The Powers That Be
Dadism - THE POWERS THAT BE
1914 – World War l began, total mechanized trench warfare.
Gutted a whole generation of artists and writers.
Politician had lied about the nature and length of the war.
There had been propaganda..which seems naïve to us now, knowing what we know!
There was hatred among artist of all forms of authority.
Longed for a clean slate. America was too far, Switzerland became a refuge for intellectuals, writers and painters from northern Europe.
Cafes became the center for intellectual life: to meet, work, argue, and display themselves. “Café Intellectual” The cafes were the home to exiles, theatre of the new.
Stalin declared war of “rootless cosmopolitans”, his enemy was café culture.
Writer Hugo Ball and his girlfriend Emmy Hennings opened a tiny cabaret: center for artistic entertainment. Hugo Ball was the founder of Dada.
A group developed called DADA (nonsense word)
Not an art style like cubism or a socio-political program like Futurism.
It stood for the freedom to experiment, play as the highest human activity and its main tool was chance.
“Repelled by the slaughterhouses of the world war we turned to Art” Jean Arp, a Dadaist wrote.
They believed in the power of art to save mankind from political abominations…this optimism would last until the next war.
One condition of the elementary art was spontaneity: childhood and chance
Jean Arp’s Jigsaw wooden reliefs of 1916 - 20 were like toys, simple and direct
Arp also tore out scraps of paper (their edges drew themselves with conscious intervention by being torn) then dropped them on a sheet of paper fixing them where they fell, collages made in accordance with the laws of chance. 20th Century art is inconceivable without Arp’s defining shapes, those irregular, shifting fluidly between abstraction and representation.
Tristan Tzara made poems by scrambling words.
Futurism was a big influence on DADAism..Marinetti brand of controlled hysteria.
But Zurich Dadaism did not worship the machine
There was no distinctive Dada art: the stage happenings, simultaneous poems and mock rituals at the Cabaret Voltaire were spinoffs of Futurism theatre.
Kurt Schwitters made art from scraps picked up on the street. Instead of painting junk he rearranged it into art: tatty, stained, rusty, bent, torn and crumpled but capable of redeeming itself under the collaboration of the artist.
He used urban waste, his compositions were based on the cubist grid.
His theme was the city; so many messages, journeys, possession and rejection…the city was renewing its fabric.
Merzbau was his greatest work
It was destroyed by an Allied bomb in 1943
He began it 1923.
The construction spread over 2 floors of his house
An actual city within a larger city, mimicking its imagery
It had love grottos and a murderer’s cave and sex-crime den.
Schwitters also produced graphics that were playful but were a commentary on the day’s political and social climate.
Many believed that the Dadaist were against art…they pocked fun at middlebrow cult of art.
Art was pseudo religion, worshipping the Culture-Hero.
The best satire on that idea was Marcel Duchamp’s LHOOQ, 1919
The moustache on the Mona Lisa, a gesture of cultural irreverence.
The pun worked on several layers
The title LHOOQ pronounced by letter in French means “She’s got a hot ass”
Giving male attributes to the most famous female portrait ever painted is also a joke on Leonardo’s homosexuality and Duchamp’s own interest in the confusion of sexual roles.
Duchamp made other attempts to de-mystify art with ready-mades, common things like a snow shovel and a bicycle wheel or a bottle rack which he exhibited as object without aesthetic value but in a different context were considered ART
The most outlandish of these pieces was FOUNTAIN, 1917, a porcelain urinal.
These objects proclaimed that the world was already full of interesting thing that the artist did not need to add to them! The act of choice equaled creation.
(These ideas would appeal to future American and European artist who were interested in the nature of art)
Dada moved to Berlin in 1918 and became overtly political, it was no longer an alternative to conflict. In Berlin, after WWl, to be modern meant to be involved with politics, it was a city torn by shortages and post-war misery.
A year after the Russian Revolution there was a socialist uprising in Germany.
In this atmosphere there could be no such thing as a radical art that did not take political side. There was already anti-war protest in German art which came from Expressionism (coming next class). They were interested in the past but the Dadaist were interested in the present. They attacked the Expressionists with their manifesto
The Berlin Dadaist, John Heartfield, Grorge Grosz, Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann worked with photomontage, collage with photos, using images cut from magazines and newspapers.
Max Ernst was the first to produce interesting work with photomontage.
His work can be seen as revelations of dread like his Murdering Airplane 1920
Hovering over the French landscape the aircraft is half machine and half bad angel.
The most aggressive political use of photomontage was John Heartfield. He created a kind of truth that is not possible with paint. The realism of the photograph made his work credible.
The most gifted of the collagist working in Berlin was Hannah Hoch.
Her pieces were small and edgy. She had a fine sense of placement and her compositions were a unified surface. It was a strange, bleak and poisoned world.
German Dada tried to reject all tradition but were fond of stereotypes.
One of there obsessions was the war cripple. Half man/half machine
Otto Dix’s Card playing war Cripples a political mutant, a casualty of war.
Raoul Hausmann produced the most memorable of all Dada sculpture: The Spirit of our Time. He has no brain, it is all glued to the outside of his head, tape measure for making judgments.
The master of radical sourness was George Grosz. He was critical of the Weimar politics: the empty speeches and the promises of a better future.
In Republican Automatons 2 war cripples, members of the bourgeoisie, judging by their dress, one in black tie and fancy shirt, wearing an iron cross, the other in a stiff white collar.
Daum Marries has a bachelor and a prostitute. The bachelor is a dummy, programmed with certain desires and the only possible bride for him is a prostitute.
Prostitutes were a common subject for Grosz. She was the poison maiden of German folklore, the bringer of disease and sin. He thought there were 4 breeds of pig: The fat industrialists, the officer, the priest and the hooker.
“My aim is to be understood by everyone: it was for the masses and to be reproduced.
