The Dada Movement

Dada was born tomorrow

All over the world, discoveries have been made under the dadaists' inspiration: whether they were the domestication of the photographic "art" in Berlin through Hausmann and Heartfield's photomontages, or Man Ray's "Rayograms" in America; the upsetting of the process of retinal knowledge by Duchamp's "optical machines" or Picabia's "transparencies", heralds of op art; or again the use of collaborative works (Fatagaga in Cologne or Cadavres exquis in Paris) as a substitute for the cult of personality, far too prevalent among painters and gallery owners; and the appropriation as "art" of ordinary objects (Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray ou Schamberg).

Thus we could follow at length Dada's encroachments on the various frontiers of the human imagination. And it is doubtless this polyvalence which explains the actual reawakening of interest among artists belonging to opposite tendencies. Its is also why the dadaist aventure is so close to the sensitivity of the 20th and the budding 21st century, which has been dominated by a need for systematic revolt against existing forms, in politics, in literature and in the arts: against all form, because it is form, and therefore limitation.

It can be seen that Dada's greatest lesson, tacitly transmitted to its successors, is not an esthetic, but a philosophical one: on the best use of revolt. It is by unceasingly, patiently, obstinately putting into question the most well established truths, that man will become conscious of his collective destiny: "I revolt, therefore we are", will say Camus. Unexpectedly and unwillingly, Dada saw new esthetic concepts blossoming out of its nihilism, thereby learning at its own expense that if art is difficult, it is even more difficult for man not to create.