the.com/dadaism
art's tantrum against logic, born from a war that made sense look stupid
means An early 20th-century avant-garde art and literary movement that rejected logic, reason, and conventional aesthetics in favor of nonsense, absurdity, and deliberate provocation.
from From French dada, a child's word for a hobby-horse. The popular story goes that the movement's founders, gathering in Zurich during the First World War, opened a dictionary at random and landed on this babbling, meaningless syllable — which was exactly the point. Whether the dictionary tale is literal or burnished in the retelling, the name was chosen precisely because it meant nothing, a fitting flag for artists who found that a war devouring Europe had already drained the old meanings dry.
- name origin
- possibly 'dada' picked randomly from a dictionary
- toilet trouble
- Duchamp signed a urinal and called it art
- war reaction
- nonsense as revolt against WWI's deadly rationality
- birthplace
- founded in a Zurich nightclub, 1916
- self-destruct
- declared itself dead, spawned Surrealism instead
hugo ball's cabaret voltaire — zurich nightclub founded 1916 where dada movement officially began with nonsense performances
marcel duchamp's fountain — readymade urinal submitted to 1917 nyc art show that became dada's most iconic work
tristan tzara's sound poems — romanian-born poet performed abstract phonetic verses at cabaret voltaire starting 1916