A few Dada art pieces includes:
Noise concerts, Mona lisa with a mustache,
and reciting gibberish poems while wearing cardboard tubes.
Dada was designed to be misunderstood, it defied expectations the world had for art
and it promoted confusion. It was basically the representation the exact opposite of everything
which art stood for. And they liked it that way. Where art was concerned with traditional
aesthetics, Dada completely ignored them. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada
was intended to offend and provoke.
Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition.
In fact, one of the important features of Dada is the idea of chance. For them, art
reflect life, and in life, there’s chance. And chance is something that you can’t,
and maybe shouldn’t, control. They believed that chance was an outlet for their unconscious
minds, so you get pieces and performances like Tristian Tzara’s, who would cut out
single words from a newspaper, toss them in a paper bag, and then spill the words out
into a poem.
Perhaps the artists willed themselves into the playfulness of childhood, while the adult
world was busy destroying itself during World War I.
Hans Richter, one of the original Dadaists, said:
“Our provocations… were only a means of arousing the bourgeoisie to rage, and through
rage to a shamefaced self-awareness… Dada was a storm that broke over the world of art
as the war did over the nations.. it was an artistic revolt against art.”
During WWI, many artists left their homes and fled to neutral Switzerland, and in 1916,
the poet Hugo Ball made a deal with a Zurich bar owner, that he would increase the beer
and sausage sales, if he would let Ball transform his establishment into a literary cafe called
the Cabaret Voltaire.
Soon, artists both foreign and local would gather at Cabaret Voltaire, forming the collection
of independent, like-minded thinkers, and this is where Dada begins to form.
The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe it’s just a nonsensical word. Others
believe it’s from Romanian artists Tristan Tzara's and Marcel Janco's frequent use of
"da, da," which in Romanian means "yes, yes". Another legend states that they took a French-German
Dictionary, stabbed it with a knife, and the knife just happened to point to 'dada', which
in French is 'hobbyhorse'.
In their first publication in May 1916, Ball wrote that Cabaret Voltaire “has a sole
purpose to draw attention, across the carriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent
spirits who live for other ideals” Other ideals, of course, was his jab at the war.
The movement encompassed a wide range of practices, including visual arts, poetry, literature,
theater, art manifestoes, art theory, graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics
through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.
Cabaret Voltaire was a gallery, a concert hall, and a stage for poetry readings. And
important figures were, of course Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Hans (Jean) Arp
and more join even later on, including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Andre Breton, and
Man Ray.
Like the Futurists, they were interested in freeing language from conventional syntax
and semantics to raw sound though noise music, and jumbled type - but while the Futurists
has a mission and a message, the Dada seemed to only have one mission, and that was to
have no mission at all. And at that moment in history, in the words of Richter, “it
was just this that gave the movement its explosive power to unfold in all directions.”
Marcel Janco recalled, "We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished.
We would begin again after the tabula rasa. At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking
common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing
order."
The movement spread almost simultaneously to New York, and then to Paris, Barcelona,
Berlin, Cologne, and Hanover.
By the early twenties, it was pretty much burned out or subsumed into Surrealism or
other practices, but its short life was witnessed across the world through this network of these
nomadic and passionate artists.
The Dadaists were young, and perhaps naive, to believe that they could change the world
by mocking it, but they knew with certainty during the war, that that the world needed
change.
For them, art has grown old and stale with its rules and values- they wanted to free
it from commercialization and the industry that comes with it. Despite their anti-art
pose (“Dada is Anti-Dada” was a favorite among them”) their art was still art - but
rather than art sitting on the wall or a pedestal, it
was art that want to provoke. Their anti-art antics were a breath of fresh air - clearing
out old, stale ideas and paving the way for new ones.
I hope you enjoyed watching this video and learned something new. If you want to keep
learning more art history, please check out some of my other videos and subscribe for
future ones. And, I’ll see you guys next time!