DADA by LeenZal

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“Nothing is more pleasant than to baffle people. The.”

- Tristan Tzara, The Dada Manifestos & Lampisteries

Although revolution has an effect on art throughout history until our present time, art can also anticipate and foreshadow revolution. It all started from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s El Manifesto Comunista, or The Communist Manifesto. All manifestos after that emerged from the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engel both offer their own versions and ideas of declarative statements and demands for overturning the status quo in 1848 at the peak of the bourgeois revolution. At that point in time, the Revolutions of 1848, better known as the Spring of Nations, was taking place. These revolutions occur from the dissatisfaction with political leadership, demands for more participation in government and democracy, demands for freedom of press, and other demands made by the working class or the bourgeois like the rise of nationalism and regrouping of established governmental forces.

Leaders of the Russian Revolution - which is also the first successful socialist revolution - based their strategies on Marx and Engel’s perspective in The Communist Manifesto. All manifestos emerged from the communist manifesto Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, where they both offer up their own tumble of declarative statements and demands for overturning the status quo in 1848, at the highpoint in the bourgeois revolution in Europe. After that, many manifestos followed, including Filippo Marinetti’s The Futurist Manifesto, the Russian Manifesto, The Dada Manifesto by Tristan Tzara, and countless others. They are all in favor of the new. They express and show their despising of the establishment and what the establishment themselves presents as art. They declare that ‘we the young artists, we support the new, and we will not permit other sectors of society to set standards for our work.’ It was a kind of selfemancipation for the artists. They wanted to be free from all legal, social or political restrictions.

fter World War I, artists started deviating from the norm, and rebelling against tradition. Futurism became a major influence on other art movements, and its violent, revolutionary techniques were adopted by the Dadaists, Constructivists, and De Stijl. Dada came along and helped to strip typographic design of its traditional rules and orders. Dadaists reacting against the bloodshed and killing of World War I rejected all tradition, and wanted complete freedom. They claimed to be anti-art and had a strong negative and destructive element. “Dada writers and artists were concerned with shock, protest and nonsense. They bitterly rebelled against the horrors of war, the decadence of European society, the shallowness of blind faith in technological progress, and the inadequacy of religion and conventional moral codes in a continent upheaval” (Meggs’ 265). To show the anarchy of this movement, Dadaists did not even agree on the origins of the name Dada. They said that “they were not creating art, but mocking and defaming society gone insane” (Meggs’ 265). Dada inherited Marinetti’s assault and rhetoric on all artistic and social traditions and took it further by becoming a major liberating movement that inspired and continues to inspire innovation and rebellion.

The origin of the name Dada is unclear. It was chosen for a reason, but was also chosen at random, simultaneously. “In equating everything with ‘Dada’, which does not mean anything, the Dadas hoped to invalidate all meaning. According to Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada is a virgin microbe… Dada has 391 different attitudes and colors depending on the sec of the chairman. It transforms itself - affirms - simultaneously says the opposite - it doesn’t matter - screams - goes fishing’,” (Kuenzli, 17). Because the name signifies nothing, it is the most inspiring type of protest. Jean Arp explains that “The Larousse dictionary was consulted for an international word free from any political of partisan color, and even from any exact meaning” (Hopkins, 9) From Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with a moustache, to Hugo Ball’s poem recital wearing a cardboard outfit, Dada was designed to be misunderstood. It defied expectations the world had for art, and it promoted confusion. It was basically the representation of the exact opposite of everything that art stood for, and Dadaists liked it that way. “As a group [Dadaists] were united in a hatred for the professionalization of art, seeing themselves as cultural saboteurs, but it was not necessarily art per se that they rejected; rather it was the way art served a certain conception of human nature” (Hopkins, 7). And if art was supposed to appeal to your feelings, Dada intended to insult and provoke. Dada rejected rationality and logic, praising nonsense, irrationality, and intuition.

