Dada

Dada was an avant-garde movement that used absurdity, chance, and anti-art gestures to reject the cultural values associated with the First World War.

Readymade: An ordinary manufactured object presented as art with little or no alteration. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades made the choice to designate an object an anti-art gesture.
Zurich: The largest city in Switzerland and a major center of European Dada during the First World War. Neutral Zurich sheltered exiles who established Dada’s earliest organized scene.
Hugo Ball: A German poet and performer who co-founded Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916. Ball’s sound poetry made language itself a target of Dada’s experiments.
Fountain (Duchamp): A 1917 artwork by Marcel Duchamp consisting of a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt.” Its submission to an art exhibition tested whether selection alone could make an object art.
Surrealism: An artistic and literary movement that explored dreams, the unconscious, and unexpected juxtapositions. Surrealism inherited Dada’s experiments but pursued a more sustained account of the unconscious.
Chance music: Music composed or performed using procedures that leave some outcomes to chance. Dada artists used chance procedures to disrupt deliberate composition and conventional taste.
First World War: A global war fought from 1914 to 1918, centered on Europe and involving many world powers. Dada’s rejection of reason and nationalism responded to the war’s mass violence.
Tristan Tzara: A Romanian-French poet and one of the central organizers and promoters of Dada. Tzara spread Dada through manifestos, publications, and international connections.
L.H.O.O.Q.: A 1919 work by Marcel Duchamp that altered a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and beard. Duchamp’s defacement turned a revered masterpiece into a comic challenge to artistic authority.
Conceptual art: Art in which the idea or procedure takes priority over the creation of a traditional art object. Dada’s readymades anticipated later art centered on decisions and concepts rather than craft.

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