Dadaism

Matinée Dadá poster; January 1923.

Dadaism was a cultural and artistic movement created to oppose the arts, which emerged in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. It was proposed by Hugo Ball, writer of the first Dadaist texts; Later, the Romanian Tristan Tzara joined, who would become the emblem of Dadaism. A fundamental characteristic of Dadaism is the opposition to the concept of reason established by positivism. Dadaism was characterized by rebelling against literary conventions, and especially artistic ones, by mocking the bourgeois artist and his art.

His activity extends to a wide variety of artistic manifestations, from poetry to sculpture, through painting or music.

Poetry was illogical and difficult to understand, since it was based on a succession of words or sounds that often made no sense. And he took an attitude of mockery and humor against bourgeois society. And in painting he followed the same path, they were collages made with waste objects and garbage.

For the members of Dadaism, this was a modus vivendi that made the other present through Dadaist gestures and acts: actions that they intended to provoke through the expression of Dadaist negation. By questioning and challenging the literary and artistic canon, Dadaism creates a kind of modern anti-art, which is why it is an open provocation to the established order.

Introduction

Dadaism was a cultural movement that emerged first in Europe and later in the United States. It was created at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich (Switzerland) between 1916 and 1922 with Hugo Ball as founder, when great artists of different nationalities found themselves as refugees in that city during the First World War. Later it was adopted by Tristan Tzara, who would become the most representative figure of Dada. towards the apathy and social disinterest characteristic of the artists of the interwar period.

Relevant artists of this movement were Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco from Romania, the French Jean Arp, Juliette Roche, Marcel Duchamp and Suzanne Duchamp, the Germans Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hannah Höch, Hans Richter, Richard Huelsenbeck and the Swiss Sophie Taeuber-Arp. After several informal meetings in different cafes, they began to shape the idea of creating an international cabaret. The first celebration took place on February 5, 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, and consisted of a variety show with French and German songs, Russian music, black music, and art exhibitions. That same year a pamphlet entitled Cabaret Voltaire was published containing contributions by Guillaume Apollinaire, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Vasili Kandinski; on the cover was a drawing by Jean Arp. In 1917 the Dada Gallery was inaugurated.

The expansion of the Dadaist message was intense, broad and had repercussions in all artistic fields. In Germany he found followers among the intellectuals and artists who supported the Spartacus movement. In France he won the sympathies of writers like Breton, Louis Aragon, the Italian poet Ungaretti.

Dadaism is usually a succession of words, letters and sounds that is difficult to find logic. It is distinguished by the inclination towards the doubtful, death, the fanciful, and by constant denial. Thus, he seeks to renew the expression through the use of unusual materials or handling planes of thoughts that were previously unmixable, which leads to a general tone of rebellion or destruction. Dadaism is also characterized by provocative gestures and demonstrations in which the artists tried to destroy all conventions regarding art, thus creating an anti-art. The Dada movement is an anti-art, anti-literary and anti-poetic movement because it questions the existence of art, literature and poetry. In fact, by definition, it questions Dadaism itself.

Dadaism is presented as a total ideology, as a way of life and as an absolute rejection of any previous tradition or scheme. Basically it is an anti-humanism, understanding by humanism all the previous tradition, both philosophical and artistic or literary.^{[citation needed]} Not by chance in one of his first publications there was written as a header the following phrase from Descartes: "I don't even want to know if there was another man before me."

Dadaism manifests itself against eternal beauty, against the eternity of principles, against the laws of logic, against the immobility of thought, against the purity of abstract concepts and against the universal in general. Instead, he advocates the unbridled freedom of the individual, spontaneity, the immediate, current and random, the chronicle against timelessness, contradiction, the "not" where others say "yes" and the "yes" where others say "no"; defends chaos against order and imperfection against perfection. Therefore, in its negative rigor, it is also against modernism, and the other vanguards: expressionism, cubism, futurism and abstractionism, accusing them, ultimately, of being substitutes for what has been destroyed or is about to be destroyed. be. Dadaist aesthetics denies reason, meaning, the construction of the conscious. Its expressive forms are the gesture, the scandal, the provocation. For Dadaism, poetry is in action and the borders between art and life must be abolished.

