DADA
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Introduction What is Dada??????? Who were the Dadaists? Dada Cities Dada Techniques The Spirit of Dada Bibliography
Die Kunst ist tot. Es lebe die neue Maschinenkunst Tatlins
Art is dead. Long live Tatlin’s new mechanical art Sperren Sie endlich Ihren Kopf auf! Machen Sie ihn frei für die Forderungen der Zeit!
Unlock your head! Open it up to the demands of our time! Nieder die Kunst: Dada ist gross und Heartfield ist sein Prophet
Down with art: Dada is great and Heartfield is its prophet Dada ist die willentliche Zersetzung der bürgerlichen Begriffswelt
Dada is the deliberate subversion of bourgeois values Dada steht auf Seiten des revolutionären Proletariats!
Dada is on the side of the revolutionary proletariat! Nur zupacken und festhalten
Grab hold and hang on tight
dada LIVES
What is DADA ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Dada means hobbyhorse, your father, babytalk, nonsense, irrational, absurd, YES, YES! Dada had setup itself to be highly influential and short lived. Dada reacted to the devastation caused by World War I. It strove to accelerate the bourgeois society’s downfall. It questioned the established traditions of art. It rejected aesthetics and generated shock and awe. Dada is everything at once, dada is scopious, dada is an exhibition, a performance, a riot.
Ddada ADA
The magic of a word – – which has brought journalists to the gates of a world unforeseen, is of no importance to us.
To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC to fulminate against 1, 2, 3 to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big ABCs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life just as the latest-appearance of some whore proves the essence of God. His existence was previously proved by the accordion, the landscape, the wheedling woArd. To impose your ABC is a natural thing - hence deplorable. Everybody does it in the form of crystalbluff-madonna, monetary system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising the ardent sterile spring. The love of novelty is the cross of sympathy, demonstrates a naive je m’enfoutisme, it is a transitory, positive sign without a cause. But this need itself is obsolete. In documenting art on the basis of the supreme simplicity: novelty, we are human and true for the sake of amusement, impulsive, vibrant to crucify boredom. At the crossroads of the lights, alert, attentively awaiting the years, in the forest. I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet 1 say a things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles (half-pints to measure the moral value of every phrase too too convenient; approximation was invented by the impressionists). I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense. DADA - this is a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot down; every bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different subjects and who, instead of situating suitable characters on the level of his own intelligence, like chrysalises on chairs, tries to find causes or objects (according to whichever psychoanalytic method he practices) to give weight to his plot, a talking and self-defining story. Every spectator is a plotter, if he tries to explain a word (to know!) From his padded refuge of serpentine complications, he allows his instincts to be manipulated. Whence the sorrows of conjugal life. To be plain: The amusement of redbellies in the mills of empty skulls.
There are no world-renowned Dadaists on the scale of a Hemingway, or a Shostakovich, or a Picasso, and no Dadaist produced a particularly large body of work-- not least because so many of the good ones killed themselves as the ultimate expression in Dadaist performance art. If you’ve never even heard of the
movement, you’re hardly to be blamed-- the Dadaists were simply there one day-- like a wisp of smoke swirling briefly, illuminated by a moonbeam-- and the next were gone. Rarely do artistic movements fulfill their stated intentions so completely-- Dada was a fullyrealized, soulless expression of Dionysian excess. A howl of existential despair and a casualty of war.
Max Burchartz
Kurt Schwitters
Lotte Burchartz Cornelis van Eesteren
Hans Arp
Hans Richter
Pe
Theo van Doesbu
Nelly van Doesburg
eter Rรถhl
urg Alexa Rรถhl
Participants at the International Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists, Weimar, Germany, 1922
Werner Graeff
D AdA C ITI ES The origins of Dada in Zurich date to the 1916 founding of a cramped café, the Cabaret Voltaire. Though open a mere six months, the Cabaret— established by Hugo Ball as a gathering spot for free-thinking artists and intellectuals—set the stage for Dada activities.
Dada’s arrival in Paris in early 1920 brought together many artists who had been active elsewhere, including Arp, Ernst, Duchamp, Picabia, Tzara, and Man Ray. These dadaists, and others already in Paris, burst onto the scene with a frenzy of activities including six group performances, two art exhibitions, and more than one dozen publications produced in a five-month span known as the “Dada season.”
Removed from the immediacy of the war, New York provided an atmosphere distinct from the European cities where Dada flourished. While New York Dada’s irreverence was less aggressive and more playful than its European counterparts, World War I nonetheless influenced many of its activities. The antics and excesses of the New York dadaists—a number of whom were European artists escaping the war—was a form of protest against the carnage they had witnessed.
Dada in Cologne emerged in autumn 1919 when the terms of the Treaty of Versailles placed the city under British military control. The movement’s defiant tactics befit a public disillusioned by the continuation of military authority and censorship in the postwar period. Dadaists in Cologne experimented with various Dada techniques including photomontage, readymade, and reliance on absurd or even incoherent juxtapositions.
