Dadaism

Dadaism or Dada is a post-World War I cultural movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic design. The movement was, among other things, a protest against the barbarism of the War and what Dadaists believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society.  Its works were characterized by a deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. It influenced later movements including Surrealism.  Dada probably began in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, and there were active dadaists in New York such as Marcel Duchamp and the Liberian art student, Beatrice Wood, who had left France at the onset of World War I. At around the same time there had been a dadaist movement in Berlin. Slightly later there were also dadaist un-communities in Hanover (Kurt Schwitters), Cologne, and Paris. In 1920, Max Ernst, Hans Arp and social activist Alfred Grunwald set up the Cologne Dada group.  But while broad reaching, the movement was also unstable: artists went on to other ideas and movements, including Surrealism, Socialist Realism and other forms of modernism.  By the dawn of World War II, many of the European Dadaists who remained had fled or been forced into exile in the United States, some died in death camps under Hitler, who personally disliked the kind of radical art that dada represented. The movement became less active as post-World War II optimism led to new movements in art and literature.

DADA doubts everything. Dada is an armadillo. Everything is Dada, too. Beware of Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man’s normal condition, is DADA. But the real dadas are against DADA.

-Tristan Tzara 

Art is dead. Long live Dada.

-Walter Serner 

Freedom: Dada, Dada, Dada, crying open the constricted pains, swallowing the contrasts and all the contradictions, the grotesqueries and the illogicalities of life.

-Tristan Tzara