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chance, and chance is something that you probably shouldn’t and cannot control. They believe that chance was an outlet for the unconscious mind. Maybe the artists tried to put themselves in

he suggests that the aspiring Dada poet should choose an article of an appropriate length, take a pair of scissors and cut out each individual word. These are then to be placed into a bag, shaken and drawn at random, and

written down in exactly this changedetermined order. This is a strategy which will ensure that all casual and premeditated relationships between a given stock of words will be eliminated, and that their

In fact one of the important features of Dada is the idea of chance. “Language dissection is very literally suggested as a recipe for making Dadaist poems in Tristan Tzara’s ‘Pour faire un poème Dadaiste’ (1920), in which

arrangement will defy linguistic laws and will thus also eclipse the principles of bourgeois logic and values, which constitute the actual poetic target here” (Adamowicz and Robertson, 39). For them art reflects life and in life there is

a state of playfulness of and as a reminder of their childhood, while the adult world was busy destroying itself during World War I.

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Males in that time tended to dominate the Dada movement and positions within that movement. Despite this pattern, Hannah Höch, of the most influential women of that time, used scissors and glue to create and craft new objects from simple, mundane everyday items. She used photomontage for her work, along with artists like Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and Jean Arp.

Everything during this movement was emphasizing the ‘anti’, whether its antiart, anti-war, anti-bourgeois, and even anti-dada.

One of Höch’s best known work is called ‘Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Epoch of Weimar Beer-Belly Culture in Germany,’ is made up of a ‘collage of figures, machines and text [representing] the complex nature of culture and politics in the unsettled urban environment of post-war Germany, a cross-selection of ‘beerbelly culture’” (Kuenzli, 104) In this photomontage, many significant people from the Weimar Republic are scattered throughout a “technological landscape of wheels, cogs, machines that suggest dynamism and movement” (Kuenzli, 104). At the top of the painting, the saying ‘Die anti Dada’ appears next to anti Dadas that include politicians and military figures. And at the bottom of the painting we can see the Communist leaders Lenin and Marx alongside other radicals and figures of women and quotes saying ‘Invest your money in Dada!’ or ‘Join Dada’.

“On the bottom right corner, Höch has glued a small map showing the European countries in which women could then vote” (Dillon, p.2). Another artist that embraced the illogical and chaotic against the people that supported the outbreak of war in Europe is Marcel Duchamp. One of his most famous pieces is called L.H.O.O.Q. and features the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci with a moustache on her upper lip and a beard on her chin. It was “Duchamp’s avant-garde stance against bourgeois morality, traditional definitions of art, and the veneration of the masterpiece and its creator” (Kuenzli, 76). Pronounced in French, L.H.O.O.Q. is sounds like ‘elle a chaud au cul,’ which translates to ‘she has a hot ass’. In giving the Mona Lisa these masculine attributes, Duchamp is trying to make fun of rumors about Leonardo da Vinci’s homosexuality, and the true identity of ‘The Mona Lisa’. Duchamp alludes his interest with gender role-reversal, which shows in his work Rrose Sélavy. This photograph taken by Man Ray features Duchamp’s alter-ego, Mademoiselle Rrose Sélavy. “Soon after, she began appearing in photographs taken by Man Ray, fashion photographer, fellow artist and informal Dada compatriot. The perfect Duchampian character, Rrose brought to life the artist’s well-marked and symbolic use of language as well as all the playfulness and irony of Dadaism” (Hawkins, p.2). ‘Rrose Sélavy’, one of Duchamp’s aliases, sounds like the French phrase ‘eros, c’est la vie’, which is a pun that can be translates as ‘Eros… this is life.’ It could also be read as a ‘toast to life’.

During World War I many artists left their homes and fled to Switzerland. “The Dada protest was born in the free, programmatic, collective space of the Cabaret Voltaire, which was the creation of the writer and theater director Hugo Ball” (Dachy, 35) after escaping to Switzerland in 1915. Hans Richter stated that “Ball was interested in everything: he was at once a philosopher, a novelist, a cabaret artist, a poet, a journalist and a mystic” (Dachy, 35). Hugo Ball published the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire was published as a press release, and was quickly answered by the most influential Dada artists and advocates, including “Arp and his future companion Sophie Taeber; the Rumanian painter Marcel Janco and his friend the poet Tristan Tzara, who had recently arrived from the “Paris of the Balkans,” Bucharest. They were followed by a young German poet and medical student, Richard Huelsenbeck. A few months later, Huelsenbeck was to start another Dada group in Berlin (early 1918), composed a witty, fiery manifesto of his own, and entitled it Letzte Lockerung (Last Loosening)” (Dachy, 35).

