Dadaism
- The sound of Experiment
- Oct 21, 2024
- 14 min read
Updated: Oct 24, 2024
Introduction
Dadaism, a prolific and subversive art movement, first emerged in Zurich during the First World War and then spread to centers such as Berlin, Paris and New York. Through their new works – sound poems, collages, performances – Dadaist artists rejected traditional cultural values while appropriating the cultural and artistic forms of non-Western cultures such as Africa, Oceania and the Americas (Dada Africa, Non-Western Sources and Influences - 2017-10-18 | Musée de l'Orangerie). Influenced by other avant-garde movements – cubism, futurism, constructivism and expressionism – his output was extremely diverse, from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting and collage. Dada's aesthetic, characterized by the mockery of materialist and nationalist attitudes, proved to be a strong influence on artists in many cities, including Berlin, Hanover, Paris, New York and Cologne, which formed their own groups. The movement dissolved with the introduction of Surrealism, but the ideas it gave birth to became the cornerstones of various categories of modern and contemporary art (‘Dada Movement Overview and Key Ideas’). The Nanny had introduced irrationality, irony, mockery, gesture, randomness, "Automatism". The Dadaists, determined to give the bourgeoisie, which had provoked the war, and what remained of its values the coup de grace, introduced anti-art, proclaimed foolishness, sought in the unconscious the sources of their inspiration. In order to scandalize the fine taste of the bourgeoisie, they did not hesitate to use all kinds of means of expression: they made paintings out of rags and garbage, of random objects of everyday use, the "ready mades" (= ready-made (objects), usually mass-produced) (History of Art). The Dadaists not only proclaimed freedom from civilization, but tried to act on it in the production of their art. Of course, from our perspective of postcolonial mindfulness, there is something trivial about the way non-Western cultural objects were appropriated out of context as a way of raising the psychological stakes. But, as they saw it, "Africa" was an antidote to the fundamentally disconnected prudence of European culture, already evident in the machinations of the privileged dandy Roussel, who used the imaginative idea of Africa in both Impressions d'Afrique and the poetically spasmodic Nouvelle Impressions d'Afrique (1932) as the backdrop for his fictional stories. (Nechvátal).
Historic Overview
Founded in Hugo Ball's infamous Cabaret Voltaire nightclub in Zurich in 1915, Dada drew inspiration from art and cultures from around the world. In this Swiss club leftist writers, artists and thinkers met for evenings of progressive music and performances. Many of their shows mimicked African rituals in an attempt to shake and challenge the audience and themselves. Dadaist artists wanted to rebel against bourgeois ideals and the hypocrisy of European society which, despite considering itself superior, still allowed the horrors of the First World War. In the eyes of the Dadaists, European culture had lost credibility, so they turned to the rest of the world and were forced to recognize its wealth and validity. From the beginning, Dadaism saw non-European cultures as the "other" and did not shy away from exoticizing their "difference." This opportunism has remained almost undeniable in art ever since: from Jean-Luc Godard's quote, "It's not where you get things from – it's where you get them from" to Ai Weiwei using refugee life jackets as his palette. With confrontation and other techniques, Dadaism invented new ways of viewing and confronted Nazi Germany with a reinvigorated set of beauty ideals in art. However, not without failing to note that it has perpetuated the hypocrisy of the West simply by ignoring the horrors of European colonisation and appropriating rather than cooperating. The diversity in Dada's repertoire has shaped art to this day, including the problems that come with appropriation. (The African Cultures That Shaped Western Art). Initially, in 1916, the founders and other first members of the club - Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp - focused on the Western cultural products of several artists and writers: composer Igor Stravinsky, poet and publisher Filippo Marinetti, Bohemian novelist and poet Franz Werfel, poet