Lady Dada

If there was one movement in the history of art that shook society’s notion of art and cultural production the most, it was Dada. Emerging during the crisis period of First World War this anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical movement questioned the myth of originality across many countries. From Zürich to New York to Berlin, to Paris Dada argued that everybody should be an artist and anything can be art. But how does one make nihilistic and anti-aesthetic art like that exactly?

To make anti-art sounds absurd, impossible even, and yet the movement emerged in 1916 at Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. Borne out of disgust with bourgeois values, it was not so much of a style but a refusal, a stance that manifested in group collaborations, spontaneity and most importantly anti-aesthetic gestures against everything that painting and sculpture stood for. The Berlin Dada group in particular, which Höch joined in 1917, sharpened that refusal into something more explicitly more political, and photomontage became one of its signature weapons.

In Zurich the international profiteers sat in the restaurants with well-filled wallets and rosy cheeks, ate with their knives and smacked their lips in a merry hurrah for the countries that were bashing each other’s skull in. Berlin was the city of tightening stomachs, of mounting, thundering hunger, where hidden rage was transformed into a boundless money lust, and men’s minds were concentrating more and more on questions of naked existence. Here we would have to proceed with entirely different methods, if we wanted to say something to the people.

^{— German poet, Richard Huelsenbeck, left the dada group in Zurich and arrived in Berlin, still at war in early 1917, he realized that the socio-political situation there was very different.}1