ABSTRACT
Opinions divide on how to dene anti-art. e concept has become a multipurpose signier for the denunciation of art, rejection of aesthetic norms, ridicule of art institutions, repudiation of art markets, and is even sometimes confused with iconoclasm. Initially the word identied extreme manifestations of the modernist avantgarde’s eort to transform and break with cultural convention, refute bourgeois society and its values, and align with radical politics, from nihilism to anarchism. Despite the prodigious aesthetic productivity of Dada and Futurist artists, both movements have been described as anti-art: Dada for its inclusion of non-aesthetic materials, and resistance to World War I; and, ironically, Futurism for its celebration of war and violence. e subtitle to Hans Richter book Dada: Art and Anti-Art (1964) is instrumental in associating Dada with anti-art. Richter may have misappropriated the term from Hannah Höch’s collage, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic (1919), in which the words “Die anti dada ists” appear in its upper right-hand corner. Rather than a reference to the Dadaists’ aitudes toward art, the text identies the caricaturized gures immediately below it of several German generals and Kaiser Wilhelm II, who led Germany into World War I. Richter also identied the readymade as anti-art, regardless of the fact that Duchamp made it clear that he was “against the word ‘anti’” for its association with the “atheist [who is] as much a religious man as the believer is” (Schwarz 1969, 33). Anti-art oered a pretext for Surrealists to appropriate the Freudian unconscious as authentic art material. Yet, in 1958 aer musing on Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (1926) and its relation to the nuclear age, Salvador Dalí wrote “Anti-material Manifesto,” turning away from Freud’s “iconography of the interior world” to the indeterminacy of physics and “the exterior world [in order] to transport my works into anti-maer” (Dalí 1958, n.p.).
