Dada and the absurd: pedagogies of art and survival.

Douglas, Anne

Abstract

In the early 1970s Allan Kaprow, artist, theorist and educator, wrote three essays entitled The Education of the Un-artist I, II and III. From the late 1950s Kaprow had been instrumental in the development of what he called 'Happenings' and was part of the Fluxus movement, which had taken up the mantle of Dada. With his Happenings, Kaprow suggested that artists should open up to life beyond the art establishment. Kaprow began as an art historian and became an avant-garde artist. The push and pull between a relatively secure sense of the past from the history of art and a volatile present was rooted in Kaprow's personal experience. He was writing at the height of the Vietnam War and the Protest Movement in the United States. As both an artist and an educator, his concept of educating the un-artist points to a refusal to be trapped in past knowledge while using this history as leverage to move forward, to act in the chaos of the fast-changing life that surrounded him.

Citation

DOUGLAS, A. 2022. Dada and the absurd: pedagogies of art and survival. In T. Ingold (Ed.), Knowing from the inside: cross-disciplinary experiments with matters of pedagogy. London: Bloomsbury Academic [online], chapter 9, pages 189-211. Available from: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350217171.ch-009

• Online Publication Date: Feb 21, 2022
• Publication Date: Mar 24, 2022
• Deposit Date: May 24, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: May 24, 2024
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Pages: 189-212
• Book Title: Knowing from the inside: cross-disciplinary experiments with matters of pedagogy
• Chapter Number: 9
• ISBN: 9781350217140
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350217171.ch-009
• Keywords: Dada; Fluxus movement; Avant-garde artist; Pedagogies; Cultures in crisis; Art education; Postmodern academy
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/2023554