"Dada is a state of mind."

(The titular quotation is culled from Andre Breton's Dada Geography.)

How you found yourself here is immaterial. Dada is not. Why join Dada? To answer this question, we must briefly survey the history of Dada.

What is Dada? Dada is an “anti-art” movement that emerged from Zurich in 1916. Its impetus was the unprecedented and wanton destruction that was World War I. The Dadaists believed that in the face of this inhuman carnage, traditional art had become a socially irrelevant tool. Thus, their focus was on creating controversial new art-forms (i.e. photo collages, readymades, sound poems) and deriding the art made by contemporaries and predecessors. Dada’s volatile aesthetics led the prominent social critic Walter Benjamin to deem the movement an “instrument of ballistics.” Ironically, the movement not only produced innumerable iconic works of art but also served as a catalyst and influence for many of the twentieth century’s major artistic movements (i.e. surrealism, pop art, absurdism, postmodernism). As Dada’s influence shows, Benjamin’s definition was a prescient one.

But all this falls short of explaining why Dada is relevant today. Dada’s continued importance lies in the fact that the conditions for its initial establishment (i.e. wanton destruction and societal desensitization to said destruction) have only worsened since the movement faded away in the 1920s. One can only imagine how the Dadaists would react to the events that have since shaped the world (the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, 9/11, to name but a few).

In the face of these unimaginable tragedies, one can clearly fathom the Dadaists’ utter disillusionment with society. One can see what lead Louis Aragon to proclaim in his Dada manifesto ME, “Everything that is not me is incomprehensible.” One can see in the crude commercialization of culture and in the obstinacy of the modern political landscape what Paul Eluard meant when he proclaimed “We need entertaining. We are determined to stay exactly as we are or will be.” Though its power as an artistic catalyst lasted only a decade (all artistic movements eventually become obsolete given that art strives constantly to be novel), its value as a philosophical framework remains intact today. The magnitude of Dada is measured in its foresight and in its commitment to engaging mankind in a critical dialogue with culture. As Andre Breton said, “Dada attacks you through your own powers of reasoning.”
-Richard P. Chandler