News, featured posts & topics from the London Dada archives; 2005 – present
_ Gaza 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4X70ikWMgk&list=RDH5sdNYu1DD0&index=2
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LONDON DADA 2005 – 2025 – the essence ( above )
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An original 1914 edition of the illustrated French Larousse dictionary, the same edition opened at random by German artists Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck in 1916, that led to the ‘discovery’ of the word Dada as the name given to the activities of a small group of radical anti-war protest artists, writers and musicians that had gathered at a compact club at Spiegelgasse 1, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland
New for 2025
After the 2024 purchase of Cylinders estate near Elterwater, Great Langdale Cumbria by non-profit company Factal Foundation, plans are in place for a virtual copy installation of Kurt Schwitters’ life’s great work, the Merz Wall – currently physically on show at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle – with its artistic counterpart the Merz Barn, that has been languishing minus its “other half ” since the 1960s
See links below
Michael St.Mark’s 2018 call for the physical repatriation of the Merz Wall
No Place Like Home
” After examining what kind of man Schwitters was, who could possibly go along with the idea that he would be happy to see his “life’s work” forever split into two parts? – with the most important half located so far away from the locality in which it was constructed entirely out of locally- sourced objects. I strongly suggest that KS, if alive today, would be campaigning vigorously for steps to be initiated at
the very least for a feasibility study into its return home. ” – Michael St.Mark, 2018
“ .. and the plan is underway. Factum, having bought the estate, is now seeking funding to create this artists’ Cumbrian colony, complete with a copy of the wall placed in the barn.“
“It’s something Schwitters would have loved,”. “And we would love to create it.” – Adam Lowe, 2024
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” Mankind you should be learning – but you’re just the same “
( from ‘Sins of the Father‘ by The Groundhogs)
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GRENFELL fire official report published, September 4th 2024
A Banksy / London Dada ‘collaboration’ , August ’24
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England Football Fan ( 2006 ) After the 2024 national team’s defeat in the European Cup final, now in its 7th generation repost.
The inventors of the game; now 58 years without lifting a cup on the world stage!
June 2024. One small instance of what it is to be an art influencer;
Hannah Hoch – Neglected Berlin Dadaist / Photomontage pioneer
Höch’s photomontages display the chaos and combustion of Berlin’s visual culture from a particularly female perspective” (Makholm). “Höch was not only a rare female practicing prominently in the arts in the early part of the twentieth century—near unique as a female active in the Dada movement that coalesced in her time—she also consciously promoted the idea of women working creatively more generally in society. She explicitly addressed in her pioneering artwork in the form of photomontage the issue of gender and the figure of woman in modern society (The Art Story).
In these montages, Höch gathered images and text from popular forms of media, such as newspapers and magazines, and combined them in often uncanny ways, which were able to express her stances on the important social issues of her time. The fact that images she included in her pieces were pulled from current newspapers and magazines gave her messages validity.
Link to HH and examples of artwork
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New Dada-related books ( from the Kurt Schwitters Society Newsletter )
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Banksy Unmasked for Real – Spitalfields, London, 2014
+ Banksy Reality Check II ( Gaza situation January 2024 )
Banksy Reality Check ( 1 ) Balloon Girl redefined. ( LD Work No. 768 )
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Re-visited post from 2016; ( August 2023 )
” Some Things, for Some People, Never Change “
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R.I.P. Tony ( TS ) McPhee, Rock and Blues Artist, 1944 – June 6, 2023.
An admirable example for those pertaining to call themselves genuine artists – a creative output based on true perception-based expressions and fearless comment on social issues.
THE HUNT
https://youtu.be/BRIUUBlFVZ8
” Yelping hounds pack to form a Gorgon’s head of gyrating tails ready to turn a stag’s heart to stone at a single glance.
Each dog has a pedigree that would fill a ream of paper as have their masters boasting generations of good breeding.
Family trees with branches laden with the names of past landed gentry, their greatest contribution to the land being when they fall in their Autumn years, providing the earth with the same humus as their mongrel serfs.
But these that are currently at the apex, clad in red to match their ruddy complexion which only the liver would disclose whether from the action of the wind or reaction to the wine.
Those who satisfy their blood-lust on creatures who only recognize such drive in the quest for food epitomize all that is base in man.
That they are an anachronism is of no doubt, a desperate clinging to feudal systems when their families oppressed whole communities, today they have to be content mortally oppressing a single creature.
like well-fed cats clawing at a mouse until their instincts, not their hunger, are satisfied, leaving it to decompose, a symbol of the confused mind that is so lethal.
