The Dada movement was founded in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire on Feb. 5, 1916.
As S.S. Fair states in "Gaga for Dada": "Dada and its guerilla theatrics tweaked the snouts of Europe's sacred cows, generating so much provocation and intrigue that it instantly permeated every aspect of modern art." (see www.cabaretvoltaire.ch)
Cabaret Voltaire, rescued from the developer's wrecking ball by the chief executive of Swatch, has been restored and opened to the public as a living monument to all things Dada.
More about Dada, Surrealism and their precursors (e.g. Alfred Jarry's pataphysics) later.
One distribution strategy for SATORI TANGO...inspired by Dadaist, Situationist strategies...guerilla marketing and distribution...of Limited Edition only (along with giving copies to friends)...prior to more conventional approaches...there can be no attachment to results...below are some practitioners...to get a whiff of the aroma of rare "lost objects"...
Sunday, September 25, 2005 NY Times, Arts and Leisure section.
SHOPGIFTING
A conceptual artist’s retail strategy: buy clothes, return art.
Zoe Sheehan Saldana buys items of clothing at Wal Mart, creates her own handmade versions of them, replaces the original labels and price tags then smuggles them back into the store to be bought by the ordinary customer.
Ms. Sheehan Saldana, a West Village artist and Baruch College art professor, is a shop-dropper. Shop-dropping, also known as "reverse shoplifting", involves the addition of hand-made imitations of generic merchandise to a store’s stock. It is a nascent artistic phenomenon with a nationwide network of devotees.
www.queasylistening.com
"Lost Objects" is our attempt to provide that chance encounter: it is the logical, desparate and dadaistic endpoint of our angst - the apotheosis of our disdain for the record business - conceptually, a "Lost Object" is the aesthetic isomer of the "Found Object". "Lost Objects", initially anyway, are original recordings by artists on the Queasy Listening label that are to be tactically secreted at various symbolic locations, it is envisaged, both in the UK and abroad. Each discarded recording will be professionally produced and packaged, but distributed in very limited editions. Each release will be itemised in our catalogue for the intrepid butterfly collector, but unavailable for mass-consumption. In all likelihood, the recipient of that object will have no knowledge of it's origin or intention. These recordings may even be camouflaged by an innocous veneer, all the more to entice an unwitting 'victim' to touch it's poisonous tendrils...
www.droplift.org
But what about someone who sneaks into a record store and leaves a CD behind? Droplifting, a trend that began in Chicago, is the opposite of shoplifting: sonic collagists, hounded by what they consider unfair copyright laws, are now stealthily placing their own CDs in stores next to titles by Madonna and 'N Sync, hoping to subvert the established avenues of music distribution. They may not cause a revolution, and they certainly won't make any money off it. But they are chipping away at archaic laws and frustrating the cupidity of the record business.
"The recording industry pursues a legal stranglehold on work which is essentially done by marginal artists and crackpots," says Tim Maloney, aka Naked Rabbit, a Los Angeles collagist and the person responsible for coordinating the Droplift Project. "There is a one-way communication, in which we are all overloaded with stimulus from the corporate owners of culture but are unable to talk back to it in any meaningful way. It's not just frustrating for those who want to talk back at it, it's bad for our culture."
The Droplift Project isn't the first to utilize guerilla distribution tactics. According to Richard Holland, one of the leaders of the project, he and his band, Institute for Sonic Ponderance, secretly placed their CDs at Tower Records, Best Buy, and the Quaker Goes Deaf. The Droplift Project has expanded the scheme; its recent self-titled release was limited to a pressing of 1,000 copies, but through droplifting, underground radio, and the project's Web site (www.droplift.org), its music has spread ac
ross the U.S. and Europe.
www.ztrainmusic.com
Z Train Productions
Every Tuesday night, I’d go to some corner market with a Xerox machine and crank out 200 photocopies of each comic. There were a lot of black spaces on my comics, and the proprietors would scowl because I used up all their toner.
Every Wednesday morning, I’d walk up and down Haight Street and insert the latest Funny Water in the back page of new issues of The Guardian and SF Weekly. After a few weeks, store owners and patrons recognized me as the Funny Water kid. At that point, any recognition felt good.
One day, I received a letter from an Oregon cult, who picked up a Funny Water from the sidewalk during their weekend trip to the historic Haight. They enclosed a dollar and requested other issues. I sent them the motherlode but never heard back.
And so it goes...
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