R. Scott Peoples, Fairview HS, Boulder, CO

DaDa Began in Zurich, 1916, by Hungarian Jewish refugees Peaked 1922; influential far beyond Ridiculed society through deliberate absurdity and politicized art anti-war anti-bourgeois anti-art anarchistic

Marcel Janco, co-founder “We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the tabula rasa. At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste - in short, the whole prevailing order.”

Nihilism life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value morality does not inherently exist; any established moral values are abstractly contrived mood of despair at a perceived pointlessness of existence that one may develop upon realizing there are no necessary norms, rules, or laws Through DaDa, artists ridicule what they consider to be the meaninglessness of the modern world

Mediums of DaDa Literary –Poetry –Manifestos –Satires Visual –Painting –Collages –Photomontage – using media sources –Assemblage – 3D collage Performance Art

Collage

Photomontage

“Perhaps Strange” Poetry by Kurt Schwitters The world is full of goods trains The passengers are cows And milk and butter. And cheese and lovely marmelade And bulls and horses, And cocks and hens. The cow is mother to the milk, And grandma both to cheese and butter. The cheese is cousin to the marmelade. The horse is cousin to the cock The hen lays eggs. The egg is cousin to the cheese and butter, The son and daughter of the milk. Isn't it strange? It is.

from a play by Roger Vitrac FIRST CHILD Mr. Patrice, what do you bring in your shoes? PATRICE Elephants under the palm trees. SECOND CHILD And what about that lion looking at us? PATRICE That, my child, is liberty. THIRD CHILD And what about the automobile, is it for us? PATRICE It is unbreakable and deep. FIRST CHILD Are you giving us some new perfume? PATRICE Take these birds. The first child is the son of the bakery horse, while the second is the offspring of his mother's sewing machine. The third, father of a colonel in the Zouaves, shoots the other two, then remarks to Patrice, "What do you expect, Papa, I was the father of a colonel of Zouaves by accident, but I will always be the son of love."

DaDa in Germany Less anti-art, more political Communist-leaning Manifestos, propaganda, public demonstrations

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919, collage of pasted papers, 90x144 cm, Staatliche Museum, Berlin.

George Grosz

Transition to Surrealism

DaDa in New York Marcel Duchamp “Readymades” – found objects

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

DaDa in Paris Most original players had moved to Paris by 1921 Parody ballet, journals, street demonstrations By 1924, many artists had drifted into surrealism, social realism, and other forms of modernism

Influence “Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho- political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.” —Marc Lowenthal, translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation

Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1926) “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada [then nothing]. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

Cubism

Surrealism

Swans Reflecting Elephants

Salvador Dali

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943)