DADA101
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WHAT *IS* DaDa?
da·da 
[dah-dah]
-noun (sometimes initial capital letter)
the style and techniques of a group of artists, writers, etc., of the early 20th century who exploited accidental and incongruous effects in their work and who programmatically challenged established canons of art, thought, morality, etc.
[Origin: 1915-20; < F: hobby horse, childish redupl. of da giddyap]
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in neutral, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature (poetry, art manifestoes, art theory), theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti war politic through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals. Passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture filled their publications. The movement influenced later styles, movements, and groups including Surrealism, Pop Art, and Fluxus.
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.IMAGE: Cover of the first edition of the publication Dada.
Edited by Tristan Tzara. Zürich, 1917.
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 its proponents, Dada was not art, it was anti-art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent 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 The 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, in 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
Origin of the word Dada
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 Romanian language (Engl. equivalent: yeah, yeah, as in a sarcastic or facetious yeah, right). Still others believe that a group of artists assembled in Zürich in 1916, wanting a name for their new movement, chose it at random by stabbing a French-German dictionary with a paper knife, and picking the name that the point landed upon. Dada in French is a child's word for hobby-horse. In French the colloquialism, c'est mon dada, means it's my hobby.IMAGE (R): Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919, collage of pasted papers, 90x144 cm, Staatliche Museum, Berlin.
It has also been suggested that the word dada was chosen randomly from the Larousse dictionary.
According to the Dada ideal, the movement would not be called Dadaism, much less designated an art-movement.
Zürich
In 1916, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Täuber; 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. By some accounts Dada coalesced on October 6 at the cabaret.IMAGE (R): Tristan Tzara
The artists were in neutral Zürich, Switzerland, having left Germany and Romania during the happenings of WWI. It was here that they decided to use abstraction to fight against the social, political, and cultural ideas of that time that they believed had caused the war. Abstraction was viewed as the result of a lack of planning and logical thought processes.
[A]bstract art signified absolute honesty for us. - Richard Huelsenbeck
At the first public soiree at the cabaret on July 14, 1916, Ball recited the first manifesto (see text). Tzara, in 1918, wrote a Dada manifesto considered one of the most important of the Dada writings. Other manifestos followed.
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.
A single issue of Cabaret Voltaire was the first publication to come out of the movement.
After the cabaret closed down, activities moved to a new gallery, and Ball left Europe. 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 has by now 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.
When World War I ended in 1918, most of the Zürich Dadaists returned to their home countries, and some began Dada activities in other cities.
Berlin
The groups in Germany were not as strongly anti-art as other groups.Their activity and art was more political and social, with corrosive
manifestos and propaganda, biting satire, large 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.
IMAGE (R):
Cover of Anna Blume
Dichtungen, 1919
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 journals, and held the First International Dada Fair, 'the greatest project yet conceived by the Berlin Dadaists', in the summer of 1920. As well as the main members of Berlin Dada, Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Höch, Johannes Baader, Huelsenbeck and Heartfield, the exhibition also included work by 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 such as Nehmen Sie Dada Ernst! Es Lohnt Sich (Take dada seriously! It's worth it) 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 made a loss, with only one recorded sale.
The Berlin group saw much in-fighting; Kurt Schwitters and others were excluded from the group. Schwitters, from Hanover, developed his individual type of Dada, which he dubbed Merz.
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
IMAGE (R): Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp). 1921.Photograph by Man Ray. Art Direction by Marcel Duchamp.
Silver print. 5-7/8" x 3"-7/8". Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Like Zürich, New York 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. 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 (found objects) such as a bottle rack, and got involved with the Society of Independent Artists. In 1917 he submitted the now famous Fountain, a urinal signed R. Mutt, to the Society of Independent Artists show only to have the piece rejected. First an object of scorn within the arts community, the Fountain has since become almost canonized by some. The committee presiding over Britain's prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, for example, called it the most influential work of modern art. 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, 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 experienced its last major incarnation (see Neo-Dada for later activity).
Paris
IMAGE (R): Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.The French avant-garde kept abreast of Dada activities in Zürich with regular communications from Tristan Tzara (whose pseudonym means sad in country, a name chosen to protest the treatment of Jews in his native Romania), who exchanged letters, poems, and magazines with Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Max Jacob, 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 Ballet Russes in 1917, it succeeded in creating a scandal but in a different way than Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps had done almost 5 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.)
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.
The Netherlands
In The Netherlands the Dada movement centered mainly around Theo van Doesburg, most well 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 (entitled What is Dada?), Schwitters read his poems, Vilmos Huszàr demonstrated a mechanical dancing doll and Van Doesburg's wife, Nelly, played avant-garde compositions on piano.IMAGE (R): The lithograph Small Dada Evening
from 1922 by Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters.
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 (referring both to the latitude of Tbilisi, Georgia and to the temperature of a high fever) 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.
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 and composers such as Erwin Schulhoff, Hans Heusser and Albert Savinio wrote Dada music, while members of Les Six collaborated with members of the Dada movement and had their works performed at Dada gatherings. The above mentioned Erik Satie dabbled with Dadaist ideas throughout 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.
