History of the Dada
By: Chris Flood
The Dada art movement, a brief trend in the
tumultuous history of 20th century, was and still
is a paradox. It was a movement that proclaimed
itself to not be a movement. Despite being "antiart," it produced visual art, literature and
performance art that that remains influential
today. Situated solidly within the era of modern
art and sharing the Modernist attitude of
shunning all that had come before it, Dada also
serves as an inspiration to Postmodernism and
contemporary art. More of a phase in artistic
thought than purely an art movement, Dada is
best understood in the context of the historical
trends of modern art within which it arose.
Modern Art Before Dada: The underlying
premise of modern art was a rejection of
previous, traditional art, which had sought to
represent ideas, images and allegories visually.
Modern art turned instead to an increasingly
abstract form in which the image referred only to
itself. In the early 20th century, Futurism
seemed to take this concept to an extreme,
calling upon youthful vigor, technology and
abstraction as artistic inspirations. Although
Marcel Duchamp, who frequently poked fun at
science and technology, was not a part of the
Futurist movement, his "Nude Descending a
Staircase" (1912) exemplified Futurism as it
attempted to depict human motion through a
dynamic and mechanical fracturing of form.
Dada's Brief History: Like Futurism and other
modern art movements, Dada both rejected
traditional art and took its own ideology to an
extreme. However, instead of promoting any
particular ethos, Dada was decidedly against
having any ethos whatsoever. Borne of the
frustrations of artists who had fled to Zurich and
New York during World War I, Dada was their
answer to the horrors of the bloodiest conflict the
world had ever witnessed. Viewing the war as a
Art Movement
result of "reason," "objectivity" and other cultural
norms, these artists called upon themselves and
others to strike back with chaos, whimsy and
anarchy through a multitude of manifestos,
demonstrations and performances. Duchamp
also exemplifies this movement with "Fountain,"
a urinal with "R MUTT" inscribed on it. Rejected
by the Society of Independent Artists in 1917 for
not being art, Duchamp's piece was, like Dada,
a bold attempt to question and undermine the
previous mores of the art world.
Into Paris and Surrealism: By the mid 1920s,
Dada's revolutionaries had congregated in Paris,
where the movement was already in its final
stages of inevitable self-destruction. The hardline contingent most dedicated to Dada's overall
nihilistic tendencies spread its written manifestos
with fervor but eventually died out. A second
branch morphed into the Surrealist movement,
which, like Dada, heralded the seeming chaos of
chance as an expression of inner, unconscious
truth. While Surrealism seemed to depart from
the visual abstraction characteristic of much
modern art, it still adhered to the concept that a
single truth existed, only now it was to be
unlocked through the exploration of dreams and
the unconscious rather than by logic and reason.
Postmodern After-Effects of Dada: In
"Unacknowledged Roots and Blatant Imitation,"
David Locher scathingly critiques
Postmodernism for "stealing" its philosophical
foundations from Dada. While Locher is correct
in connecting some of the means of art between
the two movements, such as utilizing images or
items from everyday life, the diversity of
intentions behind Postmodern art defies any
fundamental connection to the pure anti-art
mentality of Dada. Where Postmodernism
willingly uses historical motifs to create eclectic
art, Dada eschewed all prior forms of art and
viewed itself as inherently anti-art. Postmodern
art gives voice to previously excluded ethnicities
and experiences, but Dada sought simply to
denounce and destroy the cultural norms that
defined contemporary aesthetics, and many of
its most renowned practitioners remained as
culturally conservative as their forbears.
Dadaism
(1916-1924)
Dadaism or Dada is a post-World War I
cultural movement in visual art as well as
literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic
design. The movement was, among other
things, a protest against the barbarism of the
War and what Dadaists believed was an
oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and
everyday society; its works were characterized
by a deliberate irrationality and the rejection of
the prevailing standards of art. It influenced later
movements including Surrealism.
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 aesthetics, Dada ignored
them. If art is to have at least an implicit or latent
message, Dada strives to have no meaning-interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on
the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities,
Dada offends. Perhaps it is then ironic that Dada
is an influential movement in Modern art. Dada
became a commentary on art and the world,
thus becoming art itself.
