Allan Kausch sent me his collage contribution to Maintenant 14: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art last week (thanks, Allan!). I don’t know if this was meant to be a comment on current events but it’s difficult to avoid such an interpretation, especially regarding the USA where people continue to behave like children while the corpses pile up around them.
By coincidence, Strange Flowers notes today that the First International Dada Fair was staged in Berlin 100 years ago this week. The efflorescence of Dada was a brief one thanks to contradictory impulses, conflicting personalities and a hostile social reaction, so the participants might be surprised that their ethos lives on in magazine form a century later. They might also be satisfied that the site of the First International Dada Fair is now an empty plot in a rebuilt street. What better memorial for the Death of Art than a hole in the ground?
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The original Cabaret Voltaire
Hurra Dada!
“What better memorial for the Death of Art than a hole in the ground?”
Such imagery!
You foreigners in developed nations tend not to see it but the US is facing the threat of fascism but, for all intents and purposes, has passed that point. If we’re not a fascist state, we may as well be.
But whatever, we’re not a true developed nation. We’re just a failed state albeit one with great, heavily concentrated wealth. A leader who allows his people to die because acting timely would make him look bad. Unaffordable healthcare. A nation too focussed on enriching special interests to prepare for disasters. A dominant party opposed to free elections and the rule of law, a party that triggered an economic depression.
Looks like shithole to me.