Dada emerged in Zurich as a dramatic rejection of WWI and modern materialism. Often described as a nihilist movement, Dada sought to rip apart everything that was complicit in the bourgeois values and social structures that had ultimately led to the war. These extreme ends were pursued through a total rejection of tradition and the embrace of chance and nonsense in their writing and painting. Dada combined its negative desire to destroy the past in order to shock the present out of complacency with utopian ideals, influenced by primitivism, of a vital future that was also a return to older, purer ideals.
"Collage for the cover of Dada 4-5" by Jean Hans Arp, 1919, Zurich, Bibliothèque des Musées de Strasbourg | Public Domain.
Map of Dada Manifestos
Famous Dadaists include Tristan Tzara, who wrote the Dadaist manifesto, Jean Arp, Richard Bulsenbeck, Max Ernst and others. Reminiscent of but more extreme than the Futurists, Dada deconstructed language, playing with pure sound and extravagantly nonsensical or visually unusual arrangements of text. Dada authors viewed language with some contempt, as being complicit in a corrupt social order. Dada visual artists like Marcel Duchamp embraced chance and irony in their works, often using found objects and new techniques like collage and photomontage. Dada influenced the surrealists and the abstract expressionists.
References
“Dada.” "Encyclopædia Britannica Online", Encylcopedia Britannica Inc, 2020.
Ian Buchanan. “Dada.” A Dictionary of Critical Theory, Oxford University Press, 2018.
Jones, Dafydd. Dada Culture : Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Kuenzli, Rudolf E. Dada. London : New York: Phaidon Press Ltd. ; Phaidon Press Inc., 2006.
Russell, C. “Dada”. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton University Press, 2012.
White, Michael. “Dada.” Modernism/modernity 13, no.4 (2006): 773–776.