The artists of the Dada movement had
become disillusioned by art, art history and
history in general. Many of them were veterans
of World War I and had grown cynical of
humanity after seeing what men were capable of
doing to each other on the battlefields of Europe.
Thus they became attracted to a nihilistic view of
the world (they thought that nothing mankind
had achieved was worthwhile, not even art), and
created art in which chance and randomness
formed the basis of creation. The basis of Dada
is nonsense. With the order of the world
destroyed by World War I, Dada was a way to
express the confusion that was felt by many
people as their world was turned upside down.
The Early Days of the Dada
Sometimes it takes an explosion to show people what
they could be missing
Reacting against a world gone mad, torn apart by
both war and fascism, the Dada anti-art movement had a
strong negative and destructive element. Dada writers and
artists were concerned with shock, protest, and nonsense.
They bitterly rebelled against the horrors of the world war,
the decadence of European society, the shallowness of blind
faith in technological progress, and the inadequacy of
religion and conventional moral codes in a continent in
upheaval. Rejecting all tradition, they sought complete
artistic freedom.
The Dada developed as a literary movement after the poet
Hugo Ball (1886-1927) opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich,
Switzerland; a gathering place for independent young poets,
painters, and musicians. Dada's guiding spirit was a young
Hungarian poet, Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), who edited the
periodical DADA beginning in July 1917. Tzara joined Ball,
Jean Arp (aka Hans Arp) (1887-1966), and Richard
Huelsenbeck (1892-1974) in exploring sound poetry,
nonsense poetry, and chance poetry.
Tzara's steady outpouring of Dada manifestos solidified the
anti-art movement, creating a perfect definition of chaos.
Rather than define their own style, the actions of the Dada
sought to tear down the definition of art. Their "style" was
characterized by chance placement, artistic anarachy, and
absurd titles. A famous story points to the members throwing
open a French-German dictionary and pointing to a random
word on the page, hence even the name "dada" was born of
chance (Dada could mean "yes yes," "father," or "rocking
horse" depending on who was asked)
Marcel Duchamp
The voice of the Dada
The French painter Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) joined the
Dada movement and became its most prominent visual
artist. Earlier, he had analyzed his subjects as geometric
planes under the influence of Cubism. His painting Nude
Descending a Staircase pushed the limits of the static
image's ability to record and express motion. To Duchamp,
art and life were processes of random chance and willful
choice, and he therefore became the movement's most
outspoken orator.
Dada as an Art Form
From the chaos comes a cohesive style
Artistic acts became matters of individual decision
and selection. This philosophy of absolute freedom allowed
Duchamp to "create" readymade sculpture, such as a bicycle
wheel mounted on a wooden stool, and exhibit "found
objects" such as old urinals in galleries. In essence, the
works of the Dada pressed the public to consider how they
felt about the definition of art by showing them how far that
definition could be stretched and broken. Some got the joke
while others were outraged, for example when Duchamp
painted a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. This
act was not an attack upon the Mona Lisa itself. Rather, it
was an assault upon tradition and against a public who had
lost the humanistic spirit of the Renaissance.
As chaos often does, the Dada quickly spread. Despite the
claim that they were not creating art but were mocking and
defaming a society that had become insane, several
Dadaists produced meaningful visual art that has contributed
to graphic design. Dada artists Raoul Hausmann (1886-1977)
and Hannah Hoch (1889-1978) claim to have invented the art
of "photo montage," a technique of manipulating found
photographic images to create jarring juxtapositions and
chance associations.
Kurt Schwitters and The Merz
Dada hits the big time
Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) of Hanover, Germany,
created a nonpolitical offshoot of Dada that he named
"Merz," coined from the word kommerz ("commerce") in one
of his collages. Beginning as a one-man art movement in
1919, his Merz pictures were collage compositions using
printed ephemera, rubbish, and found materials to compose
color against color, form against form, and texture against
texture. His complex designs combined Dada's element of
nonsense and chance with strong design properties. When
he tried to join the Dada movement as "an artist who nails
his pictures together," he was refused membership for being
too bourgeois.
