Dada (/ˈdɑːdɑː/) or Dadaism
- Came to fruition in Germany specifically Zürich and Berlin within a few years spread out to New York, Europe and Asia
- The roots of Dada lie in pre-war avant-garde
- Founded by Hugo Ball (1916)
- The Dada Manifesto is a short text written by Hugo Ball detailing the ideals underlying the Dadaist movement. It was presented at Zur Waag guildhall in Zürich at the first public Dada gathering on July 14, 1916.The choice of this date, Bastille Day, was important to Ball as it carried significance as a protest to World War
- On March 23, 1918, Tzara wrote and published another, longer, Manifeste Dada 1918.This manifesto was angrier and more nonsensical in tone
- Anti War / Anti establishment/ Anti art (Anti-art is a loosely used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general- can be seen pre WW1 (1914) in Marcel Duchamp’s found objects like ‘fountain’. Term Later to be used by conceptual artists in 1960
- Within the movement Artists used a wide variety of forms to protest the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalism and modern war
Grand opening of the first Dada exhibition: International Dada Fair, Berlin, 5 June 1920. The central figure hanging from the ceiling is an effigy of a German officer with a pig’s head
The art of the movement began primarily as performance[9] art, but eventually spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture.
No shared style but commonly influence from ‘machine aesthetic’
The machine aesthetic describe works that either draw the inspiration from industrialization with its mechanized mass production or use elements resembling structures of complex machines (ships, planes, etc.)
Machine aesthetic is neither an art style, nor an art movement in itself, but a common trait shared by multiple movements of the first three decades of the 20th century (so called First Machine Age) – e.g the earlier movement *Italian futurism*
The work of French poets, Italian Futurists, and German Expressionists would influence Dada’s rejection of the correlation between words and meaning
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,
Downfall: Dadaism gripped audiences into the 1920s, but the movement as a whole was destined to crumble. Some, like Man Ray, found their inclinations moving into the subconscious realm of Surrealism; others found the pressures on the modern European artist too weighty to bear. The rise to power of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s dealt a powerful blow to the modern art world
————————-
Links to modernism:
Rebellion-absurdity-Experimentation
Dadaism interest me as I enjoy the way it protests rebells against and mocks the absurdity of War, Capitalism and its leaders
Society – controlled by media to certain extent and at the time people being pumped with War propaganda / facism /
Leaders of country complicit in war crimes. People are poor not looked after by government which in the next breath is asking young people to die for their country
Workers exploited – industrial revolution
War-
Leave a Reply