Dada
An artistic idea and movement that arose in the mid-1910s. Against the background of resistance to the First World War and the nihilism the war brought, it rejected reason, order, and the values of existing art themselves. It made deliberate use of nonsense, chance, and shock, and produced new forms of expression such as sound poetry, collage, photomontage, and the readymade. It began in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916 and spread to Berlin, Paris, New York, and elsewhere.
Origin of the name
The origin of the name "Dada" is not clear. It is said to have been a word chosen at random from a dictionary, and the story is told that Richard Huelsenbeck stabbed a paper knife into a French-German dictionary and landed on dada, French for a hobby horse (a toy horse). Other explanations are that its infantile sound, or its neutrality, belonging to no particular language, suited an international movement.
Birth in Zurich
In 1916 Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, which became the base of the movement. Tristan Tzara, Hans (Jean) Arp, Marcel Janco, and others joined, and staged readings and performances of sound poetry. Ball issued the Dada Manifesto on July 14, 1916, and Tzara issued an influential manifesto of his own in 1918.
Dada in each city
- Berlin — strongly political, and photomontage developed here
- New York — Marcel Duchamp and others carried out theoretical experiments. Duchamp's Fountain is known as the representative example of the readymade, a manufactured object presented as a work as it is
- Paris — absorbed into Surrealism by around 1924
- Hanover and other cities also had their own developments
Afterwards, and in Japan
By the mid-1920s much of Dada's destructive energy had passed into Surrealism. It has left its influence on later avant-garde art, postmodernism, culture jamming, and more. In Japan the poets Shinkichi Takahashi and Jun Tsuji introduced and practiced Dada, and the art group MAVO, active from 1923 to 1925, is placed in the same current.
To verify
- Which of the theories on the origin of the name is considered the strongest
- The opening date of the Cabaret Voltaire (some sources give February 1916)
- When Tzara moved to Paris
References
- Mentioned in
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