Schwitters wrote and designed poetry that played sense
against nonsense. In the early 1920s, Constructivism
became an added influence in Schwitters's work after he
made contact with El Lissitzky (1890-1941) and Theo van
Doesburg (1883-1931), who invited Schwitters to Holland to
promote Dada. Schwitters and van Doesburg collaborated
on a book design with typographic forms as the characters.
From 1923 until 1932, Schwitters published twenty-four
issues of the periodical Merz, whose eleventh issue was
devoted to advertising typography. During this time
Schwitters ran a successful graphic design studio with
Pelikan - manufacturer of office equipment and supplies - as
a major client, and the city of Hanover employed him as
typography consultant for several years. When the German
political situation deteriorated in the 1930s, Schwitters spent
increasing time in Norway and moved to Oslo in 1937. After
Germany invaded Norway in 1940, he fled to the British
Isles, where he spent his last years.
The Berlin Dadaists
Taking an Axe to the Axis
In contrast to the artistic and Constructivist interests
of Kurt Schwitters, the Berlin Dadaists John Heartfield (aka
Helmut Herzfelde) (1891-1968), Wieland Herzfelde (1896 1988), and George Grosz (1893-1959) held vigorous
revolutionary political beliefs and oriented many of their
artistic activities toward visual communications to raise
public consciousness and promote social change. A German
WWI veteran and founding member of the Berlin Dada group
in 1919, Heartfield used the harsh disjunction of
photomontage as a potent propaganda weapon and
innovated in the preparation of mechanical art for offset
printing. The Weimar Republic and the growing Nazi party
were his targets in posters, books, magazines, political
illustrations, and cartoons.
Heartfield did not take photographs or retouch images but
worked directly with glossy prints acquired from magazines
and newspapers. Occasionally, he commissioned a needed
image from a photographer because photography was still
considered a poor man's art form, and Heartfield's images
met with immediate identification and comprehension by the
working class.
After the stoßtruppen occupied his apartment-studio in 1933,
Heartfield fled to Prague, where he continued his graphic
propaganda and mailed postcard versions of his graphics to
Nazi leaders. Learning that he was on a Nazi watch list in
1938, he fled to London where he stayed until settling in
Leipzig, East Germany, in 1950. There, he worked mainly as
a designer for theater sets and posters.
Before his death in 1968, he produced photomontages
protesting the Vietnam War and calling for world peace.
Unfortunately Still Timely is the title given to retrospectives of
his graphic art.
Heartfield's younger brother, Wieland Herzfelde, was a poet,
critic, and publisher who edited the journal Neue Jugend,
which was designed by Heartfield. After being jailed in 1914
for distributing communist literature, Wieland started the
Malik Verlag publishing house, an important avant-garde
publisher of Dada, left-wing political propaganda, and
advanced literature.
The painter and graphic artist George Grosz was closely
associated with the Herzfelde brothers. His biting pen
attacked a corrupt society with satire and caricature. He
advocated a classless society, and his drawings project an
angry intensity of deep political convictions in what he
perceived to be a decadent, degenerate milieu.
End of the Dada
The flame that burns brightest…
Having inherited Marinetti's rhetoric and assault upon
all artistic and social traditions, Dada was a major liberating
movement that continues to inspire innovation and rebellion.
Dada was born in protest against war, and its destructive
and exhibitionist activities became more absurd and extreme
after the Great War ended.
In 1921 and 1922, controversy and disagreement broke out
among its members, and the movement split into factions.
French writer Andre Breton (1896-1966), who was
associating with the Dadaists, emerged as a new leader who
believed that Dada had lost its relevance and that new
directions were necessary. Having pushed its negative
activities to the limit, lacking a unified leadership, and with its
members facing the new ideas that eventually led to
Surrealism, Dada floundered and ceased to exist as a
cohesive movement by the end of 1922.
Dada's rejection of art and tradition enabled it to enrich the
visual vocabulary started by Futurism. Through a synthesis
of spontaneous chance actions with planned decisions,
Dadaists further rid typographic design of its traditional
precepts by continuing Cubism's concept of letters as visual
shapes rather than simple phonetic symbols.