"Dada is an armadillo. Everything is Dada"

Dada, or dadaism, was an art movement -- or as dadaists would prefer, an "anti-art" movement, that flourished in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and France during World War I and the early days of the Weimar Republic (Weimare Republik). Dada started when a group of artists, disgusted with the Great War (WWI), assembled in Zürich, Switzerland at the now-famous Cabaret Voltaire. Dada continued during the beginning of the Weimar Republic; this era between World Wars was a time of great cultural advances in Western Europe. While there was relative freedom of expression (as evidenced by cabaret clubs, jazz, changing roles for women, and the like), Europeans were disillusioned by the devastating Great War (WWI) that had just occurred. This manifested itself in the Dada movement -- a flurry of visual art, theater, and poetry that united a loose collection of absurdist artists.

This absurdism is shown in this quote by French-Romanian performance artist Tristan Tzara:

"DADA doubts everything. Dada is an armadillo. Everything is Dada, too. Beware of Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man’s normal condition, is DADA. But the real dadas are against DADA."

Dadaists called their movement an "anti-art" movement because they were rebelling against traditional aesthetics, politics, and norms. Dadaists were generally staunchly anti-war, and most felt that the traditional institutions of government, capitalism, and bourgeoisie were to blame for the Great War (WWI). Dadaists rejected traditional aesthetics, techniques, and traditions, opting for an avant-garde style that was often inaccessible or completely off-the-wall.

French poet Louis Aragon wrote of the dadaist mentality:
"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."

Dada flourished in Zürich, Berlin, Cologne (Köln), Paris, and eventually New York City. Famous Dada artists included Hugo Ball, Hannah Höch, Jean Arp, Hans Richter, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, among many others. While Dada was eventually usurped by the more formal surrealist art movement and other art styles, Dada has had a long-lasting impact on the worlds of modern art and postmodern art.


Der Dada (cover)
Edited by Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and George Grosz.
No. 3 (April 1920)



Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden by Otto Dix, 1926


Sources:
dadaism to sans serif: http://typophile.com/node/30008 (lots of good pix here and a link to Hugo Ball's famously weird performance piece)
http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/hofmann.php
http://strangewondrous.net/browse/subject/d/dada
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada