What does one picture when the word Dadaism or Dada is said? For no two human beings is the picture that arises identical. One might think more technically of Marcel Duchamp and his controversial Fountain. Another might think of newspaper collages and another might think of random noises and bric-a-bracs thrown about. That is the beauty of Dadaism. Unlike the average art current, you cannot truly picture one singular thing, for Dada is a mixture of it all, a water not yet clear as impressionism or cubism, but yet murky with uncertainty.
But, what is Dada? Nothing can be without definition, no matter how vague.
Dada was a revolutionary art movement that commenced in the early 20th century in Zürich, Switzerland in the Cabaret Voltaire. It was founded by Hugo Ball(check out his ‘Karawane’ performance on YouTube) and Emmy Hennings. This was 1916 and that was when Dada started, only a year later in 1917 spreading to Berlin.
Nobody knows or will ever know what ‘dada’ truly meant. It could mean dada in French, which is rocking-horse, rocking back and forth mindlessly and making the one who rocks happy and exhilarated. It could mean da da, which is a double yes in Romanian, one of the most prominent countries in this movement. Quoting Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist Manifesto, “We see by the papers that the Kru Negroes call the tail of a holy cow Dada. The cube and the mother in a certain district of Italy are called: Dada. A hobby horse, a nurse both in Russian and Rumanian: Dada.” Lastly, and most probably, it could merely be a nonsensical sound which the Dadaists bore great affinity for, as they did for all which was strange and non-materialist.
By definition, Dadaism has always, and in its last modern remnants will remain anti-art. It spurred in an era of war and destruction, becoming a sort of anti-war protest in which anyone of any skill-level could participate, for one did not require great technical knowledge to become a dadaist. Only the right mindset was required, which in that time period was uncommon. Dadaism became unpopular and few partook not because they were physically unable to but mentally.
Dada had four goals:
Be and protest against society and its traditional values, which was the cause of all wretched things on earth, the grandest being WW1.
Be nonsensical and reject art, for true art is made for the mind and not the eye.
Be nihilistic.
Contradict the average bourgeois aesthetic desire.
All could be reduced to one.
Be Nothing.
What reaction does this work draw out from you? Is it repulsion, for this isn’t true art but a man pretending to be an artist? Is it confusion, for you haven’t yet noticed what is wrong? Is it delight, for someone has finally desecrated what is a most revered unoriginal work? Whatever it is, a sentiment must have been incited and thus, the goal was achieved. You probably bear a stronger feeling towards this work than towards the Mona Lisa.
Dada is against the world. The Dadaist Manifesto quite literally stated that “Dada spits on everything. Dada is bitterness laughing at everything that has been accomplished. No more painters, no more writers, no more religions, no more royalists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more police, no more aeroplanes, no more urinary passages.”
`WW1 was slaughter and Dadaists caught unto that. They realised how nonsensical it is that men should be sent to their deaths for nothing. Not only was Dada anti-art, but it was anti-patriotic and anti-nationalist. These people, for I cannot call artists people who deny this title, would gather in cities such as Berlin and Bucharest and perform nonsensical poems dressed in cardboard and mock the high society, the politicians, propaganda, bourgeois and the madness of the society rooted in traditional which had flared and fed the war.
HOW DO YOU MAKE A DADA POEM? - By Tristan Tzara
1. Take a newspaper.
2. Take some scissors.
3. Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
4. Cut out the article.
5. Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and
put them all in a bag.
6. Shake gently.
7. Next take out each cutting one after the other.
8.Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
9. The poem will resemble you.
10. And there you are--an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
FAMOUS DADA PERSONALITIES
The Dadaist is not an artist, but an entity or a personality. By taking part in Dada, they have renounced their artistic titles and their titles in society and have become condemners of the ancien regime of daily life. Here, I have collected five of the most prominent figures of the ‘current’.
HANNAH HÖCH
Hannah Höch, 1889-1978, was a German Dada figure. She is best known for her collages and Weimar-era work when she pioneered photomontage. She is the only woman associated with the BERLIN dada ensemble. She often made provocative photomontages to explore gender/ethnic differences and political themes in the Weimar Era. From 1912 to 1920 she studied at the Berlin-Charlottenburg School of Applied Arts. In 1915, she became romantically involved with artist Raoul Hausmann, who introduced her to the Berlin DADA movement. She soon took up a job designing patterns, which gave her a hefty supply of images and text that she could use for collages. Höch and the Dadaists were the first to use photographs as the dominant medium, which they often employed to create montages and collages reflecting the chaos and violence of the war and post-war era. Dada was anti-art, so it is wrong to call it art, as it was repulsed by and criticized the Expressionists. Although shunned by the other male members of the dadaist group, Hoch worked most of her life to criticise gender norms through her work and become the independent, new woman; hair cut short, financially emancipated, and liberated. Hannah Hoch was an icon and a pioneer of photomontage, Dadaism, and the women’s rights movement.
MARCEL DUCHAMP
Marcel Duchamp, 1887-1968, was a French Dada figure. He is known for his controversial works, which were oftentimes rough readymades such as ‘Fountain’(1917), ‘Bicycle Wheel’(1913) and ‘L.H.O.O.Q’(1919). Originally, Duchamp was a painter and a sculptor in the traditional sense, studying fauvism, cubism and impressionism. However, later in his ‘artistic’ career, he turned to Dadaism and the unconventional. Duchamp, besides harbouring Dadaist feelings, broke the norms of the masculine in one other way. His guilty pleasure was dressing up as Rrose Sélavy(c’est la vie).
