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Emily Holmes

Flat Art11/3/06

Dada

Dada was a radical art movement that ran from about 1914 to the mid 1920s,

primarily in the North Atlantic. The basic premise of Dada was a reaction to the society

involved with World War I, using “anti-art” to reject the traditional society that

traditional art reflected. Dadaists pushed social and governmental change as a solution to

the violence-supporting WWI society Europeans faced. Dada also deconstructed social

values and conventional concepts about the arts. To go against the traditionally accepted

art world, Dadaists used new art making techniques like collage in place of oil paintings,

as well as conceptual art works called “ready-mades,” like Duchamp’s “Fountain.” The

conscious act of breaking away from convention made Dada a generous predecessor for

Surrealism and any other radical art movements to follow the early 20th

century.

“Dada”

As a word, Dada holds multiple definitions. The Kru tribe calls the tail of a holy

cow Dada, while a certain region in Italy calls the cube and mother Dada. In French,

Dada is a hobby horse. To many languages, Dada is an infant’s first word. “In other

words, it means nothing” (Kristiansen 457). Dadaists chose this word to fit their already

existing artist movement. One story is that an artist picked it at random in a French-to-

German dictionary. The important part of the word, however, is the way it has been

repeated in Dada poetry and art. The works suggest that “Dada” is simply a reminder of

how arbitrary verbal language is.

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Dada Centers

There are six main cities in which Dada existed throughout its 1914-1924

lifetime. Dada began in Zurich and ended in Paris, and locations of Dada artists were

influenced directly by the war; many artists were refugees. Certain artists such as Francis

Picabia and Tristan Tzara seem to have been part of almost all Dada centers, and the

internationality of Dada is evident in its ability to draw artists together across countries.

Zurich

Dada originated in Zurich, Switzerland. “In light of the close connections between

Dada and the First World War it is not surprising that the movement was founded by

German, Rumanian, and French war refugees fleeing to the neutral land of Zurich (Foster

and Kuenzli 5). Having come into close contact with the atrocity of war in their

homelands, “The Dadaists response to the horrors of war was a profound disillusionment

with the patriotism, religion, modern education, and technology that brought about and

justified the war” (Stokes 117). Having left their homelands, these artists were ready to

break away from the past to create completely new art and ideas about what makes art,

both physically and conceptually.

In Zurich, these refugee artists congregated in cafes and clubs. The Cabaret

Voltaire was founded by Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Arp, and Hugo Ball.

Cabaret Voltaire served as a gallery, stage, and club for like-minded, radical intellectuals.

Here, chaotic poetry and music was performed, composed of multi-lingual recitations,

odd noises, and employed performances with costumes often constructed out of

cardboard or other unusual materials. It was here that Dada was born, rejecting the

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conventional notions of art (Geneva 113). Tristan Tzara, a founding member of Dada,

quotes:

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 the bourgeois, demolishing his idea of art, attacking common sense,

public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole

prevailing order” (Foster and Kuenzli 12).

The rein of Zurich as a Dada center ended with the end of WWI in 1918 when refugees

could again travel Europe (Foster and Kuenzli 6). The other Dada centers produced art

throughout the timeline of 1914-1920’s, but the war directly influenced where artists

worked.

New York

New York was a secondary refuge for European pacifists and war resisters. New

York Dadaists are best known for one man’s conceptual works. Marcel Duchamp, a

French refugee, was the figurehead of New York Dada. His experimentation and theories

about art and anti-art led to radically new art forms, such as the “ready-mades” and

“ready-mades assisted” (Kuenzli 69). “Ready-mades” are every day objects “which were

declared to be works of art on the basis of some purely arbitrary declaration by

Duchamp” (Geneva 111). The most famous example is “Fountain,” which is a urinal that

was displayed as art. The act of declaring seemingly random objects as art challenged the

way that we understand art; the focus turned to an idea and intention rather than the

object itself. In place of esthetics and content portrayed traditionally or even pictorially,

Duchamp used “ready-mades” to provoke the art world. Duchamp had not physically

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created the objects, nor had he altered them much, but he claimed authorship and the art

became the ideas behind the “ready-made.” Using art as a conceptual critique was highly

innovative and radical to the early 20th

century art world.

In his painting “Nude Descending a Staircase”, Duchamp broke pictorial tradition

by attempting to portray movement in a static portrait and by challenging the concept of

painting a nude. Traditional nude paintings hold visual appeal for the spectator; to label a

jagged Cubist painting a nude was radically unexpected. Turning a nude into a conceptual

analytical painting challenged the conventional, canonical art muse (193 Preston-

Dunlap). Additionally, for his Dada paintings, Duchamp worked within the canonized

medium of oil painting, which other Dadaists rejected through the use of new mediums

like collage, which will be described later in this essay.

