Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the
European avant-garde in the early 20th century.
Many claim Dada began in Zurich, Switzerland
in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter
but the height of New York Dada was the year
before, in 1915. To quote Dona Budd's The
Language of Art Knowledge,
Dada was born out of negative reaction to
the horrors of World War I. This international
movement was begun by a group of artists and
poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire
in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic,
prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition.
The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some
believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others
maintain that it originates from the Romanian
artists Tristan Tzara's and Marcel Janco's
frequent use of the words "da, da," meaning
"yes, yes" in the Romanian language. Another
theory says that the name "Dada" came during
a meeting of the group when a paper knife
stuck into a French-German dictionary happened
to point to 'dada', a French word for 'hobbyhorse'.
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. In addition to being
anti-war, Dada was also anti-bourgeois and
had political affinities with the radical
left.
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. Key figures in the movement
included Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp,
Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader,
Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Richard Huelsenbeck,
George Grosz, John Heartfield, Marcel Duchamp,
Beatrice Wood, Kurt Schwitters, and Hans Richter,
among others. The movement influenced later
styles like the avant-garde and downtown music
movements, and groups including surrealism,
Nouveau réalisme, pop art and Fluxus.
Marc Lowenthal, in I Am a Beautiful Monster:
Poetry, Prose, And Provocation, tells us:
Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and
sound poetry, a starting point for performance
art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence
on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be
later embraced for anarcho-political uses
in the 1960s and the movement that laid the
foundation for Surrealism.
Overview
Dada was an informal international movement,
with participants in Europe and North America.
The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak
of World War I. For many participants, the
movement was a protest against the bourgeois
nationalist and colonialist interests, which
many Dadaists believed were the root cause
of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual
conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that
corresponded to the war.
Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and
'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had
led people into war. They expressed their
rejection of that ideology in artistic expression
that appeared to reject logic and embrace
chaos and irrationality. For example, George
Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art
was intended as a protest "against this world
of mutual destruction."
According to Hans Richter Dada was not art:
it was "anti-art." Dada represented the opposite
of everything which art stood for. Where art
was concerned with traditional aesthetics,
Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal
to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend.
As Hugo Ball expressed it, "For us, art is
not an end in itself ... but it is an opportunity
for the true perception and criticism of the
times we live in."
A reviewer from the American Art News stated
at the time that "Dada philosophy is the sickest,
most paralyzing and most destructive thing
that has ever originated from the brain of
man." Art historians have described Dada as
being, in large part, a "reaction to what
many of these artists saw as nothing more
than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."
Years later, Dada artists described the movement
as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst
of the postwar economic and moral crisis,
a savior, a monster, which would lay waste
to everything in its path... [It was] a systematic
work of destruction and demoralization...
In the end it became nothing but an act of
sacrilege."
History
Zurich
In 1916, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan
Tzara, Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck,
Sophie Täuber, and Hans Richter, along with
others, discussed art and put on performances
in the Cabaret Voltaire expressing their disgust
with the war and the interests that inspired
it.
Some sources state that Dada coalesced on
October 6 at the Cabaret Voltaire. Other
sources state that Dada did not originate
fully in a Zurich literary salon but grew
out of an already vibrant artistic tradition
in Eastern Europe, particularly Romania, that
transposed to Switzerland when a group of
Jewish modernist artists settled in Zurich.
In the years prior to World War I similar
art had already risen in Bucharest and other
Eastern European cities; it is likely that
DADA's catalyst was the arrival in Zurich
of artists like Tzara and Janco.
Having left Germany and Romania during World
War I, the artists found themselves in Switzerland,
a country recognized for its neutrality. Inside
this space of political neutrality they decided
to use abstraction to fight against the social,
political, and cultural ideas of that time.
The dadaists believed those ideas to be a
byproduct of bourgeois society, a society
so apathetic it would rather fight a war against
itself than challenge the status quo.
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 Cabaret closed its doors in early July
and then at the first public soiree at Waag
Hall on July 14, 1916, Ball recited the first
manifesto. In 1917, Tzara wrote a second Dada
manifesto considered one of the most important
Dada writings, which was published in 1918.
Other manifestos followed.
A single issue of the magazine Cabaret Voltaire
was the first publication to come out of the
movement.
After the cabaret closed down, activities
moved to a new gallery and Hugo Ball left
for Bern. Tzara began a relentless campaign
to spread Dada ideas. He bombarded French
and Italian artists and writers with letters,
and soon emerged as the Dada leader and master
strategist. The Cabaret Voltaire re-opened,
and is still in the same place at the Spiegelgasse
1 in the Niederdorf.
Zurich Dada, with Tzara at the helm, published
the art and literature review Dada beginning
in July 1917, with five editions from Zurich
and the final two from Paris.
When World War I ended in 1918, most of the
Zurich Dadaists returned to their home countries,
and some began Dada activities in other cities.
Others, such as Swiss native Sophie Täuber,
would remain in Zurich into the 1920s.
Berlin
"Berlin was a city of tightened stomachers,
of mounting, thundering hunger, where hidden
rage was transformed into a boundless money
lust, and men’s minds were concentrating
more and more on questions of naked existence...
Fear was in everybody’s bones "- Richard
Hülsenbeck
The groups in Germany were not as strongly
anti-art as other groups. Their activity and
art were more political and social, with corrosive
manifestos and propaganda, satire, public
demonstrations and overt political activities.
It has been suggested that this is at least
partially due to Berlin's proximity to the
front, and that for an opposite effect, New
York's geographic distance from the war spawned
its more theoretically-driven, less political
nature.
In February 1918, Huelsenbeck gave his first
Dada speech in Berlin, and produced a Dada
manifesto later in the year. Hannah Höch
and George Grosz used Dada to express post-World
War I communist sympathies. Grosz, together
with John Heartfield, developed the technique
of photomontage during this period. The artists
published a series of short-lived political
magazines, and held the First International
Dada Fair, 'the greatest project yet conceived
by the Berlin Dadaists', in the summer of
1920. As well as work by the main members
of Berlin Dada – Grosz, Raoul Hausmann,
Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader, Huelsenbeck
and Heartfield – the exhibition also included
the work of Otto Dix, Francis Picabia, Jean
Arp, Max Ernst, Rudolf Schlichter, Johannes
Baargeld and others. In all, over 200 works
were exhibited, surrounded by incendiary slogans,
some of which also ended up written on the
walls of the Nazi's Entartete Kunst exhibition
in 1937. Despite high ticket prices, the exhibition
lost money, with only one recorded sale.
The Berlin group published periodicals such
as Club Dada, Der Dada, Everyman His Own Football,
and Dada Almanach.
Cologne
In Cologne, Ernst, Baargeld, and Arp launched
a controversial Dada exhibition in 1920 which
focused on nonsense and anti-bourgeois sentiments.
Cologne's Early Spring Exhibition was set
up in a pub, and required that participants
walk past urinals while being read lewd poetry
by a woman in a communion dress. The police
closed the exhibition on grounds of obscenity,
but it was re-opened when the charges were
dropped.
New York
Like Zurich, New York City was a refuge for
writers and artists from World War I. Soon
after arriving from France in 1915, Marcel
Duchamp and Francis Picabia met American artist
Man Ray. By 1916 the three of them became
the center of radical anti-art activities
in the United States. American Beatrice Wood,
who had been studying in France, soon joined
them, along with Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
Arthur Cravan, fleeing conscription in France,
was also present for a time. Much of their
activity centered in Alfred Stieglitz's gallery,
291, and the home of Walter and Louise Arensberg.
The New Yorkers, though not particularly organized,
called their activities Dada, but they did
not issue manifestos. They issued challenges
to art and culture through publications such
as The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York
Dada in which they criticized the traditionalist
basis for museum art. New York Dada lacked
the disillusionment of European Dada and was
instead driven by a sense of irony and humor.
In his book Adventures in the arts: informal
chapters on painters, vaudeville and poets
Marsden Hartley included an essay on "The
Importance of Being 'Dada'".
During this time Duchamp began exhibiting
"readymades" such as a bottle rack, and was
active in the Society of Independent Artists.
In 1917 he submitted the now famous Fountain,
a urinal signed R. Mutt, to the Society of
Independent Artists exhibition only to have
the piece rejected. First an object of scorn
within the arts community, the Fountain has
since become almost canonized by some as one
of the most recognizable modernist works of
sculpture. The committee presiding over Britain's
prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, for example,
called it "the most influential work of modern
art." As recent scholarship documents, the
work is likely more collaborative than it
has been given credit for in twentieth-century
art history. Duchamp indicates in a 1917 letter
to his sister that a female friend was centrally
involved in the conception of this work. As
he writes: "One of my female friends who had
adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me
a porcelain urinal as a sculpture." The piece
is more in line with the scatological aesthetics
of Duchamp's friend and neighbour, the Baroness
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, than Duchamp's.
In an attempt to "pay homage to the spirit
of Dada" a performance artist named Pierre
Pinoncelli made a crack in The Fountain with
a hammer in January 2006; he also urinated
on it in 1993.
Picabia's travels tied New York, Zurich and
Paris groups together during the Dadaist period.
For seven years he also published the Dada
periodical 391 in Barcelona, New York City,
Zurich, and Paris from 1917 through 1924.
By 1921, most of the original players moved
to Paris where Dada experienced its last major
incarnation.
Paris
The French avant-garde kept abreast of Dada
activities in Zurich with regular communications
from Tristan Tzara, who exchanged letters,
poems, and magazines with Guillaume Apollinaire,
André Breton, Max Jacob, Clément Pansaers,
and other French writers, critics and artists.
Paris had arguably been the classical music
capital of the world since the advent of musical
Impressionism in the late 19th century. One
of its practitioners, Erik Satie, collaborated
with Picasso and Cocteau in a mad, scandalous
ballet called Parade. First performed by the
Ballets Russes in 1917, it succeeded in creating
a scandal but in a different way than Stravinsky's
Le Sacre du Printemps had done almost five
years earlier. This was a ballet that was
clearly parodying itself, something traditional
ballet patrons would obviously have serious
issues with.
Dada in Paris surged in 1920 when many of
the originators converged there. Inspired
by Tzara, Paris Dada soon issued manifestos,
organized demonstrations, staged performances
and produced a number of journals
The first introduction of Dada artwork to
the Parisian public was at the Salon des Indépendants
in 1921. Jean Crotti exhibited works associated
with Dada including a work entitled, Explicatif
bearing the word Tabu. In the same year Tzara
staged his Dadaist play The Gas Heart to howls
of derision from the audience. When it was
re-staged in 1923 in a more professional production,
the play provoked a theatre riot that heralded
the split within the movement that was to
produce Surrealism. Tzara's last attempt at
a Dadaist drama was his "ironic tragedy" Handkerchief
of Clouds in 1924.
Netherlands
In the Netherlands the Dada movement centered
mainly around Theo van Doesburg, best known
for establishing the De Stijl movement and
magazine of the same name. Van Doesburg mainly
focused on poetry, and included poems from
many well-known Dada writers in De Stijl such
as Hugo Ball, Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters.
Van Doesburg became a friend of Schwitters,
and together they organized the so-called
Dutch Dada campaign in 1923, where Van Doesburg
promoted a leaflet about Dada, Schwitters
read his poems, Vilmos Huszàr demonstrated
a mechanical dancing doll and Nelly Van Doesburg,
played avant-garde compositions on piano.
Van Doesburg wrote Dada poetry himself in
De Stijl, although under a pseudonym, I.K. Bonset,
which was only revealed after his death in
1931. 'Together' with I.K. Bonset, he also
published a short-lived Dutch Dada magazine
called Mécano.
Georgia
Although Dada itself was unknown in Georgia
until at least 1920, from 1917-1921 a group
of poets called themselves "41st Degree" organized
along Dadaist lines. The most important figure
in this group was Iliazd, whose radical typographical
designs visually echo the publications of
the Dadaists. After his flight to Paris in
1921, he collaborated with Dadaists on publications
and events.
Yugoslavia
In Yugoslavia there was heavy Dada activity
between 1920 and 1922 run mainly by Dragan
Aleksić and including Mihailo S. Petrov,
Zenitist's two brothers Ljubomir Micić and
Branko Ve Poljanski. Aleksić used the term
"Yougo-Dada" and is known to have been in
contact with Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters,
and Tristan Tzara.
Italy
The Dada movement in Italy, based in Mantova,
was met with distaste and failed to make a
significant impact in the art world. They
published a magazine for a short time and
held an exhibit in Rome, featuring paintings,
Tristan Tzara quotes, and original epigrams
such as "True Dada is against Dada". The most
notable member of this group was Julius Evola,
who went on to become a preeminent occult
scholar of the 20th century, as well as a
right-wing philosopher and aide to Mussolini.
Tokyo
A prominent Dada group in Japan was MAVO,
founded in July 1923 by Tomoyoshi Murayama
and Masamu Yanase. Other prominent artists
were Jun Tsuji, Eisuke Yoshiyuki, Shinkichi
Takahashi and Katsue Kitasono.
Russia
The Russian literary group Nichevoki came
close to the Dada ideologies. They became
famous for proposing Vladimir Mayakovsky to
go to the "Pampushka" at the "Tverbul" and
clean any desiring person's shoes, when he
declared that he would "clean Russian poetry".
Poetry; music and sound
Dada was not confined to the visual and literary
arts; its influence reached into sound and
music. Kurt Schwitters developed what he called
sound poems, while Francis Picabia and Georges
Ribemont-Dessaignes composed Dada music performed
at the Festival Dada in Paris on 26 May 1920.
Other composers such as Erwin Schulhoff, Hans
Heusser and Albert Savinio all wrote Dada
music, while members of Les Six collaborated
with members of the Dada movement and had
their works performed at Dada gatherings.
Erik Satie also dabbled with Dadaist ideas
during his career, although he is primarily
associated with musical Impressionism.
In the very first Dada publication, Hugo Ball
describes a "balalaika orchestra playing delightful
folk-songs." African music and jazz was common
at Dada gatherings, signaling a return to
nature and naive primitivism.
Legacy
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.
Dada is a named influence and reference of
various anti-art and political and cultural
movements including the Situationist International
and culture jamming groups like the Cacophony
Society. Upon breaking up in July 2012, famous
anarchist pop band Chumbawamba issued a statement
which compared their own legacy with that
of the Dada art movement.
At the same time that the Zurich Dadaists
made noise and spectacle at the Cabaret Voltaire,
Vladimir Lenin wrote his revolutionary plans
for Russia in a nearby apartment. Tom Stoppard
used this coincidence as a premise for his
play Travesties, which includes Tzara, Lenin,
and James Joyce as characters. French writer
Dominique Noguez imagined Lenin as a member
of the Dada group in his tongue-in-cheek Lénine
Dada.
The Cabaret Voltaire fell into disrepair until
it was occupied from January to March, 2002,
by a group proclaiming themselves Neo-Dadaists,
led by Mark Divo. The group included Jan Thieler,
Ingo Giezendanner, Aiana Calugar, Lennie Lee
and Dan Jones. After their eviction the space
became a museum dedicated to the history of
Dada. The work of Lee and Jones remained on
the walls of the museum.
Several notable retrospectives have examined
the influence of Dada upon art and society.
In 1967, a large Dada retrospective was held
in Paris, France. In 2006, the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City held a Dada exhibition
in conjunction with the National Gallery of
Art in Washington D.C. and the Centre Pompidou
in Paris. The LTM label has released a large
number of Dada-related sound recordings, including
interviews with artists such as Tzara, Picabia,
Schwitters, Arp and Huelsenbeck, and musical
repertoire including Satie, Ribemont-Dessaignes,
Picabia and Nelly van Doesburg.
Art techniques developed
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.
Photomontage
The Dadaists – the "monteurs" – used scissors
and glue rather than paintbrushes and paints
to express their views of modern life through
images presented by the media. A variation
on the collage technique, photomontage utilized
actual or reproductions of real photographs
printed in the press. In Cologne, Max Ernst
used images from World War I to illustrate
messages of the destruction of war.
Assemblage
The assemblages were three-dimensional variations
of the collage – the assembly of everyday
objects to produce meaningful or meaningless
pieces of work including war objects and trash.
Objects were nailed, screwed or fastened together
in different fashions. Assemblages could be
seen in the round or could be hung on a wall.
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. The piece was not displayed during
the show, a fact that unmasked the inherently
biased system that was the art establishment,
seeing as any artist that paid the entry fee
could in theory display their art, but the
work of R. Mutt was banished by the judgment
of a group of artists.
See also
References
Bibliography
External links
Media related to Dada at Wikimedia Commons
Dada at DMOZ
Britannica.com - includes a good review of
Dada by Encyclopædia Britannica
Dada art - includes images showing the characteristics
of Dada
The International Dada Archive - includes
scans of publications
Dadart - includes history, bibliography, documents,
and news
Dada magazine translated into English and
remastered for the internet.
From Dada to surrealism review from The Guardian
Dada audio recordings at LTM
Manifestos
Text of Hugo Ball's 1916 Dada Manifesto
Text of Tristan Tzara's 1918 Dada Manifesto
Excerpts of Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto
and Lecture on Dada
