In February of 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich Switzerland, the first Dada performance was held. Known for its reactive, absurd, humorous, and random nature, Dada is often presented as a manifestation of a fascination with the irrational, like in the 1936 Museum of Modern Art exhibit, Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism, or classified as a reaction to the horrors of World War One (WWI). Granting the wide array of micro, macro, and random events that culminated in Dada it is obviously inaccurate to define the movement solely by the societal context of its era. Yet, the complexity of Dada can be partially illuminated through the examination of Dada as a personification of the social context in which it was created through focusing on the impact of modernity and the cultural ramifications of the first and second industrial revolutions and the group relations between the individual Dadaist and Dada through the shifting the cultural landscape and class structures of post-WWI Europe.
The beginning of the 20th century was a period marked by the disillusionment with the deep seated faith in science and reason, and the foregoing of Kant’s ideals of rationalism and autonomy, that had dominated 19th century’s the cultural landscape . The outbreak of the First World War was greeted with much enthusiasm, and little critique. The “war craze” in Europe surrounding the beginning of WWI meant widespread celebrations, with the outbreak greeted with enthusiasm fuelled by the optimism, rationalism, and the faith in technological development carried over from the 19th century. Following the first industrial revolution’s mechanisation of labour and urbanisation of cities, the second industrial revolution was marked by the technological advancements and expansion of the uses for steel, electricity, and petroleum. The rationalism of the war was fuelled by national education programmes in the preceding century, providing states with opportunities to indoctrinate citizens as loyal and obedient (Gündüz, 2017). Further fuelled by propaganda with a promise of honour and national glory, the fighting countries legitimised the invasion and subjection of other nations using Darwinistic principles developed in the previous century, with the promoters of the war keenly aware of the social role of intellectuals, knowing that to “win”, intellectuals had to declare public solidarity with their country, which helped to further promote nationalism and patriotism while sweeping others up in the nationalistic fervour characteristic of the early 20th century. WWI physically and psychologically disturbed Europe. In contrast to the start of the war, by the end, the horrors of technologized warfare, brought home through the 19th century’s invention of photography, shattered the faith in scientific innovation and rationalism that was so believed in at the end of the 19th century.
Dada first exists as a protest against the rationalised madness of WWI, turning to anti-rational strategies. Zurich, the birthplace of Dada acted as a centre of intellectual activity during WWI, being in neutral Switzerland. The city served as a gathering place for those in central Europe looking to escape the war. From the vantage point of Zurich, Dada explores the other aspects of modernity including the commodification of art and autonomous art, all while subverting concepts of value. Through a Gramscian reading of the time period, “intellectuals play a major role in the struggle for hegemony” (Gündüz, 2017), and Dada was no exception. In the intellectual and cultural milieu of Zurich, the Dadaists struggled through their art against the faith in technology, rationality, and reason, with the rest of Europe realising the validity of their arguments as the horrors of the technologized and romanticised Great War played out. From Zurich, and carrying on through to the other chapters of Dada to be developed in cultural centres such as New York, Paris, and Berlin, Dadaists challenged the uncritical and unconscious world in which they lived, beginning with a world in which could desire a great war.
The 20th century’s modernity marked the change in the role of the artist and the definition of art. Since the 17th century, movements such as Symbolism and Aestheticism, developed a deeply self-referential and insular art, growing more and more distant from the realities of everyday life. The 20th century marked a new context for art, as the change in the notions of work and free time prompted by industry triggered the rise of urban mass culture and leisure, starting at the end of the 19th century (Grindon, 2011). As the role of the artist shifted with modernity, there was the move from aristocratic patronage to a market system, signalling a shift in the power structure of content production, with social conditions beginning to inspire works as opposed to he “ideals” and “pure forms” valued by the autonomous art favoured by the bourgeoise (Deblijack, 1998). As the shift to a market system meant a shift in the realm of art into more openly performing a social role, the questions surrounding art’s social autonomy and the cultural capital of art as a product began to be explored. As commodification was increasingly defining the status of art, there was a new turn in the logic of commodity: artwork had to break away from traditional norms to produce its own values, thus also attempting to create a new audience (Wallenstein, 2012; Grindon, 2017). It is through these conditions that the historical avant-garde emerges.
