Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Dadaism

Starting point is 00:00:00 In the middle of the First World War, a group of artists, poets, and philosophers created an artistic and intellectual movement in response to the war. While the movement itself didn't last very long, its legacy laid the foundation for modern art in the 20th century and can still be seen in most modern art today. Once you understand this movement, it helps make sense of most modern art. Learn more about Dadaism, what it was and its legacy on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

Starting point is 00:00:52 It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Many people don't get modern art. Why is a banana duct tape to a wall considered art? Why will people pay millions of dollars for a painting that's nothing but random drips from a paintbrush? Why is a stuffed tiger shark in a vada formaldehyde considered art? The goal of this episode isn't to justify such art or even try to make you appreciate it.

Starting point is 00:01:29 That is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. Rather, the goal is to give you an idea of where these concepts of art originally came from and why. And the story begins in the early 20th century. Artistic movements such as Impressionism in the 19th century began the process of moving from literal depictions of reality to more abstract depictions. Impressionism focused on capturing fleeting effects of light and atmosphere, utilizing loose brushstrokes and vibrant colors. While it might have strayed a bit from reality, it was, however, at its core, still an artistic movement. The idea of abstracting an image was taken even further with cubism.

Starting point is 00:02:07 Cubism broke down images into geometric forms and depicted multiple viewpoint simultaneously. It was more radical than Impressionism, but it was still an artistic movement. And by this, I mean that the movement was still about the creation of images, even if those images were flouting contemporary standards. Neither Impressionism nor Cubism was directly responsible for Dadaism, but they both laid the groundwork for it by challenging and upending artistic conventions. There were other artistic movements as well before the First World War that included expressionism, futurism, and other abstract forms of art that all fell under the banner of avant-garde.

Starting point is 00:02:47 The origins of Dadaism can be traced back to Zurich, Switzerland in 1916. The First World War was still raging. It was the worst and most destructive war that humanity had ever seen up until that point. Artists from countries on both sides of the conflict gravitated to Switzerland, which was a neutral party. The artists who assembled there began debating and discussing all of the problems of the world and the madness of the war. Their reaction to the war wasn't just against the war per se, but against the entire social and economic system which they felt caused the war. The rejection of the culture which created the war was extensive and extended into a rejection of the very foundations of Western culture, including logic, reason, truth, and beauty. The war was evidence that all of these attributes had failed humanity.

Starting point is 00:03:35 Instead, they embraced spontaneity, negation, and absurdity. There is no clear-cut story for the origin of the word Dada. Dada is the word in French for a hobby horse. It's also one of the first words that a child might speak. Others claim that it has no meaning. It's just something that sounds like a word in almost any language. The French German sculptor Jean Arp claimed that the Romanian poet Tristan Dazzara invented the word at 6pm on February 6, 1916, at the Café de la Taraz in Zurich.

Starting point is 00:04:05 Another story holds that the German poet Hugo Ball picked the word out of a dictionary at random. Whatever story you choose to believe, the entire point is that the word Dada has no real meaning, which pretty much encapsulates much of Dadaism. Throughout 1916, the Loosed collection of Dadaists met in Zurich and refined their ideas. The center of the Dadaist universe was the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The Cabaret Voltaire was created by two of the founders of the Dada movement, Hugo Ball and the German poet Emmy Hennings. The cabaret Voltaire wasn't around very long, only about six months.

Starting point is 00:04:40 However, during that period, it became ground zero for Dadaism. There were regular performances of spoken word poetry, dancing, and music. On July 14, 1916, Hugo Ball delivered the Dada Manifesto. Here, I should probably provide a bit more detail as to precisely what the Dadaists were doing. Dadaism was something that could be practiced across many different art forms. Dada's poetry could be done in many different ways, but in the end, it absolutely made no sense. The poetry of Hugo Ball was nothing but sounds and nonsense words. At the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, he performed his poem, Carawane.

Starting point is 00:05:20 Here are the first several lines of the poem. Quote, Jolifanto Bambla Ophali Bambla, Grosiga Imfala, Habla Horan. Egiga Goramen, Higgo-Boliko, Rusla-Hiju, Holaka, Holala. End quote. I may have gotten some of the pronunciations wrong, but given that the words are all nonsense, I'm not even sure that that's possible. This became known as sound poetry.

