Some fine ( fine ) tuning from Topsy:
Dada's Boys - Identity and Play in Contemporary Art
at the Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh 27 May - 16 July 2006
Knut Asdam, Matthew Barney, John Bock, Roderick Buchanan, Marcel Duchamp, Keith Farquhar, Douglas Gordon, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Sarah Lucas, Man Ray, Paul McCarthy, Lee Miller, Francis Picabia and Richard Prince.
Dada's Boys examines male identity as part of a post dada tradition, which was inaugurated most powerfully in scurrilous and iconoclastic gestures carried out in New York by Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia around 1916-1917.
Irreverent humour, self-consciously laddish repartee, preoccupation with taboo bodily processes, regression to infantile patterns of behaviour, dandyish concern with sartorial display and the wholesale questioning of traditional male attributes and roles, are some of the defining features of dadaist and post-dada art.
The exhibition begins with a small selection of historical touchstones for male dada attitudes in the form of typically succinct but incendiary provocations by Duchamp, Picabia and Man Ray. The bulk of the exhibition is then devoted to a more recent lineage of artists with demonstrable dada/surrealist sympathies who have continued to fashion a poetics of male subjectivity.
The exhibition seeks to move between the poles of male arrogance and insufficiency, eschewing a tone of pious political correctness for a more open-ended celebration of humorous self-reflexivity. The keynote for the exhibition is the sophisticated rudery and witty self-questioning that characterised dada at its best, and to which a major strand of contemporary art remains firmly committed.
A great evening of international and regional poetry up at the The Sage last night. ( Hah! Look at why they closed the carpark!) I really enjoyed it - J was reading some of the translations.
And suddenly this has become a long blog! I need to get on and knuckle down before the weekend! Working at home today and then chemo at 4.00...
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