Dada

Dada
The Dada movement claimed to be an anti-art movement; it had negative and destructive elements, writers and artists were more concerned with shock of what the First World War had brought with it. Rejection all the traditional tactics, they looked for liberty. 

The dada movement instinctively grown as a literary movementafter Hugo Ball opened the cabarater Voltaire which used to be a gathering place for independent young artists. One of dada’s leading figures was the Tristan Tzara, who edited the periodical DADA in the beginning of July 1917. Tzara had joined Hugo Ball, Jean Arp (known as Hans Arp) and Richard Huelsenbeck in exploring poetry. Dadaists  did not agree on the creation of the name Dada. Marcel Duchamp joined the dada movement and became its most outstanding visual artist, he was influenced by cubism, his style of style, as geometric planes; while futurism had inspired him to convey time and motion.

Dunchamp had painted a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa; it was brilliant assault on tradition and a public that had lost the classical essence of the Renaissance movement.

Dadaists were not creating art but mocking a society that has gone insane; several dadaistts produced meaningful visual art and influenced graphic design. Dadaists claimed to have created photomontage

Photomontage is a technique that manipulates found photographic images to create clashing juxtapositions and associations, Raoul Hausman and Hannah Hoch created outstanding work in this technique in 1918.

Kurt Schwitters created a nonpoltical offshoot of dada which he named Merz in one of his collages. Merz meaning as the title of a one-man art movment, his Merz pictures were collage compositions using printed clients, rubbish, and found materials to compose colour against colour, form against form and texture against textures. His designs were complex designs combined to Dada’s elements of absurdity. Kurt Schwitters, wrote and designed poetry that played sense to this absurdity, he definedpeotry as the interaction of elements.

In 1920s, one could see that construcvism became an added influence in Schwitters work after he made contact with El Lissitzky and Theo van Doesburg they invited Schwitters to promote dada in Holland, Van Doesburg and Schwitters work together on a book in which typographic forms were interpreted as characters.  Schwitters also managed a successful graphic design studio with Pelikan as a major client. He came employed by Hanover where he was the typography consultant for several years. He spent his last years in the British Isles were he returned to doing traditionalist paintings.

Other Dadaists John Heartfield, Wieland Herzefelde and George Grosz promoted social change.  Heartfield used the crude disjunctions of photomontage as a potent propaganda weapon.  He introduced innovation in the preparation of mechanical art for offset printing, he target the Weimar Repbulic and the growing Nazi party in book, magazine covers and illustration and also a few posters. Heartfield worked with images directly with glossy prints brought from magazines and newspapers, he and on occasion commissioned a needed image from a photographer.

Before his death, he produced photomontages protesting the Vietnam War calling for world peace, the one of his retrospective photomontages of his graphic art; it went by the title “Unfortunately Still Timely”.

George Grosz drawings represented angry intensity of deep political conviction he perceived them to be a corrupt ambiance.

Dada was a liberating movement that continued to influence innovation and rebellion, it was born in protest against war, and its destructive activities became more absurd and extreme after the war ended.  Having pushed its negative activities to the limit, it was lacking the unified leadership, and its members were face with new ideas that eventually had led to surrealism.  

 Reference: 

 Meggs P. B. and Purvis A. W. 1998. 5th Edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons , Inc.

Artlyst , 2009, Dada; a movement of artists against art [online], available at: http://www.artlyst.com/member-articles/dada-a-movement-of-artists-against-art [accessed 3rd of december 2013)