Beatrice Wood with Marcel Duchamp (left) and Francis Picabia (center) | 1917	Evening at Arensbergs, 1932 Beatrice Wood
Rationalization is on the March John Heartfield	The Mechanical Head Raoul Hausmann

 

What is Dada?

"In spite of many statements to the contrary, most Dadaists seem to have wanted to create a new art that would have nothing to do with former styles and notions. In order to find it, they absorbed or invented many new means of expression: abstraction; photomontage; collage; assemblage; frottage; typography; glossolalia; phonetic, concrete, visual and simultaneous poetry; conceptual art; the readymade; the drawing and painting of invented machines; happenings; performance art; and kinetic art, including film. No less crucial was the inspiration that came from African artifacts, from the art of the insane, and the drawings of children – an inspiration that proved fundamental to many visual artists of the twentieth century...

...Dada was not a fashion, a style, or a doctrine. It was more than a footnote to cultural history. We can better understand it as a condition, a spirit, a productive state of mind that has remained alive. Looking for core elements within the chaotic structure of Dada, I would mention paradox, chance, abandon, protest, aggression, antinationalism, humor, irony, bluff, art, and mysticism...

...There seems to me more than a little resemblance between the world a hundred years ago and much of what we observe today. There is no all-out war, but there is a sense of a deep crisis and an overbearing feeling of menace, of being faced with enormous threats."

– Alfred Brendel, October 27, 2016
Volume LXIII, Number 16
The New York Review, 22 - 25

 

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Cabaret Voltaire, 1916 - Marcel Janco

Marcel Janco “We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the tabula rasa.” – Marcel Janco

 

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Tristan Tzara

“Having known 'the thrill of awakening', Dadaists proclaimed a 'harsh necessity free from all disciplines or morals', the 'identity between order and disorder, between I and non-I, between affirmation and negation as the radiance of an absolute art', and an 'active kind of simplicity, the incapability of distinguishing any degrees of clarity'. 'What is divine within us’.”

– Tristan Tzara 

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Jean Tinguely

“With Dada I… have in common a certain mistrust toward power. We don't like authority, we don't like power, To me art is a form of manifest revolt, total and complete. It's a political attitude which doesn't need to found a political party. It's not a matter of taking power; when you are against it, you can't take it. We're against all forms of force which aggregate and crystallize an authority that oppresses people. Obviously this is not a characteristic of my art alone – it's much more general, a basic political attitude.” – Jean Tinguely

 

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“Dada is a ‘state of mind’.” – Man Ray

Man Ray

 

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“You’ll never know why you exist, but you’ll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously”

– Tristan Tzara 

 

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Richard Huelsenbeck, Berlin 1917

“Dada is the sun, Dada is the egg. Dada is the Police of the Police.” – Richard Huelsenbeck

 

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Dada Manifesto - Hugo Ball

Hugo Ball “Our cabaret is a gesture… Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.” – Hugo Ball

 

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Kurt Schwitters

“We, the founders of Dada-movement try to give 'time' its own reflection in the mirror.”

– Kurt Schwitters 

 

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Fountain, 1917 - Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp (photo by Beatrice Wood) “Dada is 'nothing'.” – Marcel Duchamp

 

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Theo van Dousburg

"Dada is able to mobilize the optical and dimensional static viewpoint which keeps us imprisoned in our [three-dimensional] illusions. Thus it became possible to perceive the entire prism of the world instead of just one facet at a time. In this connection Dada is one of the strongest manifestations of the fourth dimension, transposed onto the subject... Dada is 'yes-no, a bird on four legs, a ladder without steps, a square without angles'. Dada possesses as many positives as negatives. To think that Dada simply means destruction is to misunderstand life, of which Dada is the expression.” – Theo van Dousburg

 

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“Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds.” – Jean-Hans Arp

Jean-Hans Arp

 

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Hans Richter

 

Costumes Designed by Sophie Tauber Arp
for a dance performance by Sophie and her sister
to acommpany a Poetry Reading by Hugo Ball.

 

Artwork by Hannah Hoch

Art Critic by Raoul Hausmann

 

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“Dada hurts. Dada does not jest, for the reason that it was experienced by revolutionary men and not by philistines who demand that art be a decoration for the mendacity of their own emotions...”

– Richard Huelsenbeck 

 

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