Dada. Productive destruction
Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies:
LIFETristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto” (1918)
During the World War I, neutral Switzerland became a battlefield between proponents of old vs new art. The Dadaists, successors of the Futurists from the European avant-garde art scene, declared themselves from the top of their lungs and were the reaction from the creative intelligentsia to the nonsense and horror of military confrontations.
The first Dada literary evenings took place in February 1916 in the Zurich cafe “Cabaret Voltaire”.
From the first days, the Dadaists proved themselves as desperate brawlers and bullies. Their performances were rarely without brawls and police intervention.
In May 1916, the word “dada” was printed for the first time on the first collection of the group’s members.
Unlike Futurists, Dadaists didn’t fight against the classics, they went further: their motives were fundamentally anti-artistic. When Dadaists spoke about the destruction of art they did not mean the destruction of creativity but the very concept of art that has been developed.
That’s why it is so difficult to single out something in common between works that would characterise Dadaism as an art movement.
Connotated with the sinking ship atmosphere of the European civilisation, creators were trying to reject all aesthetics and chant for the inevitable collapse.
“Seize the Memes of production“
Despite the nihilism, the movement gave birth to notoriously important techniques and ideas that fed into a variety of avant-garde movements such as surrealism, abstractionism, pop art, generative art and performance art.
For example, artists like Jean Arp found it very important to leave some part of their work to random events occurring outside of author’s control. This approach was contrary to all the norms of creating works of art, where previously everything was precisely planned and had a logical conclusion.
The introduction of an element of chance was one of the forms of protest of the Dadaists against traditional canons in art, as well as an attempt to find an answer to the question of the role of the artist in the creative process. Those ideas gave birth to today’s generative art where an artist merely guides some generative process (e.g. machine learning model).
Other new noteworthy techniques became known as collage and ready-made popularising reuse of existing objects in new contexts.
Collage assumed the combination of heterogeneous elements in one artwork. Elements would differ in origin/material/style to create a two-dimensional image.
A collage could combine surfaces of different texture and colour. Everything that the artist has at hand was used — photographs, fabric, scraps of newspapers and magazines, wallpaper.
In Zurich, the collage was random. In the tradition of the Berlin Dadaists, the collage, on the contrary, had a pre-conceived composition and would contain a political slogan.
Dadaists from Cologne (Max Ernst) and Hanover (Kurt Schwitters) endowed collages with the properties of a poetic work:
The collage technique is the systematic exploitation of the accidentally or artificially provoked encounter of two or more foreign realities on a seemingly incongruous level — and the spark of poetry that leaps across the gap as these two realities are brought together.
Max Ernst
A photocollage in turn is a collage made of photographs.
When a collage goes beyond the space of the sheet and goes into volume, it would have been called an assemblage — the assembly of everyday objects to produce meaningful or meaningless (relative to the war) pieces of work including war objects and trash.
Objects were nailed, screwed or fastened together in different fashions. Assemblages could be seen in the round or could be hung on a wall.
Finally, “ready-mades” — these were simply household items that could be bought and presented as a work of art after the insignificant significance of the artist. The use of ready-mades has raised questions about artistic creativity, the purpose of art in society and the very foundation of what could be considered as a work of art.
Instead of epilogue
In Dadaism, artists of various talents and worldviews got along, as they were united by anti-civilisational sentiments. Dada, as a state of mind, remains the most daring art movement of the last century thanks to humor, skepticism, and sarcasm.
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