The political concerns that animated Zurich Dada came to the forefront in Berlin, reflecting the catastrophic circumstances of wartime Germany. Richard Huelsenbeck returned to Berlin in 1917, bringing early Dada ideas with him. Arguably the most lasting artistic contribution of the Berlin dadaists was their radical development of photomontage.
Dada in Hannover was largely a solo operation of the artist Kurt Schwitters. Though geographically removed from other artists, Schwitters acted as a conduit for dadaist ideas, which he spread through his magazine and contacts with other avant-garde artists. He expanded the dadaist interest in collage when, he constructed works made from the detritus of modern life, such as used ration cards and other trash gathered on his daily outings.
Techniques
o b j e t s t r o u v é s
Readymades are to be art merely such. They were test the limits of
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everyday manufactured goods that are deemed by virtue of the artist's selection of them as invented by Marcel Duchamp who wanted to what qualifies as a work of art.
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Readymade Although he had collected manufactured objects in his studio in Paris, it was not until he came to New York in 1915 that he identified these objects as a category of art, giving the English name "readymade" to any object purchased "as a sculpture already made."
To common household goods, he added signatures and titles, converting them into works of art. When he modified these objects, for example by penning mustache and goatee on the color reproduction of the Mona Lisa, he called them "assisted" or "rectified
readymades." Duchamp's most scandalous readymade was the porcelain urinal that he turned on its back, titled Fountain, signed R. Mutt (a pun on the German word Armut, or poverty), and submitted to the supposedly jury-free exhibition at the Society of Independent Artists.
2. Chance Antidote; offered a way of letting go of conscious control; presented a critique of the notion of artistic mastery.
3. Photomontage Variation of collage in which posted items are photographs; the Dadaists use brushes and paint instead of scissors and glue; they also call themselves monteurs(mechanics) rather than artists because of their radical notion on traditional art.
Developed by Picasso and Braques in Paris; used papers, fabric, and other 2D materials and pasted them together; they broke down the barrier between everyday life and art by creating collages.
4. Collage
5. Typography Mixing fonts; used different punctuations; printed words both horizontally and vertically; this experiment shows the audience the fascination with the newly printed culture.
6. Photography
Relished its modern means of creation; dadaists used double exposures, radical perspective, unconventional subjects, and photograms; these are among the earliest abstract photographs.
7. Assemblage
Sculptures and 3D pictures hung on walls built from everyday objects that were fastened, nail, or screwed together; examples of these objects were bits of trash and war supplies.
Although Dada only lasted for a few years its impact was considerable. The Dadaists introduced and explored techniques and concepts that we take for granted in art today: automatism, chance, photomontage, assemblage, and the idea that an artwork could be a temporary installation. They also expanded the boundaries and context of what was considered acceptable as art, which in turn inspired future developments such as Action Painting, Pop Art, Happenings, Installations, Conceptual Art and its various post-modern splinter groups. The DNA of Dada was self destructive. The Dadaists had condemned cultural conformity but the paradox is that any revolution eventually becomes a conformity in itself. Artists have a basic need to create but the inherent negativity
of by Dada’s ‘anti-art’ dogma must eventually limit their creative potential. There were many good artists in Dada who could see that possibility and the best of them adapted the innovative techniques of Dada to their own ends. By the end of 1920, most of the main protagonists had migrated to Paris where Dada had a short-lived swan song. However, unlike Zurich and Berlin where there was a predisposition towards ideological unity, there were now elements of individuality that were calling for a more positive philosophy which would shortly materialize as Surrealism.
To make a Dadaist poem: Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem. Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag. Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag. Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar. -Tristan Tzara
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A p h Y r G https://www.nga.gov
http://www.ai-ap.com/ http://www.artyfactory.org/ http://www.dada-companion.com/ http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/dada.htm http://ahsugarbear.blogspot.com/2007/02/dada-techniques.html http://www.391.org/manifestos/1918-dada-manifesto-tristan-tzara.html
https://texturefabrik.com/2013/11/18/17-paper-textures-vol-3/ http://inspired-progress.com/go-7105vintage-map-europe
Duchamp, Marcel. Rotative Demisphère (Optiques De Précision) c.1924 (p.4) Baargeld, Johannes Theodor. Typical Vertical Misrepresentation as a Depiction of the Dada Baargeld. Photomotage(p.5) Duchamp, Marcel. Prière de toucher (Please Touch) c. 1947, Medium: Book with collage of foam rubber, pigment, velvet, and cardboard adhered to removable cover (p.13)
(p.15) Top to bottom Raoul Hausmann, fmsbwtözäu, poster poem, line block. 1918 Raoul Hausmann, Der Kunstreporter (The Art Critic), 1919–1920 Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919
(p.16) Top to bottom Tristan Tzara, Poster for Salon Dada, Exposition Internationale, lithograph. 1921 Man Ray, Rayograph, gelatin silver print. 1923 Marcel Duchap, Rotary Glass Plates ( Precision Optics). 1920