Dude, Where’s My Van? Part 10:  An Art to End All Arts!

“U üü ü, schampa wulla wussa olobo, hej tatta gorem,

eschige zunbada, wulubu ssubudu uluwu ssubudu,

tumba ba-umf, kusa gauma, ba – umf”. 

Hugo Ball, 1916

What responsibility does an artist have to the public? 

The answer is…DADA!!

Reflecting on his service for the German military during World War I, Max Ernst wrote in his diary:

Several other artists across Europe were asking themselves similar questions at this time. And the answer for them all turned out to be: DADA.

DADADADADADDAAAADADADADADADADADAAAADaDADDADADAAAA!!!!!!

Sit down. I’ll explain.

While the Italian Futurists had tried to use avant-garde art to spark a great war, most other artists were horrified by the devastation that came with World War I. 

Many did their part in fighting for their nations, as Max Ernst did. And upon witnessing what they felt was a needless, senseless, and tragically costly war consuming all of Europe, their ideals came to be shattered. 

• They lost faith in the wisdom of their leaders, in the greatness of their respective homelands. They lost faith in the noble intentions of mankind, in the cultural systems that legitimized progress, including art.

• They lost faith in the power of human reason to dictate action. In short, they were revolted by what civilization had become and they wanted to burn it all down, or at least find a way to escape.

But they also knew that such dreams were futile. So upon finding each other, these artists decided to at least share some laughs together as they pissed on everything they could.

Dadaism had no one starting place, but the closest thing to an official start occurred in Zurich in 1916.

Switzerland had remained neutral during the war, and so it was the ideal haven for disenchanted ex-patriots to leave their nations and gather together. There, artists such as Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Andre Breton set up regular performance events at the Cabaret Voltaire. 

The opening event they hosted featured Ball dressed as a sort of pope in outlandish cardboard robes, reciting in unison with the others a chant of nonsensical sounds as a benediction for their new movement.

The club’s patrons, who had largely come for cheap sausage and beer, could not have known what to make of what they were witnessing. And that was largely the point.

Dadaism was a social art movement waged against society, and against art movements. In their raging against the failed ideals of reason and progress, the artists came to embrace the aesthetics of disorder and nonsense.

And had plenty of fun in the process.

Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters composed extended songs and poems of completely made-up words. Here is my favorite one.

Andre Breton wrote plays using actual words, but with plots and dialogue that made no sense. 

Tristan Tzara turned typographic printing into an assault on the eyes. Max Ernst, Johannes Baargeld, and Raoul Hausmann made photo collages that could be hilarious and/or nightmarish. 

Instead of painting, Schwitters assembled multi-textured works from metal, wood, and random objects…as well as paint, sometimes. 

Marcel Duchamp made art from “readymades” such as a bicycle wheel and an old urinal. He presented these pieces at the Grand Central Palace in New York City as important new works.

And he defaced a picture of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and a raunchy French pun. Quoth Duchamp: “It’s art because I say it is.” 

If the public had been resisting their suspicions that modern artists were playing practical jokes on them, here’s when all their suspicions were confirmed.

From here on out, art was nothing, and everything was art.

The anti-art of Dada wasn’t completely without precedent. There was a group in Paris called the Incoherents who formed in 1882.

They came from the Symbolist and Decadent circles of that time, but these artists were pranksters creating satirical works to dump on notions of beauty, taste, talent, and sense.

Alfred Jarry was a friend of the Incoherents, and aside from making the loud, silly, and profane play Ubu Roi, he pioneered collage art and typographic experiments that the Dadaists would hone to perfection.

Alfred Jarry was a friend of the Incoherents, and aside from making the loud, silly, and profane play Ubu Roi, he pioneered collage art and typographic experiments that the Dadaists would hone to perfection. Like Jarry’s infamous character Pere Ubu, there was more than a little childishness to the antics of the Dadaists. That was intentional.

They wanted to let out their inner brats and make the art world their playground for a little bit.

Some artists would eventually pursue these more intuitive dimensions of their works more seriously, but that’s a story for another time.

Like the Symbolist poets, there is nihilism at the root of this movement, and real despair.

But, there is plenty more to it than that. The work of the Dadaists is so often electrifying, full of life, despite the cynicism and irreverence. Through their dark humor, the artists were able to process their trauma and their feelings of powerlessness.

And they did so by banding together, in one of the first international art movements in history.

Far from bleak: that’s downright inspiring. 

At the edge of the abyss, these men decided not to jump, but to let out a good fart and find out what it sounded like.

In the end, the Dada artists did not destroy the systems they hated, but their movement did at least allow them to vent.

And the art world was thoroughly transformed through their efforts, for better and for worse. “For the better” in that the radically unique and daring ideas of these individuals were eventually lauded and emulated. They redefined the art elite’s standards of taste and beauty, arguably far more than the Symbolists did. 

“For the worse” in that even the cheap readymade products–heck, even replicas of Duchamp’s urinal piece–became commodities to be bought and sold for millions of dollars.

The system had indeed changed, but some rules seem to always remain the same.

(In my own spirit of snotty defiance, I say piss on that. And apparently Brian Eno agrees.)

From punk rock to art cinema, and even Monty Python, Dadaism paved the way for so much subversive countercultural art in the decades that followed.

Nowadays, at this late date, even popular music, television, movies, and advertisements show a debt to the movement.

Though it was defined by its rejection of normative culture, and was banned by authoritarian regimes as degenerate art, the rebellious spirit of Dada has since become thoroughly mainstream. 

I fear that it’s the cynicism and the domineering impulsiveness that’s mostly been preserved and spread around. But hopefully some young artists out there are finding new ways to laugh at despair.

May they give the next generation a fart to end all farts.

And may it give them joy.

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