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Introduction to Dada
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
ConnecticutCollege
New London, CT06320
(This essay was written in 2000 and needs more work.)
Dada was a disorganized, international "movement" of disaffected, alienated, urban bohemians which emerged in the cynical aftermath of the international disaster of World War I. The effect of the war on artists and intellectuals was varied and complex. For many, the war undermined the lofty nineteenth-century rhetoric of historical progress and international brotherhood while exposing the ugly consequences of nineteenth-century nationalism. For Dada artists, it undermined all lofty public values and high ideals and encouraged a modern art which was even more aggressively hostile to conventional morality, respectable values, and all traditional notions of art, even modernist notions to the extent that they became orthodoxy. Dada made cynicism, anarchy, and rebellion into core values.
All this made Dada more a fast-changing set of attitudes, postures, and practices than a coherent, organized movement. While it contributed to the rise of Surrealism around 1921-23, Dada was implacably opposed to all rules, orthodoxies, and artistic movements. This tension led to a violent riot between Dadaists and Surrealists at the 1923 Dada-arts soirée held in Paris in 1923. Afterwards, the Dadist, Tristan Tzara noted, "the true Dadas were always separate from Dada". For Tzara and others, any attempt to reduce the anarchy of Dada to a coherent movement meant the death of Dada. (As noted in the essay on Futurism, modern artists were eager to form artistic movements to transcend their highly individualized identities and to build strength and solidarity but they had great problems sustaining the compromises and unity needed for any movement to succeed.)
The term Dada itself is revealing in so far as it was a nonsense term coined to describe a bohemian attack on all moral, social, and cultural norms, all notions of order and reason, all established hierarchies and values. Dada artists reveled in anarchic festivals, parades, and theatrical parties at Dada clubs and cafes. They spoofed everything important, including art itself, especially anything taken seriously as high art. Thus Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and signed it LHOOQ. Pronounced in French, this sounds like the French for “She has a good ass”.
To deface a work which was already hailed as one of the greatest achievements of Western art, to deflate Leonardo’s beautiful, decorous sitter to a low physical object, and to reduce the experience of seeing great art to acoarse voyeurism was calculated to offend all notions of art and aesthetic experience. By coding his vulgar expression, Duchamp also made his work into an intellectual game for those capable of playing it. In this sense, Duchamp still presumed an aesthetically sophisticated viewer of sorts, though hardly the one who flocked to the Louvre to see its Italian Renaissance masterpiece.
Duchamp, Fountain, 1917
In a similar vein, Duchamp took a urinal, disconnected it, turned it on its side to give it a new sculptural quality. He then titled it,Fountain, and signed and dated the object. In doing so, he not only ridiculed all earlier sculpture but the very idea of Art itself. Since his urinal carefully preserved all of its ugliness as something to piss in, Duchamp's Fountain also ridiculed itself and modern art.
On a more serious side, Fountain raised a key issue at the core of modernism: the redefinition of Art as a matter more of artistic vision or style than of subject matter or materials. Looking back over this course, one can see how artistic vision had slowly assumed an increasing value ever since Renaissance writers invented the idea of the "artist" and the corollary of individual, original, artistic vision. From the time of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Titian, art took on a more self-conscious originality and intellectual invention. (Ironically few Renaissance artists did more to remake art into a higher artistic vision than Leonardo, the very artist mocked by Duchamp.)
In the seventeenth century, artists like Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Bernini, and Vermeer made expressing lighting, color, composition, movement, and brushwork even more prominent, surpassing the importance of subject matter. With the spread of lowly subject matters such as
landscape and still-life in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, artistic vision and handling became even more important, allowing paintings with ordinary subjects to be hailed as great art. With the coming of modernism in the late nineteenth century, artistic vision claimed absolute authority and preeminence over all subject matter. And with the coming of non-representational art around 1913-16, the primacy of artistic vision was complete; all subject matter was banished in favor of pure vision and visual expression.
Duchamp's Fountain is inconceivable without this gradual development. Indeed, it is the most extreme expression of that modernist idea. Art is redefined as a matter of vision or artistic idea, not of traditional subject matter or even of technique. As the American Dada and Surrealist artist, Man Ray later noted, anyone could make a “found object” (objet trouvé) but only one person could come up with the original idea. According to Ray, the found object, whether left intact as with Duchamp, or playfully combined with other objects, as with Ray, was
"designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify, inspire reflection, but not to arouse admiration for any technical excellence usually sought or valued in objects classified as works of art".[1]
While Duchamp's Fountain literally "pissed" on the traditional art object, it also sprayed the larger cult of art and artists which had been essential to modernism since the Impressionists and especially the Post-Impressionists and Symbolists. When modern art appeared as a urinal, the modern artist was also poking fun at the serious, self-important rhetoric of modernism with its heroicizing of artistic vision.
The Important Legacy of Dada: Surrealism, Pop, Conceptual Art, Happening Art, Performance Art
It is all too easy to dismiss Dada as a brief, nihilistic cultural moment born of the cynical aftermath of World War One in certain metropolitan centers (Zurich, Geneva, Berlin, Paris, and eventually New York). To some extent it was just that. But Dada also produced some of the most inventive, playful, unexpected formal experiments of all twentieth-century art. Furthermore, these experiments worked as important legacies in the unfolding of later twentieth-century movements. For example, the Dada rejection of polish, technique, reason, and the lofty seriousness of High Art, contributed directly to the irreverent, irrational playfulness of much Surrealism. So too, Dada artists first deconstructed the uncritical mainstream rhetoric extolling modern technology and the high civilization of the "machine age" and spurred the more extensive Surrealist imagery of irrational and erotic "machines".
Dada also exploded traditional categories of art objects by making art out of "found objects" as in Duchamp's Fountain. If Cubist and Dada collage playfully assimilated real things into collage without destroying higher notions of the art object as something conceived and materially produced by the artist, the Dada art of the "found object" suggested, subversively, that anything could become art. While this, too, was enormously important for some Surrealism, it was even more important later in opening the door conceptually for Pop art in the 1950s and 1960s, a movement which dwelled on mundane commercial objects.
The same focus on idea rather than object was also crucial for the emergence of Conceptual Art in the 1970s where all art objects were banished in favor of ideas written on paper. Other Dada legacies deserve comment. The Dada love for street theater and theatricality helped pave the way for the art as theater movements of the 1960s (Happening Art) and the 1980s-90s (Performance Art).
Finally, the serious study of Dada art offers larger implications for a critical understanding of modern art as a whole. For Dada was an early moment of rupture within modernism, a moment when modernist artists ridiculed the inflated seriousness of modernism itself with its grandiose notion of artists as heroic visionaries, risk-takersand truth tellers working against the grain to create "timeless" or "universal" artistic forms. In this sense, Dada was a brief but telling period when modernist artists explored the limitations, myths, and vulnerabilities of modernist culture itself. As such, Dadaism helped open the door, at least a crack, for the later crisis of modernism when it collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s and led to the diffused and ambiguous cultural moment known as post-modernism.
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