Dada is a strong, Negative, and destructive art movement which artists protested against and saw it as nonsense. They rebelled against the horrors of WW1 and the decadence of European society. Rejecting all tradition, they fought for artistic freedom. The Dada developed literary movement after the poet Hugo Ball opened the cabaret Voltaire in Switzerland and gathering place for independent young poets, painters, and musicians. Dada's inspiration was a young Romanian poet called Tristan Tzara, who edited the periodical Dada beginning in July 1917. Tristan Tzara joined Hugo Ball, Jean Arp and Richard Heulsenbeck, exploring sound, poetry, Nonsense poetry, and Chance poetry. Tristan's steady outputting of Dada Manifestos solidified the anti-art movement, creating an exact definition of chaos. The Dada created a new prospective of what art could be. Chance placement, Artistic Anarchy, and absurd titles was the characteristics of the Dada's style.
Hugo Ball
He was born into a strict family. He was a sensitive child, He was apprenticed as a young man to a leather factory. It was Hugo Ball who provided for the Dada movement in Zurich with the philosophical roots of it revolt. 1910-1913 he embarked on a career in the theatre. His ambition was to develop a theatre modelled on the idea of Gessamtkunstwerk, which is a synthesis of all arts that could motivate the social transformation and rejuvenation. He started writing Reviews on Poems, articles and plays to the journals Die Neue Kunst which was known as the new art. He also wrote for Die Aktion. Both of these journals were within style and content that anticipated the later format of Dada journals. Poems written together by Hugo Ball and Hans Leybold appeared under the pseudonym Ha ha Bailey. Young and rebellious expressionist writer Hans was really close friends with Hugo Ball. Hans was also a great influence on Hugo Ball's intellectual development. He also helped the formation of Hugo ball's ideas in the Dada period especially. Abstract painter and the expressionist Blau Reitar group leader and Richard Heulsenbeck, a young doctor and student who would later become central to Dada in Zurich and Berlin, both of whom he met for the first time in Munich. in 1914 Hugo Ball tried to sign up for the army three times and was refused the job each time due to medical issues. The trauma he experienced when he had took a private trip to the font in Belgium prompted him to abandon the theatre and move to Berlin, where he began to absorb into political philosophy Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin especially. He started writing a book on Bakunin that would continue to occupy him for the rest of his life. With Heussetback, Hugo Ball staged several anti-war protests in Berlin. They first took place in February 1915 and was a memorial to all fallen poets. Hans Lybold included who was mortally wounded in the war.
Sound Poetry
Hugo Ball's last performance in Zurich at the cabaret Voltaire marked the beginning of a new genre known as sound poems. this meant poems without words or abstract poems. to construct them language is broken down into its abstract parts (syllable and individual letters) and then configured as meaningless sounds. simultaneous poems- poems in which multiple languages are read at once rendering each unintelligible, offered an alternative approach to abstract poetry.
Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literary and musical composition in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic a syntactic values, "verse without words". By defining sound poetry is intended for performance.
It is sometimes argued that sound poetry is found in oral poetry tradition, the writing of pure sound texts that downplay the roles of meaning and structure is a 20th century phenomenon. The futurist in Dadaist vanguards of being of this century were the pioneers in creating the first sound poetry forms.
Sound poetry evolved into visual and concrete poetry, two forms based in visual art issues although the sound images are always very compelling in them. Later on with the development of the magnetic tape recorder, sound poetry evolved thanks to the upcoming of the concrete music movement at the end of the 1940's, some sound poets were used by later poetry movement in the 80's and by other art and music movements that brought up the new forms such as text sound art that may be used for sound poems which more closely resemble fiction.
Marcel Duchamp
The voice of Dada
He was a French painter who joined the Dada movement and became its most prominent visual artist. He had analysed his subjects as geometric planes under the influence of cubism. His painting nude descending a staircase pushed the limits of the static images, ability to record and express emotion. To Marcel Duchamp art and life were processes of random chance and wilful choice and he therefore became the movements most outspoken orator.
Dada as an art form
From the chaos comes cohesive style
Matters of individual decision and selection became the new artistic act. This found freedom influenced Marcel Duchamp to make ready made sculpture. Such as a bicycle wheel mounted on a wooden stool and present found objects, (assemblages) such as the urinals shown in his exhibitions. From the inspiration of the Dada movement this now opened the publics eyes and views of what art can expand out to and how. Some got the joke whilst others were outraged, they didn't consider his work acceptable to be seen as art, they took his work as an insult because it questioned their "solid" definition of what they know as art. Another example is when Marcel Duchamp painted a moustache on a reproduction of Mona Lisa. It was to represent an assault on tradition, again redefining art. The public saw this as an attack upon Mona Lisa.
Assemblages
Assemblage refers to three- dimensional work of art compressing found elements. These works can be sculptural objects, that are seen in the round , as well as pictures that are hung on walls. As Dadaist collages were constructed from papers collected from daily life and pasted together, assemblages were built from everyday objects that were nailed, screwed, or otherwise fastened together. The range of objects was virtually endless, sometimes evocative of war (military medals, revolvers), the assembled objects often were mundane bits of rubbish (flotsam and jetsam, porcelain shards, furniture knobs, wire mesh).
