Key Ideas
- "Dada was the first conceptual art movement where the focus of the artists was not on crafting aesthetically pleasing objects but on making works that often upended bourgeois sensibilities and that generated difficult questions about society, the role of the artist, and the purpose of art."
- "Dada artists are known for their use of ready-made objects - everyday objects that could be bought and presented as art with little manipulation by the artist. The use of the ready-made forced questions about artistic creativity and the very definition of art and its purpose in society."
- "Artists like Hans Arp were intent on incorporating chance into the creation of works of art. This went against all norms of traditional art production whereby a work was meticulously planned and completed. The introduction of chance was a way for Dadaists to challenge artistic norms and to question the role of the artist in the artistic process."
- "It's output was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage."
- THE ART STORY
Conclusion:
Artworks produced during the Dada movement are truly jarring and goes against all conventional perceptions of form and structure. This is especially evident in the photo montages produced, where the human form is highly distorted by combining different elements together.
As Dr Flude mentioned, Dada had also influenced typography, photo montage, negative white space, layout, letter spacing and line spacing, all of which played a significant role in the development of communication design.
Dada's influence on typography stood out to me. In modern times, the number of fonts used are limited, and the texts are neatly arranged so that its intentions would be communicated to its viewers in a non-confusing manner. However, in Dadaists would not restrict themselves to the number of fonts used. They would use punctuation in unconventional ways, and loved to drop random letters or symbols throughout their pages. They would also print both horizontally and vertically on the same paper, composing indifferently in any direction. [source] As such, I wondered how it could have communicated its message efficiently and accurately given the illegibility of the text.
Some Examples:
In Dada's typography, the shape of the typeface and its layout gave rise to its meaning, as opposed to obtaining meaning from the literal word.
More Interesting Examples:
Photo Montage
Artwork description & Analysis from The Art Story:
"Ernst's use of photomontage was less political and more poetic than those of other German Dadaists, creating images based on random associations of juxtaposed images. He described his technique as the "systematic exploitation of the chance or artificially provoked confrontation of two or more mutually alien realities on an obviously inappropriate level - and the poetic spark that jumps across when these realities approach each other".
Between 1919 and 1920, Ernst made a series of collages that combined illustrations of war machinery with those of human limbs and various accessories to create strange hybrid creatures. Thus the fear generated by weaponry was combined with benign elements and often lyrical titles. This catharsis no doubt had a personal resonance for Ernst who was injured in the war by the recoil of a gun. In The Chinese Nightingale, for example, the arms and fan of an oriental dancer act as the limbs and headdress of a creature whose body is an English bomb. An eye has been added above the bracket on the side of the bomb to create the effect of a bizarre bird. Thus Ernst's whimsy defuses the fear associated with bombs. The title was taken from a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen."
Ready-made
Artwork description & Analysis from The Art Story:
"Duchamp was the first artist to use a readymade and his choice of a urinal was guaranteed to challenge and offend even his fellow artists. There is little manipulation of the urinal by the artist other than to turn it upside-down and to sign it with a fictitious name. By removing the urinal from its everyday environment and placing it in an art context, Duchamp was questioning basic definitions of art as well as the role of the artist in creating it. With the title, Fountain, Duchamp made a tongue in cheek reference to both the purpose of the urinal as well to famous fountains designed by Renaissance and Baroque artists. In its path-breaking boldness the work has become iconic of the irreverence of the Dada movement towards both traditional artistic values and production techniques. Its influence on later twentieth century artists such as Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, Damien Hirst, and others is incalculable."
Artwork description & Analysis from The Art Story:
"This work is a classic example of Dada irreverence towards traditional art. Duchamp transformed a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa (1517) painting, which had only recently been returned to the Louvre after it was stolen in 1911. While it was already a well-known work of art, the publicity from the theft ensured that it became one of the most revered and famous works of art: art with a capital A. On the postcard, Duchamp drew a mustache and a goatee onto Mona Lisa's face and labeled it L.H.O.O.Q. If the letters are pronounced as they would be by a native French speaker, it would sound as if one were saying "Elle a chaud au cul," which loosely translates as "She has a hot ass." Again, Duchamp managed to offend everyone while also posing questions that challenged artistic values, artistic creativity, and the overall canon."
Chance
Artwork description & Analysis from The Art Story:
"Hans Arp made a series of collages based on chance, where he would stand above a sheet of paper, dropping squares of contrasting colored paper on the larger sheet's surface, and then gluing the squares wherever they fell onto the page. The resulting arrangement could then provoke a more visceral reaction, like the fortune telling from I-Ching coins that interested Arp, and perhaps provide a further creative spur. Apparently, this technique arose when Arp became frustrated by attempts to compose more formal geometric arrangements. Arp's chance collages have come to represent Dada's aim to be "anti-art" and their interest in accident as a way to challenge traditional art production techniques. The lack of artistic control represented in this work would also become a defining element of Surrealism as that group tried to find paths into the unconscious whereby intellectual control on creativity was undermined."
Photograph
Artwork description & Analysis from The Art Story:
"Man Ray was an American artist who spent most of his working years in France. He termed his experiments rayographs, which are photographs made by placing objects directly on sensitized paper and exposing them to light. The random objects leave behind a shadowy imprint that dissociates them from their original context. These works, with their often strange combination of objects and ghostly appearance, reflected the Dada interest in chance and the nonsensical. As other Dada artists liberated painting and sculpture from its traditional role as a representational art, Ray did the same for photography - in his hands it was no longer a mirror of nature.
Ray's discovery of the rayograph was itself based on chance: after he had forgotten to expose an image and was waiting for an image to appear in the dark room, he placed some objects on the photo paper. Upon seeing them, Tzara called them "pure Dada creations" and they were an instant hit among like-minded artists. While Man Ray did not invent the photogram, his were the most famous."
Conclusion:
Artworks produced during the Dada movement are truly jarring and goes against all conventional perceptions of form and structure. This is especially evident in the photo montages produced, where the human form is highly distorted by combining different elements together.
Man Ray's accidental discovery of the rayograph brings further emphasis to the concept of 'Mistake-ism' Dr Flude mentioned in Lecture 2.
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