Dada movement 1916

The art movement known as Dada was born in a cool little nightclub named Cabaret Voltaire in
Zurich, Switzerland in February 1916. The times when this amazing movement started its life were,
however, not so amazing. World War I was roaring and artists from different countries were running
away from the terror. Fleeing from the ongoing war, a group of artists moved to neutral Switzerland
and formed a new artistic group. Dada was truly an international movement with artists coming
from all over Europe. Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco came from Romania, Emmy Hennings and
Hugo Ball from Germany, and Jean Arp from France. Dada united artists opposed to war, who
were looking to find new and alternative art practices through which they could communicate their
feelings about the world around them. They wanted to create a new universe that was completely
different from the one happening around them. Dada, therefore, became anti-everything. Anti-war,
anti-bourgeois, anti-nationalist, anti-establishment, anti-museums, anti-materialism. Dada, as Andre
Breton said, was a state of mind. Dadaist truly wanted to bid farewell to established rules, ideals,
and conventions. They aimed to destroy what was thought of as reasonable. Or as Jean Arp
phrased it "Dada is for the senseless which does not mean nonsense. Dada is senseless like nature.
Dada is for nature and against art." Since Dadaists were anti-meaning too, they chose a peculiar
name for their movement. The word DADA could represent a sound a baby would make, or it could
mean a rocking horse, or it could mean yes-yes in Romanian. Either way, Dada could mean
everything and nothing! the previously mentioned Cabaret Voltaire became a hotspot for all things
Dada. It was the place where performances, poetry readings, dances, exhibitions, and dada soirees
were held at. It was a center for all types of avant-garde artistic entertainment. The Cabaret lasted
for six months only, but its legacy is surely enormous.Many dada soirees, or dada evenings,
consisted of Dadaist poetry readings. And Dadaist poetry was certainly unconventional. Artist
Tristan Tzara even wrote an instruction on how to create a dada poem. What you need to do is
take a newspaper, cut out the words, put them in a bag, shake the bag, and then you take the
cutouts one by one, and there's your poem! You could even try and make a dadaist poem yourself!
A number of Dadaist poems, like the ones Hugo Ball wrote, consisted of random nonsensical
words that would just represent a seemingly meaningless sound.
Other Dadaists like Jean Arp also liked to play with the idea of spontaneity and chance in art.
When creating some of his collages, Arp would drop paper cut-outs from the air and glue them
exactly where they fell. After the war ended, Dadaists started moving to other places from
Switzerland, so Dada spread around too! Mainly to France, Germany, and the USA. After Zurich,
Dada had its new centers in Paris, Berlin, and New York City.The Berlin group, led by Hannah Hoch,
Richard Hueselback, and Raoul Hausman, was the most openly political of all Dadaist branches.
During the 1920 First International Dada Art Fair In Berlin, even the ceiling was used for exhibiting
a piece.Artists John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter created a life-sized doll of a soldier with a
pig's head made out of paper-mâché and named it The Prussian Archangel.
images used in the Weimar Republic, but Dadaists used them in subversive and even feminist
ways, especially in the case of Hannah Hoch who created many pieces reflecting the idea of what
the new The Berlin Dada group is also famous for coming up with a new art-form known as the
photomontage. Photomontages represented a new version of collage where media images from
newspapers and magazines were cut out to create a work of art with a political message.
Photomontages showed the media modern woman should be like.
Now, let's move on to the American branch of Dada. The New York Dada is connected to the very
famous Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp created one of the best-known Dadaists pieces and probably
one of the most famous art pieces in the history of art - The Fountain. The Fountain consists
of a signed piece of a regular white porcelain urinal seen in restrooms all over the world. Duchamp's
main goal was to show that the artist had the intellectual power to choose what object becomes art
and change its context. What's important here is the artistic idea and not the object itself. And this
notion became a big game-changer in the history of modern art.Duchamp's philosophy of art was of
enormous importance for postwar art movements like conceptual art, performance art, and
postmodern art. What we choose to see as art can be art, it doesn't mean that it's good or bad, it's
just - art. Duchamp decided to call his chosen mass-produced objects made into artworks his
readymades. Dada slowly dissolved during the early twenties with artists going their own ways and
moving on to new art movements like surrealism for which dada laid the foundation for.

Avant-garde
Emerging in the mid-19th century, the avant-garde received their name for their fighting
spirit.Avant-garde is French for ‘vanguard’; a military term used to describe the front-line of an army
moving into battle.
Artists were compared with these soldiers, as they were often a group force, challenging
long-established concepts and ideas about art and fighting an deep rooted establishment. Artists
such as Courbet, Gauguin and Kirchner were regarded with great hostility, because they pushed
accepted boundaries. As these establishments denied the work public exposure, the avant-garde
fought this censorship of their art. Works like this by Ernst Kirchner convey freedom, energy, feeling
through their brush strokes and vivid colours. This new approach marked Kirchner as an
avant-garde artist. Though in his German homeland the Nazis considered him a ‘degenerate’ artist.
An unsettling term, with unsettling implications. Kirchener’s expressionism might have challenged
the prevailing styles and authority of the time but reads very differently to a contemporary eye.
Hannah Höch was another German artist breaking new ground in the early twentieth century. She
was an early creator of photomontage art; collages of pasted photographs. We see a tribal mask, a
baby's torso, an eye from a fashion magazine; an eclectic selection. The figure is mounted on little
feet - as if on display; representing treatment of women in Weimar Germany - as inferior and
infantile, yet put on a pedestal. The geometric background is almost a cage. Höch was a radical who
blazed a trail for photo collage, but was also a pioneer for her gender. Avant-garde artists challenge,
and sometimes provoke us through satire. Many would argue that Picasso’s work remains radical.In
‘Bottle and Glass on a Table’, the bottle is a piece of newspaper, on which stencilled letters spell
“OLD J A R” - short for Old Jamaica Rum. Writing the subject name on the canvas rather than
carefully copying its physical form was revolutionary. If newspaper can become a bottle, then what
is reality?