To comprehend the nonsense and subversion of Dada, one must cast one’s gaze much wider than its original founder Hugo Ball and his Dada Manifesto. Dada was a revolutionary response by artists to the atrocity and idiocy of the First World War. The artists involved wanted to focus on every aspect of a society capable of starting and prolonging such destruction. Ironically, their disgust at that idea drove them to cause destruction, at least in a figurative way, by attempting to remove traditional values in art and to develop a new type of art (Tate, 2017). Dada was also anti-bourgeois, anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical with political leanings to the radical left (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 14). In many respects one could consider it to be a form of artistic anarchy or a communist revolution in the art world.
The Dada movement was founded in 1916 when Ball started a satirical night-club in Zurich called ‘the Cabaret Voltaire’, and wrote his aforementioned manifesto. Originally intended to be a political movement, pressure from other artists of the time led to its rapid transformation into an art movement. Dada quickly became international and eventually formed the basis of surrealism in Paris after the war (Tate, 2017).
In contrast to the art movements that preceded it, most of the Dada artists were also poets and pioneers of performance art, and verbal artworks. Many of them were among the first intermedia artists. It is also important to note that Dada artworks were often intended to shock audiences and at the time provoked violent reactions (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 11). It could be considered as the origin of the shock art that has gained so much publicity in recent years.
The simple fact that Surrealism, Constructivism, Lettrism, Situationism, Fluxus, Pop and Op art, Conceptual Art, Minimalism and most other twentieth-century art movements after 1923 can trace their roots from Dada amply demonstrates its revolutionary influence (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 14). Dada’s strategies of critiquing the dominant culture have been used by radical groups ever since. (Kuenzli, 2015, pp. 14–15).
One of the main proponents and pioneers of the Dada movement was Marcel Duchamp, born in 1887 in Normandy (Riggs, 1997). In his book Dadaism, German art historian Dietmar Elger refers to him as “indisputably the most influential artist of the 20th century (Elger, 2004, p. 80).” He became well-known for his so-called ‘Ready-mades’, works which are “mass-produced items that Duchamp chose to claim and exhibit as his own works of art (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 72).”
One of his most famous works is Fountain (Figure 2), a porcelain urinal inscribed with ‘R. Mutt 1917’ in marker pen. He purchased a urinal from a sanitary ware supplier and submitted it anonymously in 1917 to the society of independent artists which Duchamp helped to found (Howarth, 2015). The board of directors took exception to the work and rejected it on the basis that a piece of sanitary ware associated with bodily waste could not be considered a work of art and was indecent. Duchamp resigned in protest at their censoring of his work.
The board’s decision to reject the work, instantly gave it a certain cache amongst rebellious youth and ironically, probably did more to guarantee its success than the work itself. On the other hand, perhaps that is exactly the point of Dada. Despite appearances, this single artwork is a mark of massive change in the history of art. Duchamp produced this work almost solely to test how far one could push the boundary of what was considered art at the time. Its subsequent fame is a demonstration of how Dada changed art forever. Its meaning cannot be deciphered in the usual terms of art, but can in the terms of its reason for being produced. The purpose of the piece being submitted as an art piece at the time is essentially the meaning of the piece. It represents rebellion against traditional values in art and promotion of unrestricted form in which an artist can express oneself.
Another one of Duchamp’s famous contributions to the Dada movement was L.H.O.O.Q (Figure 3), which he produced in 1919. Another one of his ready-mades, this work is a postcard featuring Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, a painting which was largely unknown outside of the art world until it was notoriously stolen in 1911 (PBS, 2009). The painting became an international sensation following this event and in the words of journalist John Lichfield is “the most visited, most written about, most sung about, most parodied work of art in the world (Lichfield, 2005).”
Duchamp obtained one of the ubiquitous postcards and drew a moustache and beard on the model’s face with a pen. He captioned the painting with ‘L.H.O.O.Q.’, which when pronounced in French sounds like the phrase ‘Elle a chaud au cul’. This is a vulgar expression which translates literally as ‘She has a hot arse’ or figuratively ‘She’s a scorcher’ (Elger, 2004, p. 82). Duchamp makes this joke at the expense of the unnamed model in the painting and implies that despite her dignified manner, she is nothing more than a slut. It is also an attack on traditional art and the commercialisation of such artworks.