Those sounds, telling you that the hunt is near, go to ground let your heart dissipate it’s fear, give you time ’til danger is passed and all is clear.
No words could ever describe the hate I feel for these men who sacrifice life for no ideal, just the Id, to satiate the lust for the blood they steal life and let it be torn to pieces by your hounds.
Someday the nightmares you inflict will be in your dreams, I just hope I’m around to see you suffer, just to satisfy MY Id. “
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On returning Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Wall to the Merz Barn, Elterwater
In July 2018, the official Kurt Schwitters Society UK ( new website online, March 2020 ) published in its Newsletter the following interview with artist Michael St.Mark on the possibility of returning Schwitters’ Merz Wall from the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle – where it has been on view since the 1960s – back to its place of origin and obviously intended exhibition status as integral to the Merz Barn in Elterwater, Great Langdale.
Editor, scholar and recognized KS authority Gwendolen Webster raises some thorny issues and poses challenging questions surrounding both the practicality and artistic merit of such a future move.
PDF here..
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” The Spirit of Merz “
© Michael St.Mark 2020
A hand-finished 2-image digital overlay collage print comprising photographs of the Merz Wall in situ at Merz Barn, Langdale circa 1950 ( by Ernst Schwitters ), and that of Kurt Schwitters, selected from the well-known portrait series.
Photographic print, hand-finished in ink and colored graphite. 8” x 8″ (Unique work)
Part of “Schwitters’ Army” – an international collage collection; compiled, curated and now archived at Merz Gallery, Sanquhar by Ric Kasini Kadour, artist in residence, January & February 2020
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Featured Post 2 ( Coronavirus update )
Uniquely psychologically relevant to the present dire world situation.
A succinct visual encapsulation metaphor of the stranglehold of money over morality
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Featured post 3
November 2018
100 years since the end of WW1 and the Armistice of November 1918.
High time surely to re-design the traditional poppy to add a long-overdue reminder to our politicians to never again allow an unjustified war such as the Iraq debacle, which was essentially based on oil prospects rather than national defense.
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Featured Post 3
LONDON DADA’s 10-year pressure campaign to delete ageism from the Turner Prize finally bears fruit, via 2017 winner Lubaina Himid ( 64 )
Turner Prize chiefs were finally shamed into removing the anachronistic and blatantly ageist Under-50 rule for shortlisted entrants. Did any other artists have the moral backbone to put their careers at risk by daring to criticize the TP directors over this?
” The artist expands awareness and when the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness ”
William S. Burroughs
Click through X2 on the collage for full legibility
Protest leaflet from Turner Prize 2016 event; after 25 years of art ageism and following London Dada’s 2016 expose, the Under-50 rule was scrapped for the very next year’s Prize.
Video; ” Raising Tate Britain 1p Above the Art Poverty Line “
Rausing Tate Britain One p above the art poverty line
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Link to 2016 blog post ” The Ageist Turner Prize “
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Featured Post No. 4
THE DOORS TO EQUAL OPPORTUNITY ( 2012 )
Re-visited Work No. 631 from 2012; this longstanding shameful national phenomenon is again highlighted in a damning new report (see link below).
The Doors to Equal Opportunity
c. Michael St.Mark 2012
Padlocked door pair rendered in light/dark blue ( Oxbridge boat race colors )
Alexandra Palace, Muswell Hill London N.
As London Dada has been highlighting over the past 9 years, Britain is a highly discriminatory employment fascist state in a job opportunity lockdown. While only 1% of the adult population and 7% of graduates have attended private fee-paying schools, on average well over half of top jobs in Banking & Finance, Media, Law, PLCs, and Politics in the UK are filled by this Oxbridge etc-educated elite, creating and maintaining a time-honored and deeply-entrenched network of cronyism and privilege that controls all the serious power and wields the major influence in this, the most class-divided nation on earth.
Result – selective promotion from a small talent pool that’s based on elitism rather than merit, leading inexorably to bad, out-of-touch governance and management, and more importantly fair opportunity denied to millions of gifted young people whose talents are tragically wasted – many forced to spend an entire lifetime languishing in unsuitable low skill work, trapped under bomb-proof glass ceilings rigorously enforced and gate-keeper’d by all the major institutions and corporations.
