Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in
\nEurope and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the
\noutbreak of World War I. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist
\n interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war,
\n and against the cultural and intellectual conformity\u2014in art and more
\nbroadly in society\u2014that corresponded to the war.<\/p>\n
Many Dadaists believed that the \u2018reason\u2019 and ‘logic\u2019 of bourgeois capitalist
\n society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that
\n ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and
\nembrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest \u201cagainst this world of mutual destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Hans Richter Dada was not art: it was \u201canti-art.\u201d Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend.<\/p>\n
As Hugo Ball
\n expressed it, \u201cFor us, art is not an end in itself \u2026 but it is an
\nopportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live
\nin.\u201d<\/p>\n
A reviewer from the American Art News<\/i>
\n stated at the time that \u201cDada philosophy is the sickest, most
\nparalyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the
\nbrain of man.\u201d Art historians have described Dada as being, in large
\npart, a \u201creaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than
\n an insane spectacle of collective homicide.\u201d<\/p>\n
Years later, Dada artists described the movement as \u201ca phenomenon
\nbursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a
\nsavior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path\u2026
\n[It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization\u2026 In the
\nend it became nothing but an act of sacrilege.\u201d<\/p>\n
To quote Dona Budd\u2019s The Language of Art Knowledge<\/i>,<\/p>\n
Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of the First
\nWorld War. This international movement was begun by a group of artists
\nand poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire
\n in Z\u00fcrich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense,
\nirrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear;
\nsome believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it
\noriginates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara\u2019s and Marcel Janco\u2019s
\nfrequent use of the words \u201cda, da,\u201d meaning \u201cyes, yes\u201d in the Romanian
\nlanguage. Another theory says that the name \u201cDada\u201d came during a meeting
\n of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French\u2013German dictionary
\nhappened to point to ‘dada\u2019, a French word for ‘hobbyhorse\u2019.<\/i><\/p>\n
The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestos, art theory, theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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