A urinal with a small inscription, a simple bicycle wheel arranged on a bench, a meaningless collage and a poem resulting from the intersection of words from a newspaper article without formalism or structure. That was Dada. The anti-art; the location of everyday objects in the artistic field, generating an irony as a product of discontent with reality.
Image Duchamp
This movement arose in the capital of Swiss, Zürich, in the year 1916 as a product of several informal meetings between a group of refugees during the periods of the First and World War IIinfluencing both graphic, sculptural, literary and musical art.
The origin of its name is uncertain. One of the existing affirmations maintains that Trastan Tzara he called that word like the babble of a child Dadaist. This would be like a symbol of the genesis itself, like starting from scratch exploring all the existing fields, and managing to experiment with them from the beginning, breaking with all the pre-existing schemes.
Other claims hold that Dadaist could have been in relation to the last name of the deceased best friend of Tzara, dabed, in honor of him. A final assumption is that the group took a French-German dictionary and randomly selected a word from its contents. The chosen word would be Dadaist, a French word that means Woody horse.
What did this mode of expression consist of? Simply, in expressing their discontent with politics and current affairs, as well as questioning art, demonstrating ugliness against beauty, order against chaos, giving free rein to the imagination and the purity of abstract meaning, freeing minds of all kinds of conceptual structure that can define art. All of this is always accompanied by a great deal of irony, completely making fun of past art objects.
Image Duchamp
This means that by definition there is no work Dadaist, contrary to how it is currently displayed. What characterized the Dadaist it was the long evenings and bohemian meetings that took place in cabarets or galleries in which an explosion of photographs, meaningless music, objects, paintings and poems were exhibited.
This not only spread in Europe with its precursors tristan zara, Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janck Y jean arp among others, but also in the United States, with European refugees as Duchamp, Crotti, Schambergamong others, giving shape to the Dadaist with the readymades of Duchamp and the occurrences of their peers in New York.
Despite this absolute deconstructivism of forms, genres and uses, Dada made a great contribution to Modern art. A clear example is the collage, an innovative resource that would be taken especially by the movement pop-art.
Perhaps today we think that there are many artists who make works similar to those Dadaist. In that sense, there is no doubt, given that in recent times a freedom of thought and exploration of fields in art has been provoked that perhaps years ago were in the shadows. But the difference between Dadaist and current art, is that the former never took their creations seriously, faithfully stating that what they created were not works of art. Instead, today’s artists think just the opposite.
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