The masculinisation of the image combined with this joke creates a contradiction and comes across as sarcastic. It also plays with gender roles, something which Duchamp explored by the creation of his alter-ego, in which he dressed in female attire and adopted the pseudonym Rrose Sélavy, yet another pun which sounds like the French phrase ‘Eros, c’est la vie’, Eros, such is life in English. (Elger, 2004, p. 84).
Another big name at the time was Man Ray; an American artist who became famous mostly for his photographs. One of his pieces, Objet indestructible (Figure 4), a metronome with a photograph of an eye attached to the pendulum. This piece is very reminiscent of Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’ in the sense that it is a manufactured object purchased by the artist with only minor alterations. The eye on the piece was originally anonymous on the 1923 version, however when his apprentice and muse Lee Miller left him in 1932, he replaced it with a photograph of her eye. Miller was a model and avid photographer at the time. In fact, quite a lot of Man Ray’s photographs were taken by Miller, although they were credited to him (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 169).
In this piece, Portemanteau (Figure 5), The boundary between a human body and an object is blurred. This photograph shows a nude woman’s body obscured by a mannequin with a cartoon like shocked face and outstretched arms. The merging of human and object, or the real and the representation, is a good example of the New York set of the Dada movement (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 85). Man Ray was not only known for his art photographs, but even more so for his commercial photography of celebrities. His artwork continued long after the Dada period and quite a lot of that work was part of the surrealist domain.
Like Man Ray, a lot of Dada artists went on to produce art pieces for the Surrealist movement. Max Ernst was another artist that did just that. During his Dada years, Ernst produced photomontages, but unlike the artists in Berlin, such as Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, he liked to conceal the seams of his constructions so that a smooth, consistent image was produced. (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 125). He was then able to make photographic enlargements of his constructions, which he then considered to be the final work.
Sometimes, rather than cutting and sticking photographs to make a collage, he would use whole photos and mask the bits he wanted to conceal by painting over them with gouache. La Puberté proche (Figure 6) or Approaching puberty in English, is a good example of these so-called ‘over-paintings’. He started with a whole photograph of a reclining nude woman on a sofa, which he then turned on its side and painted over the background and face of the woman (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 128). The caption under the image reads in English as, “Approaching puberty has not yet removed the fragile grace of our Pleiades/ Our shadowy gaze is directed at the paving stone which is about to fall/ The gravitation of the waves does not yet exist (Klingsöhr-Leroy, 2004, p. 48).”
One of the notable things about this image is the removal of the face of the woman. This may be explained by the reference to Pleiades in the text. In ancient Greek mythology, the Pleiades were the seven daughters of the titan Atlas and sea-nymph Pleione, known sometimes as the ‘seven sisters’. Atlas was pursed by Orion and to protect his daughters he transformed them first into doves and then into a constellation of stars (Irving, 1990, p. 235).
The blurred outlines in the top right of the image may be soaring doves and it’s possible that the woman in the centre is Electra, one of the seven sisters who “hid her face at the fall of troy (Klingsöhr-Leroy, 2004).” It is very difficult to ascertain the exact meaning of this image due to the vagueness and ambiguities that arise when we attempt to analyse the work. It may well be that this was the artist’s intention. Dada was very much a form of anti-art and deliberately producing a work, for which upon analysis a meaning cannot be deciphered, was a part of the practise of artists in that field, e.g. Duchamp’s Fountain (Figure 2).
Dada, like many art movements, varied in its execution from country to country. In Berlin, the Dada artists aligned themselves politically with the Spartacus league, which wanted to establish a working-class republic. Their work was very political and often involved subverting pre-war bourgious values and traditions. They produced photomontages made from cut up newspapers and magazines, from which the fragments were recontextualized to subvert reality as fixed by society (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 92).
Hannah Höch was one of the most prominent of the berlin set, with her works of photomontage were a humorous and moving social commentary of a time of great change. She spent much of her time critiquing the concept of the ‘new woman’ in Germany and focusing on complex issues surrounding gender and identity. Later on, after the Dada movement, she concentrated on work around the emergence of consumer culture (whitechapelgallery.org, 2014).
