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) (Dickerman, 2003). 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, by focusing on the impact of modernity, the ramifications of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, and the group relations between the individual Dadaist and Dada throughout the shifting the cultural landscape and class structures of post-WWI Europe.
Social conditions of Europe:
WWI physically and psychologically disturbed Europe.The beginning of the 20th century was marked by a disillusionment around the deep seated faith in science and reason that had dominated 19th century’s the cultural landscape. The “war craze” in Europe, around the beginning of WWI, prompted widespread celebrations over the outbreak of the war, with enthusiasm fuelled by the optimism, rationalism, and confidence 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 expansions regarding the use of steel, electricity, and petroleum. Fuelled by propaganda promising honour and national glory, fighting countries legitimised invasions and subjections of other nations with Darwinistic principles of evolution developed in the previous century; the promoters of the war were keenly aware of the social role of intellectuals, knowing that to “win”, intellectuals had to declare public solidarity with their country, which helped sweep others up in the nationalistic fervour. The rationalisation of the war was furthered by national education programmes in the preceding century, providing states with opportunities to indoctrinate citizens as loyal and obedient (Gündüz, 2017). 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. Zurich, the birthplace of Dada, was a centre of intellectual activity during WWI. Being in neutral Switzerland, the city was a congregation point for those in central Europe looking to escape the war. From the vantage point of Zurich, Dada explored aspects of modernity including the commodification of art and autonomous art, turning to anti-rational strategies and subverting concepts of value. Beginning in the intellectual and cultural milieu of Zurich, Dada struggled against the faith in technology, rationality, and reason, through their art, with the rest of Europe only realising the validity of Dada’s arguments as the horrors of the technologized and romanticised Great War played out.
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 into autonomous art, deeply self-referential and insular and 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, also shifting content production, with social conditions beginning to inspire works as opposed to he “ideals” and “pure forms” of 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. With commodification 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 (Grindon, 2017; Wallenstein, 2012). It is through these conditions that Dada, and 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, rooted in the perception of war being the strategy used to maximise profit (Deblijack, 1998; Gündüz, 2017). As Dada artist Tristan Tzara notes, “The new artist protests: he no longer paints” (Tzara as cited in Motherwell, 1989, p.78)
Cultural conditions as manifested in Dada art:
Dadaists initiated a social revolution aiming to destroy bourgeoise autonomous art, and reintegrate life into art, through radical aesthetic innovation. As commodification was increasingly seen to define art’s status, appropriating the commodified object became the form for resistance (Wallenstein, 2012). Dada championed this appropriation, tying it into their resistance against art, morality, and society (Dickerman, 2003). A Marxist analysis of Dada work shows their critique and denouement of capitalist, bourgeoise values through forms such as photomontage, and the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. In developing these forms, Dada infiltrated culture to destroy its existing patterns through outspoken acts against the commodification of culture and to the levelling of cultural hierarchies, acts against the market.
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 (Dickerman, 2003; Grindon, 2011). 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