Dada
- About Dada: Sotheby'sDada was a European avant-garde art and literary movement that spanned from roughly 1916 to 1924. Founded as a reaction to the horrors of the First World War and the nationalism that many perceived to be a catalyst to the conflict, it espoused a new approach to art that rejected traditional, bourgeois values such as rationalism in favour of chance and the absurd.
- Dada: TateDada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performance produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature.
- World War I and Dada: MoMADada emerged amid the brutality of World War I (1914–18)—a conflict that claimed the lives of eight million military personnel and an estimated equal number of civilians. This unprecedented loss of human life was a result of trench warfare and technological advances in weaponry, communications, and transportation systems.
Research & Reference
- Dada: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on dada. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
Streaming Media
- Dada and SurrealismThe Dada movement, born as a reaction to World War I, and its successor, Surrealism, opened new avenues for artistic creation by striving to bypass the reasoning process and tap directly into the unconscious mind.
- What is Expressionism?The term Expressionism became commonly used in Germany around 1910. Developed from the work of Symbolist artists, expressionist art movements across Germany and Austria emerged; including Die Brucke in Dresden and Der Blaue Reiter in Munich. Artists associated with these groups placed the expression of feelings over all else in their work through the bold use of colour, exaggeration of form and emphasis of the spiritual over the earthly. This short film tracks the story of Expressionism in art, from its beginnings in the early twentieth century, through to its influence on artists today.
Perspectives
Dada and Surrealism: a Very Short Introduction
The avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism continue to have a huge influence on cultural practice, especially in contemporary art, with its obsession with sexuality, fetishism, and shock tactics. In this new treatment of the subject, Hopkins focuses on the many debates surrounding these movements: the Marquis de Sade's Surrealist deification, issues of quality (How good is Dali?), the idea of the 'readymade', attitudes towards the city, the impact of Freud, attitudes to women, fetishism, and primitivism. The international nature of these movements is examined, covering the cities of Zurich, New York, Berlin, Cologne, Barcelona, Paris, London, and recently discovered examples in Eastern Europe. Hopkins explores the huge range of media employed by both Dada and Surrealism (collage, painting, found objects, performance art, photography, film) , whilst at the same time establishing the aesthetic differences between the movements. He also examines the Dadaist obsession with the body-as-mechanism in relation to the Surrealists' return to the fetishized/eroticized body.
The Posthuman Dada Guide
This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life."--The Posthuman Dada Guide The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world--all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich's Café de la Terrasse--a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution--lasted for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead and Dada stronger than ever. As the poet faces the future mass murderer over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the world. Taking the match as metaphor for two poles of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, politics, and life, Andrei Codrescu has created his own brilliantly Dadaesque guide to Dada--and to what it can teach us about surviving our ultraconnected present and future. Here dadaists Duchamp, Ball, and von Freytag-Loringhoven and communists Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev appear live in company with later incarnations, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, and Newt Gingrich. The Posthuman Dada Guide is arranged alphabetically for quick reference and (some) nostalgia for order, with entries such as "eros (women)," "internet(s)," and "war." Throughout, it is written in the belief "that posthumans lining the road to the future (which looks as if it exists, after all, even though Dada is against it) need the solace offered by the primal raw energy of Dada and its inhuman sources.