Dadaism: the Anti-Intellectual Intellectual Rebellion

Leo Deng

6/3/21

HSS600 Research Paper

Introduction

Art history’s lens of analyzing the progression of culture in Western society is not only contingent on its historical context, but also what artists see for the future of society. In other words, the art of a certain time period reflects the social, political, and cultural thought at the time as art is always implicitly or explicitly affected by such forces. One of the most integral[1] movements of the modern era was Dada (or Dadaism), the confusing, contradictory, and controversial “anti-art” movement of the early 20th century. Dada has the famously vague founding story of artist Richard Huelsenbeck (very significant in the impact of the movement through both writing and art) randomly sliding a paperknife into a dictionary where it landed on Dada, a French word for hobby horse.[2] This story has never been proven to be true, but the ambiguous and spontaneous nature of it illustrates Dada fittingly well. Dada’s spontaneity and ambiguity comes from the aesthetic chaos and incoherence as the genre was not linked by an aesthetic similarity like past movements, rather it was linked by the lack of interest of aesthetic. Dada was a revolutionary “anti-art” because it dismantled the aesthetic hegemony of reproductive imitation in art. The reproductive imitation was the painting, drawings, sculptures and still-life’s of reproducing an imitation of a real object as accurate as possible. As Aristotle said, “there is man’s natural propensity, from childhood onwards, to engage in mimetic activity,” and thus, the centuries of dominance reproductive imitation had on art and culture.[3] Thus: anti-art, as Dada went against what was thought of as art in that time in a oppositional way. It is worthy to note that other art movements such as Cubism, Futurism, and Surrealism that occurred around the same time as Dada were also movements that countered the reproductive imitation art was known for in the past because of a shared Modern inquiry in self-actualization and individualism. Impressionism came along to mark the beginning of the Modern time period of art in the 1870s and the departure from realistic academic painting.[4] Throughout the Modern era though, none of them were as abrasive, revolutionary, and life-questioning as Dada.

Dada was widely misunderstood, even by scholars; art historians called it a “transitional stage” and journalists mistook its rowdiness as the essential message of Dada. Dada always defied the world through caprice and a principle of contradiction to invite everybody to misunderstand it. Their defiance was a means of arousing the bourgeoisie to rage, raging to a shamefaced self-awareness.[5] The “political theater” of art seems to all be traced back to the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Everything happening in this club was all allegory a mere year later when considering the “imitators” all over the West. Such imitators became more popular and famous or infamous (depending on perspective) for taking Dada down different routes in different locations and cultures. From Man Ray to Marcel Duchamp to Louis Aragon, a urinal as the embodiment of beauty and art along with a post card of the Mona Lisa with a drawn-on mustache evoked truth and goodness. What Dada was, was fittingly contradictory. Dada was either taking nonsense seriously or serious people indulging in the nonsensical. The latter is illustrated well by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces as “well-dressed young men in good cafes placing “KICK ME” stickers on the rumps of their working-class waiters, a privileged retort to the moral dilemmas posed by the world war.”[6] In this way, Dada was an attack on political and artistic traditions. As artist Jean Arp talks about Dada's specific response to the butchery of WWI, Dadaists decided to devote their lives to music, painting, poetry, and all types of expression and meaning-making to “cure man of the frenzy of the times and a new order to restore the balance between heaven and hell.”[7] The devotion to pure expressionism for the sake of the self in revolutionary ways was what made the movement so profound yet abstract. This led to Dada becoming the subject of disapproval and general misunderstanding. However, I believe that only bolstered the movement as people who joined understood the depths of the community and indulged in the disapproval as resistance and rebellion and misunderstanding as arousal, fueling the confrontation of the mainstream. The sheer act of confrontation itself is meritorious in the fact that it forces the subject to rethink and unconsciously dismantle their past dogmas. Dadaism was an art movement of apparent political and social consciousness that served as a counterculture of hegemonic aesthetics and politics that derived motivation from nihilistic thought.

