Dadaism

The early twentieth century was a time of massive upheaval. Between World War 1, the Soviet Revolution, and Albert Einstein, everything we thought we knew about the world was suddenly gone. Into that swirling chaos came an art movement made for the era: Dadaism. Intentionally nonsensical and absurd, it was as much a reaction to the changing times as it was a product of them. This week, we're learning about it and how Dada continues to influence art produced to this day.

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Today on Five Minute Trivia, we have a special performance. A live poetry reading by Hugo Ball, author, poet, and founder of the art movement known as Dadaism. Listen. Did you guys uh catch all that? So if that sounded like complete nonsense to you, you are not alone. It sounds like complete nonsense to everyone. Nonsense is the entire point of the Dada is movement. Which might lead you to ask, what is the point of something that is pointless? For the answer to that question, we need to understand where Dadaism came from and what it meant. And we're doing that right now.

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We choose to go to the moon! The Ram Tam Tuga is a curious cat. Hundred billion other galaxies. Right now, don't like me.

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Welcome to Five Minute Trivia, where we're making the world smarter five minutes at a time. I'm your host, R. M. Zuberi. In the early 20th century, the world was upside down. Europe was smashing itself to pieces in a senseless world war. Communists would overthrow the Russian Tsar and rename their country the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And Albert Einstein had come out with a bunch of theories that challenged our entire understanding of the universe. Nothing made any sense. Into that whirling, topsy turvy world, a German writer named Hugo Ball got up on a stage in 1916 and read aloud that poem you just heard in the intro. It was intentionally gibberish, meant to make as much sense as the rest of the world. Ball's idea was that if you could dress up widescale death and destruction as noble and glorious and courageous, then you could spout nonsensical mumbo jumbo and call it poetry. Hugo Ball wrote his ideas down in a few paragraphs called the Dada Manifesto. The movement came to be called Dadaism. The word Dada itself was coined by Ball and an artist named Richard Hulzenbeck. It does mean yes, yes in Romanian and goodbye in German and also rocking horse in French, but if you read his manifesto, that's more a coincidence than anything. For example, this is the third paragraph.

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How does one achieve eternal bliss by saying dada? How does one become famous? By saying dada with a noble gesture and delicate propriety till one goes crazy, till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, Europeanized, innovated by said Dada. Dada is world's soul. Dada is the pawn shop. Dada is the world's best lily milk soap.

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Normally something like this would have been dismissed as the rantings of a lunatic. But this manifesto resonated with people who found it no more absurd than the World War I battles that were raging all around them. Battles that left a hundred thousand dead and accomplished nothing. And it wasn't just poets. Dadaism became a hugely influential movement that encompassed all of art and even led to some new innovations. For example, the painter Max Ernst invented the art technique called Frataj. If you've ever made a pencil rubbing of an object, you've done this. Ernst uh also had a bird, alter ego, named Loplop, that appeared in many of his paintings. Often has himself presenting his work, like Loplop introduces a young girl or Loplop presents grapes, or Loplop introduces Loplop. And then there's Marcel Duchamp. We can't really talk about Dada without talking about him. His most famous painting is Nude Descending a Staircase. But before you run to Google, just know that it looks so little like anything human that one critic mocked it as quote an explosion in a shingle factory. But that isn't even the most famous or infamous thing that Duchamp did. That would be the fountain. This came from a category of art that Duchamp invented called ready maids. Ready maids were objects that Duchamp found and presented as art. In the case of the fountain, the found object in question was a men's urinal that he picked up from a plumbing supply shop. In 2004, that urinal that fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the twentieth century by a panel of five hundred British art professionals. Picasso came in second. Something as chaotic and undefined as Dadaism could obviously not last, and by the early nineteen twenties it was starting to splinter off and give rise to new artistic movements like Surrealism, which was based on the dreamlike world of the unconscious mind and made famous by artists like Salvador Dali. It influenced the pop art of Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. Even musicians like Frank Zappa, David Bowie, and Nirvanus Kurt Cobain were influenced by the techniques of Dada poetry. Dada is everywhere. Dada is nowhere. Dada is gone, Dada will never die. As Hugo Balls said at the end of his manifesto, the word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance. And that is our show this week. Join us next time, and thanks for listening.