the dance of the commodified body

Hannah Höch's Dada Dance (1922)

Image found at, http://philandfem.blogspot.com/2010/04/hannah-hoch-feminist-artist.html

Dada, Surrealism, and Oulipo Week 1: Intro to ENG 782 & Ubu Roi

Part of my desire to take this course stems from the fact that I have had little to no experience with Surrealism and the Dada movement. Most of what I know stems from a long-ago undergraduate survey of art class (I vaguely recall the works of Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp) and hearing the terms from the periphery of issues pertaining to modernity and my scholarly interests in psychoanalysis and bourgeois shopping cultures of the turn of the century. This lack of knowledge is considerable as only key terms come to mind: anti-logic, the unconscious, dreams, collage, and political/social activism. The postmodern context of movements inspired by Dada and Surrealism is only a bit more familiar: the avant-garde Situationists, the anti-everything artists and anarchists who tried to theorize anarchy (and promoted the idea of détournement), and the American Beat poets/writers. As for Oulipo, what a new and exciting term, one that necessitated a web search. 

Alfred Jarry’s play, Ubu Roi, reminds me a bit of a Shakespearean plot, but one reconstructed with a spectacle-like emphasis on vulgarity, cannibalistic tendencies, acute violence, and a seemingly onanistic drive. The ego is in high relief in this play, exemplified in Pa Ubu who consumes everything and everybody in sight just for the pleasure of it. He is the consummate bourgeoisie! The emphasis on excrement and bodily functions amplifies the consumption, while a form of paternalism (fatherly-control) informs all the relationships. Indeed, there is material here rife for a psychoanalytical study. I am particularly interested in his relationship with Ma Ubu, one fraught with violence, heteronormative values, and the emphasis on exteriority (how one looks). Jarry’s message is hardly subterranean; indeed, he confronts bourgeois values with uncensored crudity and, perhaps, even partakes in the ultimate of bourgeois acts because his carnivalesque portrayal is meant for a stage, to be consumed by the masses (whether that constitutes participation or not is something to be explored).