Founding of Dada, Cabaret Voltaire, and Hugo Ball

All this is traced back to a single club in Zurich, 1915: The Cabaret Volataire, and this contextualization will help us understand the source of Dada’s motives. There is still a lot of confusion on how Dada even began or who founded it. From famous Dada artist Raoul Hausmann in 1915 to Picabia in 1913 to Italian futurists in 1909 have either called themselves the founder or somebody else has. In Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Richter, an actual Dadaist from the time, claims that Dada originated from Zurich, not Paris not New York. That fact is significant because of the “peaceful dead-centre of the war” that Zurich was after the great stress of WWI where Dadaists started to oppose convention, radicalize approaches, accept the political nature of art, and resisted a fate of war and violence.[8] This context allowed for such diverse personalities to form this movement.[9] The incompatibility in attributes, origins, and styles of these artists was what made it such a dynamic force. It was the first time in history where such a unification of opposites became an artistic reality. Richter cites Philosopher, thinker, poet, and mystic Hugo Ball as the individual who started the avenue that would create the movement that was Dada. Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire on February 1st, 1916 to give young people in Switzerland a place to enjoy and share their independence. It was a night-club for performances ranging from Rumanian poetry to folksongs to dances and subsequently, Ball asked for artwork for the night-club that would fit and accompany such diverse ranges of expressionism. With this combination to start the cabaret, he saw success in the Cabaret as a whole, jumpstarting a strong foundation for the creation of Dada. Also, Ball wrote Flight Out of Time, which is a diary of strange thoughts and ideas that he wrote down, becoming one of the most influential works in Dada. Anything from philosophical thoughts about his contradiction between obedience and rebellion to wanting to fuck the Virgin Mary, these were the type of passages that appear in almost every history of Dada.[10] When Ball defined the terms of the Cabaret Voltaire, he borrowed Freudianism to describe art as psychoanalysis, art as cure. Ball said the independent process of fantasy through aesthetic production did good to people who lived rashly and are prey to unconscious emotions and motives. In that era, people are assaulted daily by “monstrous things without being able to keep account of their impressions”.[11]

New York Dada (Nihil and Nihilism)

Around the same time in New York, one of the most impactful formations of Dada would come into fruition—namely by one gentleman Michel Duchamp; this was the important defining creation of conceptual art and the motives of nihilism. “All members of the DADA movement are presidents,” painter Picabia declared in his 1920 “Manifesto of the Dada Movement”; “Dada belongs to everybody,” wrote poet Tristan Tzara in the one and only issue of New York Dada published in 1921, “like the idea of God or the tooth-brush.”[12] Duchamp represents all these quotes as he was the epitome of anti-art, which ironically became perceived as art. He was the one who put the urinal as art; he is the person I think about as creating the work that most easily aroused the bourgeoisie and the arrogant intellectuals. His own role in Dada was contradictory in itself, a fittingly epitomistic role for such a figure. I say this because Duchamp did not consider himself an artist, using logical meditation for his “works,” but he became an artist precisely because of those meditations. His “Ready-made” artworks of the bottle-rack and urinal are not art, according to Richter, it is the laughter that underlies the blunt exposure of “all that is holy” that is the art. The art is the reaction. That laughter (reaction) is a metaphysical experience as everybody's emotional state will have a stark change when encountering such works at a stage like a museum. Richter theorizes that the metaphysical reaction occurs because everybody's scientific faith always lacks something—

Figure 1: Michel Duchamp – Fountain

Figure 2: Michel Duchamp – Bottle Rack

"that reality is nowhere to be found, not even in ourselves”—since these objects are mere expressions of emptiness in a world that we cyclically stumble through.[13] These pieces say a lot more, claims Richter; the bottle-rack says “Art is junk” and the urinal says “Art is a trick.”[14]

