ORIGIN

Dada was an artistic and literary movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland. It arose as a
reaction to World War I and the nationalism that many thought had led to the war. Influenced by
other avant-garde movements - Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Expressionism - its
output was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture,
painting, and collage. Dada's aesthetic, marked by its mockery of materialistic and nationalistic
attitudes, proved a powerful influence on artists in many cities, including Berlin, Hanover, Paris,
New York, and Cologne, all of which generated their own groups. The movement dissipated
with the establishment of Surrealism, but the ideas it gave rise to have become the cornerstones
of various categories of modern and contemporary art.
Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the
logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense,
irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works.The art of the movement spanned visual,
literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaist
artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism, and maintained political
affinities with radical left-wing and far-left politics. There is no consensus on the origin of the
movement's name; a common story is that the German artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a paper
knife (letter-opener) at random into a dictionary, where it landed on "dada", a colloquial French
term for a hobby horse.
The Dadaist movement included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of
art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed
in a variety of media. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown
music movements, and groups including Surrealism, nouveau réalisme, pop art and Fluxus.

CHARACTERISTICS
Dada art can be characterized for its style of being Iconoclastic and playful where art had long
thrived on rebelliousness, but the Dada artists were not just disrespectful, they physically
attacked traditional art and defaced it. Dark and irreverent humor was always a theme in their
works. Dada artists relied on madness and absurdity to shock their audience. You could find that
in a blurred photo with creepy double eyes or a laundry iron with spikes! The iron in particular
stands for another common theme in their art, that is the use of everyday objects making it
Illogical and absurd.
What Dadaists were notorious for was their challenge of the accepted definition of art. They
pioneered what became a post-modern feature later in the twentieth-century. Today we call that
conceptual or installation art. Theirs was different in the way that they put on display what they
considered absurd: a coat rack or a urinal! Then they couldn’t believe it when they were taken
seriously. The mass-produced objects, they called “Readymades,” which they would buy from
local stores had no aesthetic value, yet when submitted to art exhibits, they were accepted! They
philosophized it by declaring, as bizarre as it sounds, that artists no longer need to be the creators
of their own art.