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Dada

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Culture and Diversity

   Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in neutral Zürich,
   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

   The movement was a protest against the barbarism of World War I, the
   bourgeois interests that Dada adherents believed inspired the war, and
   what they believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art
   and everyday society. Dada was an international movement, and it is
   difficult to classify artists as being from any one particular country,
   as they were constantly moving from one place to another.

   Dada thought that reason and logic had led people into the horrors of
   war, so the only route to salvation was to reject logic and embrace
   anarchy and irrationality. However, this could also be thought of as
   the logical side of anarchy and rejection of values and order; it is
   not irrational to embrace the systematic destruction of values, if one
   thinks them to be flawed.

   According to its proponents, Dada was not art — it was " anti-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 aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art were to have
   at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning
   — interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is
   to appeal to sensibilities, Dada is to offend. Ironically, Dada became
   an influential movement in modern art, a commentary on order and the
   carnage Dadaists believed it wreaked. Through their rejection of
   traditional culture and aesthetics they hoped to destroy them.

   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."

Ways Dadaism has been described

     * "DADAIST DISGUST - Every product of disgust that is capable of
       becoming a negation of the family is dada; DADA; acquaintance with
       all the means hitherto rejected by the sexual prudishness of easy
       compromise and good manners: DADA; abolition of logic, dance of
       those who are incapable of creation: DADA; every hierarchy and
       social equation established for values by our valets: DADA; every
       object, all objects, feelings and obscurities, every apparition and
       the precise shock of parallel lines, are means for the battle of:
       DADA; the abolition of memory: DADA; the abolition of archaeology:
       DADA the abolition of prophets: DADA; the abolition of the future:
       DADA; the absolute and indiscutable belief in every god that is an
       immediate product of spontaneity: DADA; the elegant and
       unprejudiced leap from on harmony to another sphere; the trajectory
       of a word, a cry, thrown into the air like an acoustic disc; to
       respect all individualities in their folly of the moment, whether
       serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, decided or enthusiastic;
       to strip one's church of every useless and unwieldy accessory; to
       spew out like a luminous cascade any offensive or loving thought,
       or to cherish it - with the lively satisfaction that it's all
       precisely the same thing - with the same intensity in the bush,
       which is free of insects for the blue-blooded, and gilded with the
       bodies of archangels, with one's soul. Liberty: DADA DADA DADA; -
       the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and all
       contradictions, freaks and irrelevancies: LIFE. ( Tristan Tzara in
       the 1918 Dada manifesto.)
     * "Dada scoffs at capital letters, atrociously." ( Marsden Hartley.)

History

Zürich

   In 1916, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Hans 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.

   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 it's 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.

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 yeah, right). 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.

   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.

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.

   In February 1918, Richard 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 International
   Dada Fair in 1920.

   The Berlin group saw much in-fighting; Kurt Schwitters and others were
   excluded from the group. Schwitters moved to Hanover where he 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 ( Jedermann sein eigner Fussball), and Dada
   Almanach.

Cologne

   In Cologne (Köln), Max Ernst, Johannes Theodor Baargeld and Arp
   launched a controversial Dada exhibition in 1920 which focused on
   nonsense and anti-bourgeois sentiments.

New York

   Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.
   Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.

   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 centre 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 of
   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

   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.

   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.

   Van Doesburg wrote Dada poetry himself in De Stijl, although under a
   pseudonym, I.K. Bonset, which was only revealed after his tragic 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.

   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.

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 Situationists.

   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. He was unappreciative of the artistic
   revolutionary activity near him. 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.

Modern usage of the word Dada

   The satirical Church of the SubGenius pays homage to Dada in its use of
   the term " Bulldada", which has passed into common usage as a
   description for concepts and items that are unintentionally ironic.

   The Brotherhood of Dada is a fictional gang in DC comics. They are
   devoted to all things absurd and bizarre.

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