To quote Dona Budd's The Language of Art Knowledge
- Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I. This international movement was begun by a group of artist and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara's and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words "da, da," meaning "yes, yes" in the Romanian language. Another theory says that the name "Dada" came during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French-German dictionary happened to point to 'dada', a French word for 'hobbyhorse'
title: Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany -Hannah Höch
My own foray into Dadaism: Erik Satie quite liked Dadaism and was friends with a few key Dadaists and wrote some articles in a Dada magazine, and his music was probably influenced by dadaism to a large degree. A lot of Erik Satie's works have odd names like "Bureaucratic Sonatinas" and "Dessicated Embryos", and oftentimes wrote odd humorous remarks in his musical scores like so: (Sorry if picture is blurry; Bad camera and all).
"I had a dog that secretly smoked all my cigars" -That's a wonderful line, could be a Zappa lyric. Thanks for sharing.
Man, I love Dada. Presumably you've come across Duchamp by now. That entire era of proto-postmodernism is wonderful, and I love how it all ties in and develops. Check out how the camera influenced painting; inspired some fantastic movements (like Futurism, for example). 20th century art is so goddamn interesting. Side-note: I came to this post from the hubski twitter account on a hunch that you had submitted it, TNG. Pretty pleased with myself for guessing that one.