Schnitt mit dem küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Figure 7), is probably her best-known work. Translating into English as “Cut with the kitchen knife Dada through the last Epoch of Weimar Beer-Belly Culture in Germany (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 105)”, it represents the complex nature of culture and politics in the unsettled environment of post-war Germany. Lots of significant people of the Weimar republic and Dada movement appear, scattered throughout a landscape of wheels, cogs and machines that suggests dynamism and movement. At the top right are the ‘anti-dadas’, including military figures and politicians. In the upper left is a press photograph of Albert Einstein, as a Dada, and in the lower left the leader of the revolutionary sailors exhorts the masses to join Dada (‘Tretet dada bei’). At the bottom right are Dadas and Communist leaders including Marx and Lenin. (Grosenick, 2001).
This work is not just a critique of the ‘beer-belly’ culture of Germany at the time but also of the social situation of women. Depictions of the ‘new woman’ are found, such as athletes and actresses from the time. This is not just a political piece, but also a critique of how gender roles upheld a conservative society. The ‘beer-belly’ male dominated military and the allusion to the ‘kitchen knife’ signifying the gender stereotype of a woman belonging in a kitchen.
Höch had an interest in fashion which came from her employment at Ullstein Verlag, a large publishing house for periodicals like BIZ (Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung) and women’s magazines such as Die Dame and Blatt der Hausfrau. She designed sewing patterns in the handicrafts department. Many of her works utilise clippings from these magazines, which she saw as an illustrated journal of a an idealized german woman (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 104).
Another one of her pieces which illustrates her criticism of the ‘new woman’. Das schöne Mädchen (Figure 8), or “The Pretty Girl” in English, focuses on the place of a woman in a modern, technological society. The image shows a woman in a swimming costume holding a parasol perched on an I-beam. Her head is replaced by a lightbulb and her face is covered by advertising imagery. The woman is wedged between a tyre on her left and a crankshaft on her right. Behind her are many BMW logos. A large hand is holding a watch in front of the logos. BMW is an automobile manufacturing company and combined with the watch signifying time and speed, is a reference to the rationalization of the workplace and the effect of mass-production on society.
The replacing of the head of the woman with a lightbulb and masking of her face with an advertisement is a representation of the mass-media commodification of women in the modern world (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 106). In many respects, like other artists of the Dada movement, Höch felt angry at the media for forcing society to conform to idealistic stereotypes. She used the anarchic nature of Dada as a critique on the way that people of certain groups, such as men and women are forced to conform to stereotypes in order to have a place in society.
To fully appreciate Dada, we must not only focus on its exhibited works but also on the posters and other media used to promote the exhibitions. Graphic Design was very important in the promotion and advertising of Dada artists and artworks and a lot of these are very much artworks in themselves.
Kurt Schwitters was a prominent graphic designer and produced many posters for Dada exhibitions. He became friends with Theo van Doesburg, leader of Dutch constructivist group De Stijl and who, under the pseudonym I.K. Bonset, published the Dada magazine Mécano and created Dada collages. (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 110). The two worked together on this page from his periodical Merz with Käte Steinitz.
Die Scheuche (Figure 9), or the Scarecrow in English, describes the story of a scarecrow who wears a top hat and shawl and carries a cane, things that are associated with a past era. He is pecked by a chicken and rooster until ghosts of the original owners of his clothes appear and reclaim them to return them to the past (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 119). The story is a tale warning against becoming stuck in the past and encourage embracing the future. The use of large typographical letters as characters in the story is a very innovative use of Graphic design. Kurt Schwitters was yet another Dada artist who went on to become part of the Surrealist movement. Dada and surrealism are very closely linked and the terms are sometimes incorrectly used interchangeably.
The difference between Dada and Surrealism, is that Dada arose towards the end of the first world war as a form of radical, almost anti-art formed on the idea that the aesthetically pleasing artworks that people had grown accustomed to were no longer relevant because of the horrors and absurdity of the war. Surrealism appeared a little later and could be considered to have taken over from Dada. The two movements have the same theme in common; absurdity, anti-tradition, nihilism and desire to understand the unconscious mind. Surrealism was different to Dada in the sense that it was a more positive movement without the angry and political nature of Dada.
