Dada and Randomness

An odd art movement got started early in the 20th century and spread throughout the western world. One thing that made it odd was that no one was sure what it was, or what it should be. It was called Dada, and they weren't even sure why that.  Maybe the name was randomly chosen from a book.  Maybe it was the name of a child's toy. Maybe it was a random sound and meant nothing.  All these ideas relate to it and are part of it.  It has sometimes been called an "anti-art" movement and that also seems at least partly true. One common characteristic was randomness, making artistic decisions by random action, rather than traditional aesthetics or formal issues.  Here is an example of a more recent related activity:

Years ago I had a co-worker who had training in both ceramics and photography.  One thing she liked to do was print her photographs as postcards, and any time she ran across an address, she would send an anonymous postcard. Found mine on an old envelope, which resulted in this showing up in my mailbox a few weeks later.  The original Dada movement is long gone, but aspects and activities live on in art today.  

For example, the Dada movement was big on collage. Could be a photo collage, where the whole image is made from cut up pieces of photographs, assembled to make a new image. Could be a chance collage, where small elements (any medium) are dropped on a surface and glued in place wherever they landed. In three dimensional terms, there was assemblage, where the artist would gather a bunch of things, either already made, or sculpted by the artist, or both, and build it into an artwork.  

One thing that is still common today, is using random chance as a way of creativity, leading the artist to something that otherwise wouldn't happen.  We will use it some ourselves for some of our planned artwork. I have taken dozens of words from the headlines of Book Reviews in the Sunday New York Times, cut then out, attached them to paper, grouped as nouns or modifying words/phrases.  I have several of these pages. 

Made a bunch of photocopies of these pages, then cut out the words again, placed them (grouped as before) into hats. 

In class, I would typically have students pick slips of paper from each hat, the two bits would be joined together, to result in a new randomly created phrase, noun and modifier. These phrases will be the subject of two of your assignments.  You will receive four such randomly created phrases in email today. No one else in the class will have the same ones. The attached letter explains further.  Hold on to them for now.  The first assignment they are for will happen a week from tomorrow.