Figure 3: Michel Duchamp – 3 Stoppages

With such insight in hand, Duchamp showed that his intentions were much more meditated and thus, his conceptual purpose and merit shines through, too. As Ara Merjian describes, “Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14)—‘a work that challenged not only the hegemony of painting but the epistemological sovereignty of geometry: ‘If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases [it] creates a new image of the unit of length.’”[15] Duchamp found his purpose in administering a strong evacuant to an era corrupted with lies and to a society that manifested from it. It was “an age of shame for which he found an artistic counterpart in the shape of a Mona Lisa with a moustache.”[16] The counterpart of his art is amorality and thus, nothingness, fueling the administering of this evacuant. He took a fatal yet progressive step for art in emptying all spiritual content from life and art. Value did not matter, and so did cynicism and regret. Duchamp made a step of Existential importance because it revealed the clean slate that art is and thus, life is. The essence of art and life were now in the controller because of the existentialist view of creating one’s own dogma to combat the problems and meaningless voids in life, giving a sternly optimistic capability in artists and thus, people's meaning-making. In this way, Dada had an enormous indulgence in solipsism. Funnily, Dada's extermination of value and reality illustrated a philosophical transition in history. It implicitly portrayed the likes of the transition from Descartes’ apparent awareness of the danger of nihilism by proving god existed to Heidegger’s constantly imminent thought of life being a hallucinatory dream. This was because modern science and civilization denied Descartes demonstration, humans are becoming more and more conscious of their isolation, and their loneliness and meaninglessness have become painstakingly unendurable. Dada was the progressive disintegration of reality and thus, Heidegger’s question of if life is just a dream.

Duchamp’s progression revealed that absolute spontaneity and emphasis on the fleeting moment was true authenticity and freedom. This was an idea that even ancient Taoists have mentioned—the idea that spontaneity was the end all be all of existence but not in a deterministic way, rather in a way of complementariness and oneness with the universe.[17] Camus says “Freedom is identified with the spontaneity of life” and “philosophers like Dilthey, Bergson, Heidegger, Nietzsche and James, [Life] is described as an infinite stream; any attempts to exhaust this richness must be inadequate.”[18] Themes of solipsism are so consistent that we see Marcus in Lipstick Traces talking about similar phenomenon, connecting it to nihilism. “Nihilism means to close the world around its own self-consuming impulse; negation is the act that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems—but only when the act is so implicitly complete it leaves open the possibility that the world may be nothing.”[19] The nihilist is always a solipsist because no one exists except for the nihilist and only their motives are real. Their actions of negation are always political as it assumes the existence of other people, calling them into being. Ironically, negationist’s tools that they are forced to use are also used by the nihilist. Dada’s deeply rooted motives of nihilism proves to be the only time when it is productive as nihilism is usually used as an escape from responsibility.

Figure 4: Kurt Schwitters – Open at Customs, 1887-1948

Punk, Artistic Mimesis, and the Dada Gaze as Analyses

Shifting our gears towards a completely different part of history, Punk was a movement in a completely different era that helps us understand Dada in a, perhaps, more relatable way because it is more recent and in-tune with the problems of hegemony that are relevant now. Punk rebelled against Corporate Capitalism of the Reagan era that commodifies, fetishizes, and drains individuality out of art that continues today.[20] In 1978, Isabelle Anscombe wrote about the parallels between Punk and Dada, revealing much about how and why society labeled certain art as Dada. For Punk, Anscombe argued that it was about Punk’s willingness to reject itself from the established, “to be open to change and to forgo the profits.”[21] Dada meant John Lennon urinating from a Hamburg balcony onto nuns heading to church and the Sex Pistols saying "fuck" on TV. The formal Dada theory that art could be made from everything and anything is like Punk's DIY theory that anyone could create art. “Here are three chords, now form a band,” said UK magazine Sniffin' Glue.[22] Punk's songs about cigarette butts and a '77 London Punk jacket could look like a 1918 Berlin Dada collage of cigarette butts and discarded concert tickets by Kurt Schwitters. According to the analysis of movements as subcultures, one key element of every subculture is a creation of community for the expression of authenticity and values that was or is repressed by mainstream ideology.[23], [24] This strikes true in the Dada movement even though it was less of a community and more of a constellation connecting artists around the world, but it was definitely a subculture that was created in the name of authenticity and to counter the cultural hegemony of their time.[25] However, Dada’s impressive distinction is that it was based on strong intellectual inquiry and spontaneity that made creation fresh and exciting. As Udo Rusker said from the Dada Almanac, “Dadaism is a strategem by which the artist can impart to the citizen something of the inner unrest which prevents the artist himself from being lulled to sleep by custom and routine. By means of external stimuli, he can compensate for the citizen's lack of inner urgency and vitality and shake him into new life.”[26] From the view of an artist, Elvis Costello says, “My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant. Not something actively destructive, but someone who irritates. Someone who disrupts the daily drag of life just enough to leave the victim thinking there’s maybe more to it all than the mere humdrum quality of existence.”[27]