The historical avant-garde pushed the modernist negative critical potential to its extreme, liberating art from the utopian aesthetic, autonomy, and social ideals as defined by the traditional artistic categories of genre, form, material, and discipline, dominant since the 17th century (Develijack, 1998). The socio-historical conditions that fuelled this artistic trend included the massive urbanisation accompanying the industrial revolution, WWI, ideals of social revolution and political reform, disenchantment with bourgeoise society, as especially rooted in the perception of war being the strategy used to maximise profit (Deblijack, 1998; Gündüz, 2017). As Tzara notes in his Dada Manifesto of 1918, “The new artist protests, he no longer paints.” (Tzara in Motherwell). The avant-garde artist operates from a position of alienation and detachment, producing transgressive art that is as alienated and detached from the art of the past century, and exemplified by attacking the bourgeoise society that valued the autonomous art.
As commodification was increasingly seen to define art’s status, the resistance took the form of appropriating the commodified object, internalising it to become its absolute fetish in order for the artwork to avoid the humiliation of being subjected to the external and fluctuating value of the market (Wallenstein, 2012). Dada championed this resistance of the form alongside its resistance against art, morality, and society, with the creation of art solely informed by the change in historical circumstances (Dickerman, 2003). To destroy bourgeoise autonomous art and reintegrate art and everyday life, a radical social revolution by way of radical aesthetic innovation was executed by Dadaists. Dada infiltrated a disturbed world to destroy all its existing patterns through fierce and outspoken acts against the commodification of culture and to the levelling of cultural hierarchies; an act against the market. A Marxist analysis of Dada work shows their critique and denouement of capitalist, bourgeoise values through forms such as photomontage, and the readymades of Marcelle Duchamp.
Collage’s inherent transgression of the traditional painting was taken to a new extreme in the photomontages of the Dadaists. Language, the machine, the commodity, and politics permeate the art through the fragmentary process and idioms of the developing media culture (Dickerman, 2003). Dada as an anti-art tirade was deeply centred around a critique of modernity as opposed to a complete rejection of development. The cultural production enclosed by the market of the bourgeoise era lead to art that was increasingly separated from the social institutions that had previously supported and conditioned it and from which the theoretical ideal of autonomous art was curated (Grindon, 2011). Along with anti-art diatribes engaging the critique of modernism, Dada also engaged in the critique of autonomous art as divorced from the human life world, instead championing autonomy-as-a-value in their work (Grindon, 2011; Dickerman, 2003). The technological culture as inaugurated by photography worked in conjunction with the grandiose nature of Dada, contributing to the spectacularisation of urban space to innovate the audience by organising a new spectacle of consumption thus gaining control over commodification. Modernity’s freedom from labour transformed the role of art and the artists’ relationship with their work. The freedom from labour marked by industrialisation fostered “an ambiguous tension between aesthetic play and capitalist work” (Grindon, 2011).
In contrast to the autonomous art of the previous era, the role of art in the early 20th century could be aligned with the notion of art as play to be allied with attacks on other powers of modernity including capitalism and the state (Grindon, 2011). Of the Dadaists, the rhetorical refusal to participate in the production of capitalist values was a positive partaking in the composing of alternatives to social norms. The potential held by avant-garde movements, including Dada, to change society by focusing attention on the recuperation and commodity fetishism helped add to the value of the artist as a trigger for other imaginations. The imagination of alternative labour identity which lies behind the refusal of work is exemplified in the increased play element of dada art, contrasting with the factory productions and mechanised work (Grindon, 2011). Dada experimented with objects’ roles in fostering anti-capitalist social relations thought the imagination and construction of alternative proactive performance objects, reimagining the art forms as social movements through refiguring commodities.
Autonomy as a value prompted a tone of deep self-critique around Dadaists as their relation to communism was from within a capitalist society, spurring great irony in their work, for example: Duchamp’s urinal. The superfluity and the use of irony imbedded in their work ties into the paradoxical position of Dadaists as workers opposed to capital who must be opposed to themselves as capital. Duchamp’s readymades exemplify this irony with the notion of production, values, and the fetishisation of the commodity imbedded in the play of repurposed objects. Through his readymades, Duchamp presents complex and self-consciously paradoxical interjections of the commodity, touching upon the ideas of cereal production and questioning how economic and aesthetic values are interrelated (Wallenstein, 2012). Like in Duchamp’s Tzank Cheque of 1919, the fiction of value is highlighted while fetishising the abstract notion of value and credit. In this vein of critique, Dada also prioritises class relations over national affiliations, adding an additional depth to the experience of the audience.
