Dada

Dada, or Dadaism, was a cultural movement that involved visual arts, literature (mainly poetry), theatre, and graphic design, and began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland during World War I.

Overview

Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals. Passionate coverage of art, politics and culture filled their publications.

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Deliberate irrationality, the rejection of the prevailing standards in art, disillusionment, cynicism, nonsense, chance and randomness characterize Dada. The movement was a protest against the barbarism of World War I, the bourgeois interests Dada adherents believed inspired the war, and what they believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society. The movement influenced later styles, movements and groups including surrealism and Fluxus.

Related Topics:
Barbarism - Bourgeois - Surrealism - Fluxus

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According to its proponents, Dada was not art — it was anti-art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning — interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada is to offend. It is perhaps then ironic that Dada became an influential movement in modern art. Dada became a commentary on art and the world and thus became art itself.

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Those who participated in Dada were attracted to a nihilistic point of view (nothing achieved by mankind was worthwhile, not even art), and created art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation.

Related Topics:
Nihilistic - Randomness

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Dada was a way to express the confusion felt by many people as their world was turned upside down by World War I. There was not an attempt to find meaning in disorder, but rather to accept disorder as the nature of the world, using it as a means to express their distaste for the aesthetics of the previous order and carnage they believed it reaped. Through this rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics they hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics.

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