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Why is a urinal considered a piece of art?
Explore Dadaism's origins, key artists, and its lasting impact on modern and contemporary art in this 8-minute video by Curious Muse.
Key Takeaways
- Dadaism challenged traditional art by emphasizing ideas over objects.
- The movement was deeply anti-war and anti-establishment, reflecting post-WWI disillusionment.
- Dadaist techniques embraced randomness and nonsense to reject conventional meaning.
- Duchamp’s readymades revolutionized art by redefining what could be considered art.
- Dada’s influence is foundational to many modern and contemporary art forms.
What the video covers
- Dadaism began in 1916 at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich as an anti-war, anti-establishment art movement.
- It was an international movement with artists from Romania, Germany, France, and more.
- Dada opposed traditional art, embracing nonsense, spontaneity, and chance in creative expression.
- Dada soirees featured unconventional performances, poetry readings, and avant-garde exhibitions.
- Jean Arp and Tristan Tzara exemplified Dadaist techniques like chance collages and cut-up poetry.
- The movement spread to Paris, Berlin, and New York, each with distinct characteristics and political tones.
- Berlin Dada introduced photomontage and politically charged artworks, notably by Hannah Höch.
- Marcel Duchamp’s 'Fountain' challenged art definitions by presenting a urinal as art, coining 'readymades'.
- Dadaism influenced later movements such as Surrealism, conceptual art, and performance art.
- Its legacy persists in contemporary art, influencing artists like Marina Abramović, Maurizio Cattelan, and Banksy.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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What does the word Dada represent?
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What are Dada soirees?
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What does Dadaist poetry sound like?
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And can everything and anything become a work of art if we chose to declare it art?
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In this week's story, you'll find out the answers to these questions and learn more about the famous art movement called Dadaism.
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If you'd like to see more art stories, be sure to give us a like and tell us which topics you want to learn about next.
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The art movement known as Dada was born in a cool little nightclub named Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland in February 1916.
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The times when this amazing movement started its life were, however, not so amazing.
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World War I was roaring and artists from different countries were running away from the terror.
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Fleeing from the ongoing war, a group of artists moved to neutral Switzerland and formed a new artistic group.
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Dada was truly an international movement with artists coming from all over Europe.
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Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco came from Romania.
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Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball from Germany and Jean Arp from France.
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Dada united artists opposed to war, looking to find new and alternative art practices through which they could communicate their feelings about the outside world.
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They wanted to create a new universe that was completely different from the one happening around them.
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Dada, therefore, became anti-everything.
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Anti-war, anti-bourgeois, anti-nationalist, anti-establishment, anti-museum, anti-materialism.
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Dada, as Andre Breton said, was a state of mind.
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Dadaists truly wanted to bid farewell to established rules, ideals, and conventions.
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They aimed to destroy what was thought of as reasonable.
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Or as Jean Arp phrased it, Dada is for the senseless which does not mean nonsense.
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Dada is senseless like nature.
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Dada is for nature and against art.
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Since Dadaists were anti-meaning too, they chose a peculiar name for their movement.
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The word Dada could represent a sound a baby would make.
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Or it could mean a rocking horse.
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Or it could mean yes, yes in Romanian.
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Either way, Dada could mean everything and nothing.
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So, you might be wondering, what was Dadaist art like?
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Well, the previously mentioned Cabaret Voltaire became a hotspot for all things Dada.
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It was a place where performances, poetry readings, dances, exhibitions, and Dada soirees were held.
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It was a center for all types of avant-garde artistic entertainment.
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The Cabaret lasted for six months only.
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But its legacy is surely enormous.
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Many Dada soirees or Dada evenings consisted of Dadaist poetry readings.
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And Dadaist poetry was certainly unconventional.
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Artist Tristan Tzara even wrote an instruction on how to create a Dada poem.
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What you need to do is take a newspaper.
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Cut out the words.
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Put them in a bag.
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Shake the bag.
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And then you take the cutouts one by one.
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And there's your poem.
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You could even try to make a Dadaist poem yourself.
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A number of Dadaist poems, like the ones Hugo Ball wrote, consisted of random nonsensical words that would just represent a seemingly meaningless sound.
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Sorry.
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Yes, these are all random words that don't mean anything in particular.
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Fascinating, right?
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Other Dadaists like Jean Arp also like to play with the idea of spontaneity and chance in art.
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When creating some of his collages, Arp would drop paper cutouts from the air and glue them exactly where they fell.
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After the war ended, Dadaists started moving to other places from Switzerland.
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So Dada spread around too.
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Mainly in France, Germany, and the USA.
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After Zurich, Dada had its new centers in Paris, Berlin, and New York City.
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The Berlin group, led by Hannah Hoch, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Raoul Hausmann, was the most openly political of all Dadaist branches.
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During the 1921 First International Dada Art Fair in Berlin, even the ceiling was used for exhibiting a piece.
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Artists John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter created a life-size doll of a soldier with a pig's head made out of papier-mâché.
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And named it The Prussian Archangel.
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The Berlin Dada group is also famous for coming up with a new art form known as photomontage.
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Photomontages represented a new vision of collage where media images from newspapers and magazines were cut out to create a work of art with a political message.
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Photomontages showed the media images used in the Weimar Republic.
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But Dadaists used them in subversive and even feminist ways, especially in the case of Hannah Hoch.
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Who created many pieces reflecting the idea of what the new modern woman should be like.
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Now, let's move on to the American branch of Dada.
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The New York Dada is connected to the very famous Marcel Duchamp.
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Duchamp created one of the best known Dadaist pieces and probably one of the most famous art pieces in the history of art.
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The Fountain.
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The Fountain consists of a signed piece of a regular white porcelain urinal seen in restrooms all over the world.
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So, you might be wondering,
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why is this considered art?
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The answer is actually quite simple.
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Because the artist chose to make it an artwork.
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Duchamp's main goal was to show that the artist had the intellectual power to choose what object becomes art and change its context.
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What's important here is the artistic idea and not the object itself.
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And this notion became a big game-changer in the history of modern art.
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So Duchamp's philosophy of art was of enormous importance for post-war art movements like conceptual art.
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Performance art and post-modern art, and his idea basically is what we choose to see as art can be art.
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It doesn't mean that it's good or bad.
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It's just art.
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Duchamp decided to call his chosen mass-produced objects made into artworks his readymades.
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A bicycle wheel, a shovel, a bottle rack, you name it.
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Duchamp made it into an artwork.
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And Dadaism made all of that possible.
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Dada slowly dissolved during the early 20s.
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With artists going their own ways and moving on to new art movements like Surrealism.
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For which Dada laid the foundation for.
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But if you're wondering if Dadaist artworks are still relevant today.
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The answer is absolutely yes.
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Without Dadaism, we wouldn't have Marina Abramović's performance art.
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Or any conceptual art piece.
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Maurizio Cattelan's infamous banana wouldn't ever be considered art without Dadaism.
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And Banksy's pieces probably wouldn't have been sold in the art market.
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So, Dadaism's legacy is huge and ever-present, both in the history of 20th-century art and the contemporary art world.
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What did you find the most curious about Dadaism?
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Would you like to learn more about the history of other art movements?
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Share your opinion in the comments if you'd like to see more stories like this one.
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Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and find us on Instagram for your daily dose of culture from Curious Muse.
Topics:DadaismDada artMarcel DuchampFountain urinalCabaret VoltaireTristan TzaraJean Arpphotomontageavant-gardeconceptual art
