Dadaism: The Art Movement

Dadaism is a European artistic movement that went from 1916-1923. It is a movement in art, literature, music, and film, repudiating and mocking artistic and social conventions and emphasizing the illogical and absurd. This movement flouted conventional artistic and cultural values by producing works of art that were marked by nonsense, travesty, and incongruity. The word dada has many meaning in different languages so it is impossible to know which language the art movement name was based from. The dada artist’s outrage was real and it was a genuine reaction to the horrors of World War 1 and the nationalism, and rationalism, which many thought had brought war about. None of the Dada art that survives can be called aesthetically pleasing in

any usual sense, as the idea was to be displeasing so as to make an impact on the viewers of the artwork. Dada artists made their artworks to shock people and to demystify artworks in the populist sense but nevertheless remain cryptic enough to allow the viewer to interpret works in a variety of ways. They used whatever materials they had access to and used them how they wished, for example artists like Marcel Duchamp who used the concept of ‘ready-mades’ for his artwork. He would take an object and turn it into ‘art’, the most controversial of these being the Fountain which was a urinal turned upside down. The Fountain also attacked the idea that art takes time and effort to make. The idea of a “readymade” was quite shocking back then, which today we would call “found art.”