To use a musical analogy, one might say that whereas Dada was punk, surrealism was more New Wave. Duchamp’s The Fountain (Figure 2), as mentioned earlier, was radically different to all the art that came before it. It was not at all aesthetically pleasing; if anything, it was shocking. It was made from very nonstandard materials as it was essentially a piece of sanitary ware with minor alterations, and it does not appear to make any sense. Dali’s Persistence of Memory (Figure 10) on the other hand, was a very careful and detailed painting of his inner thoughts. It was what he described as “hand-painted dream photographs “- reuniting the unconscious mind with realism. It used the standard materials of oil paint on canvas and was aesthetically pleasing while maintaining an air of absurdity and non-conformism. Surrealism was in many respects, a continuation of Dada but without the radical anti-art intention and with the re-establishment of the aesthetic quality.
Kurt Schwitters was a prominent figure in the world of Dada; known for his own ‘one-person’ art movement called Merz in Hanover. He would find discarded objects that littered the streets and produced artworks by gluing and nailing them together. He was rejected by the Berlin set of Dada artists for exhibiting at the ‘bourgeois’ Der Sturm gallery. To add to his quarrel with the Berlin set, he insisted that his own works were art, while saying that their collages were anti-art (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 110). It was through the philosophy of Merz that he contributed to yet another artistic movement; that of Constructivism.
In this photograph of the interior of his construction the Merzbau (Figure 11), we can see a large number of geometric shapes made out of a wide variety of materials including coloured paper, cardboard, wood, metal and glass. This work is considered by art scholar Rudolf Kuenzli as the embodiment of Schwitters’ Merz philosophy that any materials can be used in art and that it is the arrangement or alteration of those materials that is important. This art piece started as a small work which eventually took over his apartment until the building was destroyed in the second world war. It was a work that he kept adding to, with many sections that he gave names too.
In 1923 Schwitters started a series of vertical columns of paper and other materials. When he noticed how the merzcollumns, as he called them, interacted with each other and the room in which they were contained, he started to tie them together with string, wire and eventually plaster and wooden slats. This piece became more and more influenced by De Stijl and constructivism in the 1930s. He made the shapes more geometric and took inspiration from El Lissitzky’s Proun Room at the 1923 Greater Berlin Art Exhibition (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 117).
By the outbreak of the Second world war, Dada had well and truly receded into the rear-view mirror, but when one recalls the original motivation for the movement as an artistic response to the madness of world conflict, it is perhaps unsurprising that it had a resurgence in the 1950s. Neo-Dada, as it then became known, was the response of artists trained in abstract expressionism to its seriousness and pretentiousness. Robert Rauschenberg and Fluxus artists explored new possibilities for the ordinary object, focusing on everyday life and eliminating the artist’s ego (Kuenzli, 2015, p. 178).
Dada has had a huge influence on a lot of the art movements that have followed it, as well as other contemporaneous ones. The essence of Dada is a long-term survivor, and like many long-term survivors, it lives in borrowed clothes. For example, if we take Damien Hirst’s iconic work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (Figure 12), a dead shark preserved in formaldehyde in a case. The shark was not captured by Hirst but instead by a fisherman who had been paid to do so (Davies, 2010). Does this sound similar to Duchamp’s purchase of a urinal which, technically he did not produce himself, and his decision to exhibit it as an artwork? Overall, do a lot of Damien Hirst’s works seem somewhat like the ready-mades of Duchamp? What about the shock element of the work? Is this controversial in the same way as Duchamp’s fountain? Let us also consider the famous cartoons by Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame (Figure 13). Animations using photographs combined with hand drawn images. Are these similar to the collages by Hannah Höch or Max Ernst?
In conclusion, One could spend a long time showcasing examples of Dada influence from art movements far and wide, but perhaps the real Dada influence is not in the appearance of the work but in the intention behind the work and its execution. It could also be said that as the world we live in is cyclical, the new revolutionaries of today are doomed to become the old establishment of the future.
As the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates once supposedly remarked, “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers (Bartleby, 1989).” Does this sound familiar? It certainly should to any reader of a tabloid newspaper.
Dada represented a significant change in the artworld, and the ripples of that change are very much still ongoing. Hugo Ball is dead, Long live Hugo Ball.
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