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,Théodore Fraenkel, Paul Eluard, Clément Pansaers, Emmanuel Fay (cut off).
Second row: Paul Dermée, Philippe Soupault, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes.
Front row: Tristan Tzara (with monocle), Celine Arnauld, Francis Picabia, André Breton.]]
Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had spread to New York City and a variety of artistic centers in Europe and Asia. Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada, 1915–23, Abrams, 1994, . Mario de Micheli (2006). Las vanguardias artísticas del siglo XX. Alianza Forma. pp. 135–137.
Within the umbrella of the movement, people used a wide variety of artistic forms to protest the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalism and modern war. To develop their protest, artists tended to make use of nonsense, irrationality, and an anti-bourgeois sensibility. The art of the movement began primarily as performance art, but eventually spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up technique, and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism and maintained political affinities with radical politics on the left-wing and far-left politics.Richard Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada: Eine Geschichte des Dadaismus, Paul Steegemann Verlag, Hannover, 1920, 1st ed. ( Die Silbergäule): English translation in Timothy Stroud, Emanuela Di Lallo, 'Art of the Twentieth Century: 1900–1919, the avant-garde movements', Volume 1 of Art of the Twentieth Century, Skyra, 2006, The movement had no shared artistic style, although most artists had shown interest in the machine aesthetic.
There is no consensus on the origin of the movement's name; a common story is that the artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a paper knife randomly into a dictionary, where it landed on "dada", a French term for a hobby horse. (2025). 9780199239658, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199239658 Others note it suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group. Still others speculate it might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning (or no meaning at all) in any language, reflecting the movement's internationalism. Dada, The art story, retrieved March 13, 2017.
The roots of Dada lie in pre-war avant-garde. The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 to characterize works that challenge accepted definitions of art. Cubism and the development of collage and abstract art would inform the movement's detachment from the constraints of reality and convention. The work of French poets, Italian Futurism, and Expressionism would influence Dada's rejection of the correlation between words and meaning. "Dada", Dawn Adès and Matthew Gale, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009 Works such as Ubu Roi (1896) by Alfred Jarry and the ballet Parade (1916–17) by Erik Satie would be characterized as proto-Dadaist works.Roselee Goldberg, Thomas & Hudson, L'univers de l'art, Chapter 4, Le surréalisme, Les représentations pré-Dada à Paris, The Dada movement's principles were first collected in Hugo Ball's Dada Manifesto in 1916. Ball is seen as the founder of the Dada movement.
The Dadaist movement included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art and literary journals. Passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. Key figures in the movement included Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Emmy Hennings, Hannah Höch, Richard Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Beatrice Wood, 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. Oxford Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art, Oxford University, pp. 171–173
Avant-garde circles outside France knew of pre-war Parisian developments. They had seen (or participated in) Cubist exhibitions held at Galeries Dalmau, Barcelona (1912), Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin (1912), the Armory Show in New York (1913), SVU Mánes in Prague (1914), several Jack of Diamonds exhibitions in Moscow and at Moderne Kunstkring, Amsterdam (between 1911 and 1915). Futurism developed in response to the work of various artists. Dada subsequently combined these approaches. Joan M. Marter, The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, Volume 1, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 6, .
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 Randomness 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.
Additionally, Dada attempted to reflect onto human perception and the chaotic nature of society. Tristan Tzara proclaimed, "Everything is Dada, too. Beware of Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man's normal condition, is Dada. But the real Dadas are against Dada".
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 a systematic work of destruction and demoralization... In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."
To quote Dona Budd's The Language of Art Knowledge,
Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of the First World War. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. 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 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.
The creations of Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, and others between 1915 and 1917 eluded the term Dada at the time, and "New York Dada" came to be seen as a post facto invention of Duchamp. At the outset of the 1920s the term Dada flourished in Europe with the help of Duchamp and Picabia, who had both returned from New York. Notwithstanding, Dadaists such as Tzara and Richter claimed European precedence. Art historian David Hopkins notes:
Ironically, though, Duchamp's late activities in New York, along with the machinations of Picabia, re-cast Dada's history. Dada's European chroniclers—primarily Richter, Tzara, and Huelsenbeck—would eventually become preoccupied with establishing the pre-eminence of Zürich and Berlin at the foundations of Dada, but it proved to be Duchamp who was most strategically brilliant in manipulating the genealogy of this avant-garde formation, deftly turning New York Dada from a late-comer into an originating force. Hopkins, David, A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, Volume 10 of Blackwell Companions to Art History, John Wiley & Sons, May 2, 2016, p. 83,
Prominent Dadaists published manifestos, but the movement was loosely organized and there was no central hierarchy. On 14 July 1916, Ball originated the seminal Dada Manifesto. Tzara wrote a second Dada manifesto, "Tristan Tzara: Dada Manifesto 1918" by Charles Cramer and Kim Grant, Khan Academy. ( Text at upenn.edu.) . (Text ) considered important Dada reading, which was published in 1918. Tzara's manifesto articulated the concept of "Dadaist disgust"—the contradiction implicit in avant-garde works between the criticism and affirmation of modernist reality. In the Dadaist perspective modern art and culture are considered a type of fetishization where the objects of consumption (including organized systems of thought like philosophy and morality) are chosen, much like a preference for cake or cherries, to fill a void.
The shock and scandal the movement inflamed was deliberate; Dadaist magazines were banned and their exhibits closed. Some of the artists even faced imprisonment. These provocations were part of the entertainment but, over time, audiences' expectations eventually outpaced the movement's capacity to deliver. As the artists' well-known "sarcastic laugh" started to come from the audience, the provocations of Dadaists began to lose their impact. Dada was an active movement during years of political turmoil from 1916 when European countries were actively engaged in World War I, the conclusion of which, in 1918, set the stage for a new political order.
The name Cabaret Voltaire was a reference to the French philosopher Voltaire, whose novel Candide mocked the religious and philosophical of the day. Opening night was attended by Ball, Tzara, Jean Arp, and Janco. These artists along with others like Sophie Taeuber, Richard Huelsenbeck and Hans Richter started putting on performances at the Cabaret Voltaire and using art to express their disgust with the war and the interests that inspired it.
Having left Germany and Romania during World War I, the artists arrived in politically neutral Switzerland. They used abstraction to fight against the social, political, and cultural ideas of that time. They used shock art, provocation, and "vaudeville excess" to subvert the conventions they believed had caused the Great War. The Dadaists believed those ideas to be a byproduct of bourgeois society that was so apathetic it would wage war against itself rather than challenge the status quo:
Ball said that Janco's mask and costume designs, inspired by Romanian folk art, made "the horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events" visible. According to Ball, performances were accompanied by a "balalaika orchestra playing delightful folk-songs." Often influenced by African music, arrhythmic drumming and jazz were common at Dada gatherings.
After the cabaret closed down, Dada activities moved on 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.
Zürich Dada, with Tzara at the helm, published the art and literature review Dada beginning in July 1917, with five editions from Zürich and the final two from Paris.
Other artists, such as André Breton and Philippe Soupault, created "literature groups to help extend the influence of Dada".Europe of Cultures. "Tristan Tzara speaks of the Dada Movement", September 6, 1963. Retrieved on July 2, 2015.
After the fighting of the First World War had ended in the armistice of November 1918, most of the Zürich Dadaists returned to their home countries, and some began Dada activities in other cities. Others, such as the Swiss native Sophie Taeuber, would remain in Zürich into the 1920s.
Raoul Hausmann, who helped establish Dada in Berlin, published his art manifesto Synthethic Cino of Painting in 1918 where he attacked Expressionism and the art critics who promoted it. Dada is envisioned in contrast to art forms, such as Expressionism, that appeal to viewers' emotional states: "the exploitation of so-called echoes of the soul". In Hausmann's conception of Dada, new techniques of creating art would open doors to explore new artistic impulses. Fragmented use of real world stimuli allowed an expression of reality that was radically different from other forms of art:
The groups in Germany were not as strongly anti-art as other groups. Their activity and art were more political and social, with corrosive art manifesto and propaganda, satire, public demonstrations and overt political activities. The intensely political and war-torn environment of Berlin had a dramatic impact on the ideas of Berlin Dadaists. Conversely, New York's geographic distance from the war spawned its more theoretically driven, less political nature. According to Hans Richter, a Dadaist who was in Berlin yet "aloof from active participation in Berlin Dada", several distinguishing characteristics of the Dada movement there included: "its political element and its technical discoveries in painting and literature"; "inexhaustible energy"; "mental freedom which included the abolition of everything"; and "members intoxicated with their own power in a way that had no relation to the real world", who would "turn their rebelliousness even against each other".
In February 1918, while the Great War was approaching its climax, Huelsenbeck gave his first Dada speech in Berlin, and he produced a Dada manifesto later in the year. Following the October Revolution in Russian Empire, by then out of the war, Hannah Höch and George Grosz used Dada to express communist sympathies. Grosz, together with John Heartfield, Höch and Hausmann developed the of photomontage during this period. Johannes Baader, the uninhibited Oberdada, was the "crowbar" of the Berlin movement's direct action according to Hans Richter and is credited with creating the first giant collages, according to Raoul Hausmann.
After the war, 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.Dada, Dickermann, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2006 p99
The Berlin group published periodicals such as Club Dada, Der Dada, Everyman His Own Football, and Dada Almanach. They also established a political party, the Central Council of Dada for the World Revolution.
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 "".
During this time Duchamp began exhibiting "readymades" (everyday objects found or purchased and declared art) 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 but they rejected the piece. First an object of scorn within the arts community, the Fountain has since become almost canonized by some Fountain' most influential piece of modern art, Independent, December 2, 2004. as one of the most recognizable modernist works of sculpture. Art world experts polled by the sponsors of the 2004 Turner Prize, Gordon's gin, voted it "the most influential work of modern art". "Duchamp's urinal tops art survey", BBC News December 1, 2004.