IMAGE (R): Les Six
Art Techniques Developed
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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 Berlin Dadaists - the "monteurs" (mechanics) - would use 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. -
Assemblage
The assemblages were three-dimensional variations of the collage - the assembly of everyday objects to produce meaningful or meaningless (relative to the war) pieces of work. -
Readymades
Marcel Duchamp began to view the manufactured objects of his manufactured objects 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". 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.
Manifestos
- Dada Manifesto (1916, Hugo Ball) - Wikisource
- Dada Manifesto (1916, Hugo Ball)
by Hugo Ball. Read at the first public by Dada soiree, Zurich, July 14, 1916. - 391: manifestos: dada manifesto by tristan tzara, 23rd march 1918
- backdada manifesto by tristan tzara23rd march 1918.
- Tzara, "Dadaism"
- Excerpts of Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto (1918) and Lecture on Dada (1922).
- DADA, the DADA Manifesto, Tristan Tzara
- DADA, the DADA Manifesto, Tristan Tzara.
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 fled or emigrated to the United States. Some died in death camps under 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 Situationists and culture jamming groups like the Cacophony Society.
At the same time that the Zürich 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 (1974), which includes Tzara, Lenin, and James Joyce as characters.
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 Lennie Lee and Dan 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 collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
By the dawn of World War II, many of the European Dadaists had fled or emigrated to the United States. Some died in death camps under 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 Situationists and culture jamming groups like the Cacophony Society.
At the same time that the Zürich 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 (1974), which includes Tzara, Lenin, and James Joyce as characters.
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 Lennie Lee and Dan 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 collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Quote
Leave everything.Leave Dada.
Leave your wife.
Leave your mistress.
Leave your hopes and fears.
Leave your children in the woods.
Leave the substance for the shadow.
Leave your easy life,
leave what you are given for the future.
Set off on the roads.
~Andre Breton
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AnnaBolica
Jun 13, 2011 @ 4:11 am | delete
- Dada war da, bevor Dada da war
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selfdefenseclique
Jun 8, 2009 @ 1:38 am | delete
- Great!
This is the right lens by which i will know about artistic greeting cards easily. The above information given by you is very interesting and the links are great and helpful. Even you have portrayed artistic knowledge in a really new and dynamic style.
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Further Reading
Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, Paris
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Links
- Dada - Wikipedia
- Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920.
- Periods and Movements: Dada
- Art History:Periods and Movements:Dada
- International Dada Archive - The University of Iowa Libraries
- The International Dada Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries
- The Essential DADA
- The Essential DADA
- Dada: The destruction of Art
- History of Art in MundoArte
- samizDADA
- samizdat meets dadaism
Early Practitioners of Dada
- Guillaume Apollinaire
- Wikipedia
- Jean Arp
- Wikipedia
- Hugo Ball
- Wikipedia
- John Heartfield
- Wikipedia
- Arthur Cravan
- Wikipedia
- Jean Crotti
- Wikipedia
- Theo van Doesburg
- Wikipedia
- Marcel Duchamp
- Wikipedia
- Max Ernst
- Wikipedia
- Elsa von Freytag
- Wikipedia
- George Grosz
- Wikipedia
- Marsden Hartley
- Wikipedia
- Raoul Hausmann
- Wikipedia
- Emmy Hennings
- Wikipedia
- Hannah Höch
- Wikipedia
- Richard Huelsenbeck
- Wikipedia
- Marcel Janco
- Wikipedia
- Clément Pansaers
- Wikipedia
- Francis Picabia
- Wikipedia
- Man Ray
- Wikipedia
- Hans Richter
- Wikipedia
- Kurt Schwitters
- Wikipedia
- Sophie Taeuber-Arp
- Wikipedia
- Tristan Tzara
- Wikipedia
- Beatrice Wood
- Wikipedia
- Ilia Zdanevich
- Wikipedia
Feeds
Quotes
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What we call Dada is a piece of tomfoolery from the void, in which all the lofty questions have become involved . . .
-Hugo Ball
Dada means nothing. We want to change the world with nothing.
-Richard Huelsenbeck
Art is dead. Long live Dada.
-Walter Serner
Freedom: Dada, Dada, Dada, crying open the constricted pains, swallowing the contrasts and all the contradictions, the grotesqueries and the illogicalities of life.
-Tristan Tzara
We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art.
-Hans Arp
Dada . . . wants over and over again movement: it sees peace only in dynamism.
-Raoul Hausmann
I wish to blur the firm boundaries which we self-certain people tend to delineate around all we can achieve.
-Hannah Hoch
Invest your money in Dada! Dada is the only savings bank that pays interest in the hereafter!
-Kurt Schwitters
Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted.
-Max Ernst
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
-Marcel Duchamp
Dada talks with you, it is everything, it includes everything, it belongs to all religions, can be neither victory nor defeat, it lives in space and not in time.
-Francis Picabia
It's not Dada that is nonsense-but the essence of our age that is nonsense.
-The Dadaists
What is generally termed reality is, to be precise, a frothy nothing.
-Hugo Ball
Dada is the sun, Dada is the egg. Dada is the Police of the Police.
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