Art Requiem: a digital dada anti-poem for the sunset of casual art

Abstract

This anti-abstract tells of the anti-poem presented here that it is not intended to convince or induce readers to any thesis about possible connections between literature, mathematics and education. This anti-poem without content, logic, plot or purpose neither
problematizes nor claims authorship, originality or scientificity. If there is an author who can certainly claim it, he is none other than chance, the unpredictable. This anti-poem
that contains no parts consists of two parts. In the first part - preceding but also included in the second - the reader is presented with this anti-abstract of the second. In the second
part, perhaps taking inspiration - because we can never say that for sure - from reading Tristan Tzara's Seven Dada Manifestos, as well as the process of making a patchwork
composed of citational cross grafts - just like Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) and Hans Arp’s (1886-1966) collages - chance invents and presents a pastiche anti-poem that eventually took the form of a manifestly Dada anti-poem. This anti-poem is therapeutically presented in the form of text boxes or images randomly scattered over the
next 14 pages of this digital magazine, which perhaps not by chance - because we can never say that for sure - decided to publish it. Ah, sorry! I was almost forgetting to say. The anti-poem that this two-part anti-abstract does not summarize also has a third part: a succeeding anti-afterword, but also included in the other two preceding parts. In the third
part - now I, not chance anymore - I make references and sometimes clarifications to the textual or image quotations contained in randomly numbered text boxes or images to
indicate sources and authorship, thus satisfying the ego of those still insist on claiming or forcing us to cite them, even if poets do not cite their sources or ascribe them all to the muses. Chance then affords you, readers, the opportunity to engage in a therapeutic
reading experience of a text produced in a very different way than usual, and above all very different from a rule-based, argumentative text characteristic of the academic world.
I propose that you read it at random - and therefore in the order that you decide to scroll through its pages, and each page in the order in which you decide to scroll through text
boxes or images - as if each of its pages were a page of any internet site. I propose, then, that you read it as if it were a hypertext in which notes function as traffic signs indicating
directions - but never as interpretation or analysis - of the therapeutic-casual reading I made of Tristan Tzara's Seven Dada Manifestos. In so doing, by allowing the hands of chance to affect you by leading you in your personalized readings of the text, you are also surely performing other self-therapeutic readings of the Manifestos. Finally I want to tell
you that chance led me to offer this requiem anti-poem to all the dead of World War I, as well as, perhaps – because we can never say that for sure - to all the dead coming from other wars in sight or that are being or will be locked in planes of invisibility, silence, imperceptibility. I also offer this casual elegiac anti-poem to Tristan Tzara and all the artists and writers who echoing in another way inaudible screams of countless other artists
who were victims or deserters of World War I, decided to open in 1916 in Zurich the Cabaret Voltaire.