Spirit Of Dada

The devil follows me day and night because he is afraid to be alone.
Francis Picabia

(Of this men shall know nothing F. P)
Ruth Hemus’s Dada’s Women
'Before Dada was there, there was Dada', Dada is nothing and greek philosopher socrates knew "Nothing". Francios Picabia said that;Dada is like your hopes, nothing. Like your paradise, nothing. Like your idols, nothing. Like your heroes, nothing. Like your artists, nothing. LIke your religious, nothing...

The Dada Movement in Art

Dada was an artistic and literary movement that started in Europe World War , many artists, intellectuals and writers, especially those from France and Germany, moved to Switzerland, which was a neutral country. Instead of being relieved that they had escaped, the artists, intellectuals and writers were furious with the modern society. So, they decided to show their protest through artistic medium. The beautiful monster Francis Picabia wrote that; '“A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.” Dada Movement decided to create non-art since art in the society anyway had no meaning. The public were repulsed by the Dada movement. However, the Dadaists found this attitude encouraging. And, slowly the movement spread whole Europe & New York City. Just as many mainstream artists were thinking about this movement seriously, the Dada movement dissolved around the early 1920s.

(Love Parade, by Francis Picabia) So Dadaism was a cultural movement that involved visual arts, literature, poetry, theatre and graphic design.

'Dada talks with you, it is everything, it includes everything, it belongs to all religions, can be neither victory nor defeat, it lives in space and not in time.' F. Picabia)
(Rainer Ganahl Dadalenin by Richard Huelsenbeck)

Dada art movement was a protest, but at the same time it managed to be enjoyable and amusing. It was sarcastic, colorful, quirky and silly. If a person at that time had not been aware of the logic behind the movement, he or she would have been wondering what the artist was up to creating pieces like the ones that were created. However, the artist who created the Dada art was very serious about his work. The movement did not favor one medium over another. It used everything from glass to plaster to geometric tapestries to wooden reliefs. In addition, the movement was also responsible for influencing many trends in the field of visual art, the most well-known being Surrealism. Louis Aragon wrote in 'Manifesto of the Dada Movement,' in 1920; 'No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.' And 'Dada means nothing. We want to change the world with nothing.'
said The Dada Movement artist Richard Huelsenbeck.. (Spirit of Our Time (Mechanical Head, 1919)

(The Dada Movement; Seated from left to right: René Crevel, Max Ernst, Dostoievsky, Théodore Fraenkel, Jean Paulhan, Benjamin Péret, Johannes Baargeld, Robert Desnos. Standing: Philippe Soupault, Jean Arp, Max Morise, Raphaël, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Giorgio de Chirico, Gala Éluard.)
( Max Ernst - At the Rendez-vous of Friends 1922))

Man Ray's “Danger”, For the Louis Aragon novel “Aurelien.” 1956.

(The function of genius is to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years later. Louis Aragon, 1928)
(Louis Aragon Self - Portrait)

(PHOTO; Opening of the Max Ernst exhibition at the gallery Au Sans Pareil, May 2, 1921)

'The virtue of pride, which was once the beauty of mankind, has given place to that fount of ugliness, Christian humility.'
Max Ernst

Man Ray: Dada Group,Dadaist meetings 1922,. From left to right, back row: Paul Chadourne, Tristan Tzara, Philippe Soupault, Serge Charchoune. Front row: Man Ray, Paul Éluard, Jacques Rigaut, Mick Soupault, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes.

(Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Andre Breton, Hans Arp, Salvador Dali,
Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Rene Crevel, and Man R(ay in 1933. by Man Ray)

( Max Ernst - Self -Portrait)

The Elephant Celebes. by Max Ernest.
Tate Gallery, London, UK

In 1921 Max Ernst painted The Elephant Celebes, the first substantial masterpiece of Ernst's early Surrealist phase. Fragments of body parts that appear in Ernst's work could have been associated with the actual battle field of horrific images and devastation.

(The Chinese Nightingale - Max Ernst, 1920)

'Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted.'

(Max Ernst, Santa Conversazione, collage, 1921)

Art is dead. Long live Dada!

(Walter Serner)

(Photo; Hugo Ball in the Cabaret Voltaire Zurich 1916)

Hugo Ball is carried to the stage in darkness. Wearing a cardboard costume of blue, scarlet and gold, As the lights go up, the audience of Swiss bourgeoisie, artists, intellectuals, and refugees from the carnage of WWI, is silent. Ball begins a priestly incantation: ‘gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini…’. The place to be, Spiegelgasse 1: simultaneous sound poems, noise music, ‘primitivist’ chants and drums, masked dancers, the absurd, the irrational, improvisation, chance, confrontation and cacophony. The lights dim. The audience responds with bewilderment and rage, and Ball disappears into the darkness. ‘It is necessary for poetry to discard language’.. Hugo Ball’s Gadji Beri Bimba appears to be not only a parody of the Latin Roman Catholic liturgy and an attempt at a primitive chant, but also a response to his experience as a German soldier in the front lines of battle in 1914. He wrote afterwards that ‘language was deeply discredited due to its use as propaganda that “justified” war. The journalistic and political abuses of language meant that “The word has been abandoned; it used to dwell among us. The word has become commodity … [and] has lost all dignity.” (Demos 2003, p.149).

( Sound Poem 'karawane" by Hugo Ball )

DADA
'Freedom: Dada, Dada, Dada,
crying open the constricted pains,
swallowing the contrasts and all the contradictions,
the grotesqueries and the illogicalities of life.'
* * *

'Dialectics is an amusing machine that leads us (in banal fashion) to the opinions which we would have held in any case'.
Tristan Tzara, 'Dada Manifesto', 1918)
(Jean Arp, Tristan Tzara & Hans Richter in Zurich, 1917. )