Dada Simplified
Dada was an art movement that arose in Zurich during World War I as a reaction to the war’s atrocities and stupidity. Dadaist art, poetry, and performance are frequently sarcastic and absurd in character.
Summary of Dada
Dada originated in Zürich, Switzerland, as an artistic and literary movement. It emerged in response to World War I and the nationalism that many believed had precipitated the conflict. Its output was radically diverse, spanning from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage, and was influenced by other avant-garde groups such as Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Expressionism. Dada’s aesthetic, which mocked materialistic and patriotic views, had a significant impact on artists in a number of places, including Berlin, Hannover, Paris, New York, and Cologne, all of which spawned their own subcultures. With the formation of Surrealism, the movement died out, but the concepts it spawned have become pillars of different genres of modern and contemporary art.
Dada was a direct forerunner of the Conceptual Art movement, in which artists focused on creating works that challenged bourgeois sensibilities and raised tough issues about society, the artist’s position, and the purpose of art rather than on creating aesthetically attractive objects.
Dada members were so keen on rejecting all bourgeois cultural standards that they frequently exclaimed, “Dada is anti-Dada.” The Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich was a suitable location for the group’s formation: the Cabaret was named after the 18th-century French comedian Voltaire, whose book Candide ridiculed the foibles of his society. “This is our candide against the times,” wrote Hugo Ball, one of the Cabaret’s and Dada’s founders.
Hans Arp, for example, was adamant about incorporating chance into the making of art. This went against the conventions of traditional art production, which required precise planning and execution. Dadaists used the inclusion of chance as a method to question artistic conventions and the role of the artist in the creative process.
Dadaists are noted for their use of readymades, which are commonplace items that may be purchased and exhibited as art with little artist alteration. The usage of readymades prompted discussions about creative creation as well as the concept of art and its role in society.
Why is it Called Dada
According to Richard Huelsenbeck, a German artist based in Zurich, the phrase was discovered in a French-German dictionary by he and Ball. In his diary, he wrote, “Dada is “yes, yes” in Rumanian, “rocking horse” and “hobby horse” in French.
Everything About Dada
The Beginnings
Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings created the Cabaret Voltaire on February 5, 1916, in the backroom of a tavern on Spiegelgasse in a squalid part of Zürich, which was neutral during WWI and had minimal censorship. “Cabaret Voltaire,” Ball said in a press release, in order to attract other artists and thinkers. A group of young artists and writers has organised under this name with the goal of establishing a centre for artistic pleasure. The Cabaret will be operated by artists in principle, with guest artists performing musical acts and readings during the daily sessions.
The first Dada event was held in July of that year, during which Ball delivered the first manifesto. There is no consensus on how the word “Dada” came to be, although one of the most popular legends is that Richard Huelsenbeck discovered the moniker by randomly stabbing a knife into a dictionary. The term “dada” is a colloquial French phrase for a hobbyhorse that also recalls a child’s first words, and these associations of childishness and silliness appealed to the group, which was eager to distinguish itself from traditional society’s seriousness. They also recognised that the word may have the same (or different) meaning in other languages, as the organisation was avowedly internationalist.
Dada art and actions were intended to both aid in the end of the war and express dissatisfaction with the nationalist and bourgeois norms that had led to it. Because they resisted any kind of group leadership or guiding philosophy, their anti-authoritarian attitude created a diverse movement.
Zürich’s artists produced a Dada magazine and conducted art shows to convey their anti-war, anti-art message. After Ball moved to Bern to pursue journalism, Tzara opened Galerie Dada on Bahnhofstrasse in 1917, where further Dada nights and art displays were held. Tzara rose to the top of the organisation and launched a relentless effort to propagate Dada ideas, sending letters to French and Italian writers and artists. Dada, an art and literary review, was first published in July 1917, with five issues from Zürich and two final editions from Paris. Performance and printed materials were central to their work.