Berlin

In Berlin, Dada’s force was intensely political. Due to the unstable environment

of Germany, whose empire was under attack in the war, Dada reached a more militant

and abrasive value system that directly supported anarchy, or at least a revolution of

government and social structure. The destructive ideals were depicted in collages and

poetry. Collage was an innovative art making technique that juxtaposed mass produced

images, which will be described in detail later in this essay. For now, it is important to

recognize that Germany was in a “state of general misery” during its height of Dada

(Geneva 115). Compared to the wealth and political ease found in Zurich, Berliners

struggled, living on the bare minimum. The Dadaists in Berlin were vehemently political,

pushing anarchy in their disgust with the government systems and what the war had done

to their lives. German nationalist pride was rejected by Dadaists making “propagandada,”

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or art that directly challenged nationalism and military actions (Kuenzli 50). Here art was

used to enforce political motives rather than portray conventionally accepted forms of art,

much less art that supported nationalism. The focus in Berlin was not the esthetic

experience of viewing art, but to push the audience into critical thinking that would,

Dadaists hoped, create a social revolution. This was another way that Dada was

nontraditional and challenged the roles of art. While Duchamp in New York provoked the

art world to reconsider traditional art, Berlin used art in a new, political way that was

dramatically different from the canonized idea of art.

Berlin artists included Hannah Hoch, Johannes Baader, George Grosz, and Raoul

Hausmann. Hausmann and Hoch employed newspaper clippings and advertisements in

collages. “They provocatively juxtaposed and rearranged their material in collages and

photomontages in order to undercut the propaganda spread by the mass media” (Foster

and Kuenzli 6). Hannah Hoch’s photomontages linked women with Marxist revolution

ideals while degrading the current political leaders (Lavin 64). “The New Woman of

Weimar Germany was a sign of modernity and liberation, and in fact conditions for

women in Germany had changed dramatically in the first two decades of the century”

(Lavin 64). Women were empowered by voting and breaking away from traditional

gender roles, and were allowed to work for pay instead of being obliged to only

domesticity. Hoch’s photomontages supported this role and encouraged further liberation.

While other Dadaists were interested in contemporary feminism and worked to support

radical politics, Hoch was the only artist to link feminism with Marxism. She “assigned

women a catalytic role within an opposition posited between the revolutionary Dada

world associated with Marx and the anti-Dada world of the paunchy President Ebert.” In

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her post-Dada years, Hoch used photomontage to work through her own sexuality and

concepts of gender roles, further breaking away from traditional, canonized art (Lavin 64-

7).

There were several women artists in Dada, such as Emmy Hennings, Sophie

Tauber-Arp, and Hannah Hoch. While allowed to participate and be part of the

movement, these women were typically given “subordinate” positions, or not considered

quite as equal to men within Dada (Lavin 64). Dada women often worked with men or

were introduced to Dada through their lovers. Sophie Tauber-Arp often worked in textiles

as a collaboration with Hans Arp’s abstract imagery, but also focused on Dada dance and

making puppets on her own artistic terms. Although their contemporaries may have not

given them the full respect they deserved, the Dada women’s works are certainly given a

notable weight in art history texts and museums today.

Cologne

Collage was an important methodology in Berlin and Cologne, preferred for its

spontaneity and ability to be quickly assembled. Spontaneity was a core value of Dada in

that it was a new way of thinking about art in comparison to conventional painting. Oil

painting was the most conventional art medium of the time. The medium of collage not

only rejected oil painting as a medium, but also challenged the way that art is made

through the idea of spontaneity. Spontaneity followed a Dada theory based loosely on

Freudian principles; the act of oil painting by nature requires time and effort spent

consciously working on imagery, therefore negating the ability to follow subconscious

impulses. Collages were used in direct rejection of canonized art mediums. Spontaneity

was a value encouraged by Dadaists in all their works to fight against the traditional art

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making processes. Collages and other Dada art were “works that disturb or humiliate

traditional concepts of art” (Stokes 121). Rather than use Dada as a purely political

critique, artists like Max Ernst and Hans Arp used Dada for its innovation in non-

traditional art making methods and self-expression during their years spent in Cologne.

An interesting aspect of Ernst’s collage making process was his use of photography.

After assembling a collage, Ernst took a photograph of it and considered the photograph

the work of art rather than the physical collage (Stokes 112-3, 121).

In Cologne, Arp and Ernst worked together although their individual art styles

eventually became distinctive from other Dadaists. Arp worked in collage and sculpture,

dealing with solid colors and biomorphic (curvilinear and organic) shapes that vaguely

suggested human forms, while Ernst thrived in experimenting with unique art practices.

