The First World War was one of the most destructive wars in our history.
It was during this time that the avant-garde movement Dada emerged
partly as a negative reaction to the horrors of war.
Primarily a literary and artistic movement, Dada emerged almost simultaneously in several
cities in Europe and America. It was in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire club
in 1916 that the movement was first founded by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, with other
members including German-French sculptor Hans Arp
and Tristan Tzara, a French-Romanian avant-garde poet.
In New York Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, who were most associated with Dadaist ideas
of anti-art, revolutionized ideas of what constituted an artwork, with Duchamp famously
coining the term ‘readymade’ to describe his found object art, which transformed the
conventions of visual art.
French-born Picabia, a highly versatile artist, worked using a number of styles throughout his life.
He experimented with Impressionism and Cubism, but it was for his work with the
New York Dada group that he became most noted. Influenced by his friend Marcel Duchamp and
by the enthusiasm for mechanisation in America, Picabia began depicting the machine in his work.
Like Duchamp, Picabia had a taste for paradox and the absurd. He was never afraid
to court unconventionality, and his works often had hidden ironic meanings.
The Zurich group published a Dada magazine and held numerous art exhibitions spreading
their anti-war, anti-art ideas. They also had regular events with experimental poetry
readings, music and dancing, and Tzara and Arp famously explored ‘chance’ through
ripping up and scattering paper pieces onto the floor.
Dada continued to spread at the end of the world war with groups in Paris and Berlin,
among other cities. Those who participated in Club Dada in Berlin included Georg Grosz
and Hannah Höch.
Collage was favoured over more traditional techniques by many Dada artists including
Höch; who is best known for producing satirical and disturbing photomontages like
(untitled) From the collection: From an ethnographical museum.
Her work often focused on the situation in Weimar Germany from a woman's perspective,
combining political commentary, gender issues, questions of modernity
and a critique of the bourgeoisie.
In the early 1920s, many Dada artists had converged in Paris including Arp, Ernst, Duchamp
and Picabia, where Andre Breton and others had begun to formulate the ideas that would
become Surrealism.
Although the movement was essentially brought to an end with the emergence of surrealism,
Dada is now considered a watershed moment in 20th-century art. In the 1960s artists
like Joseph Beuys were also referred to as Neo-dadists
for their promotion of ‘living, anti-art.’
Artists influenced by Dada’s radical ideas reached beyond the visual arts and into music,
with the likes of Frank Zappa and David Bowie using dadaist techniques, collaging lyrics
and musical composition.
Bowie also famously showed the continuing impact of dada through costume.
Developed amidst the darkness of World War One, this anti-art movement had its focal point in the
nonsensical and absurd. Dadaism echoed the marked disillusionment of the time and concerned
itself with the absence of meaning and the inevitability of chance in life events.
If being anti-art means rejecting the styles and sensibilities of the day to make way for
fresh thinking and approaches... what artistic struggle could there be.