Author Description

This volume examines notions of shock and the senseless in Dada (Dada's intent was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, Dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature) and Fluxus (Fluxus presumes that all media and all artistic disciplines are fair game for combination and fusion. Objects and performances are characterized by minimalist but often expansive gestures based in scientific, philosophical, sociological, or other extra-artistic ideas and leavened with burlesque). This pairs two distinctly radical art movements that challenged the very notion and purpose of art. Laying out a genealogy of surrealisms, this work addresses the senseless in artistic production as a strategy toward shock -- generally considered to be characteristic of the historical "avant-garde".