Jules Laforgue, poet and art critic André Solon, novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars, playwright Frank Wedekind, writer and critic Max Jacob, poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire and painter Wassily Kandinsky. However, soon under Huelsenbeck's motivational quest for new art directions, cabaret became more of a mental playground particularly inspired by an imaginary Africa, as simulated by gallerist Han Coray. Although full of chutzpah, the Dadaists were theoretically simple by our standards. Without ever visiting Africa, they relied solely on their impressions of imported works, images, and ethnographic studies collected and shown by Cory in Zurich. (He gladly exhibited his African treasures along with fresh Dada works as early as 1917.) Their false contact with Africa was both dominant and misleading, and it took into its hands the vile spirit of Dadaism, as we see in Jarrah's Negro Poems and Note on Negro Art in 1926. Similarly, Janco's tribal masks and (later) Hannah Höch's collages resembled African art objects for a new formal art language. Höch is the more literal of the two artists in this regard – gluing fragments of Western figures together with images of African sculpture, as in the fervent "From the Collection of an Ethnographic Museum No. IX" (1929), "Streit" (ca, 1940), "Untitled, from an Ethnological Museum" (1924), and many other proposals of an undefined, mutated, revolutionary upheaval courtesy of the extensive Höch holdings of the Berlinische Galerie. Like Picasso, Dadaism was based on the same African stereotypes as the colonizers, but these excesses are certainly the price paid for the wonders of the works. An outstanding work that sets this early "exotic" context is a signed copy of Raymond Roussel's pun of the same name (and a play's far-out far-out farrago) Impressions d'Afrique (1910), a work featuring a painting machine that copies the color spectrum of the sky at dawn. It is precisely this cerebral tease that gave colossal creative influence to Marcel Duchamp, manifested in his frivolous and lustful masterpiece "The Bride Stripped of Her Bachelors, Even" (1915-1923). After seeing Impressions d'Afrique, Duchamp began producing paintings depicting mechanized sexual acts such as "Le Passage de la Vierge à la Mariée" (The Passage from Virgin to Bride) (1912) and the masterful "La Mariée" (The Bride) (1912), an inevitable reference point for the avant-garde of the 20th century. But apart from Roussel's fictional Africa, Duchamp seems mostly unaffected by Dadaism's mania for anything African, as does Francis Picabia and his quasi-mechanical painting entitled "Serpentins I" (1918) which is correctly placed near Duchamp's infamous "Fountain" (1917): the banal porcelain pissoir (urinal) signed with the nom de plume R. Mutt (followed by a lot of bruhaha). It's the same photo that was first published in The Blind Man No. 2. this is Stiglitz's photograph of The Fountain in front of Marsden Hartley's painting The Warriors (1913) (Nechvátal). To mark the centenary of Dadaism, Zurich's Rietberg Museum conceived "Dada Africa," an exhibition that explores the centrality of non-Western art to the movement's aesthetic and ideological development. (The title is a bit misleading, as the show also includes pieces from Asia, North America, Oceania, and Polynesia, as well as some wonderful examples of Swiss folk art.) Guided by Tristan Tzara's belief that "art needs a function," the artists of Zurich's dada circle exploited non-Western aesthetics as a scalpel to open up and then reconstruct European culture. Local gallerist and collector Han Coray played a central role in developing Dadaism's relationship with the "other" – a relationship this exhibition defines as dialogue, though it is probably best described as one-way traffic from south to north. Coray was the first to exhibit dada works alongside his own collection of African art objects, a collection now housed in the Rietberg Museum that forms the basis for much of the exhibition. The meaning that the Dadaists found in the so-called primitive reflected their own prejudices about non-Western cultures: most often, they distorted or misunderstood the subjects and objects of their curiosity. Beyond the politics of appropriation and primitivism, "Dada Africa" makes clear that non-Western art fueled the movement even more than previously imagined (Vinograd).
