The Object in Dada and Surrealism

FAIN: FT-52208-04

Janine Mileaf
Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA 19081-1390)

The designation of concrete things as works of art in the interwar years fundamentally altered the course of Western art history. Once Marcel Duchamp had named an industrially-manufactured urinal as art, or the surrealists had determined that a curio found amidst the flea market stalls could compel the creative process, one could no longer assume that art would be judged in terms of skill, aesthetics, or quality. Although certainly among the most significant interventions in the history of twentieth-century art, the dada and surrealist uses of objects have never been the subject of a book-length study. This book proposes to theorize these strategies by examining the object’s interactive character through the frame of tactility and taste.