Dada

Movement: Dada

Date: 1916 until the mid-1920s

Info:

• Reaction against World War I & Nationalism

• Began in Zurich, Switzerland- historically was neutral during WWI

• ”Dada” was picked at random from a German -French dictionary

  • Dada = what a child says, translates to hobbyhorse in French, nonsensical work

• Dada is opposed to bourgeois society, rationality, and social norms

• First conceptual art movement

• Has 6 bases: Zurich, Berlin, New York, Paris, Cologne, & Hanover

• Ends by the 1920s (or is subsumed into Surrealism in France & Neue Sachlichkeit in Germany)

Characteristics:

• Connected through politics & strategies rather than style

• Incorporated chance

• Collage & Montage

• Readymade

• Anti-rationality

Cabaret Voltaire

nightlife venue in Zurich, Switzerland, founded in 1916 by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, became the birthplace of the Dada movement, cabaret hosted performances+ poetry readings + art exhibitions that aimed to shock and disrupt conventional thinking featuring futurist + dadaist + surrealist artists

☆Hugo Ball, Karawane, 1916

Movement: Dada (Zurich)

Date: 1916

Artist: Hugo Ball

Title: Karawane

Info:

held at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, geometric costume with lobster like claws made of cardboard and paper, wearing a priest-type hat + cape emulating regality, absurd but also very important looking, performs nonsense poems created of words that can’t be deciphered, in front of a crowd of his peers from all over Europe who were running from the violence and destruction of WWI, all diff languages so they potentially can’t understand one another, commentary that deflates powers of political figures and speaks to the fact that these figures are talking utter nonsense and creating chaos, peers get sorta pissed bc they paid to enter and he is dragged off stage = the chaos, he gives birth to central Dada ideas but leaves movement pretty soon after

☆Jean (Hans) Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17

Movement: Dada (Zurich)

Date: 1916-17

Artist: Jean (Hans) Arp

Title: Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance

Info:

cut/torn pieces of construction paper and throws them on the ground and that’s where he ends up placing them in the work, super uninterested in composition and the artist’s hand in creating the work but still does some organization and moving around the pieces after the dropping, brings about the idea of chance into the conversation around art making

The Weimar Republic (Berlin)

• Germany loses WWI (badly)

• Kaiser abdicates

• The Empire is replaced by the Weimar Republic (1919-33)

• Contentious & troubled period in German history

• hyperinflation

• political extremism (on the right & left)

• humiliating terms of the Treaty of

• Versailles

• period of tension:

  • sense of freedom and queer utopian space for artists being able to do performances at cabarets but on the other hand Germany is struggling w long lines for bare necessities like bread and milk and their currency completely loses value

Movement: Berlin Dada

Movement: Dada (Berlin)

Info:

• Against German Expressionism (which is the dominant style in Germany by the 1920s)

• doesn’t care about the artist’s internal psyche

• Explicitly politicized- most politicized period of Dada

• Interest in the influx of photography & mass media

• Emphasis on rupture & discontinuity

• Use of montage = critique of the growing power of mass media

Artists:

• Raoul Hausmann

• Hannah Hoch

**image is of Dada exhibition in Berlin**

☆Raoul Hausmann, The Spirit of Our Time (Mechanical Head),1919

Movement: Dada (Berlin)

Date: 1919

Artist: Raoul Hausmann

Title: The Spirit of Our Time (Mechanical Head)

Info:

ready-made utilitarian materials and taking them out for everyday use by creating an assemblage, mannequin head or dummy that was used to sell hats/ consumer goods at the center, adds measuring tape + ruler +spool + number plate – all tools of rationality and mathematical functions, places the rational objects atop the mannequin/dummy head symbolizing that these tools have simplified us+ less creative + dumber, idea of the New Woman

Assemblage

form created by combining dissimilar elements on a material substrate – often everyday objects – scavenged by the artist or bought specially, similar to collage but with 3D objects, utilized in Dada and other avant-garde artworks

ex: Raoul Hausmann, The Spirit of Our Time (Mechanical Head),1919

☆Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919-1920

Movement: Dada (Berlin)

Date: 1919-20

Artist: Hannah Hoch

Title: Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany

Info:

interested in how mass media images can be cut and collaged to create a different narrative, photomontage

Divided into 4 quadrants:

• Dada is not an art trend- figures from larger mass media that are associated as friends of Dada ex: Einstein

