Dada
''Dada
doubts everything. Dada is an armadillo. Everything is Dada, too. Beware of
Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man's normal condition, is
Dada. But the real dadas are against Dada.''
Tristan Tzara (1896-1963),
Rumanian-born French dadaist. repr. In The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert
Motherwell (1951). "Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love,"
sct. 7, La Vie des Lettres, no. 4, Paris (1921).
Dadaism came around in the 20th century as a
negative reaction to World War One.
The movement, which was also a protest in itself, fought against art by ignoring aesthetics and rejecting logic and reason. It challenged the norms and values of traditional arts and promoted nonsense and irrationality. Even the music was outrageous, not making any sense. Dada was not an art form, it was an anti-art form which stood not to destroy art, but to rebel.
The movement, which was also a protest in itself, fought against art by ignoring aesthetics and rejecting logic and reason. It challenged the norms and values of traditional arts and promoted nonsense and irrationality. Even the music was outrageous, not making any sense. Dada was not an art form, it was an anti-art form which stood not to destroy art, but to rebel.
We, who are non-artists,
will create non-art -
since art (and everything else in the world) has no meaning, anyway.
Hannah Hoch, Grotesque, 1963
The Dadaists did
not have much in common apart from their ideals. Infact, they couldn’t even
agree on a name for their project easily. Some people believe the name ‘Dada’
originated from the French translation of ‘hobby horse’ whilst others believe
it is just a catch phrase which made no sense.
Later movements
such as surrealism and pop art were influenced by Dadaism.
Marcel Dunchamp was involved with the Dada movement. He is
well known for his famous, controversial work called Fountain, which consists of a urinal positioned on it’s back and
marked ‘R.Mutt 1917’ with black ink. In 2004 it was voted by British
professionals to be the most influential artwork of the 20th century.
It is said that this creation gave birth to conceptual art. It is questionable
whether the original urinal was lost intentionally, not by the artist himself. There
is only one original photograph of the work, 15 issued replicas were based on
that only photograph.
'Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own
hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed
it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of
view – created a new thought for that object'
Fountain – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
2013. [ONLINE] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)
