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Dada: Dada Movement
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Dada sought to be something with no history and no future. The Dadaists relied upon forces within themselves to create - forces with no allegiance to a movement or a history, with no existence save for the present. Dada depended on absolute spontaneity, upon wonderful and mysterious forces which could control the individual. The Dadaists valued the process of creation more then the final product from it.
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Among the leading Dadaists were Marcel Duchamp (whose Mona Lisa adorned with moustache and goatee is a Dada classic), George Grosz, Otto Dix, Hans Richter and Jean Arp. The movement had a strong influence on Pop Art, which was sometimes called neo-Dada.
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At the beginning, Dada borrowed elements from various pre-war "modernist" schools (futurism, cubism, expressionnism, etc.). But it exploited its predecessors' techniques to diametrically opposite purposes through a subtle process of "denaturation". In this way, for example, the typographical dismembering brought into fashion by the futurists in their Parole in Libertà would reappear systematically in the Dada tracts and pamphlets of Zurich, Paris and Berlin so as to become the undisputable trademark of the movement. It was no longer any question of pulling a new kind of beauty out of a jumble of type fonts, but rather of showing the vanity of all esthetic effort. Along the same lines, always following in the futurists' lead, Dada would make much of the machine. But where Severini and Balla were its high priests, Ernst, Duchamp and Picabia aspired only to desacralize it by replacing it in a perfectly unlyrical context (Duchamp's Broyeuse de chocolat).
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Some died in death camps under Hitler, who persecuted the kind of "Degenerate art" that Dada represented. The movement became less active as post-World War II optimism led to new movements in art and literature.
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The outrageous provocations of the Dada movement have prompted many to define Dada as "anti-art"—a term that the dadaists themselves used. Dada shock tactics... were meant less as a wholesale disavowal of art than as a turning away from conventional understandings of art as illusionistic or transcendental. Art, the dadaists believed, should not be an escape from daily events, but rather it should make visible the violence, chaos, and hypocrisies of contemporary life. As the dadaist Hugo Ball wrote, "For us, art is not an end in itself . . . but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in." Beneath the humor and absurdities of dadaism lies a serious moral underpinning.
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Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization...In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."[3]
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Dada Movement