Avant-Garde Searches for OriginsFriday, 2/7

Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche

Ferdinand Leeke, scene from Wagner’s Siegfried Edvard Munch, Friedrich Nietzsche

The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872)

• Disputes the dominant interpretation of ancient Greek art since the Renaissance, which was that the Ancient Greeks valued “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.”

• Asserts that the drive for reason, order, and enlightenment in Greek culture (the Apollonian) was balanced by a regressive drive toward chaos, amnesia, and de-individuation (the Dionysian).

• Claims that art loses its vitality and culture stagnates whenever rationalism suppresses the Dionysian impulse. (Science and optimism allow us to hide from life’s inherent irrationality instead of facing it head-on.)

• Puts forth Wagner’s early operas as a positive example of recapturing the balance/struggle between Apollo and Dionysus.

Apollonian Dionysian

Prophecy Amnesia

Symbols Things

Stability Flux

Moderation Excess

Comfort Terror

Individuality Self-Annihilation

Reasoning Mind Animal Body

Words Music

The Actor The Chorus

Colonialism and the Art World

Colonial Exhibitions were among the most popular public events in the major cities of Europe and the US from the 1880s through the 1950s.

Colonialism and the Art World

Colonial Exhibitions were among the most popular public events in the major cities of Europe and the US from the 1880s through the 1950s.

A scale reproduction of Canada House at the 1911 British Empire Exposition in London

Colonialism and the Art World

The 1889 Paris Universal Exposition included living recreations of West African and Aztec villages, a Javanese puppet theatre, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which featured Native American performers.

{Right alongside the newly-constructed Eiffel Tower}

Colonialism and the Art World

Mask by an unknown 19th-Century Congolese artist

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

Freud and Psychoanalysis– Our conscious mind is matched by

unconscious and subconscious “drives” that we do not fully understand or control. We do not grow out of our irrational, infantile impulses—we only repress and redirect them.

– Drives exist independent of objects—we feel desire first and then attach that desire to an object. A feeling that we think has a particular cause may have an entirely different cause—or it may have no external cause at all.

– Free association, dream analysis, hypnosis, and returning to early childhood memories are therapeutic tools and keys to self-understanding.

Surrealism and the Art of the Mentally IllDr. Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933)

Amassed a collection of over 5000 pieces of visual art and writing by German, Swiss, and Austrian mental patients. His collection was visited by, among others, Picasso, the Expressionist Paul Klee, and the Surrealist Max Ernst, and later influenced the Abstract Expressionist painters of the 1940s and ‘50s.

Jacob Mohr, Proofs (1910)

August Natterer, World-Axel with Rabbit (1911)

Jarry and Gauguin

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897)

{Gauguin and Jarry were friends and supported each other’s work— some of their mutual friends were involved in painting the “eternal” backdrop for Ubu Roi}

Jarry and Colonialism

The Ballets Russes dances The Rite of Spring

The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris on May 29 1913, with music by Igor Stravinsky, choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, and scenario and design by Nicholas Roerich.

As at the premiere of Ubu Roi, a fight broke out between supporters and critics in the audience.

The Cabaret VoltaireDada = a nonsense word (several conflicting stories exist explaining how it was chosen) denoting the group of mostly expatriate artists who met and performed shows at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, Switzerland during World War I.

Bruitism = the creation of “noise music” designed to be jarring and unpleasant to the ear.

Sound poetry = poetry made out of pure sounds, without any intended meaning

Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings: partners in Dada

Hugo Ball, Gadji beri bimbaGadji beri bimba

gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala bim gadjama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligla wowolimai bin beri ban o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen bluku terullala blaulala loooo

zimzim urullala zimzim urullala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam elifantolim brussala bulomen brussala bulomen tromtata velo da bang band affalo purzamai affalo purzamai lengado tor gadjama bimbalo glandridi glassala zingtata pimpalo ögrögöööö viola laxato viola zimbrabim viola uli paluji malooo

tuffm im zimbrabim negramai bumbalo negramai bumbalo tuffm i zim gadjama bimbala oo beri gadjama gaga di gadjama affalo pinx gaga di bumbalo bumbalo gadjamen gaga di bling blong gaga blung

Ubu and Postcolonial AfricaLeft: Busi Zukofa and Dawid Minaar in Jane Taylor’s Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997)

Right: Poster for Wole Soyinka’s King Baabu (2002)