Duchamp reached the peak of his controversy with his 1917 work “Fountain”. The ‘Fountain’ is a pissoir, a readymade object. Its story goes that when the piece was first displayed it was relentlessly mocked by the public and art critics. They were upset that not only was it terribly insensitive, but the pissoir had not been crafted by Duchamp either. Duchamp took great delight in this reception; he had succeeded in challenging the meaning of art. He boldly returned and signed it “R.Mutt 1917.” Now that it was signed by an artist, it was equal to all art.
“Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an article of ordinary life and created a new thought for that object.”
-Marcel Duchamp on the reaction to the “Fountain”.
HUGO BALL
Hugo Ball, 1886-1927, was a German poet and writer, though that all can be swept aside in favour of his ultimate title; the Father of Dadaism. After a long apprenticeship into a leather factory after an untimely mental breakdown, Ball went on to study German literature, philosophy and history in Munich and Heidelberg. He devoted himself to a study of the untraditional and the anarchical. Then, he commenced a short-lived acting career. During those times he desired that one day he should found a Gesamtkunstwerk- a morphing of all art forms culminating in revolution and social transformation. His dream eventually came to fruition in the form of the ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ in 1916. Just a year prior he had met Emmy Hennings(whom he would go on to marry five years later in 1920) with whom had come to the neutral country of Switzerland to escape the brutalities of the war the two would go on to mock. Ball advocated for the destruction of rational language as we know it. He desired to discover and form a language of novelty, unspoiled by convention and traditionalism. Ball was the creator of a new form of expression, ‘sound poetry’, strings of traditionally nonsensical sounds chanted at the Cabaret. After a fall-out with Tristan Tzara over the philosophy of Dada in opening up the Galerie Dada, Ball quit the Dadaist ensemble, never to return.
EMMY HENNINGS
Emmy Hennings, 1885-1948, was a German performer and the Mother of Dadaism. In 1915, a year after the outbreak of war, Hennings and her Daughter emigrated to the neutral, international Zürich. They were torn by the poverty which was eating away at them. They had to sell all that they possessed down to the clothes they bore. They had no steady home and jobs were sparse. Hennings was adept for anonymity, as hiding behind her mask was a woman who had struggled under the burden of morphine addiction, prostitution and document forging. In contrast to Ball, who had religious trauma which hung heavy about him, Hennings was Catholically mystical and spiritual. This spirituality influenced all of her performances and made her deeply connected with the world around her, a rare thing for a Dadaist. Many called her naive, a child-like figure despite her politically anarchist stance and job as a prostitute. She connected with her beloved Ball through their own secret language out of the conventions of Earthly society. On Spielgasse 1, 5 February 1916, the Cabaret Voltaire was founded, and with it, Dadaism. Dada was all for liberation through the nonsensical and absurd, it was the base for all that came to be, including pop art, surrealism, punk and the avant-garde. Many artists joined the Cabaret Voltaire, including women(although Hennings was the only founding woman), yet Hennings remained its essence and soul. She and Ball married in 1920 and led a happy life until his passing in 1927.
TRISTAN TZARA
Tristan Tzara, born Samuel Rosenstock, was born in 1896 in Moinesti, Bacau, and died in 1963 in Paris. His family was part of the 800,000 thousand Jewish Romanians who were denied citizenship. He was a poet, essayist and one of the most avid Dadaists that ever partook in the current. In his youth he was a good student who attended some of the most prestigious Romanian lycées, Sfantul Sava and Mihai-Viteazul. He was friends with Marcel Iancu/Janco, another Dadaist personnage(combined yet with cubism/surrealism). At 19, he took up the name he became famous under; Tristan Tzara. His explanation? Tristan because of Tristan and Isolde and Tzara because it means ‘country’ in Romanian. Only later would he come to renounce his love for the classics and his nation in pursuit of the Dadaist end goal. In 1915, Tzara reached Zürich, where he met the other Dadaists mentioned above. Absurdist Eugene Ionesco would come to call him a ‘Kafka plus grotesque’.
A direct quote from Tzara says : « Chaque soir, on chante, on récite - le peuple - l'art nouveau le plus grand au peuple - […] balalaïka, soirée russe, soirée française - des personnages édition unique apparaissent récitent ou se suicident, va et vient, la joie du peuple, cris. »
(Every night, we sing, we recite - the people- the greatest new art[current] of the people [...] the balalaika, Russian evenings, the French evenings, the unique characters that come, recite or commit suicide, they come and go, the merriment of the people, screams.)
Many say that Tzara’s affinity for the classical contrasted too openly with the Dadaists and thus they say (many including fellow Dada member, Huelsenbeck) that he was never fully devout to their current.
THE DEATH OF DADA
Dada was ephemeral. It was never meant to stand in its original form, though its philosophy retains and will retain its puissance for centuries to come. With the coming of WWII and Hitler’s rise, Dadaism succumbed to more traditionally ‘artistic’ currents and rival factions such as Andre Breton’s Surrealism or other divisions of Modernism. Hitler tried to dissolve and dismember all radical and more abstract ‘art’, destroying Dadaism in its old form once and for all. Yet, Dadaism will never be destroyed. It will forever be carried on in such desperate times, even if this is only in spirit.
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