Dada work exhibits a profound deep seated scepticism about all laws and governing social systems. Radical social revolution by way of radical aesthetic innovation through the destruction of bourgeoise autonomous art and hereby re-integrating art into social life culminates in Dada’s violation of traditional object-media boundaries with the purpose of Dada art not object production but “intervention within and activation of the terrain of modern culture” (Dickerman, 2003). Much of Dada art begins with the transfiguration of newspapers, sermons, political broad speech, manifestoes, all forms of public speech. As a result, the abstraction of language is a central tenant in Dada, often interpreted as an assault on the public communicative functions of language and its socially binding characteristics as a collective system governed by laws. The first iteration of this was in June of 1916, with Hugo Ball’s debut of his sound poems at the Cabaret Voltaire and can be found throughout the movement, in the production of manifestos, and in visual works such as the photomontages of Raoul Hausmann’s The Art Critic (1919-1920).
Dada art served both as a conductor of ideas and as sites of practice for attacks on culture through their violation of traditional artistic boundaries (Grindon, 2011; Dickerman, 2003). The framing of a dada piece does not act as a barrier between the art and the world, instead, dada art overcomes traditional boundaries into performance, media pranks, and installations, establishing new means of distribution (Dickerman, 2003). The interdisciplinary nature of Dada encompasses their forms of art including their creation of manifestoes, sound poems, chance poems, plays, recitals, dances, and montages, all acting as deliberately provocative media, promoting the Dadaists’ anti-art agenda with their subversive content aiming to resist meaning.
The increased visibility of social movements had multiple influences on the protesting form of avant-garde art. Dada artists turned tools, art, commodities, into weapons against the cultural values of their times, fashioning rebellious objects that they attempted to infuse with their performative goals of dislocation of the audience and their relation to their cultural identity, prompting a liminal environment for the audience to experience the absurdities to the cultural epoch (Grindon, 2011). The tone of Dada was a fashionable post-war mix of existentialism and nihilism, explored in the anti-art and anti-bourgeoise themes of their art. As explained by Ball in 1916, “The horror of our time, the paralysing background of events, is made visible.” (Ball as quoted in Foster, 2003). Looking to awaken the public to the “horror” of their era, Dada art, with the intention of disturbing and disrupting, aimed to be the geste gratuit, the act that breaks the chain of logical causality, as Dickerman notes, dramatising the moral amnesia of the battlefield in a civilian arena (Dickerman, 2003). This cultural reverse engineering prompted influential innovations in the art as a social movement. The performances and materials hybridised the roles of activist, artist, machine, and folk culture in claiming ironic identities.This ironic disjunction in their art allowed Dada to implicate others through the misperformance of their own identity, critiquing society through irony instead of merely taking an oppositional identity or attempting to speak from a position of authority or power (Grindon, 2011). By emphasising the affect of the artwork instead of Dadaists’ own ideological agitations, the re-performance expands upon the potential strategic effort to create a shared understanding through individual experience prompted by art thus motivating collective action in all participants of dada.
Dada was an international movement with a notably diffuse leadership and geography. The activities in a handful of city centres, created by a network of politically displaced artists of diverse nationalities, was widespread in an unprecedented way, for there had never been an art movement so decidedly international (Dickerman, 2003). Dada;s different chapters formed distinct identities through the specific political conditions of their locations, informing the specific possibilities of the framing of their contributions to the movement. Beginning with the carnivalesque cabaret culture of Zurich, featuring its expatriate community of intellectuals, after the war, Dada spread to other cities such as Berlin-where the emphasis was on the dissection of new media, and Paris-where the notion of work was explored (Dickerman, 2003). While influencing each other with political content, the international chapters of Dada were truly unified in their insistent pursuit and reworks in formal strategies such as collages, montages, readymades, and chance poems. As Dickerman (2003) notes, “the dissemination of these strategies between artists and city centres speaks to the extremism of Dada’s group dynamics with this cohesion pointing to Dada’s primary revolution: the re-conceptualisation of practice as a form of tactics, a mode of intervention within a predetermined field, intended as assault. For all factions of Dada, the cultural sphere was the battlefield. The group dynamics of Dada, the social interactions, dialogues, and validation served as a spring board for this movement’s radicalisation of intellectual innovation. Examining this movement through Georg Simmel’s ideas of aesthetics and socialisation, it is possible to see how Dada was so united by its formal values. Noting how humans draw, paint, sculpt, create to fulfil practical purpose and interests until these acts of creative interpretation transform into purposes in and of themselves with artistic forms of valuation ultimately applied to the products, Dada as a group exemplifies the mutual dependance of the aesthetic realm, emphasising the irrational and non-discursive while privileging individualism and relativistic attitudes, and the social realm (Funte, 2008).