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DADA doesn't speak. DADA has no fixed idea. DADA doesn't catch flies.
Diana Damian
Dada is anti-art, it is a phenomenon expanding politically, socially and artistically. Dada is not dead. Dada is not for the faint hearted, or for those who hold too much respect. Dada is a reaction, a response, a performance. Dada is as sensical as it is nosensecial. It is sounds, riots, cabaret, abstraction, play, revolution. Dada is ahead of its own time.
It is 1916, and, amidst a world war, a group of thinkers decide to shout against art’s self indulgent masters, against its solemnity and its variant ideologies. To kill all referents, and to lose the artistic hierarchy. To create meaningless meanings, and to play back with the very ideologies that have ignited the Dada response.
The first means of expression is the manifesto, a politically artistic (or artistically political) writing, almost onomatopoetic in form. This is some more Dada:
‘DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colours so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates’
‘Dada is life with neither bedroom slippers nor parallels; it is against and for unity and definitely against the future; we are wise enough to know that our brains are going to become flabby cushions’
‘If you have serious ideas about life, if you make artistic discoveries and if all of a sudden your head begins to crackle with laughter, if you find all your ideas useless and ridiculous, know that
IT IS DADA BEGINNING TO SPEAK TO YOU’
Da means yes in Romanian. Dada is not yes yes; well it’s not not yes yes, but it is also an action, a description, a word, a feeling, a movement, a riot. The etymology is highly debatable; after all, Dada means nurse in Hungarian. But Tristan Tzara’s word is as playful as the movement he co-created. Dada happens. And as it happens, we meet Tzara, Hugo Ball, Emmy Jennings, Marcel Janco, and, later on, Marcel Durchamp, Franz Picabia, and a lot of other great people. They create Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, the hub of Dada activity, sleepless nights and eviction notices. They create sound poems, propaganda, abstractions, writing, montage, pamphlets and, as the war finishes, they spread around the world, from New York, to Berlin to Tokyo and Tbilisi.
Now let’s be serious, just for a little bit. [Dada Death] Dada is, in fact, neither dead nor alive. It existed between 1916 and 1924, and it borrowed significant elements of post structuralism. Although the formation of meaning is in itself challenged by Dada, there is a clear fight against structure. The Dada toolkit involves political elements such as propaganda, recontextualizing the importance of the sign and the militant relationship to the signifier. The label is not rejected, but embraced. Dada is a subversion of its own accord, based on the concept that everything means something or nothing at all.
Dada was probably ahead of its time. It took place in an environment that was waking up from the horrors of war, whose cultural language was diffuse and bombarded. Dada was a highly criticized lifestyle and the socio-political society reacted negatively to it. People wanted to believe, there was no time in questioning language, despite its ridiculous use throughout the war years. Despite Dada developing into an international phenomenon, it was quickly swallowed by a transnational culture that did not require a stasis of rejection. It was parallel to futurism and gave birth to surrealism. With time, such an extreme reaction can be left behind, and the very nature of Dada allowed it to die down.
Some cultural theorists believe Dada was also the birth of postmodernism, in its lack of hierarchy of thought and its focus on a stasis, a moment, changing art’s relationship with time. Dada is, however, not an art movement. One of the most significant effects it had was to change the place of art in society, challenging the means of artistic production and the very scope of art through a short lived language. The lack of hierarchy that characterized Dada certainly had an influence on postmodernist thought and the interest in exploring a stasis, a state of being. But in historical terms, postmodernism began to emerge in the latter end of the 20th century.
So why discuss it now? There is something ridiculously attractive about the courage to trust that art is at the same time a society’s industry as it is a process (or product) that captures emotion and thought. That art means absolutely nothing, but if you want it to, it can mean the world. Dada has the guts to recontextualize what language is, reflective of the power any cultural environment has to create, question and communicate without rules or with any rules. Dada kills any snobbery, any pretense or aspiration to culture.
Dada is a[live again] naked form of criticism, and it is in its uncompromising and playful language that new context is brought to life. In a world that is diffused and influenced by inter-cultural dialogue, swept with commodity of thought and safety of expression, it feels more potent than ever. To eradicate the importance of history and future is not such an outrageous request now as it was in 1918. Or at least there is the pretension that it’s not. Dada took everything with the humor of reality, ridiculed and compromised itself. I am getting a bit militant here, but art should, once every couple of years, remove the carpet from under its feet and look over its neighbour’s fence.
In the words of Andrei Codrescu’s Posthuman Dada Guide- Tzara and Lenin Play Chess:
‘This is a guide for instructing posthumans to live a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to live a Dada life. It is and always was foolish to live a Dada life because a Dada life will include, by definition pranks, buffoonery, masking, deranged senses, intoxication, sabotage, taboo breaking, playing childish and/or dangerous games, waking up dead gods, and not taking education seriously.’