Many of the artists returned to their home countries when the war ended in 1918, helping to spread the movement further. The end of Dada in Zürich came after the April 1919 Dada 4-5 event, which, by design, erupted into a riot, which Tzara believed furthered Dada’s goals by undermining conventional art methods through audience participation in art creation. One of the most notable riots was one that began as a Dada event. It drew approximately 1000 people and opened with a conservative lecture intended to enrage the audience about the merits of abstract art.
This was followed by disruptive music and a series of readings that encouraged audience participation until the audience lost control and began destroying many of the props. “The tumult is unchained hurricane frenzy; the siren whistles bombardment song; the battle begins sharply; half the audience applauds the protestors as they hold the hall… chairs pulled out projectiles crash bang expected effect atrocious and instinctive…”, Tzara wrote. Dada was successful in creating a circuit of total unconsciousness in the audience, who disregarded the boundaries of biassed schooling and experienced the tumult of the New.
“The last victory of Dada.” For Tzara, the key to a riot’s success was audience participation, so that visitors were not simply spectators of art but participants in its creation. This was a direct affront to traditional art. Tzara went to Paris soon after, where he met André Breton and began developing the notions that Breton would later bring together in Surrealism. The expansion of Dada throughout several European cities and into New York may be traced to a few major artists, and each place impacted the aesthetics of their own Dada groups.
Huelsenbeck returned from Zürich in 1917 to create Club Dada in Berlin, which ran from 1918 until 1923 and had artists such as Johannes Baader, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, and Raoul Hausmann among its members. Closer to the front lines, the Berlin Dadaists openly opposed the Weimar Republic, and their work reflected this: satirical paintings and collages that incorporated battlefield imagery, government characters, and political cartoon clippings into scathing critiques. Huelsenbeck gave his first Dada lecture in Berlin in February 1918, and numerous Dada publications, including Club Dada and Der Dada, as well as a manifesto, were published that year.
Kurt Schwitters, who was expelled from the Berlin group due to his ties to the Der Sturm gallery and the Expressionist style, both of which were seen as antithetical to Dada due to their Romanticism and aesthetic focus, founded his own Dada group in Hannover in 1919, though he was its sole practitioner. His Merz, as he called his art, was less political than the Club Dada’s and instead focused on modernist preoccupations with shape and colour.
Max Ernst and Johannes Theodor Baargeld founded another Dada group in Cologne in 1918. Hans Arp, for example, joined the next year and made significant progress in his collage experiments. Anti-bourgeois and nonsensical art were the subjects of their exhibitions. One similar display was shut down by the police in 1920. German Dada was fading by 1922. Ernst departed Cologne for Paris in that year, thereby dissolving the group. Other movements piqued their curiosity. For example, in October 1922, a “Congress of the Constructivists” was held in Weimar, which was attended by a number of German Dadaists, and in 1924, Breton released the Surrealist manifesto.
A number of Parisian artists, including Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, and others, were interested in the Dada movement after hearing about it in Zürich. Tzara left Zürich for Paris in 1919, and Arp arrived from Cologne the following year; a “Dada festival” was held in May 1920, after many of the movement’s founders had united there. Dada and Le Cannibale, for example, held protests, exhibits, and performances, as well as publishing manifestos and journals.
Picabia and Breton left the movement in 1921, and Picabia stated in a special issue of 391 that Paris Dada had devolved into the same thing it was fighting against: a mediocre, established movement. He expressed himself as follows: “Between 1913 and 1918, the Dada movement flourished… Dada got closed in order to prolong it. Dada, you see, was not serious… and if some people now take it seriously, it’s because it’s no longer alive!… “One must be a nomad, moving from place to place, passing through ideas like one would between countries and towns.” Under the guidance of Tzara, Paris Dada launched a counteroffensive.
Marcel Duchamp bridged the gap between the Zürich Dadaists and Parisian proto-surrealists like André Breton. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades were deemed Dada artworks by the Swiss group, which admired Duchamp’s wit and unwillingness to define art.
