Green Dada: Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Ecocritical Theory

Abstract

Ecocritical writer-activists have recently focused on the difficulties of representing climate, its slowly violent changes, and the ways human and more-than-human bodies inter- and intra-act within it. Though contextually dissimilar, various Dadaist aesthetics and praxes are likewise critically engaged with the intersection of deeply complex systems and their violent effects on bodies. I argue that there are useful imbrications, previously unexplored, of the ecocritical theories of slow violence and trans-corporeality in the idiosyncratic aesthetic practices of Dadaism. The Dadaist focus on “making visible” the hypercomplex culpability of ubiquitous and otherwise invisible culture, the implicit critique of traditional visual hegemony within that culture, and Dada’s use of photomontage portraiture to ironically perform the invisible and accretive violence of that culture with representations of human and more-than-human bodies productively align with recent ecocritical theories of slow violence and intra-active trans-corporeality. Dada can then be viewed to have distantly prefigured elements of these ecocritical theories.