Dada Art

Dada Art.

The Dada movement was a movement of literature as well as a visual one. There were independent groups of Dadaism in Zurich, New York, Berlin and Paris. The first manifesto of the movement was published in 1918. It ''claimed that Dadaism was 'a new reality' and accused the Expressionists, 'of sentimental resistance to the time'. '' (Little, 2004, p.111)

The Dadaists aim was that of shocking people, and hoped to shake society out of the nationalism and materialism. These two elements (nationalism and materialism) were  the primary elements that led to the carnage of world war one. The Dada movement emerged from world war one and this was because the war led the artists to question the values of society that had created it and to find them morally bankrupt.  

The Dadaists based their art on change and making works which makes no sense. A new awareness of the role of the unconscious in everyday life is expressed. The artists of this movement reacted by making ironic, cynical and nihilistic work.

According to Gombrich in his book 'The Story of Art' he said on the artists of this movement, '' It was certainly the wish of these artists to become as little children and to cock a snook at the solemnity and pomposity of Art with a capital A. ''

The Dada movement attacked the institutionalized art world, with its bourgeois ideas of taste and concern with market values. They accepted beauty but they changed art by exaggerating their artistic creations. Painting and sculpture were hardly used by the Dadaists instead they used to use different techniques such as collage, photo montage and ready mades. In literature the nonsense poem was a characteristic form of expression. Tristan Tzara's poem shows this:

in your inside there are smoking lamps

the swamp of blue honey

cat crouched in the gold of a flemish inn

boom boom

lots of sand yellow bicyclist

(Flanagan, 1962, p.265) 

A Dada artist called Jean ( OR Hans) Arp, is a  representative case of this in fact he made collages in which he glued the paper wherever it happened to fall. Duchamp another Dadaist used to exhibit industrial or everyday objects even called 'ready mades' and signed them as though he had made them himself. One of his famous ready made is the urinal which he signed on it 'R Mutt'.Duchamp's main aim was that of making people think and making them aware that the definitions and standards by which one label and judge works of art are possibly secondary to art and/or not definitive.

Dadaism  died because the world was changing  and a new optimism was destroying the wartime feeling of despair. Dada found itself out of date because there was no longer sufficient justification for its snarling bitterness.

Bibliography


Chilvers.I, 2009,Dictionary of art and artists,4th edition, New York:Oxford university Press.

Flanagan, G.A.,1962, Understand and Enjoy Moder Art,New York: Thomas Y.Crowell Company.

Gombrich, E.H.,2010, The Story of Art, 16th edition, London: Phaidon Press Limited.

Little,S.,2004, isms understanding art,London:Herbert Press.