100 Years of Dada | Article

100 Years of Dada: an unpublished project about the subversive

art movement finally realised, Alexander Hawkins
29th Feb 2016, It's Nice That [link]

Dada-Messe, Berlin, 1920
The first international 'dada-fair' catalogue

on the Dada-Messe of 1920 (source): '...The hierarchy between fine art and applied art were reduced to nothing; performances and even a cooking prize were organized; finally, the catalogue, quite fitting for the exhibition's iconoclasm, was a single piece of newspaper folded in two.'

• '100 years ago Tristan Tzara and his Dada cohorts took art off the wall and showed it could be anything from a performance to a page in a magazine'

• 'Dada...was the quintessential anti-art movement'

• 'After centuries of painting and classical-themed sculpture came the first performance to bill itself as art: a bewildering and wholly alien mix of vaudeville, poetry written in three languages, riding crops, monocles and dance.'

• 'From here, against political backdrop of war, artists like Huge Ball and Jean Arp and Tzara were the first, or at least the most prominent figures to embrace the ideas of art as protest and reject the idea of art as commodity'

• 'Publishing was an essential part of Dadaist ongoings, and homespun art and literary journals with radical design elements were all part of a campaign to spread Dada ideas like art propaganda.'

• '...Tzara invited more than 50 artists from ten countries to submit artworks that ranged from self-portraits, drawings, and book layouts for his planned but ultimately unpublished Dadaglobe.'

Venus beim Spiel der Könige
Johannes Baargeld, 1920