Neo-Dada
ネオ・ダダ / 1953–1965 / Style / Postwar American Art
A postwar current that answered the inwardness of Abstract Expressionism by bringing household objects, printed matter and taxidermy onto the picture, working in the gap between art and life. It inherited Dada's gestures while making the materials of consumer society into structural components. The branching point immediately before Pop art.
Ready-made objects brought onto the picture / Printed matter transferred by silkscreen / Forms halfway between painting and object / Traces of erasing, layering and soiling
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Record sleeves, zines and event graphics that need to look assembled out of the world rather than designed from nothing · Campaigns built from found print, where the receipts, newsprint and packaging keep their own history as part of the message
- Type
- Mixed sizes and mixed faces from whatever was to hand, some stencilled, some torn out of existing print.
- Composition
- No grid: a horizontal collage in which one three-dimensional object breaks the picture plane and pulls the eye off axis.
- Material
- Silkscreened newsprint over smeared paint, registration deliberately out, erasures left visible.
- Caution
- Arranging the found material tidily: Neo-Dada depends on objects keeping their own dirt and their own scale, and a neat collage of clean assets is only decoration.
- Further study
- The definition of the Combine painting / Japan's Neo-Dadaism Organizers / Its proximity to Fluxus