Dada

Dada

-Reaction against World War I & Nationalism

-Began in Zurich, Switzerland

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

dictionary

-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)

-Connected through politics & strategies rather than style

-Incorporated chance

-Collage & Montage

-Readymade

At the core all about anti-rationality

Artists all coming together in zurich in response to WWI, bc Switzerland was a historically neutral place

 Pacifist 

All about being anti-rational, contracts between nations, bourgesoise, all created the war, become ant everything in some ways- even themselves

Dada- what a child says, translates to hobbyhorse in french

The idea is more important than the final product

Were gonna look at Zurich, berlin, new york + paris bc of marcel duchamp

Ends with the end of wwi

 No aesthetic but connected thru politics - chance, collage and montage, readymade

 Dada In zurich

Cabaret

Voltaire = back room where artistic performances get put on 

☆Hugo Ball, Karawane, 1916

Half elephant half lobster figure costume of cardboard and paper, priest type hat, cape, regality, absurd but also very important looking, performs nonsense poems created of words that cant be desiphered, in front of a crowd of his peers fro all over europe running from the violence and destruction of wwi, all diff languages so they potentially cant understand one another, deflates powers of political figures and speaks to the fact that these figures are speaking utter nonsense and creating chaos of this, peers get sorta pissed they paid to enter and he is dragged off stage- the chaos, he gives birth to central dada ideas but leaves movement p soon after

☆Jean (Hans) Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17- cut/torn pieces of construction paper and throws the on the grown and thats where he ends up placing on 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

In 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

Tension between liberates artists vs growing conservative movement

Berlin Dada

-Against German Expressionism (which is

the dominant style in Germany by the

1920s)

-doesnt care about the artists internal psyche

-Explicitly politicized- most politicized period of dada

-Interest in influx of photography & mass-

media

-Emphasis on rupture & discontinuity

-Use of montage = critique of the growing

power of mass-media

Artists: hausmann

Hannah hoch

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

-Dada object as assemblage: form

created by combining disparate

elements on a material substrate.

Similar to collage but with 3D objects

☆Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919-1920- interested in how mass media images can be cut and collaged to create a different narrative,  photomontage

4 quadrants - 

dada is not an art trend- figures from larger mass media that are associated as friends of dada ex: einstein

Anti dada- 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 german expressionusm w head atop a ballerina at 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 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

-The New Woman

-Emerging cultural image of

femininity that stressed

Independence

-Often chose work over

family obligations

-Was frequently shown

dressed in contemporary

fashions, smoking, with a bob

hairstyle

Marcel Duchamp (NY / Paris Dada)

-Rejected the “retinal,” or visual pleasure.

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.

- Come sup with the idea of the ready-made

-1913 - ARMORY SHOW

-1915 - Duchamp moves to NY

- EX OF HIS TWO NUDE FIGURE CUBIST WORKS
begins career as a cubist but is kicked out of potois cubist group bc of idea of movement and 

multiple moments in time, suggestions of the passage of time, nude female figures arent ok pornographic, too expressive, cubism doesnt want expression desire or sexuality as ideas they touch on

1913 Armory Show

-nude descending a staircase is displayed here

-International exhibition of modern art

-Introduced US audiences to European

modernism

-Abstraction shocked American audiences

-Made US artists realize their work was

Regressive

-duchamp is hated by American critics, utter nonsense to them, makes him famous

Readymade

-Term coined by Duchamp to designate a mass-produced everyday 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

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

☆Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917- he is part of a jury for an exhibition and everything is going to be allowed in, signs and dates work in altar ego R. Mutt, it is rejected from the exhibition, creates his own discourse around this piece as to why its a work of art photographs and has things printing in art forums, controversial bc he absolutely did not make this himself and its just a mass produced object- the artists “process” is murky, undignified object because it is a urinal, his claim is 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- doesnt originally have the crack and was cracked in shipping, after he reconstructed it he finally decides the work is done, bachelor shooting their shots ( iteral gunshots in the glass) in attempt to get inside her net, all about sexual frustration, grinding of the chocolate grinder of the bachelors, call back to cubist work about passage from virgin to bride, the mechanical elements idea of social expectations and animalistic tendiencies of human beings of violence and sexual desire, irrationality of sexual desire, rational sense of machinery with parts that fit together and can be replaced 

Marcel Duchamp, Etant donnes, 1946-66- was belived he quit art forever but after his death this was found in his studio, peephole in door that shows nude female figure, you as the viewer are the voyeur