Dadaism was a literary and artistic movement that originated around 1916. The objective of this current was to break with everything, to move away from what, until now, was artistically considered “conventional” or “normal” by applying various techniques based on something completely removed from reason: coincidences.
The main objective was unique: to discover reality in an authentic way.
Origin of the word “dadaism”
Like the storyline of this movement, the word was born out of sheer chance. The fathers of this movement (Hgo Ball, Richard Hulesenberg, Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball) were meeting in a cafeteria in the city of Zurich, during the First World War, and they began to look up random words in a dictionary.
The purpose of this act was to find a term that was not linked to the artistic and that was resonant or pleasant to the ear.
In the midst of this search, the word “dada” appeared, which alludes to the first sound that babies produce, and the group agreed that this would be the term they would coin for this new trend.
Characteristics of Dadaism
- Protest movement against the “conventional” or “normal” of the time.
- Humor and mockery are continuously present through provocation, irony or satire…
- In poetry, dadaist creations are very difficult to understand since they assume to be a succession of sounds and words that do not maintain a logical relationship with each other.
- Change is its central axis. All centered from the freedom of the individual.
- The random, the spontaneous, the immediacy, the contradictions, the chaos, the imperfect or the intuition mark the artistic creation. I mean, nothing is logical.
- Go against beauty, laws, the eternal…
- Demonstrations against the immobility of thought, the universal, reason, sense.
- Denial of previous currents such as modernism, futurism, cubism, the abstract, expressionism.
- Present regressions to childhood. To the primitive, to the surreal. To the imaginative thinking of when we are children in which everything seems fantastic.
- The most important thing is not the product created, but the whole process of creating it.
Plastic arts
In the plastic or the graphic, Dadaism presents its own characteristics that made it an artistic movement that departs from the usual conventions of art. Among these plastic characteristics, the following predominates:
- Complete change of expression when using unusual materials.
- Everyday waste was presented as an artistic objective.
- This movement is a pioneer in the use of collage with materials such as paper, newspapers, fabrics, wood… and photomontage. All with provocation as the central axis.
In painting, all previously learned techniques were thrown to the ground. What he prevailed were difficult to understand images.
In sculpture, Marchel Duchamp was like the GREAT exponent with his “ready-mades” technique. This technique is based on taking already created objects and changing them without modifying their shape.
That is, he simply chose the object and changed its position, attached it to another object and gave it a name or a title and that composition was: ART.
Literature
Poetry was the genre that stood out the most. The “dada” poems had composition characteristics that made them completely different from all the production of poems that had been produced up to that moment.
Among them are, for example, cutting individual words from newspaper articles, putting them into a container and taking them out at random. Then they would take those words, mix them up, and as a result, we have our poem. Many experts in the field say that this movement was the predecessor of literary surrealism.
Main exponents of the movement
Among the main creators or artists of this movement are Tristan Tzara and Marche Jank, both Romanian. Frenchman Jean Arp; Hugo Ball, Hans Richter and Richard Huelsenbeck (German).
Like any movement, it had representatives in all artistic disciplines. For example, in Germany, he had a larger following among intellectuals and artists. On the other hand, in France, his greatest polish was in the literary world with Breton, Louis Aragon and the Italian poet Ungaretti.
Decline of movement
Like any current of creation, Dadaism had its beginning and its end, its rise and decline. Little by little other movements began to appear that were vanishing it.
According to various studies, the “decline” of this artistic trend in Europe dates back to 1920 and its total extinction occurred in 1922.
A different case was in the United States, specifically in New York, since like the Phoenix bird, it rose from its ashes in the 50s.
This American resurgence would give rise to the creation of new movements from it. This is the case of the famous “pop-art”, whose greatest exponent is the plastic artist Andy Warhol. This artist is the creator of the famous “Campbell’s Soup” painting, or multicolored portraits of great figures of the time such as Mao Zetung or Marilyn Monroe.
Pictures so characteristic that we don’t even need to illustrate them, because surely they have already come to mind.
Another movement that drank directly from “dadaism”, as we have already mentioned above, is surrealism. Taking that unusual and groundbreaking language and aesthetics that made the viewer’s mind work.