Art history is a complex dialog of aesthetic actions and counteractions to diverse cultural, socio-economic and political factors. Dada was an arts and literature avant-garde movement which flourished into a very strong paradigmatic revolution from the traditional fashion of thinking and perceiving not only art, but also life itself. It tried to deconstruct all previously established truths about logics, artistic canons, western aesthetic values, conventions and general “definitions” that the Dadaists perceived to be obsolete in the light of the new century.Dada was an art movement of the early 20th century (it started on 1915-16 and lasted until 1920-22), and it is not a coincidence that it synchronized with a shocking global event, WWI: it started and respectively ended two years after this worldwide conflict. Dada was itself an international phenomenon with members from the whole Europe and North America, and it aimed to expose and subvert traditionally academic artistic norms, as well as the bourgeois notions of what is worth to be called art and hence be shown in museums.The first “exhibitions” of the Dada pioneers were at the Cabaret Voltaire in France, an unconventional gallery and theatre scene where German playwright Hugo Ball, Alsatian poet-painter Jean Arp, Romanian artists Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara, German poet Richard Huelsenbeck produced their spontaneous plays, poems, art and lectures together with engaging painters like Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky or Pablo Picasso, all of whom continued the Dada revolution in their individual and unique manners, reinventing the ideas and designs of conventional art exhibits into what today is known as Abstract and Modern Art.
The ManifestoThe Dada movement made itself popular by disseminating art manifestoes (Dada, edited by Hugo Ball or Tristan Tzara), journals and publications, by organizing public protests, demonstrations or gatherings on a variety of expressions such as visual arts, random poetry and automatic dictation, graphic design (collages and ready-mades) and theatre. Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet, proclaimed in the Dada manifesto to which extend everything was to be re-evaluated from zero: “Philosophy is the question: from which side shall we look at life, God, the idea or other phenomena. Everything one looks at is false. I do not consider the relative result more important than the choice between cake and cherries after dinner. The system of quickly looking at the other side of a thing in order to impose your opinion indirectly is called dialectics, in other words, haggling over the spirit of fried potatoes while dancing method around it.”[1]Dada often employed quite irreverent works and declarations aiming to directly defy academic art and its consumers: according to Hans Arp, a collage Dada artist, "The bourgeois regarded the Dadaist as the dissolute monster, a revolutionary villain… (that) thought up tricks to rob the bourgeois of his sleep.
"[2] What has been known as figurative or high art until then (bourgeois art) got shredded into nonsense and ridiculed. It was exposed to the absurd, and by removing the “halo” of gallery-worth art, it re-became elementary and primitive. As I see it, the Dadaists wanted to completely destroy art in order to reinvent it all over again. Dadaism seeded the total destruction of pre-existing art, so that a completely new form should be born: as critics agree, Dada gave birth to significant subsequent movements, was continued into Surrealism and modern art, as well as into Postmodernism.[3]The anti-art focus was a very significant way of responding to the new historical conditions, as the First World War had overthrown all existing convictions about what is really certain or constant, what is indubitable or what is ephemeral.
These central questions did not find any irrefutable answer and thus the Dadaists declared that the only constants are the absurd and the randomness both in visual arts and in language, since there cannot exist a unified or unique meaning. As a matter of fact, the term Dada itself reflects this arbitrariness. According to art critics and historians, the name itself explains the nature and methods of the Dada movement, or the lack of it, rather: “Literally, the word Dada means several things in several languages: it's French for "hobbyhorse" and Slavic for "yes yes." Some authorities say that the name Dada is a nonsensical word chosen at random from a dictionary.
”[4] Consequently, the members stated that art should be neither tributary to established academic rules or craftsmanship, nor to transcendental ideals that separate it from the direct realities or violence of life; the only constant being that of chance, and the only authenticity that of the imagination, and hence liberated art from the tyranny of intrinsic meaning and purpose.At war against the pastWhat is the style that Dada rejected so strongly?This struggle to denounce the “lies” of the past and the need to reach innovative expressions, by means of anti-art techniques reflects the turbulent revolutions of ideas of the early 20th century, the emergence of a new sensibility and mind according to new realities, new technologies and the faster rhythm of urban life:“The First World War and the Russian Revolution profoundly altered people's understanding of their worlds. The discoveries of Freud and Einstein, and the technological innovations of the Machine Age, radically transformed human awareness. In cultural terms, the novels of Joyce or the poetry of T.
S. Elliot (…) registered distinctively new ‘modernist’ modes of feeling and perception characterized by a marked sense of discontinuity.”According to avant-garde artists, capitalism and the bourgeois expansionist-colonialist drives had caused the war. Politically, Dada raised strong cynical objections against these systems and the cultural values that made them possible[5]. Aesthetically, Dada protested against traditional stereotypes: the exclusive interest on form, on the illusion of realism, against the artistic cannons of ancient Greece and Rome like formal perfection, harmony, proportion and the void between art and the day-to-day existence[6]. The syndromes of change did not delay to appear by the early 20th century when Futurism, Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism preferred subjective authenticity to formal beauty or harmony of proportions.
