Dad Anti Everything Art - 1039 Words

Dada: Anti-everything Art World War I was the beginning and end of many things. Gone were the orderly lines of calvary men and soldiers preparing to charge on command, and in came the age of the machine. Technology advances in weaponry made killing even easier and the trenches of WWI became a blood bath. It is in this time of confusion and violence emerged an artistic and literary movement known as Dada. Dada found it s roots in Zurich, Switzerland at the beginning of 1916. According to Hans Richter, a former Dadaist and writer of Dada Art and Anti-art, the â€Å"peculiarly claustrophobic and tense atmosphere of neutral Switzerland in the middle of the Great War† made it a prime place for this movement to start (12). Here the writer†¦show more content†¦Hugo Ball defined Dada as â€Å" foolery, foolery extracted from the emptiness in which all the higher problems are wrapped, a gladiator s gesture, a game played with the shabby remnants . . . a public execution of false morality† (Richter 32). Dada was about freedom. Freedom from social, political, and artistic constraints. Dada moved from Switzerland when Tzara began a periodical and used his connections with other modern poets to help spread the movement (Richter 33). Ball believed that dada spread because it â€Å"had no programme, it was against all programmes . . . and, at that moment in history it was just this that gave the movement its explosive power to unfold in all directions, free of aesthetic or social constrains† (34). Separate from the Dada movement developing in Switzerland, a similar moment was developing in New York, lead by a periodical called Camera Work by Alfred Stieglitz. He believed that he could not only show the world through photography, he could make his own (Richter 81). He and a small group of young painters, with the help of a gallery by the name of â€Å"291† helped create a new concept of art that married the ideas of photography a nd painting, which was debuted in 1913 in a exhibition called the â€Å"Armory Show,† the focus of