Sometimes the most experimental and Avant Garde art isn’t what breaks through to the mainstream but helps lay the groundwork for what does. Such was the case with Dadaism, a brief, weird, but incredibly important artistic movement that set the stage for Modernist works to follow.
Dadaism’s Context
The story of Dadaism begins in 1915 in Zurich amidst the horrors of the First World War. Disgusted by what they saw as the failure of civilization in producing such a destructive and horrific conflict, artists such as Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball began a movement that would seek to communicate the incommunicable and criticize the moral and ethical failings of modern civilization.
Dadaism’s Ethos
They would do this via a violently “anti-art” ethos for which dadaism was to become famous. The very name of the movement hints at this, with “dada” a nonsense word. The movement itself, therefore, was focused on creating art that intentionally either resisted evaluation via traditional means or else outright attacked artistic and societal norms of what was “good” or “beautiful.”
Sometimes this took the form of “sound poems,” literally assemblages of jumbled up syllables empty of intrinsic meaning – the guttural cry of a visceral reaction against modern poetry. After all, how could that still be meaningful or an effective form of critique if it had produced a world like this?
Other times it would be more aggressively anti-art. Marcel Duchamp, arguably the most famous of the Dadaist artists, exemplified this idea with a mustachio-defaced Mona Lisa in his work “L.H.O.O.Q.” More famously still is his work “Fountain” – literally a urinal rearranged and simply called a “fountain.” The attack on traditional art in the former and scatological and scandalous implications of the latter exemplifies the rejection of traditional beauty and modern ideologies evident throughout Dadaism.
Dadaism’s Legacy
The movement itself burned out by the mid-1920s (it’s hard to sustain an artistic movement on nonsense syllables and urinals alone, after all), but the descendants of Dadaism were numerous and influential.
Its loose experimentation with syllabic sounds in literature influenced James Joyce, who used it (slightly) more comprehensively in works such as Finnegans Wake. A favorite technique of the Dadaists, the “cutup,” where words would literally be cut up and rearranged to form random poems, would be adopted by members of the Beat Generation such as William S. Burroughs.
To this day, wherever there’s protest art that marries an “anti-art” rejection of the status quo with shock value, you’re bound to find a slight whiff of Dadaist influence – “fountain”-scented and all.