DADA

“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”.

Marcel Janco


Dada: the abolition of logic, the dance of the impotents of creation;
Dada: abolition of all the social hierarchies and equations set up by our valets to preserve values;
Dada: every object, all objects, sentiments and obscurities, phantoms and the precise shock of parallel lines, are weapons in the fight;
Dada: abolition of memory;
Dada: abolition of archaeology;
Dada: abolition of the prophets;
Dada: abolition of the future;
Dada: absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the product of spontaneity.

(Tristan Tzara in “Dada Manifesto”, 1918)

Dada was a cultural movement that began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920.

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.

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 norms in art.

Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals. Passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture filled their publications.

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 but more broadly also in society — that led to the war.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art — it was "anti-art" in the sense that Dadaists protested against the contemporary academic and cultured values of 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.

After the cabaret Voltaire closed down, Tristan Tzara began a relentless campaign to spread Dada ideas. 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.

DADA in 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 produced its more theoretically-driven, less political nature.

DADA in New York:

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 centre of radical anti-art activities in the United States.

New York Dada lacked the political drive of European Dada and was instead driven by a sense of irony and humor. New York Dadaists would cheerfully avail themselves of the heavily industrialized United States' bounty of machines and other manufactured objects.

New York section of Dada concentrates on readymade objects, new technology (as with airbrushing) and graphic works reminiscent of mechanical drawing.

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, Zürich, and Paris from 1917 through 1924.

The French avant-garde kept strong ties with Dada activities in Zürich with regular communications from Tristan Tzara.

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.

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.

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 readymade 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 but also various anti-art and political, artistic and cultural movements like Nouveau Realism, New Dada and Conceptual Art.

Main protagonists of the Dada movement:

Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968)
George Grosz (1893 – 1959)
John Heartfield (1891-1968)
Hannah Höch (1889 - 1978)
Francis Picabia (1879 - 1953)
Man Ray (1890 - 1976)
Kurt Schwitters (1887 - 1948)
Tristan Tzara (1896 - 1963)
Hans Arp (1886-1966)
Baroness Elsa von Golyscheff (1874-1927)
Marcel Janco (1886-1966)