What to take from the wreckage

Dada.

Truly, it is silly stuff, isn't it? It was a frivolous movement: serious in its work ethic, inane in its content, massive in its impact. And it dies a thousand deaths, and keeps returning in some strange form whenever anyone makes art out of household objects, gloms together various bits of stuff in whatever medium into some sort of collage - paper, photoshopped, or digitally sampled from records. It's the Phoenix of art movements. No one does Cubism anymore, but often some clever fella displays an old chair and thinks he's somehow outfoxed the original fox, old foxy Duchamp, and pats himself on the back because he's so original and somehow "more unique."

But what do we take from this odd little movement that lasted 10 years and blew up 10,000?

The theory is a dead end for us. Yes, the world doesn't make a lot of sense, and we've been living with that for years and years, since WWI, and WWII, and all the bad TV we see, awful modern pop music, droughts in Africa that kill children as the cameraman films them dying, terrorism, the Tea Party, the clogged cesspool that is Congress and on and on. And it doesn't have to make sense, because we're at a time where we make our own sense - our own personal sense - of the world. We've loads of philosophy to choose from, we can look up anything on the internet. We're better equipped than any other people in the history of the Earth to assemble meanings for ourselves, and we're basically free to do it.

While the theory is interesting, we don't need it - ditto for the history.

That leaves the work itself, and isn't that what it is all about to an artist? Regardless of the impetus behind Dada, its practitioners created objects, plays, films, paintings, writings, magazines, dances, music. They were a prolific bunch.

My ideas these days on the process of creation center around the decision making involved, and I look at art movements as systems for streamlining and refining the decision making process. A movement can be lensed, then, as a collection of tactics that aid the artist in working through blockages and getting work accomplished. Different movements, different tactics, or, more likely, different uses of the same tactics.

With this in mind, what do we as artists pull out of Dada?