Dada

poetry flows‍‍‍‍.

**Dada**, the artistic and poetic movement, it is hard to define because Dada had many different facets and fanned out in its eight year history, spanning from 1916 to 1924 when it eventually turned into Surrealism (peaking from 1916 to 1922). Dada was essentially an anti-everything movement. Even to itself, movement poets and artists would often cry that "Dada was anti-Dada" meaning that Dadaists couldn't really call themselves a Dadaists because that would be admitting that they were involved in some kind of structured movement; defined leadership, forward motion, and structure are all the conventions the Dadaists, and the movement of Dada, was against. A similar quandary is the conformist-nonconformist paradox: by stating one is a nonconformist, they are naturally conforming to nonconformity.

=History and Movement=

== The Dada Movement started in 1916, in retaliation to the mass destruction that World War I had wrecked in such a short time, and as a response to the adherents' belief in the meaninglessness of the modern world. The war was a byproduct of that absence of meaning. Dada was born out of a lot of different early avant-garde movements, painters, writers and poets. Dada was founded in Hugo Ball ’s Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, which was where many of the young poets of Europe gathered to get away from the war, mostly because Switzerland was neutral ground. There are other sources that suggest the true roots of Dada stem from a Modernist movement which had already started in Romania, and was brought to Zurich by said movement's contributors; namely, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Arthur Segal. Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (right), by Hannah Höch, shows the complete chaos that Dadaists thought had engulfed the world. There are many different images as well as different words pieced together to project the feelings of turmoil. By the end of the war, Dada had spread all over to big German cities like Berlin, Hanover, Paris, and New York, all sprouting different versions of the Dadaist movement. The indeterminacy of Dada and its resulting variations in different countries is exactly what the Dadaists (or not, as they cannot be called so per the movement's true ideology, i.e., the nonconformity principle) were going for, something that cannot be defined by an overseeing establishment. However, due to the lack of true focus on what its tenets really were (and were **not**), Dada dwindled almost as quickly and widely as it had spread, with the different versions metamorphosing into independent artistic movements with their own ideologies and principles.

=Intent=

Dadaists were against the aristocracy, against authority, against art, and against the prevalent culture of that time. They arose to try and show their culture how unnecessary the pomp circumstance and habits of their world were, and did this by making fun of it. Dada stood for chaos, and that's what the art and the poetry represented, mostly because they felt that the world was already in a state of chaos.

The Dada movement prided itself on not having any rules or structure, and that was its downfall. Ultimately, they wanted this kind of free-for-all movement, but the bottom line was that it couldn't happen without the things it was against, mainly authority and structure. In the end, there wasn't anyone pushing the movement along, keeping it going or giving it momentum to go new places. As soon as they had started they had spread to many cities and had evolved but because they didn't have any definition there wasn't anything keeping the movement together. The nonconformity of the Dada Movement was both its strength and its downfall.

The Artists of the Dada movement found the art of the time ridiculous. Because of the chaos that Dada represented, and within that a freedom to do whatever they wanted, the artists themselves had free range to paint or put something together and to attribute it to the name of Dada. Dada challenged the public to rethink what they considered art, because artists like Marcel Duchamp would really stretch the boundaries, producing collections such with stuff that he found, produce it in a gallery and call it art.

Why the name 'Dada'?
"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 Manifesto (theartstory.com)//

The name Dada was chosen when Tristan Tzara picked it randomly out of a French-German Dictionary. It is french for "hobbyhorse" but also impersonates a child's first words. This childishness and randomness appealed to the group, so they stuck with it. Like the quote above states, it means something in many different languages, thus signifying that the group was an international group.

"For us, art is not an end in itself...but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in." -- Hugo Ball

=The People of Dada=

Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara, born Samuel Rosenstock, is widely known to be one of the founders of the movement and among its most central figures, coining the movement's title himself. He is also the first to ever publish Dadaist literature, his first being //La Premiére Aventure cèleste de Monsieur Antipyrine// ("The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine"), published in 1916. The most notable pieces are probably his seven manifestos of Dada, wherein he states, abides by, and exemplifies Dada's inherent rules of indeterminacy and absurdity.

"DADA is a virgin microbe DADA is against the high cost of living  DADA  limited company for the exploitation of ideas  DADA has 391 different attitudes and colours according to the sex of the president

It changes--affirms--says the opposite at the same time--no importance--shouts--goes fishing.

Dada is the chameleon of rapid and self-interested change. Dada is against the future. Dada is dead. Dada is absurd. Long live Dada. Dada is not a literary school, howl"

--Tristan Tzara, from //Dada Manifesto on Feeble & Bitter Love//, one of his seven Dada manifestos

In this section, Tzara employs many different contradictions to describe Dada, like "Dada is dead...long live Dada", which further confirms the notion that Dada is everything and nothing all at once, that it is so against everything that it can't possibly be for itself. In a sense it's dead, because it can't admit to being a movement and having people involved in it (that's against Dada standards), and in another s ense, Dada is wanted, and needed, to continue in hopes that significant change happens because of Dada. Dada really is all of these things, contradictions and nonsense included. Dada can be something absurd and something concrete at the media type="youtube" key="8o-tLrI2K6Y?rel=0" height="250" width="336" align="right" same time.

Hugo Ball
Hugo Ball was a German poet and author. He believed that the meaninglessness of Dada was a perfect response to the current state of society, which he felt had been reduced to something terrible. He wrote //Karawane// with nonsensical German sounding words as a testiment to the Dada style. Though the words seem to lack meaning, some resemble like real-life sounds (for example, "blago bung" when voiced sounds like artillery fire).

=Visual Artists=

Hans/Jean Arp
Hans/Jean Arp was a sculptor, painter and poet, born on September 16, 1887 in Strasbourg, of German-French descent, and has two names because in German he called himself 'Hans', but in French called himself 'Jean'. He went to Paris in 1904 and was amazed by the modernist art there, and soon studied at the Strasbourg School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, studying under Ludwig von Hoffmann from 1905-07. He maintained close contact with the avant-garde in Europe through friends like Marx Jacobs and Apollinaire. When war broke out in 1914, Arp moved to Zurich, and in 1916 was a founding father of Dadaism, along with Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara. Though he participated a lot in Dada, and was a founder of abstract art, he also had his hand in Surrealism and Constructivism. He died in 1966.

Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was born July 28, 1887 and was responsible for influencing quite a number of artists, visual and non-, and is also known for his inspiring and applause-worthy contribution to Dada. His artwork repulsed mainstream society and by corollary had Dadaists rejoicing everywhere due to it's "degrading" implications. Namely, one of Duchamp's "readymade" pieces, //L.H.O.O.Q.// (right), he simply paints a mustache and goatee on //The Mona Lisa// and adds the work's title to the foot of the image, bashing any formal disposition one might have previously had to Da Vinvi's artwork--especially when observing the common interpretations of the title: in French, it acts as a pun reading "elle a chaud au cul," "she has a hot ass," in English.

=Modern Dada=

media type="youtube" key="pRisDso99s0" height="251" width="336" align="left"Neil Cicierega

He is a member (and possibly only member of) a band called Lemon Demon, but his main contribution to modern Dada was a style of animation called Animutation which focused on surreal and absurd elements (one being a fascination with Japanese songs played out of context).

=External Resources=

Christian Bok performs Hugo Ball's //Karawane//

The Art Story: Dada Movement

Dada- The Ant-War Art Movement

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