How to Create a Dadaist Poem

To practice using video as a medium for teaching, I created a little blip about making a Dadaist poem using A Book of Surrealist Games compiled by Alastair Brotchie and edited by Mel Gooding. Absurdities abound, so please turn down your reality meter, and enjoy:

Resources

A Book of Surrealist Games compiled by Alastair Brotchie and edited by Mel Gooding

“Surrealist automatism is a method of art making in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind to have great sway.” {current version of cited wikipedia page}

“Tristan Tzara (Samuel Rosenstock/Rosenstein) [was a] Romanian-born French poet and essayist known mainly as a founder of Dada, a nihilistic revolutionary movement in the arts.” {archived 6/23/17}

This performance of John Cage’s 4'33 is performed by William Marx, and is not to be taken all that seriously. See quote by Tristan Tzara below for the reasons why. {archived 8/27/17}

“We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than anything else. But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this quantity of life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting. Dada knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with subtle, perfidious methods, Dada introduces it into daily life. And vice versa. In art, Dada reduces everything to an initial simplicity, growing always more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind of creation and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic reduced to a personal minimum, while literature in its view should be primarily intended for the individual who makes it. Words have a weight of their own and lend themselves to abstract construction. The absurd has no terrors for me, for from a more exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd to me. Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond between disparate acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work; the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework of words and sentiments.” — Excerpt from Tristan Tzara’s 1922 lecture, translated by Robert Motherwell. {archived 12/21/17}