Their approach was neither harmonious, nor distanced, nor did it try to create beauty - but shattered and painful, paradoxical and disappointed, fascinated with the mechanical and the illogic, beholding the world with resentment. “Dadaism was responding to the absurdity of war, and was attacking the established bourgeois rationality and morality that allowed it to happen. Dadaism was manifested through frustration and anger at the world. Dadaists created art that reflected the pathetic state of the world. They regarded art as ridiculous and irrelevant, and therefore must be destroyed. Dadaism turned to the absurd, primitive and elementary.
(…) Dadaism lived in a state of constant irony.”[7]For instance, German Dada artist Hannah Hoch, known for inventing the technique of photomontage, compiled the “Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife”, a critical portrayal of the German empire in 1919, against war and the raising Reich. Her work is said to belong to the gallery of artistic and political protest against the violence of war. The painting bellow is a montage of newspapers cuttings dating back to her time.
She portrayed in an unconventionally rich way the realities of her time and society, the underlying anguish, the frenzy of assembling the pieces of a distorted mirror into a grotesque fresco.There is no unified meaning, but a distorted gallery of faces and letters, a deconstructed reality gathered from the mass media of that reality. Interestingly, what we behold is a superficial unity covering some chaos, some danger, and some melancholy.Noticeably, the artists understood that figurative art depicting heroes and gods on their horses or resting on green pastures was superseded - just like the surface of the world had changed through the conflagration and industrialization - and chose to focus on the psychological and metaphysical side of the self, in other words to try to express that which cannot be expressed, to search describing the indescribable and to paint the psychological invisible. They were the poets of interior struggles and painters of the phantoms of imagination brought together in patchworks. It did not really matter if this art was “valuable” or seen as “ridiculous”, as long as it was true to itself and to the reality that called it into being; more than copyists, the activist Dada artists “were pledged to contesting any separation between art and the contingent experience of the modern world.
” [8] Central was “the belief that modern art needed to forge a new relationship with its audience, producing uncompromising new forms to parallel shifts in social experience.”[9]Examples of Dadaist artists and works:Clearly, quoting or retaking the art of the previous artistic schools had the only purpose of demystifying that image and its given significance. For example, Marcel Duchamp, one of Dada’s long lasting key artists, revisited with uncanny wits the most famous painting of art history, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and did what school kids do when they want to mock a photo: he added a moustache and a beard, and he changed the background into a more tumultuous atmosphere, signifying the restlessness of his times.Moreover, Duchamp gave it a cryptonym LHOOQ, which read in the French alphabet means “Elle a chaud au cul” meaning something like “She has a hot ass” or “She’s horny”[10]. However, I believe that beyond the obviously vulgar intention, Duchamp has meant to play with and subvert the greatest inheritance in the history of arts. This is obviously a blasphemy to one of the most respected masterpieces and to all the aesthetic values that it personifies, the highest expression of art’s perfection and mystery.
But when a certain form of art had reached perfection, it cannot advance anymore. So one can see this “violation” as a positive step, necessary for resurrecting a resolute form and sensibility so new art be possible.Duchamp’s iconoclastic replica does not simply resume to that, I believe, but represents the very rhetorics of Dada: there is a lot of irony, derision, childishness, biting wit and a totally new way of seeing the icons of the past by totally removing the pious way of beholding them. Furthermore, the fact that Mona Lisa is rendered as a man is not accidental, and surely Duchamp was not ignorant of some historical anecdotes and suppositions that exposed the Renaissance painting as a veiled image of homosexual love. So here we have an androgynous and maculated Mona Lisa reflecting the Dada spirit: controversial, nihilistic, ambivalent and humorous, disrespectful and very interested in exposing paradoxes, underground meanings as well as denouncing the discrepancy between the appearance and what until the had been called “essence”.
Another famous object was Duchamp’s “The Fountain” which served to illustrate the same concepts. The reversed urinal created another wave of outraged controversies, and it is now his most famous “masterpiece”, paradoxically now regarded as “high-art” exactly because it made history in a very irreverent manner. “The urinal, purchased from "Mott Works" company in New York and signed "R. Mutt," was submitted to the jury-free 1917 Independents exhibition but was suppressed by the hanging committee.” This is one of the first “ready-mades”, an object of everyday life, with a specific function that served as a potential art exhibit when drawn out of its familiar context.
His challenging dialogue (or rather humorous quarrel) with earlier art was mean to institute a new mentality, that starts from zero, if we are to remember the Dada Manifesto which chose to believe in nothing, not even in basic images and words, but rather recreate everything all over again by mixing, melting and transforming the very core of understanding the world. Another aim is to destroy the boundaries between “high” and “low” art (or art and anti-art), as well as all the traditional boundaries between genders, meaning and no-meaning, luxury objects and ordinary tools, so to say the total destruction of hierarchies.Such a systematic destruction of the concept of intellectual art, or art that rises from reason is Jean Arp’s method of making “chance collages”[11] by tearing off pieces of paper and letting them fall randomly on the “canvas”, where they shall be glued in that exact position. Looking back on art history, a history of geometric and perspective-related struggle, where symmetry and the illusion of reality were predominant, this work seems to be a mockery and anything but art.
