Dada

1. Dada

2. Dada DADA was an artistic and literary movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland. The name as nonsensical as the movement itself, Dada initially began as a reaction against the WW1, that aimed to defy reason in a world that was already in chaos. It revolutionised every art form, including comedy, music and political protests. It worked through: • Mocking the politics, • Satirising the media, • And ridiculing centuries of culture.

3. Zurich • During the First World War, neutral Switzerland was a safe haven for artists and intellectuals who were desperate to escape the carnage of the trenches. One of these bohemian émigrés was German performance artist Hugo Ball, who wrote the Dada manifesto (a surreal stream of consciousness) and founded Cabaret Voltaire. • The movement was to articulate the collective's radical nihilistic and iconoclastic ideology. In their First Dadaist Manifesto, written by Ball in 1916, the early Dadaists who met at the Cabaret Voltaire explained how their new movement was a direct revolt against the prevailing bourgeois aesthetic and social values of the West and against society's glorification of war and violence. Cabaret Voltaire 1916

4. Hugo Ball • Ball's sound poems such as Karawane (1916) and Katzen and Pfauen (1916) exemplified Dada's ironic, nonsensical, and playful yet deadly serious critique of Western culture. Ball came to the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire dressed in a cardboard suit and wearing an outrageous headdress performed them in front of an audience that was out on an evening at the cabaret Hugo Ball performing at Cabaret Voltaire in 1916

5. Berlin • The revolt in Zurich spawned important international offshoots in Paris, Berlin, and New York. • The Berlin movement's originality stemmed from its political militantism: it was involved in the social upheavals and the Spartakist revolution which broke out at the end of the war in the German capital. Its plastic works, ferociously subversive, retain for us the cruel image of the twilight of the bourgeoisie.

6. Hannah Hoch • Höch was a key progenitor of the self-conscious practice of collaging diverse photographic elements from different sources to make art. This strategy of combining formerly unrelated images sometimes made startling and insightful connections. It had massive influence in the later art movements such as Surrealism and Conceptual Art. Cut With the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919-20). In the top right corner Höch has pasted together images of "anti-Dada:" figures of the Weimar government and representatives of the old empire. Elsewhere in the collage, the proponents of Dada including photographs of Raoul Hausmann are ranged in opposition to these establishment figures. The effect is initially one of visual confusion, and yet a kind of nonsense-narrative begins to develop with sustained attention. One figure is transformed into something else by the addition of a de-contextualised newspaper clipping, such as the Kaiser's iconic moustache replaced by a pair of upside-down wrestlers. The work encapsulates the eclecticism and eccentricities of Dadaism, but also makes a pointed political statement against the staid establishment; it is a carefully-crafted homage to anarchistic opposition.

7. New York • Marcel Duchamp, having assimilated the lessons of Cubism and Futurism, whose joint influence may be felt in his early paintings, he spearheaded the American Dada movement together with his friends and collaborators Picabia and Man Ray. By challenging the very notion of what is art, his first readymades sent shock waves across the art world that can still be felt today. • The readymade also defied the notion that art must be beautiful. Duchamp claimed to have chosen everyday objects “based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste….”2 In doing so, Duchamp paved the way for Conceptual art—work that was “in the service of the mind,”3 as opposed to a purely “retinal” art, intended only to please the eye. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

8. My thoughts • I like how relevant this movement is to the present day. With Trump being the president, general elections in UK that are tearing the country apart, and the increase in terror attacks across Europe, there artists that are trying to bring light to severity of these events and also highlight • Some of the art includes Natalie Franks powerful feminist drawings that emphasise how Trumps policies are prejudiced, and Natalie Baxter that creates the empathise the concept that otherwise people disagree with each other. • Though, they’re not specifically works influenced by Dada, the movement has encouraged artists for controversy to stimulate their artworks, in that way enlighten the society. Natalie Frank, Taming the Animals. 2016. Chalk pastel and gouache on paper. Natalie Baxter, “America, Current Mood,” fabric and polyfill, 63 x 36 x 5 inches, 2016