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Dadaism
The origins of the use of the word Dada (French for hobby-horse) for an art movement are obscure. Most accounts say it was adopted during a meeting of a group of young artists and war resisters in 1916, when a paper knife inserted at random into a German-French dictionary pointed to the word.
Dadaism was a nihilistic artistic movement that flourished in Zurich, New York, Berlin, Cologne and Paris in the early 20th century. Its preoccupation with the bizarre, the irrational and the absurd, expressed through artistic creations and through protest, was to be highly influential in the rise of surrealism after World War II.
Artists involved in the movement — including Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp Man Ray and Francis Picabia — attempted to demolish contemporary aesthetic standards, often using photomontage combined with printed messages. In Germany, the movement became increasingly politicised, with many German Dadaists using their work as a protest against Nazism. In France, it took on a more literary emphasis, most notably in the work of the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara.
Find out more …
DaDa Online
www.peak.org/~dadaist/English/Graphics/
Dada poets, artists, chronology, artworks and links.
Reflections on the Aesthetics of Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism by Eric Sellin (Edwin Mellen Press, 1993) £39.95.
The three most important avant-garde movements of the 20th century, their similarities and differences.
Punk
Like Goth culture, punk was essentially about music, although appearance and attitude became increasingly important as the movement developed. Loud, fast-paced and aggressive, punk rock was detectable in the work of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges in the 1960s, but it was not until the mid-1970s that it became a genre in its own right.
The first real punk band in Britain was the Sex Pistols. Across the Atlantic, the Ramones were the leading performers of the genre. The music spawned a subculture that was particularly prevalent in the UK: spiked, multi-coloured hair, leather, ripped clothing and safety-pins became the attire of a group of disaffected London youth.
Like most youth movements, punk rejected authority and the rules of straight society — in Britain, it rejected the monarchy with vitriol. But unlike other youthful subcultures, such as the hippies, it did not have a ready replacement for what it rejected. Punk was against everything and for nothing.
Find out more …
UK Punk 1976-1979
www.punk77.co.uk/
History, books, music, new punk, women in punk, even bubble-gum punk, with great quotes and pictures.
England's Dreaming by Jon Savage (Faber, 2001) £14.99.
Who would have thought it at the time — Faber publishing the story of the Sex Pistols!
Anti-capitalism
The modern anti-capitalist movement, which grew up in the post-Cold War environment of the 1990s, is a loose and global coalition of diverse groups, ranging from environmentalists to Third World activists, animal rights protesters to socialists and anarchists. Its targets are similarly varied, but the main objects of its antipathy are international financial and trade bodies — the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Trade Organisation — as well as multinational companies, especially in the oil and pharmaceuticals industries.
Because there are so many groups involved, the anti-capitalists' objectives are hazy. They do, however, abhor a system of 'fair' trade that benefits the industrialised West at the expense of the Third World, a system of debt that keeps Third World countries impoverished, and the rape of communities and ecological systems in the name of corporate profit.
Anti-capitalist protest has become a feature of the international conference scene. Whenever world leaders meet, anti-capitalist elements are there to greet them. Protest has often been violent, due to a combination of a heavy-handed police presence and the hijacking of peaceful demonstrations by violent elements.
Find out more …
Mayday 2001 — Carnival Against Capitalism
www.mayday2000.co.uk/home.html
Archive material on anti-capitalist demonstrations, explanation of the origins of the movement, newspaper reports and links to other sites such as Undercurrents.
No Logo by Naomi Klein (Flamingo, 2001) £8.99.
She’s not the first to argue that multinationals aren’t healthy, but she’s received the most coverage.