{"id":198,"date":"2017-09-19T11:47:57","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T11:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/?p=198"},"modified":"2017-09-19T11:47:57","modified_gmt":"2017-09-19T11:47:57","slug":"full-of-hot-air-balloons-dadaism-and-the-avant-garde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/assignments\/everyday-technologies\/full-of-hot-air-balloons-dadaism-and-the-avant-garde\/","title":{"rendered":"Full of Hot Air: Balloons, Dadaism, and The Avant-Garde"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIs there any way you can make that more <\/span>cantabile<\/span><\/i>?\u201d the conductor asked. His question was met with resounding laughter from the rest of the ensemble, myself included. Though this is certainly not an odd request for a conductor to make in a rehearsal, the fact that the target of this question (a percussionist by trade) held in his hand an only-just-recently-deflated balloon made the whole thing seem just a little absurd. Found more commonly at amusement parks or clown conventions, your everyday garden-variety Mylar balloon also happens to be an instrument called for in the score of Talhoffer\u2019s Crawfish (below), a piece of contemporary classical music. The question now becomes, how did a balloon make its way into our rehearsal space as an instrument as opposed to an accessory to a 5-year-old\u2019s birthday party?<\/span><\/p>\n

https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/user-893617903\/talhoffers-crawfish<\/a><\/p>\n

In order to uncover this, let\u2019s delve a little bit into the use of regular objects in art. The use of found objects in 20th century visual art can be found most famously in the works of the Dadaist movement. One particularly well known example is Marcel Duchamp\u2019s Fountain,<\/span><\/p>\n

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

which is really just a urinal turned on its side with \u201cR. Mutt 1917\u201d scrawled along the base. As one of the first pieces of this iconoclastic genre of modern art, <\/span>this article<\/span><\/a> states Duchamp\u2019s own summation of the work, a response in a 1917 issue of the avant-garde journal <\/span>The Blind Man<\/span><\/i>: \u201cSome contended it was immoral, vulgar. Others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing.\u201d This touches on some key elements of the Dada movement, and modernism in general: the idea that the concept behind the piece becomes part of the piece itself, and that to be controversial is a positive thing. Dada originated as an avant-garde movement reacting to the terrible bloodshed and brutality seen during World War I. It was meant, in the words of Jean Arp (one of Duchamp\u2019s Dadaist contemporaries), as a way \u201c<\/span>to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order<\/span><\/a>.\u201d Dadaists placed emphasis on absurdity, repurposing of found objects, and the <\/span>laws of chance<\/span><\/a>. Though one of many different niches of modernist thought cropping up during the early 20th century, it would later be revived by the Neo-Dadaists in the 1950s and \u201860s.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Neo-Dada movement revived Dadaist thoughts during the Cold War later in the century. Neo-Dadaism used things such as found objects and chance to shift the focus away from the artist him- or herself and instead on the audience\u2019s reaction and interaction with the piece in question. This was not only a movement in visual art (<\/span>Jasper Johns<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>Robert Rauschenberg<\/span><\/a> are two big players here — you can read more about them <\/span>here<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>, respectively, if interested) but also in music. John Cage, possibly most famous for claiming silence as music in his work 4\u201933\u201d (performed below\u00a0<\/span>by NOLA the Cat), was an important composer of this school of thought.<\/span><\/p>\n