The permanent contribution of Dadaism to modern art is the continuous questioning of what is art or what is poetry; the awareness that everything is a convention that can be questioned and that, therefore, there are no fixed and eternal rules that historically legitimize the artistic. Much of what is provocative in contemporary art (such as the mixture of genres and materials typical of collage) comes from Dadaism.

In order to express the rejection of all the social and aesthetic values of the moment, and all kinds of codification, the Dadaists frequently resorted to the use of deliberately incomprehensible and challenging artistic and literary methods, which relied on the absurd and irrational. His theatrical performances and his manifestos sought to shock or perplex the public with the aim of making them reconsider established aesthetic values, following the principle of épater le bourgeois. To do this, they used new materials, such as waste found on the street, and new methods, such as the inclusion of chance to determine the elements of the works. The German painter and writer Kurt Schwitters stood out for his collages made with waste paper and other similar materials. French artist Marcel Duchamp displayed commonplace commercial products—a bottle dryer and a urinal—as works of art, which he called ready-mades.

In poetry, Dadaism opens the field for the arrival of surrealism and helps to create a free and limitless poetic language. To understand what dadaist aesthetics is in the world of poetry, there is nothing better than picking up the advice that Tzara proposes for writing a dadaist poem. The text was published in the collection Seven Dada manifestos, «Dada manifesto on weak love and bitter love», VIII (1924).

Take a newspaper

Get some scissors
Choose an article from the length that counts to give your poem
Retract the article
Straight away carefully each of the words that form the article and put them in a bag
Hold it gently
Now get each cut out one after another
Copie thoroughly
in the order in which they came out of the bag
The poem will look like you

And you are an infinitely original writer and a hechizing sensibility, though incomprehensible of the vulgo.

Dadaism left as a legacy the magazines and the manifesto, which are the best proof of its proposals. But, by definition, there is no such thing as a Dada work. The characteristic of Dadaism were the Dada evenings held in cabarets or art galleries where photomontages were mixed with isolated phrases, words, banners, spontaneous recitals and a continuous provocative ceremonial.

Although the Dadaists used revolutionary techniques, their anti-norm ideas were based on a deep belief, derived from the Romantic tradition, in the intrinsic goodness of humanity when uncorrupted by society.

Origin of the name "dada"

Although the discussion about the origin and meaning of the word dada is extensive, there is no legitimate knowledge about what it means. The explanations of the Dadaists themselves vary so much that it is impossible to single out one and call it correct. Hans Arp, a member of the group in 1921, declares the following in a magazine of the movement:

He stated that Tristan Tzara found the word "Dadá" on February 8, 1916 at 6 p.m. [...] I am convinced that this word is of no importance and that only imbeciles can be interested in data. What we were interested in is the Dadaist spirit, and we were all Dadaists before the existence of Dadaism.

Hans Arp

It is said^{[citation needed]} that Tristan Tzara took a dictionary, put it on top of his desk and wanting to look up a word he opened the dictionary to a page and searched for the rarest and unknown word, and found dadà, which means 'war horse' in French.

Tzara himself offered various explanations for the word, all pointing to its nonsense and yet confusing. Among these we find, in the Dadaist Manifesto of 1918, the following:

Dada means nothing. If someone considers it useless, if someone does not want to waste their time with a word that means nothing [...] From the newspapers we know that black kru call Dad. to the brim of the sacred cow. The cube and mother in some region of Italy receive the name of Dad.. A battle horse in French, the nodriza, the double affirmation in Russian and Romanian: Dad..

Tristan Tzara

Everything indicates that the Dadaists wanted to show their public that the word dada, the name of their movement, was unimportant; what mattered was the art, the creation that arose from their group.

Also the word Dada is attributed to the first words of a baby that mean nothing.

Dadaism in New York (1913-1920)

Marcel Duchamp, Source, 1917. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.