The concept that embodies the attributes of spontaneity and intellectual foundation of Dadaism is the “artistic mimesis” outlined by Dafydd Jones in Dada 1916 in Theory: Practies of Critical Resistance. Jones uses a quote by philosopher Walter Benjamin to base his argument off, saying that the “revolutionary strength of Dadaism consisted in testing art for its authenticity.”[28] Dada created the art of creative imitation of structures of production (the use of found objects, spontaneous creation, visual sampling, etc.), carrying the potential to achieve goals usually denied under capitalist relations—namely the control over what the artist produces. This creative imitation is artistic mimesis. The performative side of Dada was at the crux of why it was so impactful and distinct as a formation. Dada rid itself of any chance of the aesthetic hegemony of reproductive imitation by creating this artistic mimesis. A mimesis of contorting aesthetic, thematic, and conceptual components of their creations that was revolutionary in its relationship to the “endlessly other.”[29] Such obscuring surfaces of the artwork, when critiqued of its representation, assumes an effective role of critical intervention. If it is impossible to transcend the limits of representation, then Dada’s working against art’s system generates novel possibilities as the politics of representation supersede the representation of politics.[30] Additionally, Jones points out that heteronomy (Kantian idea of an action that is influenced by a force outside the individual) is a handicap in two ways: (1) in the development of autonomy and (2) for the subject’s freedom. Combining Kant and the Enlightenment into one charge: “Have the courage to use your own reason.”[31] Ultimately, Dada’s own universe of reason was the epitome of the realization of the self in the Modern era, an individualism where people could finally create their own identity. As scholar Peggy Phelan said, “Identity emerges in the failure of the body to express being fully and the failure of the signifier to convey meaning exactly. Identity is perceptible only through a relation to an other – which is to say, it is a form of both resisting and claiming the other, declaring the boundary where the self diverges from and merges with the other.”[32]

Figure 5: Hannah Höch – Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic

Lastly, the concept of the Dada Gaze showed that Dadaists’ approach to art was a heroic and revolutionary feat of counter-hegemony. Writer Joseph Nechvatal says in his article on Maria Stavrinaki’s book Dada Presentism: An Essay on Art & History, “Midway through the book, my mind turned to divinational[33] gazing within and beyond Dada, and the ways Dada’s use of chance might reorient our thoughts about viewing art. Divinational gazing is an ocular technique based on surpassing visual expectations that takes the unclear seriously as a conduit to worthwhile ‘more-than’ probabilities.”[34] This gaze reveals and asserts synchronicities, which are visual events that are not related but seem connected. Stavrinaki argues that the appropriation of the present was heroic because it bore the ontological weight of an assertion. For example, Höch’s collage promises a lot of fluid alternative imaginings of both the past and the future. Dada created the ambiguous emblematic[35]; the laudable and revolutionary feat of allowing for multiple conceptions of an individual composition. Stavrinaki says, “art will always be born only from the chaos of time.”[36] That is what she means by Dada presentism. Stavrinaki explains that the role of the Dada artist “was to forge practices that would reveal the profound ambiguity of the present. This is why such contradictory tactics as eclecticism and primitivism, parody and utopia, were all used in Dadaism as equally appropriate responses. For these artists the future was not to come; it had already arrived.”[37] This simultaneity operated in two ways: (1) “synchronistically” by absorbing the multiple contradictory qualities of modernity and (2) “diachronistically” by undertaking modern occurrences with contingency, which is a very “psychedelic perception.”[38] Dada made one ugly truth clear: that even a supposedly modern, secular, and rationalist culture needed some form of arbitrary divination, evidently illustrated in the daring action that is at the crux of market-based neoliberal hegemony (in spite of the obviously disastrous effects upon labor, ecology, and society). The parallelism between combatting aesthetic hegemony to the social and cultural hegemonies is so in tandem that it almost seems inevitable. Perhaps there is an argument for heavily-tied links between the aesthetic with the social and cultural hegemonies, which makes sense when reflecting on the symbol-reliant society of the modern era.[39]