New York City, like Zürich during WWII, was a haven for authors and artists. In June 1915, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia arrived in the city just days apart and met Man Ray shortly after. Duchamp acted as a critical mediator, introducing the concept of anti-art to the group, which had taken a mechanical turn. The Large Glass, or Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, is considered a major milestone for its depiction of a strange, erotic drama using mechanical forms. It was begun in New York in 1915 and is considered a major milestone for its depiction of a strange, erotic drama using mechanical forms.
By 1916, Beatrice Wood, an American artist, and the authors Henri-Pierre Roche and Mina Loy had joined Duchamp, Picabia, and Man Ray. The anti-artists spent a lot of time at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery and Walter and Louise Arensberg’s workshop. Their publications, such as The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada, were more humorous and less harsh than those of European groups. Duchamp became associated with the Society of Independent Artists around this time and began showing readymades (found objects) such as a bottle rack. Fountain was submitted to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in 1917.
During the Dadaist period, Picabia’s travels helped bring together groups in New York, Zürich, and Paris. He also produced the Dada monthly 391—which was patterned after Stieglitz’s 291 periodical—from 1917 until 1924. Picabia’s 391 was initially published in Barcelona, then in a number of other places, including New York, Zürich, and Paris, depending on where he lived at the time and with the aid of fellow artists and friends. Picabia was the most prominent writer in the journal, which was primarily literary.
The Dada Manifesto of 1918 stated: “Whether it’s via seriousness, depth, turbulence, nausea, the new, the eternal, annihilating nonsense, passion for ideals, or the way it’s printed, every page must explode.” “Art must be abysmal in terms of aesthetics, worthless, and hard to justify.” As already said, he split from Dada in 1921. In addition to the special issue of 391 in which he attacked Paris Dada in 1921, Picabia charges Surrealism with being a manufactured movement in the last issue of 391 in 1924, stating that “artificial eggs don’t make chickens.”
Concepts in Dada
Dada artworks include fascinating overlaps and contradictions in that they aim to demystify art in a popular sense while remaining enigmatic enough to allow the spectator to interpret the piece in a number of ways. Some Dadaists created realistic paintings of people and places in order to study form and movement. Others, such as Kurt Schwitters and Man Ray, used abstraction to represent the philosophical core of their subject matter. Both styles attempted to dismantle ordinary life in novel and revolutionary ways. The key to comprehending Dada’s works is to reconcile the seemingly stupid, slapdash aesthetics with the anti-bourgeois message.
Tzara rejected the notion that Dada was a statement in particular; yet, as Tzara and his fellow artists got increasingly upset by politics, they attempted to provoke a similar rage in Dada audiences.
Whether it was a lack of regard for bourgeois convention, government authority, traditional production techniques, or the creative canon, irreverence was a key component of Dada art. Each group’s aim differed significantly, with the Berlin group being most anti-government and the New York group being most anti-art. The Hannover group was most likely the most conservative of all the groups.
A readymade was essentially an existing object that was hijacked as a work of art by Dada artists, who often joined it with another readymade, as in Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, to create an ensemble. To challenge bourgeois preconceptions about art and creative genius, the parts were frequently picked and arranged by chance or accident. Indeed, it’s impossible to separate the dada’s concern with chance from their theoretical concentration on readymades and assembly. Several of the readymades and assemblages were strange, which allowed the group to later fuse with Surrealism.
Chance was a central theme in much Dada work, from Schwitters’ abstract and beautiful creations to Duchamp’s enormous assemblages. With Arp as one of the early and best-known practitioners, chance was embraced to embrace the unpredictable and the incidental as a method to free creativity from logical control. For example, Schwitters collected random fragments of trash from various locations, whereas Duchamp embraced mishaps like the crack that happened while he was working on The Large Glass. In addition to the loss of logical control, Dada’s disregard for preparation work and embracing of tainted artworks fit well with his rejection of traditional art.
