Dada

Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife
through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly
Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919
Hanna Höch

Dada was, officially, not a movement, its artists not artists and its artnot art. That sounds easy enough, doesn't it? Of course, there is a bit more to the story of Dadaism than this simplistic explanation. Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. 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 and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words da, da, meaning yes, yes in the Romanianlanguage. 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. Its purpose was to ridicule the meaninglessness of the modern world as its participants saw it. In addition to being anti-war, Dada was also anti-bourgeois and socialist in nature.

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. The movement influenced later styles like theavant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including surrealism, Nouveau réalisme, pop art and Fluxus.



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 andirrationality. 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." Everything for which art stood, Dada represented the opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics, the Dadaists hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics.

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."

• Dada began in Zurich and became an international movement. Or non-movement, as it were.

• Dada had only one rule: Never follow any known rules.

• Dada was intended to provoke an emotional reaction from the viewer (typically shock or outrage). If its art failed to offend traditionalists, Dada writing - particularly Tristan Tzara's manifestoes - proved a fine, nose-thumbing Plan B.

• Dada art is nonsensical to the point of whimsy. Almost all of the people who created it were ferociously serious, though.

• Abstraction and Expressionism were the main influences on Dada, followed by Cubism and, to a lesser extent, Futurism.

• There was no predominant medium in Dadaist art. All things from geometric tapestries to glass to plaster and wooden reliefs were fair game. It's worth noting, though, that assemblage, collage,photomontage and the use of ready made objects all gained wide acceptance due to their use in Dada art.

• For something that supposedly meant nothing, Dada certainly created a lot of offshoots. In addition to spawning numerous literary journals, Dada influenced many concurrent trends in the visual arts (especially in the case of Constructivism). The best-known movement Dada was directly responsible for is Surrealism.

• Dada self-destructed when it was in danger of becoming "acceptable".