Monday 2 June 2008

DADA at MoMA

Exhibition
The Museum of Modern Art, New York NY
May 21–July 28, 2008
The exhibition was organized by Michelle Elligott, Museum Archivist
More about the exhibition.

To coincide with the launch of the Museum's ambitious publication Dada in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, the ninth volume of MoMA's Studies in Modern Art series, this exhibition provides an overview of the Museum's long and rich history of collecting, documenting, interpreting, and exhibiting works of the Dada era. This display of original documents, letters, floor plans, installation photographs, and oral history commentary highlights landmark exhibitions at MoMA; addresses significant Dada acquisitions, key donors, and innovative film programs and scholarship at the Museum throughout the years; and documents the evolution of the installation of Dada works in the Museum's collection.

Catalogue
Dada in the Collection features some seventy works in various mediums—including books, collages, drawings, films, paintings, and reliefs—presented in large-scale reproductions and accompanied by in depth, object-focused entries by an interdepartmental group of the Museum's curators.
Catalyzed by the major Dada exhibition that appeared in 2005 and 2006 in Paris and Washington, D.C. and at MoMA, the book benefits from new scholarship generated by the extraordinary opportunity the exhibitions created for an international community of scholars to examine the Museum's objects beside those on loan from other institutions. This is the ninth volume of Studies in Modern Art, the Museum's publication series devoted to scholarly research on its collection. Includes 242 illustrations.

Dada in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art
Edited by Anne Umland and Adrian Sudhalter, with Scott Gerson
ISBN 9780870706684
Published in 2008
Pages 352.

Surrealism and Situtationism

Surréalistes et situationnistes, vies parallèles
"Histoire et documents"
Jérôme Duwa. Préface de Christophe Bourseiller
Editions Dilecta : Paris 2008
237 pp.

André Breton and Guy Debord never met. It seems indeed that both were mutually exclusive, so to speak.in the sense that Breton and surrealism were said to belong to the past, which World War II had just erased, so that everything had to start from scratch again. But such ahasty judgment on surrealism has to be reconsidered in a spirit which refuses to settle old scores. Was the reason, then, a fundamental divergence or a profound, secret likeness hidden behind superficial rivalry? A detailed history of the up and down relationships between the Paris and Brussels surrealists on the one hand, and Guy Debord and the Situationnists on the other, remained to be written so as to understand one of the mainsprings of the construction of the Situationnist identity. This essay, which includes an anthology of declarations and pamphlets,a dozen illustrations and texts by Jean-Louis Bédouin, André Breton, Claude Courtot, Adrien Dax, Guy Debord, Tom Gutt, Simon Hantaï, Gérard Legrand, Marcel Mariën, Benjamin Péret, José Pierre, Jean Schuster, Jan Strijbosch, Raoul Vaneigem and Joseph Wolman, helps follow the tumultuous course of those parallel lives.