Flying derbys! Revolving revolvers! Ladders to nowhere! It's Hans Richter's wonderful Vormittagsspuk (or, Ghosts Before Breakfast), certainly one of the most playful and entertaining of all the Dada film experiments of the 1920s. Presented here with a nicely done soundtrack by Donald Sosin. .
posted on Jul 20, 2008 - View this thread

The Andy Rooney Game. Here’s how you play: take out everything but the first sentence and the last sentence from Andy Rooney’s latest segment on 60 Minutes. Then you put that on youtube. That’s it! Check it out:
posted on Jun 2, 2008 - View this thread

After nearly 21 months of hiatus, whimsical politics blog Fafblog is back! And it's redesigned, too! Right now I would ordinarily include a link to best posts of the past, but I would have to include all of them.
posted on Apr 3, 2008 - View this thread

20th Century Avant-Garde is a great resource guide to experimental art from 1900 onwards. Special sections for dada, the situationists and fluxus. You can also browse by categories such as artists, film and video art, movements in art, publishers and many more. If you're interested in experimental art of the 20th Century you can get lost in this site for hours.
posted on Jan 23, 2008 - View this thread

Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp - an animated timeline of the artist's life and works.
posted on Aug 7, 2007 - View this thread

Fan of Caresses/Supreme Discharged Toilette Ron Padgett's 1968 translations of the 18 drawing-poems from Francis Picabia's poetry collection Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère, from the latest issue of onedit. Much more Picabia inside. [via this from Ron Silliman]
posted on Aug 6, 2007 - View this thread

Chema Madoz -- photos
posted on Jun 28, 2007 - View this thread

Foo! Notary sojac! 1506 nix nix!
posted on May 18, 2007 - View this thread

PSST! Pass It On…
posted on May 8, 2007 - View this thread

Mummenschanz on the Muppets Footage of swiss mime troop, Mummenschanz... [2, 3, 4]
posted on Apr 24, 2007 - View this thread

I talk to my haircut. The Rev. Dr. Fred Lane was a dada jazzbo as part of the Raudelunas scene in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the 70s and 80s. His real name is T. R. Reed, and he's a creator of wonderful whirligigs. There's also a documentary in the works (careful of your eyes on that page).
posted on Mar 27, 2007 - View this thread

Meditations on: the poetic and profane; on silence; death; catastrophe; Cage — and yet more strangeness and beauty from David Ralph Lichtensteiger's travels within the world of 20th C. avant garde music and postmodernism.
posted on Sep 17, 2006 - View this thread

In less than a month the cabaret, which at first had welcomed all modern tendencies in the arts and hoped to entertain and educate the customer, had turned into a theater of the absurd. That was the intention. "What we are celebrating," Ball wrote in his diary, "is both buffoonery and a requiem mass."The scandal spread. Lenin, who played chess with Tzara, wanted to know what Dada was all about. (Previously 1, 2, 3)
posted on Aug 29, 2006 - View this thread

Ramsey Kearney was a teenage country music prodigy nicknamed the Dixie Farmboy, a rockabilly singer with the Jimmie Martin Combo, a songwriter for Brenda Lee, and a producer of the most cloying Elvis tribute single ever recorded. Kearney would have almost no connection to alternative music whatsoever until John Trubee, a notorious crank phone caller and sideman for Zoogz Rift, found an ad in the back of the Midnight Globe tabloid from Kearney's Nashco Records label, a song-poem company offering to put his words to music for a small fee. Trubee sent his own disturbing LSD-fueled lyrics to Nashco, but to his surprise, Nashco accepted the lyrics after taking a $79.95 fee from Trubee. Kearney tweaked the lyrics slightly in order to avoid a lawsuit from Stevie Wonder, but the end product was the cult classic novelty song, Blind Man's Penis. (more inside)
posted on Aug 3, 2006 - View this thread

DADA Hits the MOMA. DaDaism was an art movement that arose prior to the rubble of WW1 where the artists led a creative revolution that shaped the course of modern art by combining different mediums to create a message of protest and hope. The MOMA exhibit tells one story (scroll to data and select full program - req flash 7) and the New Yorker reaffirms the influence on art today. However, the real story is with Richard Huelsenbeck, the ring leader and founder of the DaDa movement An interview with him from December 1960 (45 mins mp3) explains the start - as one of the few German artists in protest to the war. My favourite part is where he tells of picking out the name DaDa from an encyclopedia at a cabaret.
posted on Jul 19, 2006 - View this thread

A Piano In A Gallery. David Cunningham (the guy behind The Flying Lizards! Wikipedia because the main at-least-quasi-official site's down, but while you wait 16 days for that, why not read this interview with Deborah Lizard for your FL Fix) and his new project... A Piano In A Gallery. No, he's not actually PLAYING the piano -- the visitors are. It's a sort of similar thing to both Brian Eno's gallery work with ambient tape loops on different time cycles, creating an ever-shifting collage of sound and David Byrne's recent Playing The Building. The room is mic'd, and the sound is run through a piano, and amplified, both bringing background noises to the foreground AND creating feedback-style loops, as those sounds are also run into the mics and so forth. So... if you happen to be in London.... [via WFMU]
posted on Jul 15, 2006 - View this thread

When Artists Took Over the Asylum [NYT]: A 450 piece Dada exhibit opens Sunday at MoMA in New York. The collection features works from such Dada greats as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Jean "Hans" Arp, Hannah Höch, and Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven.
posted on Jun 17, 2006 - View this thread

The Monks
Formed in the early '60s by American G.I.s stationed in Germany. After their discharge, the group settled in Germany to concentrate on finding a unique sound, and soon began to shave their hair into Monk's tonsures and appear in cassocks. One of the truely original bands of the 60's, The Monks are now often refered to as 'proto-punk'. The Monks experimented fervently, developing a unqiue sound, with heavy bass, repetitive but amelodic rhythms, nursery rhyme style, yet powerful vocals and a good helping of feedback. They recorded only one albumn, Black Monk Time, until their 1999 reunion.
Hear some tracks from the albumn (in realmedia), See and hear The Monks Live in Germany, Also, check out Monks - The Transatlantic Feedback, a documentary (with trailer, though there seems to be something wrong with it). [Trivia: the song I Hate You can be heard in the background in one scene in the bowling alley in The Big Lebowski]
posted on Apr 21, 2006 - View this thread

Whereas: Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions. .

The mayor of Lawrence, Kansas proclaims February 4, April 1, March 28, July 15, August 2, August 7, August 16, August 26, September 18, September 22, October 1, October 17, and October 26, 2006 as International Dadaism Month.
posted on Feb 28, 2006 - View this thread

The mystery of Qwert Shmarble--solved! If you've ever wondered how stunningly useful items like Qwert Shmarble end up on Amazon, here's the inside story, from the former Amazon temp who wrote the user manual to the NM-156 Reciprocating Emu Press.
posted on Dec 5, 2005 - View this thread

The Digital Dada Library. Because "any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes me as a boring kind of game."
posted on Nov 11, 2005 - View this thread

Hannah Höch was one of the great queer female artists of the 20th century and one of the brilliant minds behind the Berlin DaDa Movement. One of the pioneers of photomontage, Höch's work is still among the best in the medium even today.
posted on Jan 28, 2005 - View this thread

Es wie wie dies und wie das und wie dies, und. Vibrant demonstration of why your favorite hip-hop artist is unlikely to be German. Link via little black dada cat.
posted on Dec 25, 2004 - View this thread

I was wandering around the internets looking for early twentieth century ephemera and look what I found. Digital Dada Library “This page provides links to some of the major Dada-era publications in the International Dada Archive. These books, pamphlets, and periodicals are housed in the Special Collections Department of the University of Iowa Libraries. …Each document has been scanned in its entirety.” EphemeraNow “is a family-friendly Web site dedicated to the commercial art of mid-century America.” The Ephemera Society “is a non-profit body concerned with the collection, preservation, study and educational uses of printed and handwritten ephemera.” and more! For those of you who have complained that this place is getting too “US politics-filter” I give you Glasgow Digital Library Collections which has all sorts of stuff including a great history of the labour movement in Glasgow 1910-1932
posted on Oct 26, 2004 - View this thread

The Pierre Boulez Project. (via Alex Ross)
posted on Aug 17, 2004 - View this thread

Life's like that isn’t it? Only the other day I was walking in the west end and... suddenly I was set upon by hordes of fans and admirers who wanted to... touch my clothes. So I took sanctuary in a nearby cinema. Normally of course I don't go in but... that day I saw something that... really moved me I'd like to share this...wonderful experience with you it was... (more inside gentle reader)
posted on Aug 12, 2004 - View this thread

Flash Mobs are cool. A couple hundred people spontaneously assemble in seconds, applaud (or ask for books, or do the robot), and leave. There are several ways to take part, if you're so inclined.
posted on Jul 31, 2003 - View this thread

Art or Crap? A quiz.
posted on Jun 3, 2003 - View this thread

The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even is usually referred to as The Large Glass but whatever the name, what is it? Also, did Marcel Duchamp hide the stitches in plain site? For that matter, when did he find the time to make music? Would hearing him in his own words help us make sense of him? What do his Francophone fans think? Does it require a lifetime of devotion to get a handle on his work? How about dragging his readymades into the lab and putting them under the microscope? If not answers then more questions can surely be found in the Duchamp world community or perhaps on its bulletin board. But, really, I suppose it doesn't matter how you encounter Duchamp just so long as you do.
posted on Aug 16, 2002 - View this thread

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 on Mar 17, 2002 - View this thread