After that, both foreign and local artists started gathering at Cabaret Voltaire, forming a collection of independent likeminded thinkers; and this is where Dada started to form. Cabaret Volitaire was a gallery, a concert hall, a stage for poetry readings and important influential Dada figures. Like the futurists, they were interested in freeing language from conventional syntax and semantics, to raw sound through noise music and jumbled type. But while the futurists had a mission and a message, the Dadaists only had one mission, and that was to have no mission at all. In their first Dada magazine publication in 1916 Ball wrote that Cabaret Voltaireâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only purpose is to draw attention, across the carriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals, meaning the war. The movement embraced a broad range of practices, including visual art, poetry, literature, theatre, art manifestos, art theory, and graphic design. Artists concentrated on anti-war politics, through the rejection of current existing standards of art through anti-art cultural works.

Marcel Janco recalls that “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” (Hofmann, 1). One of the ways Janco embraced this idea was through the masks he designed for Sophie Taeuber to wear for Balls poem recitals. He used sound abstraction combined with dancing and costumes to dictate “precise, pathetic gestures verging on madness” (Dachy, 45). Although Dadaists were against their own work, they knew that during the war that the world certainly needed change. They believed that art is a way to connect people, to move people, to engage people, to motivate and move people to action. Art is not just for entertainment or for creating something for an aesthetic, but it actually connects with people. It has a personal and emotional component to it that can make people think. It can change them. For Dadaists, art had grown old and stale with its rules and values.

They wanted to free art from the commercialization and industry that comes with it. Despite their anti-art attitude, ‘Dada is antidada’ was a favorite among the artists, which showed that the group was barely even in favor of themselves. Their art was still art, but rather than art sitting on a wall or a pedestal, it was art that wanted to provoke.

Their anti art pranks and activities were a breath of fresh air cleaning out old and rusty ideas, paving the way for new ones.

This type of expression through art carried on until today. Like futurists initiated the publication of manifestos, typographic experimentation, and publicity stunts, activists like INDECLINE and Banksy use their art to force people to rethink the nature of the life their living, and the society thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s around them. Their art and work creates tension, provokes confusion and anger, and generates conversation and debate. They force the public to become aware of the truth and what is really happening in the world they are living in, on a micro and macro scale.

INDECLINE is an American Activist Collective founded in 2001. These full-time rebels and activists focus on social, ecological and economical injustices carried out by American and International governments, corporations and law enforcement agencies. They designed five naked Donald Trump statues with no balls and called it The Emperor Has No Balls. They installed it in Seattle, New York, San Francisco, Cleveland and LA. This artistic protest shocked, horrified and amused the general public. Another stunt they pulled is called Ku Klux Clown, where they dressed clowns in KKK white suits and hung them with nooses in Virginia. Along with INDECLINE, Banksy is one of the most controversial street artists in the world. His true identity remains unknown, even after 20 years of being involved with the graffiti scene.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I like to think I have the guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things noone else believes in like peace and justice and freedom.â&#x20AC;? - Banksy, Wall and Piece

His artwork is often satirical and combines dark humor with graffiti and spreads philosophical, artistic and political messages. For one of his exhibitions, he traveled to Palestine and the West Bank and stenciled nine images on the Bethlehem Wall. Like all his other work, images of this were spread all over the internet worldwide. Like futurists and Dadaists, these artists hold vigorous revolutionary political beliefs and aimed many of their artistic activities toward visual communications to raise public consciousness and promote social change.

Colophon Adamowicz, Eliza, and Eric Robertson. Dada And Beyond - 1: Dada Discourses. Rodopi , 2011. Dachy, Marc. The Dada Movement, 1915-1923. Skira, 1990. Dillon, Brian. “Hannah Höch: Art’s Original Punk.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 9 Jan. 2014, www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/2014/jan/09/ hannah-hoch-art-punk-whitechapel. Hawkins, Alexander. “Meet Rrose Sélavy: Marcel Duchamp’s Female Alter Ego.” AnOther Mag, AnOther, 1 Dec. 2015, www.anothermag.com/artphotography/8084/meet-rroseselavy-marcel-duchamp-s-femalealter-ego. Hofmann, Irene E. “Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection.” Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago, 28 Apr. 2010, www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/ hofmann.php. Hopkins, David. Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2004. Kuenzli, Rudolph. Dada - Themes and Movements. Phaidon Press Inc., 2006.

Meggs, Philip B., and Alston W. Purvis. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. Wiley, 2012.

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