How Dada is to break its cultural accommodation and containment today necessitates thinking the historical instances through revised application of critical and theoretical models. The volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde moves precisely by this motive, bringing together writings which insist upon the continuity of the early twentieth-century moment now at the start of the twenty-first. Engaging the complex and contradictory nature of Dada strategies, instanced in the linguistic gaming and performativity of the movement's initial formation, and subsequently isolating the...

Dada formed in 1916, embedded in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion - in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, fundamentally at the heart of Western art. This book sets out new coordinates in revision of a formation that Western art history routinely exhausts through its characterisation as a 'revolutionary movement' of anarchic cultural dissent, and does so in order to contest the perpetuated assumptions about Dada that underlie the popular myth. Dada is difficult and the response to it is not easy, and what emerge from...