How Dada art got its name and what gave rise to it?

How Dada art got its name? and where?

If you dig into the roots of the word Dada, which the artists used to label their own movement, you will not find a definitive answer. You will come across explanations that list connections with the French language, German or Romanian! What matters is the founders, in war-neutral Switzerland, chose a meaningless word—even if it is probably the French word for hobby-horse (rocking horse). They intentionally chose a nonsensical word without an ism to denote that they lost all faith in Western art, culture and ideologies. So what is Dada? When one of the Dada leaders, Tristan Tzara, was faced with that question in 1918, his answer was, “Dada means nothing.”

What gave rise to Dada art?

1. WWI butchery: Dada holds a mirror to a world gone mad

At the start of WWI (1914-1918), a group of draft dodgers made up of artists, poets and intellectuals fled to the largest city of neutral Switzerland, Zürich. They were mostly French and German. In October 1916, as the Battle of Verdun (Feb. – Dec. 1916) was taking away lives at a horrific rate, a few of them gathered to express their frustration at what befell their old continent. Their outrage became a disgust by everything modern and rational. How could the most advanced nations engage in the bloodiest war the world had ever seen? Some of them were anarchists (anti-authority) and others were pacifists (anti-war). Among the biggest names of that group were Hugo Ball (poet) and Marcel Duchamp (artist). Since the French Revolution and the rise of Enlightenment values, Reason had been viewed as a great pillars for all European thought, but if Europe after all descend into mass destruction, then Unreason is the cure. If the civilization, that created the greatest art, tore its apart, then anti-art is the solution. They refused to call their “protest” a movement, and insisted that theirs is not art! Their creations followed no rules, meant to be absurd and shocking. They were fed up with modern life, and found it meaningless, so they decided to create art that is just that, without any meaning.

One of the popular, and probably apocryphal, stories about the origin of the name “Dada” involves two German poets Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck. They stab a French German dictionary with a knife that lands on the French word Dada that means hobbyhorse. That childish word and that action of random violence fit perfectly the context and content of Dada. Nonsensical violence in their homelands during WWI is the reason such characters congregated as exiles. As for childishness, or rather playfulness, that became a cornerstone for all Dada art. The “Dadaists” broke away from all conventional (read: serious) art.

The birthplace of Dada was a place called Cabaret Voltaire. It was founded by war resisters Hugo Ball (poet), along with like-minded people Tristan Tzara (poet), Richard Huelsenbeck (poet and doctor) and Hans Arp (artist). Another colorful character among the founders was Hugo Ball’s lover who was also a cabaret dancer, poet, prostitute, morphine addict and a thief! But don’t be fooled by the name of the café that refers to the great Enlightenment philosopher, whose name had stood for rationality. Clearly, that was a satire against traditional philosophy. That place became a launching pad of attacks against everything traditional, from politics and morality to music, art and aesthetics.

When Tristan Tzara explained their movement, he said, “Tristan: We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the tabula rasa [clean slate]. At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking the bourgeois, demolishing his idea of art, attacking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.”

At Cabaret Voltaire, the regulars all banded together to fight accepted bourgeois morality and taste. Their chaotic evenings were full of incomprehensible Dada declarations, boisterous performances, outrageous costumes, noise music, African tribal chants, nonsensical poems, poems made up of words pulled out of hats, or multilingual phrases. One almost wishes to be there for one evening to have the ultimate avant-garde experience! Hans Arp had to following to say about their cabaret: “While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.” Finding solace in elements of African culture was to express their despair against the so-called civilized European society. Such evenings would spread to other cafes and clubs, embraced by artists, theatre actors, musicians and writers. Later Dada ideas would also spread to other cities like New York City, Berlin, Cologne and Paris.

Hugo Ball in performance, Zurich, 1916
View an adaptation by the American rock band Talking Heads (1979) of Hugo Ball’s Dada poem “Gadji beri bimba”

In New York, the leading figure of Dada was the French refugee, Marcel Duchamp. Many of his works became iconic, one of which was a urinal, which he submitted to an exhibition in 1917. He introduced into artistic vocabulary the term “Assisted Readymades” referring to arbitrary mass-produced objects.

2. Cynicism towards technology

Not only did Dada artists feel cynical about religion, patriotism, morality and modernity but also technology. The earliest decades of the century was a period where technology was progressing at a dizzying pace: the telephone, the train, the telegraph, the automobile and the camera. The Dadaists were not particularly against technology but they could not how the Machine Age that promised to be utopian be true while wholesale slaughter is happening across Europe, while trenches are filled with mud, blood and human waste.

Despite questioning the benefits of technology, they still endorsed it in their artworks. Using photographs, they introduced a new type of collage: the photomontage. They also used the “mass-produced fruits” of technological progress, the so-called readymade objects and displayed them in a mockery of contemporary culture. With technology, Dada art became a mutlimedia art movement.

3. Anti-art had to happen after decades of Modernist challenges to the meaning of art

Art historians often mark 1870 as the beginning of modern art where realistic visual portrayal of subjects disintegrated on the canvas. The modern era brought about art movements that experimented with light and outlines (Impressionism), color (Fauvism), form (Cubism). New materials were introduced into the traditional canvas by Cubist painters creating collages. Each one of such movement was akin to an attack on the established understanding of the meaning of art. Dada arrived on the scene after half a century of radical experiments in breaking the conventions of art, laid since the onset of the Renaissance during the 1500s. The Dadaists took art one step further fueled by their pessimism and nihilism to defiantly declare their works anti-art! If their predecessors were breaking conventions on the canvas, the Dada artists just ripped the canvas apart. They replaced the canvas with a urinal! They defaced with a mustache and a goatee a reproduction of the iconic Mona Lisa. Dada is a challenge for its audience to define what makes art, how art should be made and what art should be appreciated.