Dada

The Mechanical Head
Little freaky!

Dadaism began in Zurich, Switzerland and spread to France, Germany, Spain, and the U.S. The movement began around 1916 and continued until about 1920. According to the poet Richard Huelsenbeck (1892-1927), the word was selected at random by himself and the painter-musician Hugo Ball (1886-1927) from a German-French dictionary. Essentially a nonsense word, Dada means Yes-Yes in Russian, and There-There in German while in French it means hobbyhorse. DADA also had alot of following in Zurich and artists like Jean Arp and Tristan Tzara held shows and protests.

The artists known as Dadaists thought that World War I was a terrible thing. They thought it was ridiculous for people all over the world to spend years killing each other. Because the war shaped the world in which these artists lived, this distaste for WWI became a way of expression.

The photo above The Mechanical Head by Raoul Hausmann represents a man who cannot think for himself but accepts everything he is told. He has a wooden head with tight lips and eyes that show no expression. 

Marcel Duchamp Fountain

This is the life we live in now I think.. even in modern day 21^st century, we have very little say or opinion when it comes to politics or working life. We do what is expected of us and for whatever reason don’t argue back.

 Dadaists made chaos out of the WWI culture by, for instance, calling a urinal a fountain and putting it on display (ready made)

The Dadaists took objects and created art with those objects, thus bringing out the often ignored beauty of the everyday world…

Duchamp also did his own take of the Mona Lisa. He was probably influenced the most by Dada...

Ridiculous art; painting dreams and exploring the unconscious.

The art, poetry and performance produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature

Hans Arp  - wrote

Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.



Raoul Hausmann - The Art Critic

Hausmann, a founder member of the Berlin Dada group, developed photomontage as a tool of satire and political protest.

Photomontage was a big part in helping the Dadaists enforce the true sense of war and all the horror and imagery that came with it... The use of the camera give a true nature of the real war that was happening and the weaponry and power that was behind it...

While the futurists found this to be enlightening and a change to be glorified the dada movement seen the mass devastation of war.

I did my own take on a collage/ photomontage but instead I added a modern day take. I added a map of the campus on the wall behind the man and gave the man in the foreground long blonde hair to represent myself! I painted a floor effect and added extra imagery elements to give the idea of repetition as I to was copying like so many others probably have before me. 

MY DADA

I didn't feel I really connected with the Dada movement as I like things that make sense and I feel the reason for making nonsense is rather pointless... The very reason for doing something makes it in itself worth doing. The thinking of pointless is harder to do that it looks..... My nonsense video from wafflygood shop (30 second video) was fun and ended up worth doing .....I asked the question was it NONSENSE... well for me it was more silly and fun so in that sense No it wasnt nonsense... The ready mades to me are more nonsense I guess......
Dada got people talking and Im amazed at the big names of the artists I'm now recognizing from each of the movements.... Some of them mixing and working together. Like a small army of artists taking on a new level of seeing and expressing themselves and others! 

Other in other countries: Information found on the http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/dada.htm website......

Dada in Cologne


Other centres of Dada activities in Germany were Cologne and Hanover. The Cologne branch (1919-20) was less political and more biased towards aesthetics, even if only in the sense of being anti-aesthetics. It included two major artists - Jean Arp and Max Ernst. The latter, along with John Heartfield, exploited satirical collage techniques using popular printed material, depicting the grotesque and the weirdly erotic, in a style which heralded Parisian Surrealism. Cologne witnessed one of the first Dada exhibitions in May 1920: an event held in the glass-roofed courtyard of a public house entered through a men's lavatory. The irreverent show was closed down by the authorities within days due to a suspected pornographic exhibit. However, it quickly reopened when the offending work was discovered to "Adam and Eve" by the great Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer.

New York Dada

Bicycle wheel

This branch was set up by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) - see his signature style of "readymades" like Bicycle Wheel (1913, Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris) - Man Ray (1890-1976), and the Cubist painter Francis Picabia (1879-1953). Duchamp and Ray also collaborated with Katherine Dreier in setting up Societe Anonyme, an association to promote the growth and appreciation of modern art in America. (It paved the way for New York's Museum of Modern Art). Another New York Dadaist was the Precisionist artist Morton Schamberg (1881-1918).

Paris Dada

By 1921, many of the pioneers of Dada - such as Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara - had arrived in Paris, where they mingled with a number of French poets like Andre Breton (1896-1966) and Louis Aragon. As a result, Paris Dada became noted for its theatrical, multi-cultural, though no less irreverent, activities. But the Dada movement proved unable to contain the diverging ideas and personalities of its members. In particular, the innovative and curious Breton fell out with nihilistic die-hards like Tzara and Picabia, and when he quit Dada to establish a new movement (which became known as Surrealism) many Dadaists followed and the movement dissolved.

In the !950's Robert Rauschenberg an avid collector of trash and other interesting urban debris,made  his studio a junk heap, containing items as varied as Coca Cola bottles, newspapers, magazines, clocks, radios, wire, metalwork, photographs, taxidermied animals and fragments of clothing, most of which would eventually be integrated into his work. Here is some of his work influenced by Dada

monogram

retroactive

In his "Combines" (1954-62) - now considered to be his foremost body of work - Rauschenberg extended the conventions of collage and found objects, to produce combinations or hybrids of painting and sculpture in a manner comparable with Marcel Duchamps "readymades