Dada was a subversive movement in the arts that flourished mainly in France, Switzerland, and Germany from 1916 to 1923. Dada was based on the principles of deliberate irrationality and anarchy. It rejected laws of beauty and social organization and attempted to discover authentic reality through the destruction of traditional culture and aesthetic forms. The movement's founders included the French artist Jean Arp and the writers Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball. At a meeting of young artists in 1916 in Zurich, one of them inserted a paper knife into a French-German dictionary. The knife pointed to the word dada, a French baby-talk word for a hobby-horse, which the group saw as an appropriate term for their anti-art.
Dada emerged from despair over the First World War and disgust for the conservative values of society. Dada was the first expression of protest against the war. Dadaists used absurdity to create artworks that mocked society yet defied intellectual analysis, such as the use of “found” objects in sculptures and installations. The forerunner of the Dadaists, and ultimately their leading member, was Marcel Duchamp, who in 1913 created his first “ready-made,” the Bicycle Wheel,consisting of a wheel mounted on the seat of a stool. In his effort to discourage aesthetics, Duchamp shocked the art establishment with these ready-mades—manufactured objects that he selected and exhibited—including a bottle rack and a comb. The Dada movement extended to literature and music and became international after the war. In the United States the movement was centered in New York City. Dadaists on both sides of the Atlantic had one goal in common: to demolish current aesthetic standards.
Fifty years after the Dadaists, another generation of artists reacted to the standards and values of society. However, instead of rejecting ordinary things, the young artists of the Pop movement of the 1960s embraced them. Pop artists were curious about the commercial media of ads, billboards, newsprint, television, and all aspects of popular culture. Thus, the barrier between “high” and “low” art collapsed,which the Dadaists had aimed for and the Pop artists attained with an energy not seen before.
Pop art received its name from critic Lawrence Alloway, who considered Pop to be the culture of the mass media, photographs, and posters一a style that must be popular, transitory, and witty. The subject matter of Pop art was derivative, depicting something that had already been published or produced, such as comic strips, soft-drink bottles, and photographs of movie stars. Pop art caught on quickly; it was art about mass consumption that was eagerly consumed by the masses.
The most popular of the Pop artists was the painter Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein painted enlarged copies of the least “arty” things he could find: romance and adventure comic strips. He was the first American artist to react to comic strips, finding beauty in these crude designs, along with a distinct sense of style. Lichtenstein also painted other pictorial styles, including blowups of other artists' brushstrokes and parodies of Cubism and Art Deco.
Andy Warhol, more than any other Pop artist, took on the mind-numbing overload of American mass culture. Warhol began his career as a commercial illustrator, and in 1962 he had his first exhibition in an art gallery, where he showed his 32 Campbell's Soup Cans. The thirty-two soup cans are about sameness: same brand, same size, same paint surface, and same fame. They mimic the condition of mass advertising. All of Warhol's work flowed from one central insight: mass culture is filled with images that become meaningless by being repeated again and again, and in this glut of information is a role for art. Warhol felt this and embodied it. He conveyed a collective state of mind in which celebrity—a famous brand name or the image of a famous person—had completely replaced sacredness in art.
Glossary:
anarchy: absence of any form of authority; disorder; confusion
aesthetic: relating to beauty; artistic
