On Dadaism

(or, rather, why it counts as art)

In 1914, the Great War began.
In 1916, Dadaism was born.

In the years before World War I, Europe’s reality seemed to be breaking. Einstein’s universe sounded more like science fiction than possibility, Freud’s theories made the unconscious reasonable, and Picasso’s Cubism distorted shapes and human anatomy.
“The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of art, but that of disgust.”
-Tristan Tzara

June 28, 1914

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is assassinated. This serves as the linchpin that sets off the Great War within a few weeks, the likes of which have never been seen before. Warfare machinery is ruthlessly implemented for the forst time, causing unprecedented numbers of death and destruction.
(or, rather, why it counts as art)

June 1915

The Gorlice-Tarnów Offensive takes almost 1.1 million lives. That’s the equivalent of wiping out the entire population of Amsterdam today. Destruction on such levels had never been seen before, and the impact reverberated throughout the world.

1916, Zurich

An international collective of disgruntled artists blames nationalism and the absurd, ruthless logic of capitalist Europe for the horrors of WW1. Searching for a moniker, they plunge a knife into a French-German dictionary, landing by chance on the word ‘dada’ (French for hobby-horse).

September 1916

The Brusilov Offensive takes more than 2.3 million lives. If the end of the offensive was determined by the number of people dying, and 1 person died a day, it would have taken 6,301 years for the offensive to finish. The offensive would have finished in 8,217 AD.

1916, Zurich

An international collective of disgruntled artists blames nationalism and the absurd, ruthless logic of capitalist Europe for the horrors of WW1. Searching for a moniker, they plunge a knife into a French-German dictionary, landing by chance on the word ‘dada’ (French for hobby-horse).

April 1917, France

A swift German offensive leaves 120,000 French dead just 150 miles from Paris. One village witnessed a band of French infantrymen (sent as reinforcements) baa-ing like lambs led to slaughter, in futile protest, as they were marched to the front.

1918

The Dada Manifesto declares: "Art must be unaesthetic in the extreme, useless, and impossible to justify."
Soldiers begin coming back, many severely crippled with missing limbs. The resulting growth of the prosthetics industry struck Dada artists as creating a race of half-mechanical men. Dadaists took to representing the human form as mutilated, manufactured, or mechanical.

November  1918

The Great War ends, leaving 20 million dead and some 21 million wounded. That’s the equivalent of wiping out the entirety of Beijing or Mumbai.

1920

Dada begins to fade into Surrealism, but is the catalyst for modern art as we know it today.

Characteristics of Dada

Readymades were everyday objects that could be bought and presented as art with little manipulation by the artist. The pieces were often chosen and assembled by chance or accident to challenge bourgeois notions about the definition of art, creatvity, and their purpose in society.

Chancewas used to embrace the random and the accidental as a way to release creativity from rational control. In addition to loss of rational control, Dada’s lack of concern with preparatory work and the celebration of marred artworks fit well with the Dada rejection for traditional art methods, questioning the role of the artist in the artistic process.

Humor and irony were key to the Dada beliefs that nothing has intrinsic value. Irony also gave the artists flexibility and ability to embrace the craziness of the world around them, thus preventing them from taking their work too seriously or from getting caught up in perfectionism.

Irreverence, tied closely to Dada humor was a crucial component of Dada art, whether it was a lack of respect for bourgeois convention, government authorities, conventional production methods, or the artistic canon.
L.H.O.O.Q. - Marcel Duchamp

After trying his hand at Impressionism and Cubism, Marcel Duchamp rejected all painting because it was made for the eye, not the mind. In 1919, he penciled a mustache and goatee on a print of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and inscribed the work "L.H.O.O.Q." The letters pronounced in French form a risqué pun: "Elle a chaud au cul", meaning "She is hot in the arse”, or "She has a hot ass”. It’s a play on the French "avoir chaud au cul," an explicit expression implying that a woman has sexual restlessness. In a late interview, Duchamp gave a loose translation of L.H.O.O.Q. as "there is fire down below". Intentionally disrespectful, Duchamp's defacement was meant to express the Dadaists' rejection of both artistic and cultural authority.