Official 34 - lecture 1
listen to part of a lecture in an art history class.
last week, we started talking about the painters and sculptors who were part of the art movement call Dada.
but I don't want to you think the ideas that introduced last time were limited to painting, sculpture, that sorta thing.
so today, I want to move beyond the visual arts and talk a bit about Dada on performing art in theater.
The visual arts are art forms that create works that are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, photography, video, film making and architecture.
but let's start by reviewing what Dada is, OK?
as you'll recalled, Dada began in Switzerland, in the city of Zurich, in 1916.
the artists who started reacting against traditional notions of beauty, of reason, of progress.
which has been the standards of Western thought since the 18 century.
they looked around, and the First World War was ragging, they did not see so much beauty, reason and progress in the world.
第一次世界大战是一场于1914年7月28日至1918年11月11日主要发生在欧洲的大战。
instead, they saw the world that was chaotic, random, a world that didn't make sense.
And if that's the way the world was, they wanted their art to reflect that.
let's review a couple of key ideas that were the backbone of Dada art.
first the Dadaists wanted to completely reject to the classical idea of art, classical ideas like proportion, balance, all the things you think about when you think about great art.
great art involved the reason, the logic, the beauty, that's the Dadaist wanted to overthrow.
philosophy the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.
philosophy sounds like 'the logic'
to a Dadaist, classical art were a reflection of out-dated thinking.
that is why Dadaist created the sculptures like the ones we saw last week, remember the stool with the bicycle wheel mounted on top.
stool
I wouldn't exactly call that beautiful, would you? but of course, it wasn't meant to be. That was the point.
another key Dada idea we talked about was the embracing of randomness, right.
if life is random, said Dadaists , why would we make art that has order and logic?
and so we have that collage we looked at where the artist took different, cut out squares of colored paper, threw them onto the canvas.
collage: 拼贴画
and wherever they landed, that was the composition of work.
and other favor of Dadaists, was something called chance poetry. A chance poet would pull words out of a hat, and that would be, well, that would make up the poem.
poetry: verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of languages.
poetry is the process of creating a literary piece, while a poem is the end result of this process.
this idea of change and randomness was a key element of Dadaism because the whole world seemed so random to them.
let's take a look how Dadaist ideas were presented to audiences in highly unconventional. I don't even sure about how to categorize these unconventional events.
I suppose you just have to call them shows, these show started in Zurich in a place called the Cabaret Voltaire.
the rejection of classical western art, you see this in the nature of what took place at the Cabaret Voltaire.
they didn't put on plays or operas there, what they did was throw out all conventions, they mixed everything or anything together.
plays, operas
they would, it might start somebody reading a poem, then somebody else playing an instrument followed by a display of paintings, followed by somebody else banging on a big drum, and someone dressed in a robot costume, jumping up and down.
so it's not like a play, there is no real plot development here, like you'd find in traditional, theoretical performance.
The performers at the Cabaret Voltaire would also get audience involved, which is extremely unusual.
think about a traditional play, the action's self-contained. The actor act as if there's no one watching, right?
A self-contained person does not have a large number of relationships with other people or does not depend on others for support.
as if: seems like: 好像是
It's like a world unto itself. Well, at the Cabaret Voltaire, audience members could get up on stage and dance or chant, or shout and sing from their seats.
chant: to make melodic sounds with the voice especially : to sing a chant. 吟唱
And every night would be different because there would be a different audience and a different set of acts and displays.
so all this could get pretty chaotic, No barriers between the performers and the audience. And no barriers between kinds of art, either.
think about it. Poetry, painting, music, dance, all on the same stage, and often at the same time.
Poetry
Portray
this is what Dadaist had in mind, when they set out to make art that reflected their own idea of reality. It didn't make sense. But why should it?