Dadaism: what it is and what are its characteristics

What is Dadaism? How can such provocative elements like the urinal and Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa with mustaches be in a museum? What did the Dada movement intend with such “irreverence”? Is it disrespectful to art, is it art, or is it nothing?

Dadaism is one of the most original movements in history and also one of the most enigmatic., precisely because of the clarity and forcefulness so extremely violent with which it is expressed. In this article we will try to briefly unravel the mysteries of this claim, which was born in a Zurich café when the rest of Europe was plunged into the devastation of World War I World.

What is Dadaism?

In the year 1916, a group of young intellectuals regularly meets at the Cabaret Voltaire, a café in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. The group is heterogeneous, but they all have one characteristic in common: they flee from the war and the horror that has gripped Europe.

Indeed, since 1914 the First World War ravaged the European continent. The brilliant years prior to the conflict, commonly referred to as the Belle Époque, have vanished. A splendor that, on the other hand, was nothing more than a mirage, since in the last decades of the 19th century the rearmament of the European powers was an open secret.

This pre-war climate, which portends little less than a collective shipwreck, saddens the generation born around the year 1890. In Paris, the Fauves began to open the way for what would become, a few years later, the avant-garde., artistic movements that violently oppose the order and the prevailing society.

This youth protest is the result of deep anguish, the awareness that the end of a world is being experienced and the concern of those who do not know what will come next. In general, the avant-garde divides into two forms of protest: the first means a naive and almost childish evasion, a distance from that hostile world, through a naïve and romantic art; the second is a violent and highly demanding protest, which directly attacks the foundations of the society of the time.

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Dadaism is an absolute denial

It is in this second group that the Dadaists must be placed. Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) was a Romanian student who was in Zurich studying philosophy when he was surprised by the war in his homeland; Hans Arp, for his part, was in town to visit his mother. On the other hand, we also find deserters from the army who, horrified by the blood, death and desolation of combat, take refuge in Switzerland. This is the case of Hugo Ball, a former soldier in the German army.

We must imagine this group of young people sitting at the tables of the Cabaret Voltaire, smoking, perhaps absentmindedly observing the passers-by, chatting in a low voice, when not plunged into an anguishing silence and oppressor. Europe sinks. The whole world is sinking. It is 1916, and the Great War seems to have no end.

The Dada movement, which arose from the minds and hearts of these artists disillusioned with society and the human being, took their protest to the extreme. And we are not referring to violent actions. Absolutely.

quite the contrary, the dadaists took nihilism, that is, absolute negation, to its ultimate consequences. They even deny art, a concept that, in other avant-garde movements, such as German expressionism (also very critical of the war situation), was still prevailing. As Mario de Micheli states in his book The artistic avant-garde of the 20th century, “dadaism is anti-artistic, anti-literary and anti-poetic”.

It is still curious and, in a certain way, funny, that Dadaism, the most transgressive and demanding movement in the art history, which considered itself "anti-art", is now included in art books as a move more. What would Tristan Tzara and his companions have thought of him? We do not know. Because, under all that strong denialist attitude, there was a disillusioned artistic sensibility. Let us remember that all the members of the Dada movement were intellectuals, writers and artists. It would be for something.

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“Dada”: the name that means nothing

The artist Hans Arp (1886-1966), one of the founders of the Dada movement, declared in a magazine in 1921 that the name "dada" came to them one day at the Café Terasse in Zurich. The way in which he narrates it, artificial and very "dadaist", makes us question the veracity of the statement (after all, the Dadaism was that, mockery and sarcasm): "I declare that Tristan Tzara found the word "dada" on February 8, 1916 at six in the late. I was present with my twelve children when Tzara uttered this word for the first time (...) it happened in the Café Terasse in Zurich, while he was bringing a bun to my left nostril... ”.

His fellow movement members, the writer George Ribemont-Dessaignes (1884–1974) and Tristan Tzara himself, play along, giving the public different versions. The first ensures that the word was discovered by chance, when a "letter opener accidentally slipped between the pages of the dictionary." Tzara, for his part, says that he found the word "dada" by chance between the pages of a Larousse.

What is the truth? Well, as they say colloquially, who knows. With the Dadaists everything was a circus ring, full of magic acts, acrobatics and visual tricks. This is what, basically, the Dada movement wanted: confuse the viewer, make him frown, arouse anger in his heart, the rage of impotence.

Actually, "dada" means nothing. Precisely for this reason it is the perfect name for the group; a nomenclature that is empty, that resonates due to its hollowness, that is only a symbol of rebellion and denial of all the values ​​of the accepted culture.

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Variants of the expression of Dadaism in different arts

How to make "art" when you absolutely deny it? What, then, were the creative procedures of this group that did not believe in artistic creation? Let's briefly examine how the Dadaists expressed their convictions.

1. Dadaist "poetry"

Dadaists do not create, but manufacture. Thus, in this very simple way, they bring down the glorious Art (with a capital letter) from the pedestals and lower it to the terrain of the mechanical, of the prosaic. In its Manifesto on weak love and bitter love (1921), Tristan Tzara details the steps to make a "poem."

Among them, we find newspaper clippings taken randomly from a bag, and later placed on a sheet. It is, of course, what de Micheli called “anti-literature”; there is no creative process, since everything is left to the whim of chance.

It is still curious, however, the beautiful title with which Tzara titled this manifesto, a title full of poetry which, despite containing an obvious sarcastic charge, denotes, once again, that the Dadaists were, deep down, artists. Even if they wanted to pretend otherwise.

2. Dadaist "sculpture"

if we have in mind Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal (1887-1968), we already have a clear image of what the Dadaists presented as sculpture. The “work”, ironically titled The fountain, was simply bought by Duchamp (how else was he going to make a urinal without being a plumber?) and sent to the Annual Association of Independent Artists. The “work” was rejected, of course, but this was the artist's intention. As a good Dadaist, Duchamp did not believe in artistic institutions or anything similar, not even "independent" ones.

Against all odds, The Fountain is currently on display in a museum, The Tate Modern in London. Surely, Duchamp would have laughed, and a lot, with it.

3. Dadaist “painting”

The famous Gioconda of da Vinci, an undeniable icon of universal art, adorned with lustrous black mustaches. This is how the well-known Marcel Duchamp presented it; in 1919 he took a reproduction of the Monna Lisa and added a mustache and the letters L. h. EITHER. EITHER. Q. If these letters are read quickly in French, we get the phrase “elle a chaud au cul”, that is, “she has a hot ass”. The provocation is more than evident.

With this work, Duchamp takes Dadaism to its maximum expression, since, first of all, he ridicules a consecrated work, thus demonstrating that no art is “sacred”; Secondly, artistic creation is again lowered from the pedestals, since it appropriates someone else's work and modifies it at will. For this reason, the Dadaists have been considered the precursors of the new media art or of new media art, since they were among the first to exercise the appropriation of works of art for a new use, in addition to the fact that they used techniques such as collage and photomontage profusely.