Arts
The Dadaism movement is based on notions of absurdity and provocation and was seen not only as an art movement, but as an anti-war movement. The absurdity of existing rules, rules, traditions and values was questioned by the Dadaist movement. The artistic movement included various art forms, including writing, poetry, dance, and performance art. Part of the movement was to question what could be described as "art" [1]. Dadaist artists often incorporated objects or images from the media into their art through collages and ready-mades. Artist Marcel Duchamp created famous Dadaist ready-made sculptures by manipulating found, prefabricated objects in a simple way and then presenting them in a gallery as art. Artist Hannah Hoch is famous for using collage. He pioneered photomontage, in which elements of different photos are pasted to create a new image. Dadaist art is often characterized by absurdity, humor and stupidity. Marcel Duchamp famously painted a mustache on a postcard of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa to show his disrespect for established artistic traditions and his sense of humor. Dadaist art was often spontaneous, playing with the elements of chance and encouraging the creativity of the moment. At Dada exhibitions, poems would be created by cutting out words from a single sheet of newspaper, scattering them on the ground, and then organizing them randomly on a page (‘Dadaism Definition, History, and Famous Dada Artists - 2023’). The historical period of avant-garde art movements coincided with two phenomena that can be interpreted as the failure of rationalism that characterizes the modern, capitalist system. One of them is Taylorism, which dehumanized and robotized the person involved in the work process, and the other is the First World War. Several avant-garde movements were critically related to reason and consciousness (expressionism, surrealism), but the most radical was Dadaism. The manifestos and Dadaist activities reveal that Dadaism wants to abolish not only the legacy of the past, but also the linguistic and logical structures that make up the fabric of society. Profane poems, meaningless words and sentences, simultaneous poems and various uses of sound aim to dissolve language itself. The negation of reason is most evident in Tristan Tzara's manifesto, in which the series of mutually contradictory claims concludes with an extremely clear statement: "I hate common sense." Logic, argumentation and dialectics are rejected in the name of freedom and life, characterized by Jara in the following way: "the interweaving of contradictions and all contradictions, of freaks and irrelevance: LIFE" (Jara 1918). In my paper, I supplement Peter Burger's thesis on the failure of the avant-garde (which is explained by him through its artistic success) by drawing attention to the failure of its belief in the face of reason, which is most evident in the search for meaning as an essential part of artistic reception. Thus, Dadaism is interesting only if the meaningless phenomenon is associated with some meaning during the artistic reception (Gizella)
Music
Dadaism permeated the music. The Dadaists were inspired by nonsense and irrationality. In the first decades of the 20th century, the Italian Futurists broke into the now, full steam ahead, while the Cubists dismantled the physical form itself. But it was on the stage of Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire that nonsense grabbed the audience by the throat and forced the music into the mad chatter of sound poetry. Cabaret Voltaire was a center for artists and writers to experiment with performances of spoken word, dance and music. Noisy soirées consumed at night. Chaotic, confused and brutal, they reacted against cultural and intellectual conformity in art and society after the devastation of the First World War. The anchor of the arts broke from her ship and got lost in the ocean that consumed everything: art came unstuck. Music abandoned tonality, Picasso's cubism distorted the human form, and Dadaism broke conformity, rules, and regulations, separating the polystyrene walls that surrounded the art that divided it into a self-contained field. Processes using non-artistic materials extended the form into a complete "functional anarchism," as Jed Rasula calls it. Anarchists and nihilists broke the definition, dragged art and music from the referee's tied pedestal and turned it into absurd art and absurd music for an absurd world torn apart by war. Derived from the Futurists' manifesto Art of Noises (1913), Richard Huelsenbeck described Dadaist music in Dada's 1920 story: "The music of Dadaism was stupid, fascinated by raw sound, and could consist of simultaneous chanting of syllables of nonsense or voices... Dadaism 'loves the noises of the Métro.'" This self-collapse of music into "non-music" was etched into experimental synthesis. Edgard Varese's "liberation of sound" merged with the absurd art of Marcel Dutchamp and Francis Picambia. "Sound makers" shook Varèse's music with whistles, rattles and sirens reflecting sounds of everyday life. Marcel Duchamp's self-proclaimed "readymades" – a signed urinal (Fountain 1917), A Bicycle Wheel (1913) – echoed Varèse's noises of the everyday, freeing art from subjectivity. The American composer George Antheil promoted this mechanical ideology in his 1923 