Dada

Dada began as a response to the trenches.

On 5 February 1916, the German émigré poet Hugo Ball and his partner Emmy Hennings opened the Cabaret Voltaire in a small back room at Spiegelgasse 1, Zürich — three doors down from where Lenin was living in exile. Ball was a draft-age pacifist; Switzerland was the only neutral country he could reach. Within weeks the cabaret had drawn the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, the Alsatian sculptor Hans Arp, the Romanian painter Marcel Janco and the German poet Richard Huelsenbeck. Their nightly performances of nonsense verse, simultaneous poetry, mask dances and noise music ran until July 1916.

The name Dada — picked, the standard story goes, by stabbing a knife into a French dictionary — appeared in print in the first issue of the journal Cabaret Voltaire (June 1916) and was formalised in Tzara’s Dada Manifesto 1918.

The movement crossed borders fast. Berlin Dada (Huelsenbeck, Hausmann, Höch, Heartfield, Grosz) formed in 1917 and pushed the movement towards political photomontage and revolutionary polemic. Cologne Dada (Max Ernst, Johannes Baargeld) ran 1919–1922. Hannover Dada was effectively a one-man branch: Kurt Schwitters, who called his version Merz. Paris Dada (Tzara, Picabia, Breton) lasted from Tzara’s 1920 arrival until Breton broke away to found Surrealism in 1924. New York Dada (Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray) ran in parallel from 1915.

Tzara declared Dada dead in 1924. Surrealism absorbed most of the Paris cohort. Heartfield, Höch and Schwitters kept working into the 1930s. Höch survived the Nazi period in internal exile near Berlin. Heartfield fled to Prague and then London. Schwitters fled to Norway and then the Lake District, where he died in 1948.

Dada’s core argument was negative — against the institution of art as the West had constructed it — but the negation produced a durable set of working methods.

“Dada means nothing. … We are reading the papers, we are making manifestos, but we don’t know any more.” — Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto 1918

Anti-art. The work refuses to play the role of bourgeois cultural ornament. Tzara’s manifestos are arguments. Duchamp’s readymades are objections. Heartfield’s covers are weapons.

Chance and the readymade. Composition by selection rather than depiction. Arp tore paper, dropped the fragments and pasted them where they fell. Tzara cut sentences out of newspapers and drew them from a hat. Duchamp picked manufactured objects and signed them.

Photomontage. Berlin Dada’s signature method. Photographs cut from press, stock and advertising sources, reassembled into arguments the original photographer never authorised. Höch and Hausmann claimed the technique simultaneously in 1918; Heartfield industrialised it across the AIZ covers from 1930.

Anti-typography. Pages built from broken type cases, ransom-note headlines, deliberate mis-registration. The Berlin and Hannover wings (especially Schwitters) treated the printed page as a Cubist composition rather than a structured layout. The methodology runs directly into Lissitzky’s For the Voice (1923) and from there into every later editorial type-as-image experiment.

Sound poetry. Ball, Hausmann and Schwitters performed poetry consisting of pure phonemes — Ball’s Karawane (1916), Hausmann’s optophonetic poems (1918), Schwitters’ Ursonate (1922–1932). The form prefigures concrete poetry by forty years.

Anti-war polemic. Dada in Zürich was always pacifist. Berlin Dada was actively communist after 1918. The argument that graphic design is a political act — picked up by Constructivism, the Bauhaus communists and every subsequent protest poster — is one of Dada’s permanent legacies.