DADA and Radical Art

Originally the term 'avant-garde' is a French one, adopted from military use in the 1820s by a group of Utopians closely connected to Saint-Simon. In 1906, Filipo Tommaso Marinetti connected the term 'avant-garde’ with the idea of the future, thus paving the way for what is now commonly called the 'modernist' or 'historical avant-garde'. During the 1960s, a broad attempt was made to define the notion of 'avant-garde' sensu stricto, as a reaction to the post-war avant-gardes that started up during the 1950s, but during the last decades of the twentieth century the term as such became so broad and diffuse that it was evident it could not signify anything. Since at least the middle of the 1990s, though, a debate on the issue of avant-garde has gradually developed again.

DADA Companion An Online Research Companion NEW!
Situationist International
- Constant | Guy Debord | Asger Jorn | Gruppe SPUR
Fluxus and Happening
- George Brecht | Ray Johnson | Allan Kaprow | Arthur Koepcke | George Maciunas

This research companion starts from the assumption that the challenge of new cultural technologies, in particular, collage and montage, photography and film, constitutes the main driving force of the formation and further development of the avant-garde.
In selecting and evaluating print resources, I have strongly emphasised primary documents as biographies, manifestos, artist books and treatises. I included secondary material with a special eye for online available (open source) material. From an enormous amount of online resources, I have selected websites on actual content, but also on accuracy, comprehensiveness, scope and uniqueness. I wanted sources to be as analogous to typical scholarly sources as possible, excluding commercially based sites and sites presenting an amalgam of information.