DDADA

Movement: Dadaism

Why I have looked into Dada is my final piece of work is influenced by Ai WeiWei who uses dada within his work.

Officially dada wasn't a movement. Dada was an artist movement that was born in Europe (Switzerland) it was a reaction to the World War 1 and the nationalism and rationalism. Dada was influenced my other movements such as cubism, futurism, constructivism and expressionism, it’s output was widely diverse including performance, poetry, photography, sculpture, painting and collage.

 

Dadaists were disgusted by the nationalism that had sped the course to the war in 1914, they were always opposed to authoritarianism and to any form of group leader ship or guiding ideology. Their interests are mainly in rebelling against what they saw as cultural snobby, bourgeois convention and political support for the war. Events including spontaneous readings, performances and exhibitions had been taking place for three years at Hugo Ball's cabaret Voltaire before Tristan Tzara claimed that he invented the word dada in his dada manifesto of 1918. There have been various explanations for the name of the group but the most common is by co-founder Richard Huelsenbeck who said he found the name by plunging a knife at random into a dictionary. It is a colloquial French term for a hobbyhorse yet it also echoes the first words of a child and these suggestions of childishness and absurdity appealed to the group as they were keen to put a distance between themselves and the sobriety of conventional society. It also appealed to them because it might mean the same (and nothing) in all languages - as the group was avowedly internationalist. 

Artists: 

Marcel Duchamp 

Year 1887 Marcel Duchamp was born in Blainville, France. Duchamp's early paintings were influenced by Matisse and Fauvism, but in 1911 he created a personal brand of cubism combining earthy colours, mechanical and visceral forms and a depiction of movement which owes as much to futurism as to cubism. After 1912 Duchamp did very little painting creating the first of his 'readymades' in 1913. They were ordinary objects of everyday use, sometimes slightly altered and designated works of art by the artist. His earliest readymades included Bicycle wheel (1913) and In advance of the broken arm (1915). One of his best-known pieces is titled Fountain which is a urinal that’s signed 'R Mutt'. This piece he submitted to an exhibition of the society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. Readymade art became associated with an assault on the conventional understanding of the nature and status of art. Duchamp also used readymade parts as parts of a private symbolic language. He spoke of how using prefabricated objects feed him from the 'trap' of developing a particular style or taste.  

 

Why I like Duchamp’s work is the use of his everyday objects. Using everyday objects to create a piece of work enhances its ubiquity and makes you realise the small things in life. Also I like how he used irony to attract mainstream audience and then provided them with his works that were contradictory to the audience’s perception of what was artistic talent as I believe that anything can be classed as art no matter what it is.

 

Hannah Hoch

 

Hannah Hoch was a German dada artist, best known for her work of the Weimar period when she was one of the originators of photomontage. Hoch was born in Gotha, Germany 1889. In 1912 Hoch attended the school of applied arts in berlin with the guidance a glass designer Harold Bergen. She chose to do glass design and graphic arts to please her dad. At the start of the World War I she left school and returned home to Gotha to work with the Red Cross. A year later in 1915 she returned to the school. Also in 1915 Hoch and Raoul Haussmann (A member of the berlin Dada movement) began an influential friendship. In 1919 Hoch’s involvement with the berlin Dadaists began. After school Hoch began working in the handicrafts department for Ullstein Verlag, designing dress and embroidery patterns for the practical berlin woman. You can see the influence of this work within her later work involving references to dress patterns and textiles. Over the years Hoch made many influential friendships such as, Kurt Schwitters and Piet Mondrian. Hoch as well as Haussmann was one of the first pioneers of the art form that would come to be known as photomontage.   

 

I love photomontage for quite a few reasons. Photomontage is spontaneous and you never know what you will come out. You can come out with many outcomes and often will be relatively funny when using face parts. Also with photomontage you can also put the point you want to get across in a desecrate way which can leave the audience thinking.