Dadaism Case

DADA

“Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.”

-Tristan Tzara "Dada Manifesto 1918”

When the terror of the Great World War I broke out, and the horrors got to people, one of the first artistic movements to acknowledge the slaughter came into emergence. Dadaism, an art movement started by a group of people, known as Dadaists who believed that Logic and Reason was the cause of their sufferings, set out to challenge the status quo of politics and the modern society, while prizing nonsense, chaos and intuition.

The origin of the name Dada is a little unclear. There are different theories about how the name was chosen. The first theory is that, Dada is a multicultural nonsense word, which mimics the sounds a baby would make. Second theory says that, it originates from the Romanian artist, Tristan Tzara and Marcel Jancos’ frequent use of the words ‘Dada’, which mean “Yes!” in Romanian, and the third which has been used in most sources written about history suggests that, the Dadaists chose the word at random from a French-German dictionary. Dada is French for a child’s hobbyhorse. The word satisfied the Dadaists’ desire for something irrational and nonsensical. (Davies, Denny and Horfrichtar)

The movement first began in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916. Hugh Ball, founded the Carbaret Voltaire which was a nightclub, in Zurich and along with his companions he set up the place as a center for performance art, where the writers, poets, painters etc, discussed and protested against the war. By attacking logic and reason, Dadaists opened up a new path for creative inventions, and even though it was the horrors and disgust of the war that gave way to this movement, it still pretty much ended to be witty, amusing, and sardonic. (Kleiner)

Figure 1: The Dada movement started in Zurich, but it spread out to many other countries.

A Dada-Artist in Zurich, whose work was hung in Carbaret Voltaire, ‘Jean Arp’ believed in a theory called chance. Arp believed that chance itself replicated nature, that nature or chance has a way of sorting things out in our lives, despite our best laid plans. It was belief in this theory, which led to a creation by Arp, called ‘The Law of Chance (1916-1917).’

Figure 2: Jean (Hans) Arp, Collage arranged, According to the Laws of Chance, (1916-1917). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Deriving the influence from Cubist Art, Jean Arp was making a collage, when he took some sheets of paper and tore them into free hand squares, randomly dropped them onto the