Dada’s interest in comedy, usually in the form of irony, was intimately linked to their irreverence. In reality, Dada’s use of irony is based on his acceptance of the readymade, since it demonstrates a recognition that nothing has fundamental worth. Irony also provided flexibility to the artists by expressing their acceptance of the world’s insanity and stopping them from taking their work too seriously or becoming caught up in excessive excitement or utopian aspirations. Their sense of humour is an unambiguous affirmation of everything as art.
The End of Dada
Following the disbandment of the different Dada organisations, many of the artists went on to join other art movements, particularly Surrealism. In reality, the surrealist enthusiasm for imagination and representation of the imaginary was strongly influenced by Dada’s legacy of irrationality and chance. Several artists, like Picabia, Arp, and Ernst, were members of both groups since their work functioned as a catalyst for ushering in an art based on a relaxation of conscious control over art creation. Despite the fact that Duchamp was not a Surrealist, he assisted in the curating of Dada and Surrealist shows in New York.
Dada, the forerunner of conceptual art, is today seen as a watershed period in twentieth-century art. Without Dada, postmodernism as we know it would not exist. Dada artists invented or at least used almost every underlying postmodern theory in visual and written art, as well as music and drama: art as performance, the overlapping of art with everyday life, the use of popular culture, audience participation, interest in non-Western forms of art, the embrace of the absurd, and the use of chance, to name a few.
Since Dada, the anti-establishment group has influenced a vast variety of artistic groups. These might include Pop art, Fluxus, the Situationist International, Performance Art, Feminist Art, and Minimalism, in addition to the obvious examples of Surrealism, Neo-Dada, and Conceptual Art. With their use of collage, Dada had a significant impact on graphic design and the world of advertising.
Key Art in Dada
Ici, C’est Stieglitz (Here, This is Stieglitz)
By Francis Picabia
1915
Picabia was a French artist who embraced and defined many of Dadaism’s concepts. Over the course of his 45-year career, he relished the opportunity to defy convention and redefine himself to operate in new ways. He first collaborated closely with Alfred Stieglitz, who presented him with his first one-man performance in New York City. But, as this “portrait” of the gallerist as a bellows camera, an automobile gear shift, a brake lever, and the word “ideal” above the camera in Gothic letters shows, he later attacked Stieglitz.
Fountain
By Marcel Duchamp
1917
Duchamp was the first artist to utilise a readymade, and his selection of a urinal was sure to confound and upset even his peers. Except for turning it upside-down and signing it with a fictional name, the artist doesn’t do much with the urinal. Duchamp was questioning the basic conceptions of art as well as the role of the artist in making it by taking the urinal from its everyday setting and placing it in an art context. With the title Fountain, Duchamp made a sardonic allusion to both the function of the urinal and legendary fountains created by Renaissance and Baroque painters.
LHOOQ
By Marcel Duchamp
1919
This piece is a famous illustration of Dada’s anti-traditionalist attitude toward art. Duchamp reimagined a cheap postcard of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1517), which had just recently been restored to the Louvre after being stolen in 1911. While it was already a well-known piece of art, the theft’s notoriety elevated it to one of the most beloved and well-known works of art: art with a capital A.” A. Duchamp put a moustache and a goatee on Mona Lisa’s face and called it L.H.O.O.Q. on the postcard. If the letters were spoken as a native French speaker would, it would sound like “Elle a chaud au cul,” which approximately translates to “She has a hot ass.”
Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany
By Hannah Höch
1919
Hannah Höch is recognised for her collages and photomontages made from newspaper and magazine clippings, as well as sewing and craft patterns culled from the Ullstein Press magazines she contributed to. Hoch unashamedly attacked German society as part of Club Dada in Berlin, literally ripping apart its images and reassembling them into vivid, fragmented, and emotive representations of modern life. The title of this piece alludes to prewar German culture’s decadence, corruption, and misogyny.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
