March 17, 2002

11:35 PM

The University of Iowa, of all unlikely places, maintains the International Dada Archive. I suppose someone had to try, since almost no one understands it. There you can not only view images, but download PDFs—page by page, unfortunately—of many Dadaist publications. Most of them are in various non-English languages, but still worth looking at just for the visual design. And yes, the urinal is there, but you'll have to find it yourself.
[via Consumptive]
posted by Su (8 comments total)

Q: "how many dadaists does it take to change a lightbulb?"

A: "three giraffes and a tub of cherry jello."
posted by patricking at 11:38 PM on March 17, 2002

I thought the answer was "fish"?

No wait, that's surrealists...

This is really cool. I wish they had more publications (they seem to be missing a lot), but I guess it's great for what it does have. I hope they add to it.
posted by mkn at 12:09 AM on March 18, 2002

See also this fluxus site. And this one.
posted by beagle at 5:49 AM on March 18, 2002

Superneato. Thanks, Su.
posted by D at 6:03 AM on March 18, 2002

Forgive me, but doesn't it (at least somewhat) fly in the face of the Dada spirit to maintain a web site using HTML and scripting, which imply a sense of hierarchy and planning?
posted by alumshubby at 6:17 AM on March 18, 2002

Whoa, beagle, thanks for the fluxus sites! The one I knew had died.

alumshubby: flying in the face of dada is very dada, in a way. But...yeah.
posted by rodii at 6:20 AM on March 18, 2002

I'm not sure it's fair to the U of Iowa to say "of all unlikely places" as in the post. They do have the Iowa Writer's Workshop, an extremely prestigious (prose) fiction-writing program. Not that it's linked directly to Dada, I'm just saying that the fact that it's Iowa shouldn't be misconstrued to mean that it's an unlikely place for sophisticated intellectual thought, etc. etc.
posted by bingo at 8:52 AM on March 18, 2002

I was gonna say the same thing about Iowa not being that unlikely. Their MFA fiction program is widely regarded as the best in the country.
posted by mdn at 12:26 PM on March 18, 2002