Art and the trust-company udder
Tzara’s 1918 manifesto puts the relationship between art, money and the bourgeoisie in blunt terms.
Lynn Cole / Writing
Writing
Essays, thoughts, and technical notes.
Dada is not a safe, dead thing
Teaching Dada as a safe, dead movement strips away the challenge it still poses to art, tradition and power.
The freedom of giving up control
Giving up control is an internal struggle for an artist trained to work meticulously. The freedom I find lies between the controlled and the chaotic.
Dada wants nothing: overthrow reality
Dada wants nothing—and wants to turn reality, reason and your preconceptions inside out.
Another declaration of principles
A declaration of principles about hierarchy, the commons, Dada, punk and the volatile possibilities of AI.
Dada was never safe
Dada was never a safe philosophy with nothing pointed to say about the art establishment. Imagining it that way is revisionism.
Morality, money, and two Dada quotations
Two quotations from Tzara and Picabia frame Dada’s hostility toward morality, money and the prospect of becoming respectable.
Dada belongs to the malcontents
Dada belongs to the malcontents of the art world, not a comfortable memory of an establishment-friendly movement.
Dada, experimentation, and the copying argument
Dada’s commitment to experimentation challenges the copying argument and the assumption that AI cannot be subverted beyond its simplest use case.
A living document for a new epoch
Reading Berlin as a living document opens a disagreement about AI, power and the artist’s epoch. Both empowerment and oppression can exist in the same technology.
Dada speaks to the current moment
Dada’s arguments about art, technology, skill and the establishment still speak directly to the current moment.
The sources behind my Dada arguments
The historical sources behind my Dada arguments include Tzara, Huelsenbeck’s Berlin manifesto and Picabia.