Word: dada
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...Dada was protest, the anguished cry of artists who came of age during the horrors of World War I. Several of the founders of the movement, who came together in Zurich in 1915, were dodging the draft in their home countries. But the Dadaists objected to more than just the cruelty of war--they protested anything that infringed upon the dignity and freedom of the individual. Industrialism came under fire: Raoul Hausmann wrote in 1920 of the paralysis of the spirit "in a world which continues to function like a machine...
...Dadaists railed against all that was conventional, against blind acceptance of tradition, against the uncritical absorption of stale and outdated ideas that inhibited free thought. The art historian Herschel Chipp describes Dada as a movement of negation. Indeed, the debilitating effect of Dada's nihilism struck many of its practitioners. In 1924 Tristan Tzara, founder of the movement, wrote: "Another characteristic of Dada is the continuous breaking off of our friends....Everybody knows that Dada is nothing. I broke away from Dada and from myself as soon as I understood the implications of nothing." In 1920 Richard Huelsenbeck pinpointed...
Critic Roger Shattuck suggests that while Cubism and Futurism affirmed aspects of the modern world, Dada was founded on doubt. The Dadaists sought to return to a tabula rasa: to clear the slate and begin again, Hausmann felt that it was necessary "to see things as they are." Dadaists searched for authenticity amid the seemingly irrational and arbitrary forces that shape human history...
DADAISM WAS REVOLUTIONARY in spirit. Politically, it was an attack on bourgeois materialism and coventionalism. In art, Dada prescribed no specific aesthetic, but rather an attitude, a shared feeling that traditional art had somehow failed to reach modern man. The Dadaists sought new modes of expression that would make art relevant to life. Taking this idea literally, they introduced everyday objects and materials into art. Duchamp created "readymade" sculptures using old urinals, bicycles and other assorted junk. Kurt Schwitters invented the term "merz" for his art, defined as a "fusion of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes." Collage and photomontage...
...representation. And while many of the works protest the cruel and dehumanizing forces of modern life, others are deliberately cryptic. Sound poems such as Schwitters' "Primal Sonata," composed of nonsensical strings of syllables, attempted to transcend conventional language and reach listeners on a more basic level. The word "dada" itself had no specific meaning when first adopted in 1915; it acquired associations only over time. Huelsenbeck called Dada "a word, which only later was to be filled with a concept...