ABSTRACT
Relationships between the arts and everyday life became subject to radical scrutiny in the period of the historical avant-garde. Sceptical of the ways in which the high arts, and specifically the visual arts, had been commodified and rarefied by the capitalist market, the challenge to the bourgeois cultural institutions in the period during and immediately following the First World War was led by the Dadaists. This movement began in the politically neutral zone of Zurich in Switzerland and quickly spread to Paris, Barcelona and New York. The Dadaist project was to expose the uselessness of art, not by rejecting art itself but by removing the frame that separated and elevated the work of art from everyday life. Their practice was intentionally controversial, designed to provoke audiences into questioning both the values of the arts and contemporary social values. The spontaneity and playfulness that characterised Dadaism was re-imagined and reconfigured in the later, neo-avant-garde period, where it became associated with ‘Happenings’ as part of the permissive and counter-cultural performance practices of the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter will examine these two specific historical moments as illustrative of aesthetic experiments that sought to challenge perceptions of both art and the everyday.
