What is
DADA
Dada means nothing.
CABARET VOLTAIRE
The Dada Movement was born in Zurich in 1916 when the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, and the German writers Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, the painter-sculptor Arp founded
The Cabaret Voltaire, a literary-artistic circle with no program, but intended to ironize all constituted values of Culture and of contemporary society.
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The group will also be joined by Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and the painter/photographer Man Ray.
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Why play by the rules, when the rules lead to war, hunger, and authoritarianism?
Why not embrace nonsense, irrationality, and intuition?
DADA IS NOTHING
Dada tries to separate the idea of art from the idea of form,
destroying the Cubist analogy between the functioning of the
artwork and machines,
making the artwork itself a machine,
generator of symbolism.
They created an amorphous art, which does not represent anything: Dada is only a gesture.
READYMADE
Art was still considered production of objects, the social status
of art remained unchanged because in bourgeois society
the object is commodity = wealth = authority and power.
Cubism strengthened the conception of art as a producer of
valuables. But art is no longer a sign of existence, when all
around is death.
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It was necessary to remove the attention from the object to
focus it on the subject: from the product to the manufacturer.
Dada used any tool available, documenting the mental process, and giving it aesthetic value because it was free. In the non-sense, a new internal coherence and a purified rigor are also rediscovered.