The ways of Dada quickly spread. Despite being accused of mocking and reframing a society that had become insane and not creating "art" several Dadaists produced meaningful, visual art that has contributed to graphic design. Dada artist Raoul Haussmann, Hannah Hoch claim to have intended the art of photo montage. A technique of manipulating found photographic images to create Jarring Juxtapositions and chances associations.
Kurt Schwitters and the Merz
He created a non-political offshoot of Dada that he named Merz. Beginning as a one man art movement in 1919. His Merz pictures were collages compositions using printed ephemera, rubbish and found materials to compose colour against colour, form against form, and texture against texture. His complex designs combined Dada's elements of nonsense and chance with strong design properties. When he Tried to koi the Dada movement he was refused membership due to the fact for being too bourgeois.
Chance
Skeptical of reason in the wake of the war, Dadaists turned to chance as an antidote. The random and the accidental offered a way of letting go of conscious control. "The law of chance" Hans Arp wrote " can be experienced in a total surrender to the unconscious. using chance as a technique for making works of art also presented a critique of the traditional notion of artist mastery and technical excellence. Artistic creation was no longer family in the control of the artist, but instead was given over to arbitrary decision making.
He wrote and designed poetry that played sense against nonsense. In the early 1920's constructivism became an added influence in Kurt Schwittwers work after he made contact with El Lissitzky and Theo Van Doesburg who invited Kurt Schwitters to Holland to promote Dada. Kurt Schwitters and Van Doesburg collaborated on a book design with typographic forms as the characters.
From 1923 until 1932, Kurt published 24 issues of the periodical Merz, whose 11th issue was developed to advertising typography, during this time Kurt ran a successful graphic design studio with pelican- manufacturer of office equipment and supplies, as a major client, and the city of Hanover employed him as typography consultant for several years. When the German political situation deteriorated in the 1930's, Kurt spent a lot of time in Norway and moved to Oslo in 1937. After Germany invaded Norway in 1940, He fled to the British isles. Where he spent the rest of his years.
The Berlin Dadaists
Taking the axe to the axis
In contrast to Kurt Schwitters, the Berlin Dadaists John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde, George Grosz, held vigorous revolutionary political beliefs and oriented many of their artistic activities towards visual communications to raise public consciousness and promote social change. A German WW1 veteran and founding member of the British Dada grout in 1919, John Heartfield used the harsh disjunction of photo montage as a potent propaganda weapon and innovated in the preparation of mechanical art offset printing. The Weimar republic and the growing Nazi party were his targets in posters, books, magazines, political illustrations and cartoons.
John Heartfield worked directly with glossy prints acquired from magazines and newspapers. He commissioned a needed image from a photographer only occasionally because photography was still considered a poor mans art form. Heartfield's images met literal and comprehensive working art. After the stubtruppen occupied his apartment studio in 1933, he fled to Prague where he continued his graphic propaganda and mailed postcard versions of his graphics to Nazi leaders, learning that he was on a Nazi watch list in 1938, he fled to London where he stayed until setting in Leipzig, East Germany in 1950. There he worked mainly as a designer for theatre sets and posters.
Before his death in 1968 he produced photo montages, protesting the Vietnam war and calling for world peace, unfortunately still timely is the title given to the retrospective of his graphic art.
Heartfield's younger brother Wieland was a poet critic and publisher who edited the journal Neu Jugend. Which was designed by Heartfield. After being jailed in 1914 for disturbing communist literature, Wieland started the Malik Verdag publishing house an important avent grade publisher of Dada. Left wing political propaganda and advance literature.
The painter and graphic designer George Grosz was closely associated with the Herzflede brothers. His biting pen attacked a corrupt society with satire and caricature. He advocated a classless society and his drawings project an angry intensity of deep political convictions in what he perceived to be a decadent, degenerate Milieu.
The end of Dada
The flame that burns the brightest.
Having inherited assault upon all artistic and social traditions. Dada was a major liberating movement that continues to inspire innovation and rebellion. Dada was born in protest against war and its destructive exhibitionist activities became more absurd and extreme after the great war ended.
In 1921 ans 1922 controversy and disagreement broke out among its members and the movement split into fractions. French writer Andre Breton who was associating with the Dadaists, emerged as a new leader who believed that Dada lost its relevance and that new directions were necessary. Having pushed its negative activities to the limit lacking a unified leadership and with its members facing the new ideas that eventually led to surrealism, Dada floundered and ceased to exist as a cohesive movement by the end of 1922.
Dada's rejection of art and tradition enabled it to enrich the visual vocabulary started by futurism, though a synthesis of spontaneous chance actions with planned decisions Dadaists further rid typographic design of its traditional precepts by continuing cubism's concept of letters as visual shapes rather than simple phonetic symbols.
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