Ballet Mécanique, written for percussion and non-musical mechanical objects, essentially "ready-made", indifferent without aesthetic feeling. The Dadaists developed new artistic techniques and effects. Pierre Schaeffer's Musique Concrete adopted these same everyday, ordinary soundscapes, using fragments that already existed in reality, creating not just music but "sonic objects." John Cage's Living Room Music (1940) promoted this. A score for performers playing household objects, furniture and parts of the room's architecture, it frames the usually unnoticed everyday life as art. Futurist Antonio Russolo's 1921 composition Corale and Serenata sounds like a traditional march, but it's filled with roars that shadow the orchestration, like a huge industrial machine. Ball's Karawane of 1916 follows only a trio of singers singing louder and louder together. Tristan Jara's 1916 L'amiral cherche une maison à louer exuded exuberant comedy with sound effects. Eric Satti collaborated with Picasso on productions such as The Ballet Parade (1916–17) which was a parody of herself. Satie used sound collages – an orchestral suite with piano passages and siren to confuse. These effects of collage, cut-ups, photomontage, readymades and performance art formed the basis for the Dadaist reaction. Photomontage, as invented by John Heartfield and George Grosz, served as a mechanism for social commentary, combining images of promiscuous classes and forcing them to come out in the media. So did Dadaist sound poetry that redesigned sound, introduced extinct languages and noise. Andy Warhol, Frank Zappa, the Sex Pistols, David Shrigley and Lady Gaga identify the same anti-artistic sentiments of Dadaism, celebrating nonsense. Although the Nazis tried to kill Dadaism by calling it degenerate – "Entartete Kunst" – this only reinforced the spirit of rebellion after World War II, allowing postmodern indifference to flourish, permeating art and music today (‘Dada’).
Notable Compositions
Simultaneous poem kaa gee dee - Kurt Schwitters (1919)
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in various genres and media, including Dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what became known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures ('Kurt Schwitters'). In The Trio Exvoco begins a chant that soon evolves into a staccato vocal and gibberish.
George Antheil - Ballet Mécanique (1923)
George Carl Johann Antheil (July 8, 1900 – February 12, 1959) was an American pianist, composer, and inventor. He has written several film scores (‘George Antheil’). The Mécanique Ballet is the best-known work of American composer George Antheil (1900–1959), written between 1923 and 1925, revised in 1953. Dudley Murphy and Fernand Leger directed the film of the same name that was to accompany the ballet. It is written for percussion and non-musical mechanical objects, essentially "ready-made", indifferent without aesthetic feeling.
Pierre Schaeffer - Noise Studies (1948)
Pierre Henri Marie Schäfer (14 August 1910 – 19 August 1995) was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist, acoustician and founder of the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC). His innovative work both in the sciences – particularly communications and acoustics – and in the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end of World War II, as well as his anti-nuclear activism and cultural criticism gained wide recognition in his lifetime ('Pierre Schaeffer'). Pierre Schaeffer's Musique Concrete adopted these same everyday, ordinary soundscapes, using fragments that already existed in reality, creating not just music but "sonic objects." The Five Studies of Noise is a collection of musical compositions by Pierre Schäfer. The five études were composed in 1948 and are the first pieces of musique concrète, a form of electroacoustic music that uses recorded sounds as a synthetic source ('Five Noise Studies').
John Cage - Living Room Music (1940)
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and the non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the postwar avant-garde. Critics have praised him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. [1] [2] [3] [4] He was also instrumental in the development of contemporary dance, notably through his collaboration with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic collaborator for most of their lives. [5] [6] (‘John Cage’). Living Room Music is a musical composition by John Cage, written in 1940. It is a quartet of indeterminate instruments, which can be found in a living room of a typical house, hence the title (Pritchett, 1993, 20). Living Room Music is dedicated to Cage's then-wife, Xenia. The work consists of four movements: "For beginning", "History", "Melody" and "End". Cage guides performers to use any household items or architectural elements as instruments and gives examples: magazines, cardboard, "largish books", floor, wooden frame of a window, etc. The first and last movement is percussion music for these instruments. In the second movement, the performers are transformed into a speech quartet: the music consists entirely of fragments of Gertrude Stein's short poem "The World Is Round" (1938) that was said or sung. The third move is optional. It includes a melody played by one of the performers on "any suitable instrument" (‘Living Room Music’).