As recent scholarship documents, the work is still controversial. Duchamp indicated in a 1917 letter to his sister that a female friend was centrally involved in the conception of this work: "One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture."Duchamp, Marcel, translated and quoted in The piece is in line with the scatological aesthetics of Duchamp's neighbour, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. In an attempt to "pay homage to the spirit of Dada" a performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli made a crack in a replica of The Fountain with a hammer in January 2006; he also urinated on it in 1993.
Picabia's travels tied New York, Zürich and Paris groups together during the Dadaist period. For seven years he also published the Dada periodical 391 in Barcelona, New York City, Zürich, and Paris from 1917 through 1924.
By 1921, most of the original players moved to Paris where Dada had experienced its last major incarnation.
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 final two editions of Dada, Le Cannibale, and Littérature featured Dada in several editions.)Marc Dachy, Dada : La révolte de l'art, Paris, Gallimard / Centre Pompidou, collection "Découvertes Gallimard" (nº 476), 2005.
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 (initiated by André Breton) 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.
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 literature Dada magazine called Mécano (1922–23). Another Dutchman identified by K. Schippers in his study of the movement in the Netherlands was the Groningen typographer H. N. Werkman, who was in touch with van Doesburg and Schwitters while editing his own magazine, The Next Call (1923–6). Two more artists mentioned by Schippers were German-born and eventually settled in the Netherlands. These were Otto van Rees, who had taken part in the liminal exhibitions at the Café Voltaire in Zürich, and Paul Citroen.
After his flight to Paris in 1921, he collaborated with Dadaists on publications and events. For example, when Tristan Tzara was banned from holding seminars in Théâtre Michel in 1923, Iliazd booked the venue on his behalf for the performance, "The Bearded Heart Soirée", and designed the flyer.
In Tsuburaya Productions's Ultra Series, an alien named Dada was inspired by the Dadaism movement, with said character first appearing in episode 28 of the 1966 tokusatsu series, Ultraman, its design by character artist Toru Narita. Dada's design is primarily monochromatic, and features numerous sharp lines and alternating black and white stripes, in reference to the movement and, in particular, to chessboard and Go patterns. On May 19, 2016, in celebration to the 100 year anniversary of Dadaism in Tokyo, the Ultra Monster was invited to meet the Swiss Ambassador Urs Bucher.
Butoh, the Japanese dance-form originating in 1959, can be considered to have direct connections to the spirit of the Dada movement, as Tatsumi Hijikata, one of Butoh's founders, "was influenced early in his career by Dadaism".
In literary arts, Dadaists focused on poetry, particularly the so-called sound poetry invented by Hugo Ball. Dadaist poems attacked traditional conceptions of poetry, including structure, order, as well as the interplay of sound and the meaning of language. For Dadaists, the existing system by which information is articulated robs language of its dignity. The dismantling of language and poetic conventions are Dadaist attempts to restore language to its purest and most innocent form: "With these sound poem, we wanted to dispense with a language which journalism had made desolate and impossible."
Simultaneous poems (or poèmes simultanés) were recited by a group of speakers who, collectively, produced a chaotic and confusing set of voices. These poems are considered manifestations of modernity including advertising, technology, and conflict. Unlike movements such as Expressionism, Dadaism did not take a negative view of modernity and the urban life. The chaotic urban and futuristic world is considered natural terrain that opens up new ideas for life and art. (1997). 9789042001527, Rodopi. ISBN 9789042001527
By the dawn of the Second World War, many of the European Dadaists had emigrated to the United States. Some (Otto Freundlich, Walter Serner) died in death camps under Adolf Hitler, who actively persecuted the kind of "degenerate art" that he considered Dada to represent. The movement became less active as post-war optimism led to the development of 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, 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 Zürich Dadaists were making noise and spectacle at the Cabaret Voltaire, Lenin was planning his revolutionary plans for Russia in a nearby apartment. Tom Stoppard used this coincidence as a premise for his play Travesties (1974), 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 (1989).
The former building of the Cabaret Voltaire fell into disrepair until it was occupied from January to March 2002, by a group proclaiming themselves , led by Mark Divo. 2002 occupation by neo-Dadaists Prague Post The group included Leumund Cult, Ingo Giezendanner, Aiana Calugar, Lennie Lee, and Dan Jones. After their eviction, the space was turned into a museum dedicated to the history of Dada. The work of Lee and Jones remained on the walls of the new museum.
Several notable have examined the influence of Dada upon art and society. In 1967, a large Dada retrospective was held in Paris. In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a Dada exhibition in partnership with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The LTM Recordings 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.
Musician Frank Zappa was a self-proclaimed Dadaist after learning of the movement:
In the early days, I didn't even know what to call the stuff my life was made of. You can imagine my delight when I discovered that someone in a distant land had the same idea—AND a nice, short name for it.Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 162David Bowie adapted William S. Burroughs' cut-up technique for writing lyrics and Kurt Cobain also admittedly used this method for many of his Nirvana lyrics, including In Bloom.
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.Marc Lowenthal, translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation
Many young artists in America embraced the theories and ideas espoused by Duchamp. Robert Rauschenberg in particular was very influenced by Dadaism and tended to use found objects in his collages as a means of dissolving the boundary between high and low culture.
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