Dadaist Writings (The DADA Reader)

Returning to Dada, June 1919, there are four critical works written by Dadaists themselves to explicitly portray the counter-hegemony they were executing. Many Dada artists were also writers that helped contribute unique statements with the poets and critics that were affiliated with Dada at the time. The first work is a collaborative effort by Baader, Hausmann, Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara titled Year 1 of World Peace. In this primary source "Dada Statement," the Dadaists alike collaborate on a piece that I would even identify as prose poetry that questions Germany's willingness to sign something (likely the Weimar Constitution) to allow Germans not to starve anymore (war reparations). They also heavily criticize the press as a cultural weapon of evil, humorously using "press-ure" as wordplay.[40]

Another work is Alitterel by Raoul Hausmann. The influential and famous Dada artist critiques and detaches Dada from almost any “movement” type label the masses try to place on them. The piece is broken up into three parts with three different prefixes attached to “litterel.” A- is the prefix of negation or abstraction, de- is of detraction, and sub- is of subtraction. In the first part, Hausmann calls for anarchy and “absolute idiocy” in contrast to the German revolution and intellectuality.[41] In the second part, we see him covering themes of futility and critiquing modern writers and poets that should be given swirlies (heads dunked in latrines). Lastly, the third part takes a more philosophical turn as Hausmann goes in depth about the ignorance and hypocrisy humans lived in, using the Stirnered[42] heaven as ethical law. It is a very pessimistic but important commentary about the problematic nature of life at the time; to live in hedonism and a lack of awareness, people sold their bodies to fight in wars and work in a cyclical manner just to fall in bed and sleep every night. Hausmann focused much on the theme of sleep as a double entendre referencing sex, that darkness allows for a deed the common people were ashamed of (he said that a candle would be more effective than a condom). He ends the piece with a mockery of what the mainstream is saying: “Compulsory servitude and the ship are the only recourse. We demand discipline! Against free art! Against free thought!... Sell your corpse towards settlement of the German.”[43]

The next work is by the ambiguous “Central Office of Dadaism,” which were presumably a group of artists that are or are related to the already mentioned Zurich artists. In Put Your Money in dada!, they say “dada is the only savings bank that pays interest for eternity. The Chinese has his tao and the Indian his brahma. dada is more than tao and brahma. dada doubles your income.”[44] This piece tells the reader to invest both financially and personally into dada, to believe in it. This “office” argues that dada is the only metaphysical experience available that transcends any and all religions, ideologies, and natural phenomena. “All transfers in the dada savings bank are valid anywhere in the world,” “when you are dead, dada is your only nourishment,” “Guatama thought he was going to nirvana and when he died he found himself not in nirvana but in dada.”[45]

Lastly, Hausmann’s The German Petit Bourgeois is Cross finishes these presented works with a clear political critique. Here, Hausmann makes a harsh critique on the German Petit Bourgeois and German intellectuals while explaining Dadaism to support his claims. He confidently confronts the German intellectuals as petty reactionaries to the threat of Dada on their traditional ways of art and poetics. Hausmann found their fixation on reproductive imitation disgustingly narrow-minded, and their attacks on Dada were mere defense mechanisms to compensate for their subconscious awareness that genuine progression in art was happening and they could not handle it. He goes on about how their attacks render no impact as dadaists are their own worst enemy because dadaists are anti-dadaists. The critique of the intellectuals’ biggest fear that art is in danger is hilariously effective, first making a metaphor of art to a naked female that the intellectuals reap pleasure from. This is an artfully critical stance of intellectuals’ tendency to commodify art for their hedonism, and Hausmann then abruptly interrupts this by saying that art does not exist anymore—that it is dead![46] One of Dada's biggest accomplishments was killing art. In other words, the definition and thus, idea of art died and was ready for revival into something completely new. Thus, these writings show Dada’s contradictory nature is a good trait in critiquing the political and intellectual hegemony of Western Europe with a foundation of intellectual backing to the Dadaists’ arguments.