«furthered this. Scored for performers playing household objects, furniture and parts of the room’s architecture, it framed the ordinarily unnoticed everyday as art.»
Ball - Karawane (1916)
Karawane is a poem by Hugo Ball, first performed at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916. The print edition was later published in Dada Almanach, as Ball's performance can be seen as one of the key moments in Dada's development. The artist comes from literary and theatrical backgrounds and reinvented meaningless language or grammar, also known as Lautsprache. During his performance he was dressed in a paper uniform, resembling a clerical member. The recitation of the poem on stage led to ecstasy in his mind, with the audience fascinated. In the end he had to be moved off stage, due to exhaustion, with the audience rising on top of him. The font and text design of Karawane's print edition underscore these features of chaos and anarchy. Ball's design is simple, easy to reproduce, and clean to read, while still creating a dissonance due to the seemingly randomly chosen fonts. The design is also very similar to the visual properties of a booklet, due to its flexibility, indicating an easy reproduction and distribution.
Tristan Tzara - The Admiral Is Looking for a House to Rent (1916)
Also, since 1916, the same trio has been performing a kind of exuberant comedy, with accompanying whiz-bang sound effects that one would hear in radio plays of the following decades.
Erik Satie - Parade (1916-17)
Eric Sati collaborated with Picasso on productions such as Ballet which was a parody of himself. Satie used sound collages – an orchestral suite with piano passages and siren to confuse. These effects of collage, cut-ups, photomontage, readymades and performance art formed the basis for the Dadaist reaction.
Bibliography
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Dada Africa, Non-Western Sources and Influences - 2017-10-18 | Musée de l’Orangerie. https://www.musee-orangerie.fr/en/whats-on/exhibitions/dada-africa-non-western-sources-and-influences. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.
‘Dada Movement Overview and Key Ideas’. The Art Story, https://www.theartstory.org/movement/dada/. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.
‘Dada: The Nonsense Soundscape of the Cabaret Voltaire’. Varsity Online, https://www.varsity.co.uk/music/14163. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.
‘Dadaism Definition, History, and Famous Dada Artists - 2023’. MasterClass, https://www.masterclass.com/articles/dadaism-guide. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.
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Gizella, Horváth. ‘Dada: Dead and Loving It’. Mens Sana: Rethinking the Role of Emotions., edited by Rozália Klára Bakó and Gizela Horvath, Partium, Debrecen University Press, 2016, pp. 217–34.
‘John Cage’. Wikipedia, 19 Jan. 2023. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Cage&oldid=1134514758.
‘Kurt Schwitters’. Wikipedia, 22 Jan. 2023. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kurt_Schwitters&oldid=1135105002.
‘Living Room Music’. Wikipedia, 8 Sept. 2020. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Living_Room_Music&oldid=977290152.
Nechvatal, Joseph. ‘The Dadaists’ Fevered Dreams of Africa’. Hyperallergic, 15 Feb. 2018, http://hyperallergic.com/425850/the-dadaists-fevered-dreams-of-africa/.
‘Pierre Schaeffer’. Wikipedia, 8 Feb. 2023. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pierre_Schaeffer&oldid=1138292790.
The African Cultures That Shaped Western Art. https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/african-art-dada/. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.
Winograd, Abigail. ‘Dada Africa’. Frieze, no. 181, 12 July 2016. www.frieze.com, https://www.frieze.com/article/dada-africa.
Ιστορία Της Τέχνης. http://ebooks.edu.gr/ebooks/v/html/8547/4706/Istoria-tis-Technis_B-G-EPAL_html-apli/. Accessed 31 Aug. 2022.
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