1. Connor Rensimer
Professor Noble-Olson
Dada & Surrealism
6 April 2015
Ready-Made Reality
! The Dadaists effectively, as they set out to do, undermined the spirit and the
notion of unitary being. Resulting from manifestations of their intellectual assertions,
process became a metonym for self, essentially, becoming replaced being. Their self-
immolation entailed manifold expressions relative to particular members at specific
junctures, at one point dissolving and merging with the expression of the unconscious in
chance operations, at another willfully asserting themselves as individuals against
prevailing hierarchical social relations, motivated by a world embroiled in mechanistic
violence. At every turn, whether in the collaborative effort and reception of the discursive
poeme simultantes of the Zurich group, the calculated courting with chance in Marcel
Duchamp’s projects, or the incendiary public demonstrations of the Berlin group, the
prevailing intentions and effects were grounded, whether understood or not, in patterns
formed out of a continually changing order.
! Although far removed, in terms of civilization’s timescale, from Greece’s
Hellenistic Era, the bourgeois institutions and codes against which the Avant-Garde
movements formed, to a notable degree embraced an Apollonian measure of beauty,
predominantly so in neoclassical academic art (which employed Greek iconography),
but also in Romanticism. On a side note, it is argued that Romanticism foresaw the
invocation of the unconscious in art, and thus the outbreak of Dada and Surrealism’s

2. innovations as soon as the perfect geopolitical and technological storm had arrived. The
Apollonian perspective is one which champions semblance, a fictional instantiation of
idealized excrement, aesthetically shaped around a consented ethical and moralistic
armature. Art objects such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace and Venus de Milo are
heralded as the definitive acts of semblance for their time, literally embodying the
Platonic form of the Good. Neoclassicism in the 19th century resurrected the classical
Greek ethical principles based in reason, as seen in The Apotheosis of Homer,
celebrating the Eurocentric, white patriarchal institution’s most cherished thinkers and
artisans. These illusionistic configurations are effectively thrusting into the fore an
imperialistic power structure, acting in the interest of the values which might preserve a
specific order. If these values call for solidarity, it is clear for whom they ideologically
serve and exempt. A distancing occurs between what is bad (plebeian and base) and
good (highborn and noble) within repesentations of the bourgeois stripe, or master
morality. As Bürger states, it “projects the image of a better order and to that extent
protests against the bad order that prevails” (Bürger, 49). The prevalent “bad” order
against which master morality elevates itself, is that of proletarian, everyday mundanity.
Bürger’s conception of the production and reception of this bourgeois category is limited
to the privileged and divinized individual, essentially the artist and the well-to-do white
male patron. In spite of this institution of privilege, the avant-garde dispatched
autonomy, decadent decay, and distance from the praxis of life, in favor of destroying
the distinction between the producer and recipient, and the embracing chance as a
means of subordinating reason.

3. ! As demonstrated by the disjunctive and discordant poeme simultante
performances of the Zurich Dadaists or Karawane, Hugo Ball’s seminal sound poem,
Dada seeks contradiction and suspension of the horizon of all ideological meaning
drawn up by prejudicial reason. Through these exercises, the Dadaists liberated their
flesh from the prison of the soul. This undermining of self, as it might be considered with
regard to the modes of subjectivation of the artist, is achieved through different means,
as revealed by Richter in the curious contrast between Arthur Cravan and Marcel
Duchamp of the New York Dada group. Cravan’s pursuits “illustrates one tendency in
Dada taken to its extreme: final nothingness, suicide” (Richter, 86). Whether or not
Cravan’s disappearance off the Mexican coast meant his demise at sea, it was his
magnum opus as a Dadaist, the ultimate signification of self-dissolution. His perpetual
willing of self-reformation, composed of truth and lies, represents the idea of being as
process (as a becoming), opposed to a static, unitary subject.
! By Richter’s account, Duchamp exemplifies nihilistic detachment from ideological
frameworks, rejecting the internalization of all meaning through its conceptual
suspension in the ready-mades. Against all prevailing measures of inherent beauty,
Duchamp established that “the choice of these ‘ready-mades’ was never dictated by
aesthetic delectation” (Richter, 89). By means of physically and verbally re-
contextualizing objects he intuitively chooses, he directs attention to their uselessness
outside of their originally prescribed function, emphasizing that there is no essence
beneath things beyond their functional and elemental properties. He affixes a bicycle
wheel to a stool, neither object retains but a few of their original functional properties, all
of which have been willfully thrust upon them, just the same way pigment is bound with

4. a medium, packaged, and eventually smeared on a primed surface. The signified status
of these chosen objects is also sublated through the surface inscription of disjunctive
verbal content. The infamous Fountain is an entity in which verbal content subordinates
and exceeds functional fixedness. Posed as an art object it loses all purpose and
meaning beyond its phenomenological digestion.
! In conclusion, Dadaism undermined the notion of a unitary soul or static being,
by means of existing through willful expressions of the unconscious and a resulting self-
immolation. This lack of concrete principle carried over into the reflexive meaning made
possible in the disjunctive meanings imbedded in their re-contextualized objects and
freely associative productions.
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