Dada Notes

·    What is Dada and why did it come into existence? 
People, mainly artists, resented the war and wanted something to rebel against it. This became the Dada movement because they strived to make anti-art work to mock the war and anything used for it. 

·      Discuss Duchamp’s notion of “Readymades”.  What are they?  
Duchamp would take already made items and turn them into something unusable and call it art. One of his most famous ones is taking a normal clothes iron and making it unusable by adding spikes to the bottom of it. This was his dada art.

·      How do they change your expectations about what art can be? 
They aren’t necessarily beautiful, but they’re interesting to look at and have meaning behind them and are more meaningful than just the first glimpse you get of the piece.

What did they embrace? 

Chance, accident, improvisation

Why did they take this approach? 

This expressed a form of personal protest against the war and criticized the violent world that they were living in. it depicted the predictableness about their lives at that specific point in time.

·      What is the value of art made by Dadaists? 

     It was not the artwork or how it looked, it was about the act of creating the artwork and collaborating with others to create a new vision of the world.

·      How and why did Dada artists work with words?

      Dada artists saw that at the heart of order and reason was language. So to symbolize the way they felt the world was crazy and chaotic at that time, they cut apart words and letters to create a completely new letter which showed the chaos. They would also put phrases together that were rather risky for their time period, creating phrases to put on their artwork such as “She has a hot ass” pictured on the image below.