Searching For Danny Tanner

I swear to you all that this blog is not going to end up being some ABC Family comedy. It just so happens that my second entry, again, revolves around our seven-month-old daughter, Audrey. I was hoping I could go a little darker or avant garde today. But considering what I'm about to write about, you--the reader--will get an equal helping of both. If you will, the best of both worlds (i.e. "cute" vs. "avant garde").

Audrey has been going through some speech patterns as of late. Throughout the past few months she's moved from staring at us like a deer in headlights, to forcing her entire fist into her mouth, to screaming at the top of her lungs for no apparent reason, to trying to sound out actual noises. For a while, her catch phrase was the letter B. "BUH BUH BUH" is what we were hearing constantly for a few weeks. It drove us mad and we dreamt about enormous B's who would come into our room at night and take us away. Now, she's working on her D noises. "DAH DAH DAH" is now what we hear at all times. And it's more so when she's looking directly at one of us. She's not sitting in the stroller, screaming the B noises to a wall like she did back in the day. Now, when we're having up close face time, she'll look directly at me and say "DAH DAH DAH." Actually, I should really be writing it in lower-case, because she's not even yelling it anymore. So now it's like "dah dah dah." Regardless of if she's trying to communicate with us, sounding out her speech pattern as part of her cognitive development, or just rambling on about nothing like her old man does, Lisa and I both have our own theories as to why she's doing this.

I'll go with hers first. Lisa is married to the idea of the cognitive development theory, pointing out that the D sound is the next logical one after the B sound. It makes sense. She's just a little kid and not old enough to be able to necessarily tie words together with elements from her life. Or is she? This is where my theory comes in. I believe that Audrey is so enthralled with the world around her, that she's actually found a connection to a specific art movement (or non-art movement *wink!*). What's she saying when she exclaims "dah dah dah?" The answer is obvious: she's talking about the post World War One art movement of Dada.

For you philistines out there, I'll turn to Wikipedia to clear it all up for you:
According to its proponents, Dada was not art, it was "anti-art". For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art were to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning, interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada is to offend. It is perhaps then ironic that Dada became an influential movement in modern art. Dada became a commentary on order and the carnage they believed it wreaked. Through this rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics they hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics.
According to Tristan Tzara, "God and my toothbrush are Dada, and New Yorkers can be Dada too, if they are not already." A reviewer from the American Art News stated that "The Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, "in reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization...In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."Dada was "a revolt against a world that was capable of unspeakable horrors."Reason and logic had led people into the horrors of war; the only route to salvation was to reject logic and embrace anarchy and the irrational.

To put my theory to the test, I have enlisted the aid of the the piece shown above. It's Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" sculpture and, because I have no access to it, I've resorted in taking Audrey into the bathroom multiple times throughout the day to stare at the toilet. It may not be Duchamp, but I hope it can still give her an understanding of this artform that she's evidently obsessed with.