Duchamp, Picabia, Mina Loy, Jean Crotti, as European refugees, together with the Americans Man Ray, Beatrice Wood, Morton Schamberg, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Florine Stettheimer give life to New York Dadaism.

Duchamp arrived from Paris to New York with a gift from the French to the Americans (particularly to the collector Walter Arensberg) consisting of a crystal ball with the air of Paris. It was the beginning of the ready-mades (a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, a bottle rack, a urinal, etc.), objects taken from reality and placed in the sphere of art by the simple action and will of the artist. The aesthetic delight was out of his intentions and the choice of objects:

...was based on a reaction of visual indifference, with total absence of good or bad taste... in fact a complete anesthesia...

Shower

These refugees joined the avant-garde trends that had been brewing in Harlem, Greenwich Village, and Chinatown since the turn of the century. Although New York was not Zurich, nor was there that climate of political refugees from the Swiss city, the iconoclastic spirit. Most Dada artists had a nihilistic thought.

In 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show, took place in New York. There, Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 caused a real stir and was described as a masterpiece by Breton. Duchamp became the black beast of art modern. Marcel Duchamp has gone down in history as one of the most enigmatic and intelligent artists.

Duchamp's most important work is The married woman stripped naked by her bachelors. Already known as the big glass. In this work, among other things, Duchamp uses techniques in which he reveals his concern for mathematical correctness in the use of forms. The piece is preceded in its realization process by a multitude of drawings in which he calculated all the details with mathematical precision, as if it were a machine. He also uses chance when admitting as part of the piece the breakage it suffered in 1923 when it was moved to an exhibition in Brooklyn. Duchamp said that this did not alter the piece, but that it was then that he considered it finished.

Man Ray developed Dadaism in painting, photography and in the manufacture of anti-art objects. Hans Richter defines him as a pessimistic inventor, transforming objects that surrounded him into useless objects, creating works with subtitles like: "object to be destroyed", or "taking photographs without a camera".

In March 1915 the magazine 391 was created by Picabia and Stieglitz. The name of the magazine had been taken from the number of the house occupied by an art gallery on Fifth Avenue. The magazine puts on the table the ideas of anti-art: an absolute lack of respect for all values, liberation from all social and moral conventions, and destruction of all that is known as art. For Duchamp and Picabia art is dead; Dadaism wanted the disintegration of reality and the ready-mades are not art, but anti-art.

Dadaism in New York will have significant support from photographer Alfred Stieglitz, his gallery 291 and his magazine Camera Work. For Stieglitz and the group of young photographers that he brought together under the movement known as Photo Secession, photography could also be seen and made as art, and not simply as a means of reproducing reality. Thus, Stieglitz became one of the forerunners of modern photography.

Dadaism in Germany

It is in Germany where Dadaism acquires a more markedly political aspect. Ideologically, the Dada artists' stances were communist and, in some cases, anarchist. After the war, Germany enters a critical situation. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the German Spartacist League - the socialist left - also rehearsed the revolution in Germany. In all this social upheaval a group of artists are going to join the leftist theses: it will be the Dadaist Movement.

Richard Hülsenbeck, coming from the Zurich group, brought the dadaist spirit to Berlin, but much more radical against previous avant-garde schools such as futurism or cubism. In 1918, at the Hall of the New Secession, Hülsenbeck gave the first Dadaist speech in Germany, first sympathizing with the Zurich Dadaists and then violently attacking Cubism, Expressionism and Futurism. Shortly after he drew up the first Dada manifesto in Germany. Hülsenbeck and the poet Raoul Hausmann promoted declarations and manifestos from the Dada Club.

The Dada club was joined by Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch and Herzfeld. The constitution of the Weimar Republic in 1919 marks the end of Dadaist political projects and their relocation within a strictly artistic framework.

Dadaism in Berlin will go down in history for the incorporation of new artistic techniques for the dissemination of ideas among the masses, mainly photomontage. The Dadaists used the technique of photomontage and collage to capture the reality that surrounded them, using visual material taken from the media.