Beyond Modernism. Berlin Dada and Form as Contradiction

This thesis revisits dominant historical accounts of modernism by engaging with the contradictions it identifies as defining Berlin Dada’s approach to form. As a group of artists, writers and cultural practitioners that worked collectively between 1918 and 1920 in Berlin, Dada has been historicized as the epitome of the political avant-garde in the West: canonical interpretations veer between commending its ‘radicality’ and dismissing its inconsistencies as ‘anti-art’. My argument is that Dada was neither ‘radical’, nor were its contradictions (e.g. remaining art while demanding its abolition) the logical outcome of its ‘anti-art’ stance. Instead I propose they resulted from attempts to re-function art as a social practice in a capitalist society and the specific nature of this challenge: to socialise art in Weimar Germany’s consumer culture meant, for Dada, re-configuring its forms vis-a-vis commerce rather than, as in Russia, labour. Taking the Berlin group as a case study, I take issue with the retrospective attempts to smooth out the contradictions that arose from this and that become most tangible in artists’ relation to artistic forms and technical media. I argue in turn that modernism was far less monolithic than prevailing approaches to form and their premises of medium-specificity (or its decline) allow grasping. Drawing on what I call a socially expanded formalism and its dynamic notions of form as developed in the vicinity of Russian formalism, productivism and heterodox Marxist art historians such as Lu Marten, I focus on form as going behind and beyond art (history) in order to develop a perspective on art from its limits rather than from the security of a dominant centre. Doing so, I propose, not only significantly broadens our understanding of modernism but also of art today.