Dada is like your hopes: nothing, like your paradise: nothing, like your idols: nothing, like your heroes: nothing, like your artists: nothing, like your religions: nothing. - Francis Picabia
It was the year 1916. The air was thick with the stench of gunpowder and fumes of poison gas. Machine guns tore through the air, the human cavalry fought a losing battle against the metal beasts. People fled their homelands, some never to return. Scattered dispatches told of lives extinguished on the battlefront.
A small group of people, hailing from different parts of the world— some poets and some artists disgusted by the bourgeoisie, its corruption, its politics and the deaths caused by machine “culture” were angry. Angry at the world and angry at conventional art for failing them. In Cabaret Voltaire’s dimly lit corners, their anger gave rise to a “movement” that aimed to challenge a world that had lost its soul.
Cabaret Voltaire (named after Voltaire, the French Enlightenment writer & philosopher) was the birth child of lovers Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, whose idea it was to create an influential nightclub in war-neutral Switzerland for avant garde artists to create performances and experiments beyond the realm of the everyday. According to politicians, the war was for a good cause, each country wanting to defend its own principles but Ball bitterly wrote that-“all this civilized carnage was a triumph of European intelligence”.
Their main motivation was to replace the logical nonsense of their war-shattered world with the illogical nonsense, which in turn gave rise to several other art movements, one of the most famous being Surrealism. Psychologically, their actions make sense, Especially when we look at the past two years of our lives. With the pandemic raining down deaths all over the world, economic and political crises around the world, it makes sense why the dadaists resorted to the insane, devoutly avoiding anything rational and being vehemently against the intellectualisation of their art. They mocked all the ways humankind has tried to find sense and purpose in what they saw as a senseless universe and purposeless existence. Whether it was their intention or not, their actions irrevocably changed our perspectives on what can even be considered as art. As Marcel Duchamp once said- “Art is meant for the eye, not the mind”. It is this same Duchamp who once submitted a urinal as a sculpture for a 1917 art exhibition.
Dadaists used art as provocation. Seeing crippled war veterans and the rise of the prosthetic industry, a lot of their works included dummies combined with mechanical instruments. Artists like Picabia also experimented with optical illusions by covering canvases with disorienting circles and lines. Duchamp used a lot of store-bought objects which he called readymades such as a metal dog comb or a snow shovel in his work. Readymades are not chosen based on their aesthetics or the emotions they provoke and that is exactly why Duchamp used them in his art, they are “visually indifferent”.
German artist Kurl Schwitters made 3D collages, assemblages and sculptures that broke through walls and roofs. He called them “Merz”. According to National Gallery’s Dickerman, the word invoked the commercial bank (Merz), the German word for pain (Schmerz) and the French word for excrement (Merde), thus implying that it is- “a little money, a little pain and a little shit.”
Dadaism was also an extremely political movement [radical left]. The rooms of the first International Dada fair in Berlin were covered in manifesto posters, Dada slogans leaping out of the wall in bold typography -“DADA is political; I can live without eating and drinking, but not without DADA” and a full body dummy of a military officer with a pig’s head hanging from the ceiling. Dada spread like wildfire to other countries. Starting in Zurich, the movement spread to groups in Berlin, New York, Paris and other cities. Due to the seemingly endless destruction the war caused, some of the artists started fleeing their hometowns and dada started dissolving, partially also due to some in-faction fighting.
There has been talk of a systematic exploration of the unconscious … The word inspiration … was quite acceptable a short time ago. Almost all images … strike me as spontaneous creations. ~ Andre Breton
Breton in this quote, is speaking of surrealism. We can clearly see the influence of Dada on Surrealism’s chance optimism, anti-colonial undertones and automatism. However these strategies were further systematized in Surrealist art through Freud’s theory of the unconsciousness and dreams.
Today, Cabaret Voltaire looks strikingly different. The poster covered walls of the night club almost screaming at the viewers, illustrations and collages occupying every inch of the wall, the nightclubs filled to the brink with a drunken mob of an audience thundering and rapturing at the strange and eclectic performances of the dadaists is now replaced by soft lighting and an evening of drinks and togetherness. However Installations, structures and visceral art fill the space indicating that the ideas, the thoughts and the anger still exists like an undercurrent snaking its way through the centuries that separate the times. As Cabaret Voltaire’s present director Adrian Notz said in an interview, Dada goes beyond art. It is a mentality. Every generation of adolescents use Dada as a device for protest and rebellion.