Dada and Surrealism

Two movements arose around the time of the first World War. Both movements were direct reactions to the war and the way the bourgeoisie values and culture have been affected by the war. Dada reduces art to a game, one which accosts the viewer with the way it mocks art, forces the viewer to ask what art really is, is it art if the artists didn't make it, and allows the viewer to really see the idea that the artist was trying to explore. Additionally, Dada art is non art. It challenges the viewer's common sense view of art and artworks. Dada art encompasses mostly sculptures, collages and photo-montages which comment on the make and meaning of art, war, and the society, culture and values of the bourgeoisie. Artists like John Heartfield worked in photo-montage because they wanted a way of working that allowed a more objective and removed media. Many artists felt that unlike other mediums, photography did not absorb the identity of the artist and that that was ideal because it implied the idea of a pure idea. 

Surrealist artists strove to challenge and comment on the bourgeoisie order between World War I and World War II, stemming from two different socio-political influences, those two being Marxist and Freudian ideologies. Those who were mostly influenced by Karl Marx were interested not only in a cultural revolution, but also a sexual revolution, and were interested in getting rid of limiting and/or oppressive values. Freudian ideals were manifest in Surrealist works of art via the ideas he had with dreams and interpretation of those dreams, which according to him, had ties to the way people may or may not repress certain desires and unpleasant feelings and experiences. Surrealists also wanted to make people aware of the oppression of sexual desire by society through their work.

Dada began with Marcel Duchamp who is often considered to be the father of conceptual art. Although artworks had concepts before, those concepts didn't question art itself, but rather questioned the subject matter and technique. Duchamp tried make the viewer and consumer of the art responsible for the definition of art for themselves; additionally the objects he makes into art are about the idea, not about the items which are displayed. As in the Fountain piece he created and submitted under the name of R. Mutt, which was rejected from a show that he himself put together, he aimed to make people aware of the fact that it is the artist who decides what they think is art, it is the decision, the choice that matters, not necessarily the craftsmanship or creation of the piece. I think this ties into a lot of work I have been looking at in regards to my Public Art class. We look at work that was designed by the artist that is then created by masons, brick layers, concrete layers and construction workers. It isn't crafted by the artist, but it was the artist's idea that they are undertaking. 

Many of my classmates might say that contemporary public artists and sculptors create designs then the works aren't art, simply because they don't make them themselves, but that they forget to remember is people like Duchamp who pioneered the found object as an art object. I am of the opinion that everyone makes their own definition for art. Some people may not think that Bottle Rack is a work of art, but it was signed by the artist, so mustn't it be a sculpture? Isn't the fact that someone finds a form, set of lines, an object with color, if someone finds that to be beautiful or meaningful for themselves, can't they call it art, even if it's rejected by the current artists and knowledge of art at the time? I have thought a lot lately about the way people talk about how there is an "art" to doing certain tasks that aren't particularly creative or artistic. Because there is an art to doing something, throwing the baseball at the right time at the right angle for example, does that make baseball an art? Is the act of throwing the art act? Is the baseball player a work of art because his body is particularly tuned and honed to a point where they are able to easily perform a perfect throw? I'm getting off topic, but I happen to believe that Art is what the person experiencing it defines Art as, not what the rest of the world decides what Art is, otherwise, people like Duchamp wouldn't decide to challenge the ideas of the Art world.