Play and the Avant-Garde: Aren't We All a Little Dada?.

Dada, an art movement that became well known in the late 1910s and early 1920s, challengeded traditional notions of art and aesthetics. Dada artists, for example, tossed colored scraps of paper into the air to compose chance-based collages, performed sound poems devoid of semantic value, and modeled a headpiece fash- ioned of sardine cans. To most art historians, Dada remains a culturally contingent expression of World War I trauma, nihilism, political disillusionment, and an aggressive attack on the moral bankruptcy of Western culture. The author sug- gests that this negative interpretation originates from art history's methodological blindness to the importance of play, not only to creative and artistic endeavors, but to human identity itself. Dada is characterized by an effervescent love of improvisation, curiosity, novelty and an unselfconscious exploration of the phe- nomenal world; it emphatically professed to be "anti-art" and "a state-of-mind. " When considered from the perspective of play research and positive psychology, Dada emerges as an early and visionary milestone in understanding play as a fun- damental expression of humanity almost a century before academia would take adult play seriously. Key words: Albert Ellis; avant-garde; cognitive-behavioral therapy; creativity; Dada; Marcel Duchamp; modernism; play; positive psychol- ogy; Richard HulsenbeckTHE AMERICAN MODERNIST ARTIST Man Ray, who spent much of his career in Paris, entitled his 1927 creation-a bubble-blowing clay pipe-Ce qui manque a nous tous (or What We All Lack). It pokes fun at Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's coauthor, who had declared, "What these gentlemen all lack is dialectic. "1 What we really lack, Man Ray implies, is neither historical consciousness nor the formulaic methodology of dialectical reasoning, but humor and creative imagination.The colorful, dynamic Man Ray embodied precisely these qualities, as did his wayfarer French artist Marcel Duchamp. In the opening epigram of Man Ray's autobiography entitled Self-Portrait, Duchamp pretends to be writing an encyclopedic entry and defines the elusive subject as "masculine, noun, synony- mous with: pleasure in play, enjoyment. "2Man Ray and Duchamp were pioneers of Dada, the exuberant artistic movement that burst into prominence in the 1910s and 1920s, first in Zurich, at a night club called the Cabaret Voltaire, and then spread to Paris, Berlin, and New York. Dada revolutionized art by pioneering new techniques and media ranging from collages, montages, and assemblages to poster poems and bruit- ist concerts; Dadaists used found objects, newspaper clippings, cutouts, bits of string and textiles, dust, nails, all sorts of seemingly random or castaway objects, and they delighted in employing chance in composing their works. Duchamp exhibited a signed urinal as Fountain; German poet Hugo Ball performed sound poems devoid of semantic value, such as Gadji beri bimba; and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, like Ball a member of the German avant garde, modelled a headpiece fashioned of sardine cans.3To art historians, Dada is the enfant terrible of their discipline, an anar- chic movement typically dubbed in art historical introductions as nihilistic, or called an iconoclastic attack on bourgeois aesthetics, or considered a pathological reenactment of the trauma of World War I. William Rubin, for example, who organized the 1968 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition on Dada calls it "aesthetic nihilism,"4 an "intellectually oriented nihilism towards art"5 that tries to debase pleasure itself.In my 2012 article "Making an Art of Creativity: The Cognitive Science of Duchamp and Dada,"6 I attacked this traditional nihilistic portrayal by arguing that art history continues to be dominated by outdated notions of creativity. Classical, romantic, and psychoanalytic notions pervade the discourse on creativity even in the twenty-first century and ignore the scientific research that has been conducted in the last forty years. …