"Dada is the complete astringent cleansing to cure you of your art-and-logic diarrhea. Dada is the cork in the bottle of your stupidity."

(The titular quote is culled from I.K. Bonset's Antiartandpurereasonmanifesto.)

If, as has been asserted in each of the previous posts, Dada is entirely conducive to today's artistic landscape, then why is there not currently a Dada revivalist movement or, at the very least, a movement that incorporates some Dada aesthetic values such as the Pop Art and Surrealist movements did in the twentieth century? For that matter, why did Dada disappear in the first place? The answer is a sad one and one that, to some extent, has plagued nearly every relevant artistic movement in recent memory (e.g. the Harlem Renaissance, the French La Nouvelle Vague, the Beat movement, etc.): a mixture of culturally conservative suppression, internal bitterness, a lack of the financial capital necessary to sustain the movement, and disinterest on the part of the public.

In Dada's case, suppression came primarily from the German government (which began to grow radically conservative as inflation skyrocketed in the 1920's). The movement, until this point, had flourished in Germany, where three of its six major outposts were to be found. As the Fascists tightened their grip on Germany, they sought to eliminate any functional forum for political and cultural dissidents. Their first targets were the arts. Books were burned by the thousands and many visual art groups (including the Dadaists) were forbidden to exhibit. Hermann Göring, later to be known as one of the most notorious of the Nazis, famously noted, "When I hear the world culture, that's when I reach for my revolver."

Internal bitterness on the part of the Dadaists was not in short supply. Splinter groups were common, as was exclusion on (tenuous) aesthetic grounds. Additionally, many of Dada's most notable artists (e.g. Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, etc.) were volatile personalities and were rigidly attached to their individual visions of what Dada was. The same aesthetic flexibility that made Dada so appealing for artists over time came to drive them apart.

Lack of financial capital and public disinterest hardly bear mentioning, given that, since the Renaissance, no society has made a lasting commitment to sustaining art within their culture. Artists, if lucky, are able to function with the help of wealthy private patrons or by working in academia. If unlucky, they suffer destitution and indifference (as in the cases of Hart Crane and Edgar Allen Poe, to name but a couple). There is also the third option of sacrificing one's credibility and making "art" designed for mass consumption (e.g. the work of Steven Spielberg, Dan Brown, etc.). Finally, there are those who are, with a great deal of luck, able to both produce artistically credible and (somewhat) commercially viable work (e.g. Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Woody Allen, etc.).

The sum total here is that my mistake is not in assuming that Dada is conducive to today's artistic landscape, but rather it is in assuming that today's artistic landscape exists in any more than a potential form.
-Richard P. Chandler

"Dada is American, Dada is Russian, Dada is Spanish, Dada is Swiss, Dada is German, Dada is French, Belgian, Norwegian, Swedish, Monégasque."

(The titular quote is culled from Walter Conrad Arensberg's Dada is American.)

As Arensberg noted, Dada was a global affair. Whereas most other artistic movements both before and since such as Impressionism, Expressionism, and Pop Art, have been primarily confined to a specific geographic/cultural environment (Paris, France; Vienna, Austria; and New York City, United States, respectively), Dada was able transcend both geographical and cultural barriers by establishing Dada havens in six major cities in four different nations (in chronological order: Zurich, Switzerland; Berlin, Germany; Hannover, Germany; Cologne, Germany; New York City, United States; and Paris, France) in the span of four years (1916-1920). There are a number of reasons why Dada had a broader cultural than most movements.

To begin with, as mentioned in an earlier post, Dada possessed a great deal of conceptual plasticity. Popular Dada forms included: architecture, avant-garde poetry, collage, film, manifesto, novel, painting, performance art, photography, readymade, sculpture, short fiction, theatre, etc. Thus, if one subscribed to a distaste of popular art, war, consumerism, or any number of other criteria, their chosen medium was more than welcome in Dada.

Moreover, Dada was among the first movements (if not the very first) to use the notion of networking. Advances in modern technology made this possible to some extent in the sense that transportation become less of a luxury in the twentieth century, but the major networking tool utilized by the Dadaists dated back to the Renaissance: the printed word. Dada movements in each of the six aforementioned cities communicated and coordinated with one another through Dada reviews, small literary magazines that also galvanized the other major Twentieth Century global movement, Modernism. That literary reviews have become all but obsolete outside of the academic community is indicative of the intellectual laziness that plagues Americans in today's culture. While some Americans have clung to the notion that it is important to keep abreast of news items from outside the U.S. (if only to preserve their own interests), it has become anathema to Americans that culture exists anywhere in the world, since it clearly does not here at home.

