Dada Photography Essay

1205 Words5 Pages
Dada was born in 1916 and over by the early 1920s.It was an international artistic phenomenon, a movement that most of the time was defiantly anti-art. Not an artistic movement in the regular sense, it was something like a bomb that dropped when the First World War raged in Europe. Dada came in the world with a new artistic ethic, from which new ways of expression was born. Different artists in different countries found different forms to give shape and reason to this anti-bourgeois spirit. Marchel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann and Francis Picabia are some fundamental Dadaistic figures. Back then Dadaism was thought to be anti-academic while now is a significant subject studied in universities. It all started in Zurich and what brought all the Dadaists together was the nihilistic view that they shared towards the traditional expectations of artists. Dada is a word that means both "hobby horses" and "father", but it was only chosen for its naive sound. Dada's origins involve one man, Hugo Ball and a cabaret bar with the name Cabaret Voltaire. He was a theorist and a poet who introduced this bar to the artistic world in 1916 in Spiegelgasse. After Zurich the movement spread to Cologne, Berlin, Hanover, Paris, Russia and New York. The cabarets in those places they all offered a programme of events like singing of street ballads, reading poems, music, dancing and all shorts of new forms of performance. Another characteristic of Dadaists is to hate any attempt of intellectual analysis based on their work. What is important for someone who wants to understand Dada is to realize the state of mental and psychological tension in which it flourished. The movement involved theatre, visual arts, poetry, art theory, graphic design and many art manifestoes. "Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point of
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