Dada

Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I
and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry,
art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics
through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Its purpose
was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world.
In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchistic in nature. In another
word, it flouted conventional aesthetic and cultural values by producing works marked by
nonsense, travesty, and incongruity.

Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary

journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety
of media. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music
movements, and groups including surrealism, Nouveau réalisme, pop art, Fluxus and punk rock.

While broad, the movement was unstable. By 1924 in Paris, Dada was melding into surrealism,
and artists had gone on to other ideas and movements, including surrealism, social realism and
other forms of modernism. Some theorists argue that Dada was actually the beginning of
postmodern art. By the dawn of World War II, many of the European Dadaists had emigrated to
the United States. Some died in death camps under Adolf Hitler, who persecuted the kind of
"Degenerate art" that Dada represented. The movement became less active as post-World War II
optimism led to new movements in art and literature.

Art Techniques Developed

1. Collage

The dadaists imitated the techniques developed during the cubist movement through the pasting
of cut pieces of paper items, but extended their art to encompass items such as transportation
tickets, maps, plastic wrappers, etc. to portray aspects of life, rather than representing objects
viewed as still life.

2. Photomontage

would use scissors and glue rather than

paintbrushes and paints to express their views of modern life through images presented by the

1
media. A variation on the collage technique, photomontage utilized actual or reproductions of
real photographs printed in the press.

3. Assemblage

The assemblages were three-dimensional variations of the collage - the assembly of everyday
objects to produce meaningful or meaningless (relative to the war) pieces of work.

4. Readymades

Marcel Duchamp began to view the manufactured objects of his collection as objects of art,
which he called "readymades". He would add signatures and titles to some, converting them into
artwork that he called "readymade aided" or "rectified readymades". Duchamp wrote: "One
important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the
'readymade.' That sentence, instead of describing the object like a title, was meant to carry the
mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal. Sometimes I would add a graphic detail
of presentation which in order to satisfy my craving for alliterations, would be called 'readymade
aided.'"One such example of Duchamp's readymade works is the urinal that was turned onto its
back, signed "R. Mutt", titled "Fountain", and submitted to the Society of Independent Artists
exhibition that year.

2
Dada was, officially, not a movement, its artists not artists and its art not art. That sounds easy
enough, doesn't it? Of course, there is a bit more to the story of Dadaism than this simplistic
explanation. Dada was a literary and artistic movement born in Europe at a time when the horror
of World War I was being played out in what amounted to citizens' front yards. Due to the war, a
number of artists, writers and intellectuals - notably of French and German nationality - found
themselves congregating in the refuge that Zurich (in neutral Switzerland) offered. Far from
merely feeling relief at their respective escapes, this bunch was pretty ticked off that modern
European society would allow the war to have happened. They were so angry, in fact, that they
undertook the time-honored artistic tradition of protesting.

Banding together in a loosely-knit group, these writers and artists used any public forum
they could find to (metaphorically) spit on nationalism, rationalism, materialism and any other -
ism which they felt had contributed to a senseless war. In other words, the Dadaists were fed up.
If society is going in this direction, they said, we'll have no part of it or its traditions.
Including...no, wait!...especially artistic traditions. We, who are non-artists, will create non-art -
since art (and everything else in the world) has no meaning, anyway. About the only thing these
non-artists all had in common were their ideals. They even had a hard time agreeing on a name
for their project. "Dada" - which some say means "hobby horse" in French and others feel is just
baby talk - was the catch-phrase that made the least amount of sense, so "Dada" it was.

Using an early form of Shock Art, the Dadaists thrust mild obscenities, scatological
humor, visual puns and everyday objects (renamed as "art") into the public eye. Marcel
Duchamp performed the most notable outrages by painting a mustache on a copy of the Mona
Lisa (and scribbling an obscenity beneath) and proudly displaying his sculpture entitled
Fountain (which was actually a urinal, sans plumbing, to which he added a fake signature). The
public, of course, was revulsed - which the Dadaists found wildly encouraging. Enthusiasm
being contagious, the (non)movement spread from Zurich to other parts of Europe and New
York City. And just as mainstream artists were giving it serious consideration, in the early 1920s,
Dada (true to form) dissolved itself. In an interesting twist, this art of protest - based on a serious
underlying principle - is delightful. The nonsense factor rings true. Dada art is whimsical,
colorful, wittily sarcastic and, at times, downright silly. If one wasn't aware that there was,
indeed, a rationale behind Dadaism, it would be fun to speculate as to just what these gentlemen
were "on" when they created these pieces.

3
The anti-war, anti-art movements are placed into a subcategory of Modernism titled Dadaism.
The social outrage circumventing the wars spawned Dadaism. Artist of this period rejected the
war, and “felt that art was the intellectual byproduct of a civilization and if the world was making
this horrible war then the art of these terrible cultures should be eradicated. Dadaism was created
to end art, to end painting, to end writing and to end music” (Jeff Robin). One of the most well
known Dadaist authors of the time was Tristan Tzara. Tzara wrote a titled, “Dada Manifesto.” In
the following passage of his manifesto Tzara leaves no question as to what Dada is and what it
represents:
To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's own littleness, to fill the vessel with one's
individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden
burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies.... Every product of disgust capable of becoming a
negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive
action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of
comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those
impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our
valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of
parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology:
Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith
in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity:Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from
a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to
respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent,
vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to
spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them -with the extreme
satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least-with the same intensity in the thicket of one's soul-pure
of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a
roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques,
inconsistencies: LIFE.
Tzara opened the door for Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. The main character Jake a
war veteran wounded regards the war as “a calamity for civilization” (Hemingway 24). Dada is
anarchy. Literature, such as Hemingway's, Sun Also Rises, is anarchical. The reader is not given
introductions when characters other than the narrator are going to speak. Each character in
Hemingway's book represent different aspects of hatred. Robert Cohn, is characterized as Jewish,
a romantic, and someone who freely shares his emotions. He is the most hated character in the
novel. Just as modernism was about hating or rejecting all conventionalities of romanticism, so
too were the characters of The Sun Also Rises. Tzara says, “Every product of disgust capable of
becoming a negation of the family is Dada...” Lady Brett Ashley, represents the rejection of love,
because the war caused the loss of her true love. Tzara speaks of Dada as the “trajectory of a
word tossed like a screeching phonograph record,” and the word Hemingway uses is Jew, when
Mike, who is Scottish, who hates the English, says to Cohn, “Take that sad Jewish face out of

4
here” (181). The novel is “spontaneity” is every time the characters jump from one place to
another. The reader is never able to feel settled because the characters in the novel never feel
settled. The same goes for Dada art. Artists of the Dada movement were generally WWI veterans
“who had grown cynical of humanity after seeing what men were capable of doing to each other
on the battlefields of Europe. They created art in which chance and randomness formed the basis
of creation. With the order of the world destroyed by World War I, Dada was a way to express
the confusion that was felt by many people as their world was turned upside down”
(http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/C20th/dadaism.htm). A painter of Dada art is Max Ernst.
Ernst served in a German artillery brigade. He painted watercolors such as the untitled one
below. Ernst paints a plane and 2 soldiers carrying another soldier who has lost his legs.