Conclusion

Dada undoubtedly countered hegemonic forces in the modern era through resistive approaches of aesthetic, conceptual, and critical ways in both their art and writing. The Cabaret Voltaire was the “hometown” of Dada, giving a foundation and concrete community for the rise of a subculture made up of a constellation of artists all over the Western world. Dadaists derived motivation from the nihilistic condition most were in because of postwar circumstances in an unforeseen fashion of intellectual intention and criticism. By striking the perfect balance between contradictory aesthetic and intellectual critique, they were able to most effectively arouse and dismantle the cultural hegemony the bourgeoisie and European intellectuals attempted to conserve in reproductive imitation. Thus, the Dadaists prevailed victorious, marking one of the most revolutionary moments in art history, killing the old definition of art to give rise to the infinite possibilities of conceptual art.

Appendix

Figure 1 - “How Duchamp’s Urinal Changed Art Forever - Artsy.” Accessed June 1, 2021. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-duchamps-urinal-changed-art-forever.

Figure 2 - Duchamp, Marcel. “Bottle Rack (Porte-Bouteilles).” The Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed June 1, 2021. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/238749/bottle-rack-porte-bouteilles.

Figure 3 - The Museum of Modern Art. “Marcel Duchamp. 3 Standard Stoppages. Paris 1913-14 | MoMA.” Accessed June 1, 2021. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78990.

Figure 4 - Kurt Schwitters- Opened at customs. “Kurt Schwitters- Opened at Customs.” Accessed June 1, 2021. http://hlehua.blogspot.com/2017/05/kurt-schwitters-opened-at-customs.html.

Figure 5 - Nechvatal, Joseph. “The Dada Gaze into the Eternal Now.” Hyperallergic, March 30, 2017. http://hyperallergic.com/368656/the-dada-gaze-into-the-eternal-now/.

Bibliography

Alan Watts Organization. “2.4.4 Philosophy of the Tao Part 1,” December 18, 2019. https://alanwatts.org/2-4-4-philosophy-of-the-tao-part-1/.

Baader, Johannes, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara. “Year 1 of World Peace.” In The DADA Reader: A Critical Anthology, edited by Dawn Ades. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Central Office of Dadaism. “Put Your Money in Dada!” In The DADA Reader: A Critical Anthology, edited by Dawn Ades. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Chilvers, Ian, and John Glaves-Smith. A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Draw Paint Academy. “Modern Art Movements.” Draw Paint Academy (blog), November 10, 2018. https://drawpaintacademy.com/modern-art-movements/.

Duro, Paul. “Why Imitation, and Why Global?” Art History 37, no. 4 (2014): 606–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12106.

Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Hausmann, Raoul. “Alitterel.” In The DADA Reader: A Critical Anthology, edited by Dawn Ades. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

———. “The German Petit Bourgeois Is Cross.” In The DADA Reader: A Critical Anthology, edited by Dawn Ades. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Hopkins, David, and Dana Arnold. A Companion to Dada and Surrealism. Hoboken, UNITED STATES: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/andover/detail.action?docID=4418731.

Jones, Dafydd. Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance. Oxford, UNITED STATES: Liverpool University Press, 2014. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/andover/detail.action?docID=4616333.

Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press, 1990.

Mattson, Kevin. “Did Punk Matter?: Analyzing the Practices of a Youth Subculture During the 1980s.” American Studies 42, no. 1 (March 1, 2001): 69–97.