Starting point is 00:05:49 Other poets would cut up pages from a book or magazine and then randomly put them back together to form a poem. While not as well known, there was Dadaist music as well. They took heavily from the sound poems of Dadaist poetry. Irwin Schulhoff, Hans Hauser, Alberto Savino, and even Eric Sati, better known for his impressionist compositions, dabbled in Dadaist music. In visual art, various techniques revolved around randomness. One technique was to cut random shapes out of paper and then drop them onto a canvas

Starting point is 00:06:20 and then glue them in place wherever they landed. Dada has popularized the technique as photomontage. They would take a collection of images that were a call. cut out from other sources such as magazines and newspapers, and then assemble them, usually in some sort of random fashion. Perhaps the most well-known work of Dadaist art came from Marcel Ducamp in 1917. At the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, he submitted a porcel urinal that was signed Armutt. And it wasn't some artistic representation of a urinal, it was literally a mass-produced urinal that was purchased at a plumbing shop. The next year, he

Starting point is 00:06:58 took a print of the Mona Lisa and drew a mustache and goatee on it, and submitted that as his entry. There was also Dadaist photography, which was mostly experimenting with optical techniques, and Dadaist films, which were just collections of various random clips. By 1917, Dadaism had left Switzerland and had found itself in major cities throughout continental Europe, as well as in New York. In 1918, Tristan Tazara issued his own Dada Manifesto. And here is a brief excerpt. quote, I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against

Starting point is 00:07:33 manifestos as I am against principles. I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air. I am against action, for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against, and I do not explain because I hate common sense. Like everything else, Dada is useless. End quote. In 1920, once the war was done, the Berlin Dadais held the first international Dada fair. Over 200 works were on display in a random fashion, with some works even being displayed on the ceiling. By the early 1920s, with the war behind them, Dadaism was already losing steam. It was slowly morphing into other things.

Starting point is 00:08:17 Surrealism was the successor artistic movement for many Dadaists. Salvador Dali best exemplifies this movement, and it represented scenes that were often illogical and represented the subconscious mind. By 1924, Dadaism was mostly dead, at least insofar as people explicitly calling themselves Dadais. So from beginning to end, the Dadaist movement didn't even last a decade. So why bothered doing an episode on this? It's because so much of what can be seen in modern and postmodern art can all be directly tied to what began with Dadaism. Many of you might be rolling your eyes at much of what I've just described, and you're saying to yourself, Gary, that's not art.

Starting point is 00:08:59 Well, here's the thing. The Dadais would agree with you. They didn't consider Dadaism an art movement. If anything, it was considered an anti-art movement. How could a urinal be a work of art? Well, according to Ducamp, it was an artwork because it was, quote, an everyday object raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice. end quote. So it was art because he said it was art, and thus anything could be art, which really meant that nothing was art. The idea of taking simple geometric shapes to create paintings

Starting point is 00:09:33 can be traced back to Dadaism. Jackson Pollock, dripping paint onto a canvas, can be traced back to Dadaism. Artists taking normal objects and putting them in a gallery can be traced back to Dadaism. Artworks that are designed to shock and disgust can be traced back to Dadaism. And even the works of Andy Warhol, who made art out of everyday objects, can be traced back to Dadaism. Dadaism inspired many of the mid-20th century avant-garde composers. The best-known example of which is the four-minute 33-second piece by John Cage, which consists of nothing but four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Dadaism was so shocking and upsetting that it not surprisingly spawned a backlash. Dadaism was most prevalent in Germany after the war. It was a large part of what the Nazis

Starting point is 00:10:19 called degenerate art. And they used this art in their propaganda campaigns, which eventually led to the degenerate art exhibition of 1937. Dadaism was ultimately a nihilistic movement. It really wasn't for anything so much as it was against everything. It was against society, culture, logic, reason, science, and capitalism, but didn't really claim to advance anything as a replacement. Its best-known followers wouldn't even claim that it was an art movement, as they weren't actually trying to create art but subvert everything that art was about. But ultimately, Dadaism was a reaction to the First World War. When confronted with the insanity of the war, Dada artists thought that insanity should be reflected

Starting point is 00:11:00 in their creations. As one French Dada is said, Dada explains the war, more than war explains Dada. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just want to thank everyone, including the show's producers, who support the show over on Patreon. If you'd like to support the show, just head over to patreon.com,

Starting point is 00:11:26 which is currently the only place where you can get show merchandise. Also, if you want to talk to other listeners about the show, head over to our Facebook group or Discord server, both of which have links in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Dadaism

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.