• Anti-dada- anti-dada weimar political figures

• World of Dadaists-  images of the Dada artists themselves, including an image of herself inside a map of countries where women have the right to vote, Kathe Kollwitz who is a German Expressionist w/ head atop a ballerina at the center of the world like a matriarch or progenitor to Hoch’s practice, The New Woman, ambiguity around Dada being tied to liberation but also a feminist critique of the new Dada world

• Join dada- images of crowds to critique the idea of populism

Photomontage

process and result of making a composite photograph, made by gluing + cutting + rearranging + overlapping two or more photographs

ex: Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919-1920

New Woman

the emerging cultural image of femininity that stressed independence, often chose work over family obligations, was frequently shown dressed in contemporary fashions + smoking + a bob

Movement/Artist: Marcel Duchamp and (NY / Paris Dada)

Info:

• rejected the “retinal,” or visual pleasure of viewing art

• preferred intellectual or concept-driven artmaking

• his work is characterized by subversive humor and sexual innuendos & the combination of chance & choice

• interested in dysfunctional machinic figures of frustrated desire

• comes up with the idea of the readymade as art

• 1913 - ARMORY SHOW

• 1915 - Duchamp moves to NY

examples and controversy around Duchamp’s cubist works:

Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912

&

The Passage from Virgin
to Bride, July - August, 1912, 1912

• begins his career as a cubist but is kicked out of Potois cubist group

• kicked out because in his works are the idea of movement and multiple moments in time, suggestions of the passage of time, nude female figures which Potois cubists considered pornographic, too expressive

• Cubism didn’t want an expression of desire or sexuality as ideas to touch on

1913 Armory Show (International Exhibition of Modern Art)

• 1st large exhibition of modern art in the US

• held in New York

• Introduced US audiences to European modernism

• Abstraction shocked American audiences

• Introduced American audiences accustomed to realistic art to the experimental styles of

  the European avant-gardes: Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism

  • America realizes it is behind in conversation with art

  • American artists realized their work was regressive

• Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912 is displayed here

• Duchamp is hated by American critics, his work is utter nonsense to them which makes him famous

Readymade

• term coined by Duchamp to designate a mass-produced everyday object

• an object taken out of its usual context & promoted to the status of artwork by the mere choice of the artist

• questions value of an artwork

• a performative act as much as a stylistic category

• has radical implications for the history of art

• What is the relationship between commodities & art?

• decenters authorship

• artists continue to reprise the readymade in various forms, to the present day (Minimalism, Pop, Conceptualism, etc.)

• 1913: Duchamp’s first assisted Readymade

• 1915: Duchamp’s first Readymade

ex: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

readymade vs assisted readymade examples: 

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913):

• assisted readymade bc technically two objects together

Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915:

• readymade because he did nothing to change the shovel

☆Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

Movement: Dada (NY / Paris)

Date: 1917

Artist: Marcel Duchamp

Title: Fountain

Info:

he is part of a jury for an exhibition and everything is going to be allowed in, signs and dates work with the name of altar ego R. Mutt, it is rejected from the exhibition, creates his own discourse around this piece as to why it is a work of art by photographing and having things printing in art forums, controversial bc he did not make this object himself and it’s just a mass-produced object- the artists “process” is murky, undignified object because it is a urinal, he claims that the artists intention is what matters and qualifies something as a work of art or not and not the actual finished artwork visually, critique of how we place value on an object- is it the level of fame it gets?, creates his own “famous” work thru media and photography conversation 

☆Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23

Movement: Dada (NY / Paris)

Date: 1915-23

Artist: Marcel Duchamp

Title: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)

Info:

works on for a very long time, didn’t originally have the crack and was damaged in shipping, after he reconstructed the shattered glass he finally decides the work is done, bride at top bachelors below, bachelors shooting their shots ( literal gunshots in the glass) in an attempt to get inside her net (her body), all about sexual frustration, grinding of the chocolate grinder of the bachelors, call back to cubist work about the passage from virgin to bride, the mechanical elements = idea of social expectations and animalistic tendencies of human beings of violence and sexual desire + the irrationality of sexual desire vs the rational sense of sex like machinery with parts that fit together and can be replaced

Marcel Duchamp, Etant donnes, 1946-66

Movement: Dada (NY / Paris)

Date: 1946-66

Artist: Marcel Duchamp

Title: Etant donnes

Info:

was believed he quit art forever but after his death, this was found in his studio, a peephole in the door that shows a nude female figure, you as the viewer the voyeur, similar message to Manet’s Olympia