Ernst developed frottage and other innovative techniques during his Dada years that

would impact his more well-known Surrealist career (Stokes 113).

Hanover

Hanover, Germany, held one primary artist related to Dada, Kurt Schwitters.

Schwitters utilized collage with unusual materials, and dealt with collage poetry (Foster

and Kuenzli 8-9). Schwitters ran his movement called “Merz” as parallel to but separate

from Dada. The fact that collages are a nontraditional medium was not enough for

Schwitters. He rejected canonized art mediums even further by incorporating fabrics,

pieces of metal, random paper scraps, and any kind of “rubbish” he could find (Kuenzli

1).

The use of unusual materials in art was another way Dadaists rejected the

traditional art canon. Traditional art usually revolved around oil painting as mentioned,

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and any three-dimensional materials were bronze, marble, or any other normal sculptural

material. Schwitter’s use of nontraditional materials that weren’t necessarily sculptural

and his use of the innovative collage was a full dismissal of canonized art ideas. His art

was totally new both in art making technique and materials used.

Paris

Around the end of the war, artists flocked to Paris. “The year 1920 was the high

point of the Paris Dada movement,” involving a gathering of all European and New York

Dadaists and becoming “almost fashionable” in mainstream society (Kuenzli 76). Paris

was already filled with a rich art scene, especially in poetry, performance, and film;

primary French artists were Andre Breton, Jean Cocteau, and Philippe Soupault. The

international collaborations culminated in a series of mass demonstrations and

performances that ultimately divided and weakened the Dada movement. Various groups

split off to form new groups as Dada died down in the following years. Breton strongly

led the way into Surrealism, while Tzara and others insistently continued Dada

performances (Kuenzli 76-7).

Conclusion

Dada paved the way for any avant-garde art including Surrealism, Neo-Dada, pop

art, and beat culture. Dada artists changed how we view art, made us ask what is art, how

art is made, and what art is made of. Through new methods like “ready-mades” and

collage, Dada broke conventional art standards down, opening the floodgates for future

artists to work outside of such constraints. In his essay “The Duchamp Heritage,” Ben

Vautier states, “A POST DADA SITUATION IS TO TRY TO DO SOMETHING NEW

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AFTER KNOWING THAT BECAUSE OF DADA NOTHING IS NEW/ BECAUSE OF

DADA EVERYTHING, ANYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ANYWHERE, IS ART /

BEFORE DADA ART WAS IN FORM / AFTER DADA, ART IS IN ATTITUDE [sic]”

(Vautier 252).

Annotated Bibliography

Foster, Stephen C. Dada/Dimensions. 1985, UMI Research.

A collection of scholarly essays regarding specific subjects within the Dada

timeline.

Stokes, Charlotte. “Dadamax: Ernst in the Context of Cologne Dada.” pp. 111-

130. An essay describing Ernst’s artistic journey during his Cologne years.

Foster, Stephen C. Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural Politics. 1996, Prentice Hall.

Preston-Dunlap, Valerie. “Notes on Bodies in Dada.” Pp. 171-196.A scholarly essay describing the use of human figures in Dada.

Foster, Stephen C. and Rudolph Kuenzli (ed.) Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt .1979, Coda Press, WI.

A collection of scholarly essays considering the innovations of Dada art makingand literature.

Vautier, Ben. “The Duchamp Heritage.” pp. 250-8.

A photo essay with general statements about Dada’s impact on today’s artists.

Geneva, A. Skira. “The ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ in Zurich.” The History of Modern Painting,volume three: From Picasso to Surrealism. 1950, Editions Albert Skira,Switzerland. An article highlighting the influence of Zurich in Dadaism.

Kristiansen, Donna. “What Is Dada?” Educational Theatre Journal. 1968, Vol 20, No. 3. pp. 457-462.

An article examining Dada’s history and values.

Dada Artifacts:[exhibition at the University of Iowa Museum of Art], Iowa City, Iowa.

March 31 – May 7, 1978.]

Catalogue to an art exhibit containing scholarly and historical articles examining

aspects of Dada artists.

Foster, Stephen C. “Dada: Back to the Drawing Board.” pp. 7-25.

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An article that studies in-depth aspects of Dada’s evolution to supplement the

exhibit.

Kuenzli, Robert. “Dada Centers.” pp. 41-76. An article concerning the main cities

involved in Dada’s growth.

Lavin, Maud. “Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah

Hoch.” New German Critique. No 51. Autumn 1990. pp. 62-68.

An essay highlighting Hannah Hoch’s political messages through her collages.

Naumann, Francis M. New York Dada, 1915-23. 1994, Abrams.

A book examining the development of New York Dada and its artists.

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