DADA

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.


"Dada does not mean anything.. We read in the papers that the Negroes of the Kroo race call the tail of the sacred cow: dada. A cube, and a mother, in certain regions of Italy, are called: Dada. The word for a hobby-horse, a children's nurse, a double affirmative in Russian and Rumanian, is also: Dada." 
- Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifestov


Artist ==> Jean Arp/ Hans Arp
Arp was a founding member of the Dada movement in Zürich in 1916. 

Arp was born in Strasbourg. The son of a French mother and a German father, he was born during the period following the Franco-Prussian War when the area was known as Alsace-Lorraine (Elsass-Lothringen in German) after it had been returned to Germany by France. Following the return of Alsace to France at the end of World War I, French law determined that his name become Jean.


Library Source: "The Artwork- Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and DADA in Paris" /George Baker


"The only word that is not ephemeral is the word death...To death, to death, to death. The only thing that doesn't die is money, it just leaves on trips. - Francis Picabia, Manifeste Cannibale Dada, 1920" (p95)

(Tableu Dada I/Picabia) " Instead of a painting, thought Picabia, he would present a living creature, a live monkey, as a work of art, escaping thereby the paralysis of representation, the inert lifelessness of the aesthetic for the immediacy and movement of life itself. No monkeys, however, presented themselves for the task. In the end, Picabia was forced to go to the toy store instead of the pet store, where he purchased a stuffed monkey, a monkey that soon found itself attached to the center of an otherwise blank canvas. Words were scrawled around this monkey. "Natures mortes", Picabia inscribed it, reversing his original title. "Still lifes", the painting declaimed, and immediately explained itself, with words running like obscenities across the expanse of a schoolboy's desk: Portrait of Cézanne, Portrait of Rembrandt, Portrait of Renoir." Deadbeats" (p99)


"It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form."- Georges Bataille (p199)