Dada Flashcards
Fountain - artist and date
Marcel Duchamp, 1917
Cut with the Dada kitchen knife through the last Weimar beer belly cultural epoch - artist and date
Hannah Höch, 1919
The hat makes the man - artist and date
Max Ernst, 1920
Richard Hamilton on Duchamp’s legacy
“All of the branches put out by Duchamp have borne fruit”
Emergence of Dada - location and dates
Emerged in Zurich, Switzerland between 1916 and 1923 with sites soon branching out to cities such as Paris, New York, Berlin and Cologne
Dada’s main philosophy / aims
first began as more of a cultural phenomenon; a state of mind or way of life that rejected rational thought.
This philosophy banded together artists who wanted to express their anger at the war
They particularly targeted bourgeois culture and believed that the only hope for society was to destroy those systems based on reason and logic and replace them with ones based of anarchy, the primitive and the irrational
where did Duchamp enter fountain (even though it was rejected)
he submitted it to an art exhibition for a new group that he was a founding member of called the American Society of Independent Artists, a group that wanted to bring in new possibilities yet still rejected ‘fountain’ even though they were meant to accept all works submitted.
What are readymades ?
everyday objects that only became a work of art due to the fact that they had been removed out of their original contexts by the artist and taken and put into a gallery - deliberate distancing from the skill and handicraft of traditional art - creates an ‘anti-art’
Weimar Germany: what was the political situation that Hannah Höch comments on?
conflicts starting to emerge between the communist Spartacist group (their leader Karl Liebknecht is featured) and the fascist Freicorp group
höch’s collage: map in the corner ?
Has a picture of her face stuck on the corner - replaces a signature
Is a map that shows all of the countries in Europe that at the time had women’s voting rights
References to gender in Höch’s collage
- Women’s role in the ‘kitchen knife’ part of the title
- Images of cogs and wheels = machinery which has male connotations
- ‘Beer Belly’ in the title is masculine (and has somewhat grotesque connotations - links to her negative representation of men / reversal of gender roles)
Top right of Höch’s collage
the anti-dadaists - mostly political figures, many of whom lead the country to war
e.g. the ex-emperor Kaiser Wilhelm is ridiculed with a cut-out of two wrestlers having been stuck upside down on his upper lip, giving the impression of a moustache
Bottom right of Höch’s collage
the dadaists
e.g. The heads of George Grosz and Elante Herzfeld have been stuck onto the body of a ballerina
Left of Höch’s collage
Dada propaganda
e.g. the head of Einstein is saying: “Hehe young man, Dada is not an art trend”. He is saying that Dadaism is not something that’s relevance will be brief and that will die out soon, but something meaningful and with political and worldly substance
What Freud book may ‘the hat makes the man’ be referencing and why
Freud’s ‘The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious’ - in this book he identifies the hat as a symbol for repressed desire - this visual pun gives another level to the suggestion of the towers being phallic. (likely Ernst had read it as he was a psychology student)
