Heiko Recktenwald wrote:
>
> > As a joke Dada is definitely NOT overrated. Some Dada on the other hand was dead
> > serious,
> > like Berlin Dada.
>
I'd always been taught, too, to view Dada as the work of hip pranksters
who were always on the lookout for a joke. I was startled when I
finally read Hugo Ball's Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary. I was
surprised at the depth of sadness directly involved in the movement over
the war. Somehow the museums and art history books had removed the
enormity of World War I right out of the discussion.
And Luis Bunuel said that for him, Surrealism was 'above all, a moral
movement'. That element too gets lost in contemporary discussions of
Surrealism.
Rosalie Gancie