Why is all of this relevant? It is relevant because in today's world, we are lucky if there is a single functional artistic movement in our society, let alone one that connects us with the rest of the world. Given our political isolationism and our geographic estrangement from the rest of the world, art continues to possess the unique potential to serve as a sort of universal language, something that can transcend political, geographical, religious, or cultural differences between the world's societies.
-Richard P. Chandler

"Dada has doubts about everything."

(The titular quote is culled from Georges Ribemonet-Dessaignes' Artichokes.)

The spirit of Dada was a very critical, perhaps even cynical, one. This spirit is necessary again today. The Dadaists reacted against what they perceived to be the trivial worthlessness of consumerism and advertising and the propaganda of newspapers and institutions. Dada's position on consumerism is never more clear than in Put Your Money in dada!, a mock-advertisement recruiting prospective Dadaists to set up accounts with the fictional "dada savings bank" where "every 100-mark note increases at a rate of 1,327 times a minute in accordance with the rules of cell division." This mock-advertisement was published in Der Dada 1 by the "Central Office of Dadaism," a fictional group whose name pejoratively recalls government bureaucracies.

Given the sycophantic relationship of the media towards the government in modern U.S. culture (e.g. the suppression by major media outlets of political dissidents such as Noam Chomsky through refusal to publish, vague and superficial reportage on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the apparent willingness on the part of the U.S. media (at least until public approval of the Bush administration began to wane recently) to take the White House at its word, etc.), a group that promotes thorough and critical examination of both of these bodies could go a long way to promote the idea of an informed electorate, something that is both vitally important and in short supply currently.

As regards consumerism, modern U.S. society is (in my estimation) unparalleled in its taste for utter decadence. By hijacking the malleable "American Dream" and equating it solely with affluence (and its resultant material gains), advertising has effectively replaced any ethical, spiritual, or intellectual impulses with the almighty profit margin. This national obsession with avarice has led the majority of the nation to readily swallow (or at the very least ignore) the morally bankrupt greed-driven ideas that shape our domestic and foreign policies (e.g. the reckless deregulation of the financial system that has led to the savings and loan, dot com, and real-estate crises; the national disgust for helping the less fortunate through social programs such as welfare, the aforementioned Iraq war which amounted to little more than an opportunistic cash-grab on the part of governmentally connected contractors, weapons producers, and the oil industry). Needless to say, a group devoted to social equity and pacifism that could convey the sheer absurdity of the prevailing conditions of modern U.S. society could only help. Moreover, this is precisely what the Dadaists did in response to World War I (a conflict similarly motivated by financial factors); that their success was mixed at best doesn't diminish that what they did was morally upright. They could face themselves without shame because they fought for humanity in the face of total depravity, and that is more than can be said for us.
-Richard P. Chandler

"Dada Means Nothing."

(The titular quote is culled from Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto 1918.)

As discussed in the previous post, Dada remains relevant because the impetus (the mechanization of society, total warfare, desensitization through the mass media) for its creation remains unresolved at best, but this only accounts for its continued validity as a philosophical construct. From an aesthetic standpoint, Dada was considered fairly oblique even in its heyday.

Accordingly, most have tended to consider Dada aesthetically unsuited to today's artistic environment. These people, both now and in the time of Dada (1916-1926), believed that they were reacting to a unified Dada aesthetic, which, incidentally, doesn't exist (to again quote Tristan Tzara: "Dada was born of a need for independence, of a distrsut towards unity"). In reality, what they were reacting to was the aesthetic values of individuals within the Dada school. It is for this reason that Paul Dermee wrote "Dada is not a literary school nor an aesthetic doctrine." This is due to the fact that Dada had no unified aesthetic premise, but rather functioned as an artistic umbrella that represented a number of highly creative and societally dissident artists.

Not only is there not a unified aesthetic for Dada, there is not even a prevailing medium. That is to say, Dada scholars continue to debate about whether literature or visual art represents quintessential Dada art. Collage and painted works have become the most famous Dada works in retrospect. At the time, Dada reviews made poetry and manifestos perhaps the dominant form of Dada expression. However, Dada began in live performance.

Thus, Dada does not represent a rigidly defined and obscure aesthetic doctrine but rather a philosophical umbrella that offers a wide range of aesthetic freedom for contemporary dissedent artists. It is for this reason that Dada should be revived as an artistic movement.
-Richard P. Chandler

"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