Against „all attempts at disavowing the factual.“

Beschreibung

The focus of my paper revolves around the function of "facticity" in Dada. It is inspired by Wieland Herzfelde who wrote in 1920: "Since the invention of photography all art movements can be characterized as having, despite their differences, a common tendency to emancipate themselves from reality. Dada is the reaction to all these attempts at disavowing the factual [...]." Manifestations of Dada, such as live performance, collage, photomontage and last but not least the photogram, demonstrated a totally new understanding of realism in art. All of these practices testify to the notion that one can cleave to the principles of realism while at the same time adhering to an "anti-mimetic concept of realism" (as Thomas Elsaesser put it). Within the medium of film, this material literalism or "facticity" can be achieved in at least two ways: One method concerns the production process, the other concerns reception. Man Ray's "Le retour à la raison" (1923), the first film with his famous photograms, tricks the camera by introducing a tactile relationship with its represented objects and therefore lays claim to a certain physicality of the cameraless production process. On the other hand, Marcel Duchamp's "Anémic Cinéma" (1926), with its disquieting rotoreliefs, creates the impression of seeing male and female protruberances in endless motion. In this regard then, it should be challenging to reconsider László Moholy-Nagy's 1922 article "Produktion – Reproduktion" in the light of Dadaism's claim for facticity. Mainly interpreted as a call for a new way of art education, its revolutionary technical implications have long been overlooked.

Titel der Veranstaltung

International Colloquium „Transfers, Appropriations and Functions of Avant-Garde

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