Dadaism

Hannah Höch, Dada Dance, 1922

The Dadaist movement began in Zürich at the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire by Hugo Ball. Other main founders were Tristan Tzara and Jean Arp. The members of the movement held the bourgeois responsible for the unprecedented carnage of World War 1. They criticized the "fat cats" who made money off the war instead of physically fighting in the battles. In this sense, Dadaism criticized the conservatism of conventional values.

The movement was literary-based emphasising poetry that consisted of absurd rhetoric, nonsensical gibberish and sounds. However, many visual artists also made their mark in the movement.

An infamous example of visual Dada is Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. Already an established artist in America, Duchamp painted a moustache and goatee on a cheap print of the Mona Lisa. When the title, "L.H.O.O.Q." is read out loud, the letters sound out "elle a chaud au cul" which translates roughly to "she's hot in the ass". L.H.O.O.Q. helps sum up the Dada Movement as a rebellion over traditional ideals. Duchamp takes a canonized and revered image, and through it, he mocks the established art world.

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919

Hannah Höch (1889 - 1978) was a member of the Dadaist group in Berlin, although as a woman, she was marginalized. However, Höch had a great impact on the history of the movement as she created visual art, in the form of photomontage, rather than the favored Dadaist literature. In Dada Dance, Höch contrasts elegance with absurdity, contrasting the elegant natural state of the African figure with the crude absurdity of the European on the right.