Wednesday, September 1, 2010

The Fourth Grade Dadaists

"Everybody can Dada"
—Dada-Fair, Berlin, poster, 1919

"Dada blasted onto the scene in 1916 with ear-splitting enthusiasm: rowdy, brazen, irreverent, and assaulting. Its sounds were clamorous, its visions were shocking, and its language was explosive. Yet Dada was not aimless anarchy. Rather, the artists were responding to the violence and trauma of World War I—and to the shock of modernity more generally—by developing shock tactics of their own. They critiqued traditional conceptions of the artist as master of his medium by using prefabricated materials or relegating aesthetic decisions to chance. They scoffed at the conventional definition of artistic media, expanding it to include the stuff of modern life—newspapers, magazines, ticket stubs, mechanical parts, food wrappers, pipes, advertisements, light bulbs, and so on. Through their performances, publicity stunts, and manipulation of mass media, they further altered perceptions of what constituted a work of art by blurring the boundaries between art and life.

The fourth grade artists studied the creations of the Dada artists and created their own Dada collages. The young artists had to use images that were very normal and arrange them in a new and unrealistic way. They were encouraged to use scale change and juxtaposition in their work.
As far as the collages went less was definitely more!"






We also created a Dada poem. Read about Dada poems here:
Mrs. Dubovich's class Dada poem:
A Fourth Grade DADA Poem

A monkey hit me! I forgot my free reading book, the jar floats in mid air.
The teacher said, “Keep the sentence simple.” The grass is green
and my school is big. Baseball is super fun!! The cat hissed at the big dog.
I don’t like homework. Why would somebody do that?
School is sometimes fun. I had soccer last night, sharks are cool.
Bob said hi to George, please pass the peas. I like globes,
I like my pets, then he got hit by a car. Bill’s tips on fishing,
the wolf ate the boar, this is a simple sentence.
There are many stars in the sky.
You can eat pancakes with syrup.
Good bye, see you later goodbye person.
I went to the store.
Bravo! Dada Artists!

No comments: