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.
