments conforming to a very concrete theory of history. This approach allows Stavrinaki to link Dada to more contemporary artistic movements and practices interested in history and the archive. At the same time, she investigates what seems to be a real oxymoron of the movement: its simultaneous claim to the ephemeral and its compulsive writing of its own history. In this way, Dada Presentism also interrogates the limits between history and fiction.
— Maria Gough
"According to a wise old saying, 'inside every fat book there is a thin article struggling to get out'. Its truth is confirmed by this remarkable and authoritative essay"
— Richard Sheppard
"Elegantly written, thorough, and unlike any other study of Dada, this essay manages to succinctly point out the uniqueness and importance of the movement. It will become a key text in twentieth-century history of art."
— Rudolf Kuenzli
"Stavrinaki presents a rather lucid reflection on Dada history and the role of art within it via the Berlin-based Dadaists' acute historical consciousness and their early modern experience of time...Insofar as the deliberate obtuseness of 'the present' is the whole point of the book, I was delighted to have uncovered some germane connective material here applicable to our present, our own now."
— Joseph Nechvatal
"Maria Stavrinaki's lively and subtle investigation recaptures the radicalism of the Dada movement: its championing of the present and presentism at a time when Europe was in utter disarray, buffeted between regret for the past and appeals to a revolutionary future. This incisive book further serves as a useful incitement to thought, for behind the presentism of the 1920s lies that of our societies today."
— François Hartog
"With the potential to nudge Dada studies in another direction altogether, this book prizes apart the philosophical and political dimensions of time and history precisely at the moment where they come radically into question. Offering a rich perspective from which to assess not only Dada, but also other modernist enterprises, it is a brisk, revivifying breath of fresh air."
— Sabine Kriebel
The introduction of the book is a submersion into the semantics of history according to Dada at the end of the First World War. On the one hand, it is about the transitions and ruptures between several other avant-garde movements and Dada. On the other hand, this semantic introduction tries to demonstrate the apparently contradictory, but profoundly coherent character of Dada, oscillating between eclecticism and primitivism, between the sense of a fossilized history and the sense of a second prehistory.
This chapter is a careful analysis of some significant Dadaist artworks, the most important of which (a photograph of a Dada exhibition) is usually examined as a simple historical document. Exploring the analogies between photography and history, analyzed in 1927 by Siegfried Kracauer, this chapter aims to show that presentism was also imposed to Dada by the new means of production and consumption of images. Defining the various modes of the analogies between photography and history in the work of Dada artists, this chapter proposes a twofold ramification: the device of montage such as used in its critical function by Georg Grosz and John Heartfield is thus opposed to the profound ambivalence of reproducibility in the work of Johannes Baader, oscillating between nothingness and God.
One of the aims of Dadaist presentism was to show the plus-value gained by the past and the future within capitalized history. If classical past was anachronistic according to Dada, its effects were profoundly present. Dada established a semantic equivalence between German idealism, Weimar classicism, parliamentary democracy and socialistic evolutionism. It's antiphrastic formal devices aimed to expose the mechanism and the effect of this semantic equivalence, namely the repetition of the same "nightmare of history", the plus-value of eternity. Chapter keywords: Plus-value, Eternity, cultural heritage, Marxism, political efficiency
Dadaist decisionism invested a horizontal, decentered ontology of the subject and of art. Renouncing to the autonomy of art – the exact meaning of the "death of art" - they either put it to the service of the communist Revolution, or to a more ambivalent, anarchic vision of reality, considered as a complex of constantly changing relations.
This last chapter explores the non genetic Dadaist conception of history, whose paradigm is to be found in the process of mechanical reproduction as well as in the theme of immaculate conception. It also explores a profound ambiguity of Dada created by its obsession with ephemeral temporality and its not less obsessive writing of history. Dada artists were their own historiographers. Accepting though the facticity of history, they cultivated a systematic ambivalence between facts and legends. Past remained thus open to all the following presents – and this was an ultimate aspect of Dada presentism.