What is Dada? I checked on wikipedia but i didnt understand the page.?

Question

What is Dada? I checked on wikipedia but i didnt understand the page.?

Answer 1

It's a form of art that's very similar to surrealism- an artist will take an every-day object and change it and twist it and add unrealistic traits until the object is no longer what it originally appeared to be.

Answer 2

Dada is a movement in art--mostly in visual or pictorial art, but to some extent in writing or literature as well--that stresses the absurd, the irrational, the childish. It comes from the French word for "rocking horse," "dada," a word that is also a childish word in many other languages including English.

In Dada, what is presented is not supposed to make sense. It is supposed to be un-explainable. The viewer or reader is being presented with images that are not assembled according to the laws of logic but according to some other, perhaps unconscious, mimetic, or otherwise organized principle. Here is a quote from Gertrude Stein's book _Tender Buttons_ that is a Dada exercise:

Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.

Look at images by Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and so on. They are not literally accurate as a whole, although parts are literal the way one sentence from _Tender Buttons_ is literal. It is the world perceived by a child, a world with no logical connection, where events, occurrences, and appearances are contiguous but not assemblable according to the western tradition of logic. It has as much meaning as a child's language: dada.

Answer 3

Dada was a short-lived movement in art that started during - and as a reaction to - World War I.  Because it completely rejects notions of order and reason, it shares some qualities with the post-modern movement which came later, but Dada also tended to reject notions of beauty and aesthetics too.  It was a kind of rebellion against not only all of established art but also against the establishment as a whole.  Some of its proponents liked to think of it as anti-art.

No one is really sure where the name came from, but one popular story suggests it was picked at random from a dictionary.  Like the works it describes, it's not really supposed to make sense or have any deep meaning.

The movement started in Zurich, but spread as far as America.  It included most forms of art... paintings, poetry, theatre, sculpture, and so on.  'The Fountain' (link 2) may be one of its best-known pieces.  Critics who reviled Dada arists (I like this reveiw:  "The Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man") tended only to drive them on: that was the reaction they were TRYING to create!