Dada Magazines

Dada magazines made Dada what it was: diverse, non-hierarchical, transnational, and defiant of the most fundamental artistic conventions. This authoritative, first volume entirely devoted to critical analysis of Dada periodicals retells the story of Dada by demonstrating the centrality of these graphically inventive, provocative periodicals: Dada, New York Dada, Dada Jok, and dozens more that began crossing enemy lines during World War I. The book includes well-known Dada centres like New York and Paris as well as cities such as Zagreb and Bucharest, and reveals that Dada continued to inspire art journals into the 1920s, years after most accounts of the movement end.

Anchored in close material analysis within a historical and theoretical framework, Dada Magazines models a novel, multifaceted methodology for assessing all kinds of periodicals. Borrowing from Actor-Network Theory, it recognizes the journals as active agents that engendered the Dada network, and its thematic, chronological structure captures the constant exchanges that took place in this network, something missed in the city-by-city approach typically used. The book employs evidence such as postmarks, page proofs, and censors' stamps to detail how the Dadaists-Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Dragan Aleksic, Hannah H ch, and many others-funded, compiled, printed, distributed, and exchanged these publications. Combining in-depth scrutiny of these magazines - and 1970s "Dadazines" inspired by them - with a comprehensive appendix of Dada-affiliated periodicals, Dada Magazines is a vital source in the histories of art and design, periodical studies, and modernist studies.