Dada Magazines

Magazines were the lifeblood of Dada, a movement that still resists neat pigeonholing in the history of the avant-gardes. Emily Hage's Dada Magazines brings a fresh eye to these publications and presents new arguments and evidence for their importance, not just as the print conduits for the manifestos, art, poems, polemics, gossip, and diverse writings of the small, widely separated groups of activists who produced them, under a non-name that spread like a virus, but as active in their own right-creating networks and influencing Dada exhibitions, for example. Hage expertly lays out the ways the juxtapositions, collages, jokes, and confrontations in the magazines influenced radical methods of display in Dada exhibitions and installations. Hage's lucid presentation, focusing on the material production, presence, and impact of the magazines, is especially valuable for the breadth of her research, bringing out the later strands of Dada in unexpected places like Zagreb and Bucharest. This excellent study of the magazines is a timely reminder of the way Dada has remained a cultural, artistic, political, and even moral irritant, whose tactics have been repeated in so many contexts over the last century: from appropriation to performance, parody to the readymade, and are still not quite laid to rest in history, as Hage's fascinating epilogue, looking at the 'Dadazines' of the sixties and seventies, explains. --Dawn Ades, Emeritus Professor, School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex, UK If we thought that we knew everything there was to know about Dada periodicals, Emily Hage's Dada Magazines sets us right. This engaging and elegantly crafted study provides fresh approaches to the 'active agents' of Dada's formation and spread. --Marius Hentea, Professor of English Literature, University of Gothenburg, Sweden The international dissemination of its creative energy, its anarchic humor and its response to the contradictions of modernity made Dada possibly the most vital of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes. Emily Hage's lively, meticulously researched volume tackles the issue of Dada's geographical expansion head-on, offering the most complete study of Dada magazines, in all their inventiveness and diversity, currently available to scholars. --David Hopkins, Professor of Art History, University of Glasgow, UK