Disfigured ground: architectures of Dada and surrealism

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)In his 1974 work, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger developed a sociological argument that the practices of the historical avant-garde had emerged as a systematic challenge to the hegemonic institutionalisation of bourgeois aesthetic taste. For Bürger, art had, since the Renaissance, gradually freed itself from societal pressures or responsibilities culminating in the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of a bourgeois institution of art that was characterised by the autonomy of the art object and its economic worth. In Bürger’s theory, the historical avant-garde (and Dada and surrealism specifically) challenged this condition by negating the “work of art” (and its value) and reconnecting the production of art with the praxis of life, effectively dismantling the autonomous status of the art object. The critical legacy of the historical avant-garde was the formation of the readymade, collage, montage and chance as strategies that challenged the aesthetic categories of bourgeois taste and the institutional status of the work of art. For Bürger, the acceptance of these works within the institution of art in the 1960s (through their adoption as neo-avant-garde strategies) had meant that they no longer functioned as a critique but as an endorsement of these institutional conditions. Framed by a recent critical reappraisal of Dada and surrealism in American art theory, this dissertation argues that architecture was an important strategy of the historical avant-garde and especially in the context of Bürger’s theoretical categories. Architecture, in this context, is indelibly tied to the praxis of life and was a contextual backdrop to the experiential aspirations of both Dada and surrealism. The dissertation argues that architecture functioned as an objet trouvé (found object) that, like the readymade, was employed in the armoury of the historical avant-garde in order to negate the aesthetic and autonomous claims of the institutionalised work of art. It is argued that this experiential repositioning of architecture as an avant-garde (rather than strictly modernist) preoccupation in the 1920s had an influence on the architecture of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, where ideas of Dada and surrealism migrated into contemporary architectural practice not only expanding the disciplinary boundaries but the nature of the architectural object in general. Focussing on the creative processes of Bernard Tschumi, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Diller + Scofidio, the dissertation argues that Peter Bürger’s positioning of a dialogue between the historic avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde is instructive for supporting a deeper understanding of the expansion of architectural concerns in this period. The dissertation concludes with a summation of the avant-garde project, its limitations and its ongoing relevance to architectural production