Ever since the early 20th century European anti-art movement, known as Dada, abandoned the prevailing institutionalized formalism of the arts for irrationality, the absurd has thrived as an integral part of the tradition of the avant-garde.
In fact, all “new” art that in some way conjures originality and dares to invent the previously unimagined and the unconceived; even if only for one ever-so-fleeting moment of real novelty, before it then becomes absorbed into culture as a generic, formalized style; carries within it the sensibility of the absurd.
This sensibility for the absurd, which excludes itself from the boundaries of conventional reason, causes us, in its sudden, terse refusal to conform to our familiar paradigms, to ask ourselves “what was that all about?”.
Outside of the cultural practices we recognize to be of a primarily creative nature, absurdity is generally greeted with critical disapproval; it becomes read as either an unseemly gimmick, or a sign of plain dysfunction. We don’t like leaders, laws, flight schedules, or the IRS to be absurd.
Yet within the domain of the contemporary arts, the right to absurdity provides a crucial foundation for the leaps (or stumbles) of creativity that change the orderly and the ordinary into the surprising and the unexpected.What, however, should we expect from art that explicitly promotes itself as deliberately Advanced Absurdity?
Advanced Absurdity establishes the direction for the Institute’s artists and scientists to explore according to their own inclinations and unique perspectives. That is, even as Advanced Absurdity poses a highly abstract mixture of ideas that would seemingly accommodate just about any slightly artistic or creative endeavor minimally grazed by absurdity, it also points to a rather concrete and determinate conceptualization of the Institute’s own ostensible opposition to the general, the commonplace, the simply accepted, and the easily adduced.
The I.A.A.’s premise speaks of the impulse to transcend and break out of the confines of the present, of the will to create the unusual and incalculable, of a desire to see things differently.
Every detail of their art is ultimately inscribed within a logic of absurdity that restricts it from any real evaluation in terms of meaning, depth, or function. Of course, one could view each of these works isolated on their own, or in a different presentational context; one where a more orthodox sort of textual exegesis would be permitted; and mine an abundance of formal interpretations about its production, its significance, its “message” perhaps.
This is simply to say that the works themselves really aren’t at all inherently absurd; many of the pieces could just as well be read as questioning absurdity as much as assuming it.But within the context of an Institute that proposes the absurd as its formal logic; that contrives its own Advanced Absurdity; the not-so-absurd pieces do fit in as representations of absurdity.
This is because even as the Institute ends up constructing a deliberately conceived absurdity, which on a certain conceptual level, thus undermines the claim behind the individual works to succeed, in practice, as anything actually and truly inexplicable and bizarre, the I.A.A. maintains the upper hand of absurdity by exposing one final, conceptual meta-absurdity: the absurdity behind the pretense of having an institute based on the calculation of the absurd.