Totally outrageous and morally indefensible in any society claimed by its government to be democratic and civilized.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-28953881
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To purchase a signed edition fine art print of this Work, link here
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Confessions of a white Oxbridge male
by Simon Kuper
( Taken from The Financial Times )
” We straight white Oxbridge-educated males who rule Britain are used to periodic rumblings of discontent from below. Now the transvestite artist Grayson Perry, writing in the New Statesman magazine, has savaged what he calls “Default Man”: “With their colorful textile phalluses hanging round their necks, they make up an overwhelming majority in government, in boardrooms and also in the media.” The writer Caitlin Moran half-jokes that she is the only working-class Briton with a newspaper column: “I have the entire quota.” Sample the FT’s top stories for a week You select the topic, we deliver the news.
Indeed, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission notes that 59 per cent of the British cabinet, three-quarters of senior judges, half of diplomats, etc, went to Oxbridge. The typical chief executive attended Oxbridge or Harvard, says business data firm Qlik. Few of these people are women. Even those of us who groom the lower slopes of the establishment – pundits, MPs, and so forth – tend to be Oxbridge men. My caste produces the opinions that most British people are expected to swallow. However, the one topic we seldom discuss honestly is our own rule.
So let me try to describe how it looks from up here. We didn’t have to work very hard to get here. Luckily, the British establishment doesn’t demand workaholism, except for a few months around exams. The gentleman dilettante is still honored (see David Cameron). Our competition to get into Oxbridge was mostly limited to other white upper-middle-class males. After that, we began recruiting each other. When I applied to the FT 20 years ago, I think I was interviewed only by white Oxbridge men, all of them straight (except for one who soon afterwards came out of the closet). My start in journalism was unimpressive but then I didn’t have much to prove: I already was a white Oxbridge male. Aged 28, I became a columnist at another British newspaper. Perry quotes the American writer John Scalzi, who “thought that being a straight white male was like playing the computer game called Life with the difficulty setting on ‘Easy’”. About the same time as I began work, a black friend started out at another newspaper. His news editor had little confidence in him, and my friend never got the career he wanted. Perhaps I now have his job. We Oxbridge males help each other throughout life. Perry remarks that nobody talks about the “white middle-class community”. But it exists. Once, in a faraway land, I visited the British ambassador. Lo and behold, he was a straight white Oxbridge-educated male! He was like a friend I’d never met. He ended up giving me a briefing in his swimming pool. We Oxbridge males display exemplary class solidarity. Our basic ideology is: trust in the system. After all, the system is run by chaps like me. I did my degree two minutes’ walk from Cameron’s college and five minutes from the opposition leader Ed Miliband’s. I don’t identify with everyone in the establishment, because of intra-caste divides that are invisible to outsiders (for instance, Cameron is far posher than me) but the current popular rage at politicians bewilders me. Like the communist rulers in 1989, we white Oxbridge males cannot defend our dominance with arguments. Most of us know we didn’t get here through individual brilliance.
Perry is wrong when he says, “Default Man will never admit to, or be fully aware of, the tribal advantages of his identity.” I’m very aware of those advantages. That’s why, although I currently have a decent job at a good newspaper, I feel very little sense of achievement. My dad went to Cambridge. I was born to be a minor establishment functionary. That’s also why I’m not desperate for my children to join the establishment. What would it prove? Our caste is always changing, just enough to make sure that everything stays the same. Lately we’ve learnt to lament the suffering of the disadvantaged. (I’m told that even younger members of the kleptocratic Angolan elite have mastered this rhetoric.) Indeed, many of the most stirring attacks on inequality and sexism are now produced by Oxbridge males – but then we produce most attacks on most things in Britain. Given our podium, many of us feel a responsibility to lament our own power. But it’s hard to feel this viscerally. I believe that other people should rule. However, I’d like to hang on to my own spot. We will not make the revolution – or as the British say, turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. We have expanded our caste a little. We now recruit some non-whites (preferably Oxbridge men). We’ve even begun admitting Oxbridge women. We just sideline them professionally the moment they make the mistake of giving birth. Still, our caste has kept raising the age at which females hit the glass ceiling: from zero to 17 once they were allowed proper education, to 21 when we let them into Oxbridge, and now to 38. That’s progress, of sorts. Perry warns darkly that Default Man might not rule forever: “Things may be changing.” But I think we’ll hang on for a while yet”
simon.kuper@ft.com, Twitter@KuperSimon
LONDON DADA 