Dada
Dada est un mouvement intellectuel, littéraire et artistique qui, pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, se caractérisa par une remise en cause, à la manière de la table rase, de toutes les conventions et contraintes idéologiques, artistiques et politiques.Le terme Dada est inventé en février 1916 à Zürich (Suisse) par les poètes Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara et les peintres Jean Arp, Marcel Janco et Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Ils investissent une grande taverne, celle de la Spiegelgasse 1 dans le quartier du Niederdorf, la transforment en café littéraire et artistique et la rebaptisent « Cabaret Voltaire ».
L’explication la plus courante de l’origine du mot est celle du hasard ludique : un dictionnaire ouvert au hasard et un coupe-papier qui tombe sur le mot « dada ». En réaction à l’absurdité et à la tragédie de la Première Guerre mondiale et en opposition avec tous les mouvements se finissant en -isme, ils baptisent le mouvement qu’ils viennent de créer de ce nom. Dada n’est « ni un dogme, ni une école, mais plutôt une constellation d’individus et de facettes libres », précisait à l’époque Tristan Tzara. Hétéroclite et spontané, Dada s’est aussi imposé comme un mouvement sans véritable chef de file.
Dada is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922.To quote Dona Budd’s The Language of Art Knowledge, “Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco’s frequent use of the words da, da, meaning yes, yes in the Romanian language. Another theory says that the name “Dada” came during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French-German dictionary happened to point to ‘dada’, a French word for ‘hobbyhorse.” The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Its purpose was to ridicule the meaninglessness of the modern world as its participants saw it. In addition to being anti-war, Dada was also anti-bourgeois and socialist in nature.Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including surrealism, Nouveau réalisme, pop art and Fluxus.
Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.
(via theanxiousghost)
