Dadaism Duchamp

Dada: The Anti-Art Movement

Dada was an international avant-garde movement founded in Zurich in 1916, during World War I, as a deliberate assault on Western rationalism, bourgeois culture, and the aesthetic values that - in its practitioners' view - had produced the industrial slaughter of the war. Its founding gesture was nihilistic: if civilized European culture had led to the trenches and poison gas, then that culture's art, logic, and values deserved not critique but ridicule and destruction.

Zurich and the Cabaret Voltaire

The movement was founded at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in February 1916 by Hugo Ball (1886-1927), Emmy Hennings (1885-1948), and swiftly joined by Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), Jean (Hans) Arp (1886-1966), Richard Huelsenbeck (1892-1974), and Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943). The Cabaret hosted performances of sound poetry - phonetic verse with no semantic content (Karawane, Hugo Ball, 1916), simultaneous multilingual readings, and anti-concerts. The name Dada was allegedly found by inserting a knife at random into a French dictionary (dada is French children's language for a hobby horse).

Marcel Duchamp and the Readymade

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was working in New York from 1915 and is the movement's most consequential philosophical artist, though he maintained an ironic distance from all group affiliations. His readymades - commercially produced objects selected and nominated as art without modification - are Dada's most enduring legacy:

• Bicycle Wheel (1913/1951 replica): a bicycle fork and wheel mounted on a kitchen stool - the first readymade
• Bottle Rack (Porte-bouteilles, 1914): a galvanized iron bottle-drying rack
• Fountain (1917): a commercially purchased urinal signed R. Mutt and submitted (then rejected) to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York. The original is lost; replicas from Duchamp's authorization (1950, 1964) exist in major museums. Fountain is repeatedly voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century in polls of artists and critics.
• L.H.O.O.Q. (1919): a postcard of the Mona Lisa with a penciled mustache and goatee, the title an obscene homophone in French

Berlin Dada: Political Photomontage

Berlin Dada (1918-1920), led by John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891-1968), Hannah Höch (1889-1978), George Grosz (1893-1959), and Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971), developed photomontage as a political weapon. Hannah Höch's Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919-20, Nationalgalerie, Berlin) is a 90 x 144 cm collage of newspaper and magazine images creating a scathing critique of the Weimar Republic's male-dominated culture.

John Heartfield pioneered photomontage as anti-Nazi propaganda in the 1930s for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung magazine, producing images like Adolf, the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk (1932).

Legacy

Dada directly preceded and influenced Surrealism (André Breton's 1924 Surrealist Manifesto drew heavily on Dada tactics). Its influence on conceptual art (the readymade as the ancestor of all conceptual work from the 1960s onward), performance art, collage, graphic design, punk music, and contemporary internet culture is incalculable.