Merjian, Ara H., and Ara H. Merjian. “Dada City: New York’s Contribution to a European Movement.” ARTnews.Com (blog), December 19, 2019. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/new-york-dada-20th-century-cultural-capital-1202673053/.

Nechvatal, Joseph. “The Dada Gaze into the Eternal Now.” Hyperallergic, March 30, 2017. http://hyperallergic.com/368656/the-dada-gaze-into-the-eternal-now/.

Richmond, Oliver P. “Dadaism and the Peace Differend.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32, no. 4 (2007): 445–72.

Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. Reprint edition. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997.

Shank, Barry. The Political Force of Musical Beauty. Durham ; London: Duke University Press Books, 2014.

[1] As it began a new understanding of art, that the aesthetic might not be of the pinnacle of importance. Dadaist Michel Duchamp is commonly cited as the creator of conceptual art. [2] Ian Chilvers and John Glaves-Smith, A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press, 2009), 171-173. [3] Paul Duro, “Why Imitation, and Why Global?,” Art History 37, no. 4 (2014): 606–27, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12106. [4] Draw Paint Academy, “Modern Art Movements,” Draw Paint Academy (blog), November 10, 2018, https://drawpaintacademy.com/modern-art-movements/. [5] Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Reprint edition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 9. [6] Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1990), 193. [7] Marcus, 194. [8] Oliver P. Richmond, “Dadaism and the Peace Differend,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32, no. 4 (2007): 448-449. [9] Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 12. [10] Marcus, Lipstick Traces. [11] Hugo Ball, Marcus, 196. [12] Ara H. Merjian, “Dada City: New York’s Contribution to a European Movement,” ART https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/aaf32d95-6c4f-9024-b536-f22a801f2f51/full/843,/0/default.jpgnews.Com (blog), December 19, 2019, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/new-york-dada-20th-century-cultural-capital-1202673053/. [13] Richter, Dada, 90. [14] Richter, 90. [15] Merjian, “Dada City.” [16] Richter, Dada, 91. [17] “2.4.4 Philosophy of the Tao Part 1,” Alan Watts Organization (blog), December 18, 2019, https://alanwatts.org/2-4-4-philosophy-of-the-tao-part-1/. [18] Richter, 92. [19] Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 9. [20] Kevin Mattson, “Did Punk Matter?: Analyzing the Practices of a Youth Subculture During the 1980s,” American Studies 42, no. 1 (March 1, 2001): 69–97. [21] Isabelle Anscombe, Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 197. [22] Marcus, 199. [23] Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place (New York: Routledge, 1992). [24] Barry Shank, The Political Force of Musical Beauty (Durham ; London: Duke University Press Books, 2014). [25] Dafydd Jones, Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (Oxford, UNITED STATES: Liverpool University Press, 2014), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/andover/detail.action?docID=4616333. [26] Marcus, 200. [27] Marcus, 200. [28] Jones, Dada 1916 in Theory, 41. [29] Jones, 43. [30] Jones, 44. [31] Jones, 48. [32] Jones, 53. [33] Divination means the act of seeking the future or the unknown through supernatural means. [34] Joseph Nechvatal, “The Dada Gaze into the Eternal Now,” Hyperallergic, March 30, 2017, http://hyperallergic.com/368656/the-dada-gaze-into-the-eternal-now/. [35] My own concept. [36] Maria Stavrinaki, Nechvatal, “The Dada Gaze into the Eternal Now.” [37] Nechvatal. [38] Nechvatal. [39] Thinking about Jean Beaudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation that was published much later in 1981, but his argument of a symbol-reliant society reaches far past before the modern era. [40] Baader, Hausmann, Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Dawn Ades, ed., “Year 1 of World Peace.,” in The DADA Reader: A Critical Anthology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). [41] Raoul Hausmann, “Alitterel,” in The DADA Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 84. [42] The philosopher Max Stirner [43] Hausmann, 85. [44] Central Office of Dadaism, “Put Your Money in Dada!,” in The DADA Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 86. [45] Central Office of Dadaism, 86. [46] Raoul Hausmann, “The German Petit Bourgeois Is Cross,” in The DADA Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 88.