Dada: How A Urinal Changed Art As We Know It
World War 1 broke out as a direct consequence of failed diplomacy; this led to widespread suspicion in establishment and authority. Artists across Europe, frustrated with society, took refuge in neutral Zurich, Switzerland, which had limited censorship. Here, they gave birth to a form of artistic and literary anarchy called ‘Dada’. The movement peaked from 1914 to 1918, with centers coming up in all major cities of Europe and in New York. It was more a protest movement than an art style, with an anti-establishment agenda sharing affinities with the radical left. Their goal was to upend bourgeois sensibilities; logic, nationalism, and materialism, which they thought led to the war. Although Cubism opened the door to radicalism, Dada condemned all former avant-garde movements (including Cubism), calling them laboratories of formal ideas and aesthetics designed to please the bourgeoisie; nevertheless, taking from them several stylistic influences.
The art world was (and arguably still is) a profit-making enterprise that dealt in art as an aesthetic commodity, controlled by notions of good taste. Dada sought complete freedom, it vehemently opposed bourgeois culture to the extreme that members often contradicted themselves, crying, ‘Dada is Anti-Dada!’.
Dadaists experimented with all mediums imaginable (poetry, sculpture, photography, collage, installation, and painting) to produce works considered wildly outrageous and lacking logical sense. But that was exactly the purpose of this ‘anti-art’, as the Dadaists themselves called it; to confuse, unsettle, and “arouse the bourgeoisie to rage” (in the words of Hans Richter). Even if that called for ‘stupidity’ and total ‘idiocy’, which became the defining traits of Dada. A classic example would be Marcel Duchamp’s famously infamous work titled Fountain (discussed later) that had the public at wit's end. A urinal exhibited upside down as sculpture, questioned all existing notions of art while raising the pertinent philosophical question, who is an artist? It would change the course of art history as we know it.
Dadaism officially began when Hugo Ball, a German thinker, and poet, with his mistress Emily Hennings, a former singer, and poetry reader, opened Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. It was a place to vent frustration with the ‘absurd meaninglessness of life’ and make people consider possibilities beyond war and nationalism. On February 5, 1916, the local newspaper carried a press release announcing Cabaret Voltaire as a group of artists and intellectuals who had convened to become a center for artistic entertainment. Anyone could attend and contribute. Musical performances and readings were held at daily meetings. Zurich Dada, as it would come to be known, had besides Ball and Hennings, four other members; Marcel Janco, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Hans Richter. The Cabaret was a riot of sight, sound, and action that is best illustrated in Janco’s painting of 1916, Cabaret Voltaire. The performers and spectators are a jumble, hardly separated by a diagonal in the center, demarcating the stage.
Cabaret Voltaire (1916)
Artist: Marcel Janco
Source: http://dolfpauw.blogspot.in/2006/02/marcel-janco-cabaret-voltaire-1916.html
Avant-garde movements like Cubism had progressively done away with the human figure as a subject; it was either completely absent or depicted in fragmentary form. Taking cue, Hugo Ball believed that the next step should be for poetry to discard language, he invented a genre called ‘sound poetry’ or “verse without words”. It emphasised phonetic aspects of human speech over semantic and syntactic values. His most popular work is the 1916 poem, ‘Karawane’; completely lacking in meaning, it is a series of syllables and vowels uttered in patterns that evoked a rhythm. He wanted the audience to suspend the cognitive urge to make sense of words spoken and just listen.
Karawane (1916)
Artist: Hugo Ball
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ball
Inspired by his contemporaries, Tristan Tzara, author of the Dada manifesto, invented two more styles of poetry. ‘Simultaneism’ referred to the same poem recited in different languages, with different rhythms and tonalities by different people, but at the same time. The other was called ‘simultaneous verse’ where, just as in surrealist automatism, poetry was generated by reciting whatever came to mind without self-conscious censorship. (Nihilism: Philosophy of nothingness, Arthur Morius Francis, p.172)
Fountain by Marcel Duchamp
Source: https://www.artsy.net/artist/marcel-duchamp
In New York, Dada attained prominence with the arrival of Marcel Duchamp from Paris in 1916. Duchamp’s contributions have influenced the way art is perceived today, especially his work, the Fountain (discussed previously). He introduced the concept of readymades, allowing for daily use objects to be presented as art with minimal changes. Duchamp took a urinal, signed it R. Mutt’s 1917 (after the plumbing store Mott’s where the urinal was purchased), and submitted it to an art exhibition by ‘The Society of Independent Artists. The urinal, as a mocking comparison to the classical fountains designed by Renaissance and Baroque artists, was intended to question the artist’s role in the process of art. A simple change in the context of the object, from bathroom to gallery, challenged existing notions and argued that an artist is anyone who could express himself/herself by any means possible, which include but are not limited to ‘making or creating’. Besides being the first of the readymades, the Fountain is a classic example of wit and humour in Dada.
