what is dada?
Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in Switzerland. It was a reaction to the horrors and absurdity of the war. Dada artists made art that didn’t make sense. Their purpose was to challenge the social norms of society and make art that would shock, confuse and outrage people. Dada was therefore called an anti-art art movement.
The artists randomly picked the name Dada from a dictionary. They didn’t want to follow rules and celebrate nonsense. Just like the war didn’t make sense. The Dada artists used their work to express their disgust towards violence, war and nationalism. They started with performance art, but later they also made visual art, texts, collages, sculptures and poetry.
In Dada poetry the artists made up new words and made sentences that didn’t make sense. They didn’t use grammar or punctuation. They also played with fonts and lay-outs.
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This is what Dadaist artist Tristan Tzara wrote in 1920:
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TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the
vulgar herd.
—Tristan Tzara, 1920
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I made my own Dada poem. I wanted to go against the rules. The rules for this assignment. I wanted to go against the authority form the teacher. So I made a new assignment, in Dada style poetry:
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Create or dada CHANGE poem an for work.
Graphic and poetry design performance
Dada song
Poster ieper/ypres
visit art An (anti-art)
And write example
Black act Reflection research
out
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reflection
During History lessons, a play performed at school and while visiting Ieper, we learned about the horrors of World War I. At Ieper we visited part of an old trench. It was weird imagining what it was like to be in a trench week after week. It was muddy, there were rats, dead people and you knew you could get killed every moment. I can imagine people going crazy. And then after all that fighting you only had a couple of meters land won back. The war was also fought by soldiers that were conscripted, not by professionals. Sometimes young men that didn’t want to be there. All because of nationalism and hatred. I can imagine why the artists from Dada thought the art that already existed couldn’t express all these new feelings. They needed something new. Something to show that the war was absurd. Something that would go against the normal rules.
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It was fun trying out the Dada poetry generator. For me it wasn’t really weird or new. But that makes sense, since I grew up years after the war, years after Dada.