Against „all attempts at disavowing the factual.“

Description

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 says). 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. More than pure optical spectacle, it is a "haptic" experience that involves the bodies of the audience by "[hitting] the spectator like a bullet" (as Walter Benjamin put it, having in mind the tactile aspect of Dadaist art in general). 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. It was already before the first Dada film appeared that Moholy-Nagy made clear that recording instruments like the grammophone or the camera are capable not merely of recording preexisting sounds and images, but also of producing new synthetic auditory and visual sensations through direct manipulation of the mediums themselves: scratching directly on to grammophon wax plates, making photograms, or drawing on film – in other words, to introduce facticity into a technical medium of reproduction. Though Moholy-Nagy would only realize a minor part of the possibilities he outlined in his text, echoes of his concepts can be traced not only in Dadaist film, but even to today's media art.

Title of Event

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

Organiser/Management