Dada is a life style, not art

Heritage of dada

Looking back, you might wonder what the heritage is that dada left behind. Is it the dadaist art? Like I already argumented, only partly. Dada was a cultural movement, a changing and interchanging group of artists that under evenly changing and interchanging circumstances seeked for possibilities to combine art and life. In any place a different form of dada developed. That is why dada must be seen as a cultural rather than simply as an art movement. Because it changed cities in a short vehement cultural struggle.

For dadaists dada was a life style. In the novel Shadow-Box the Irish writer Antonia Logue describes the triangle affair between the English poet and artist Mina Loy, the American world champion boxing Jack Johnson and the French dadaist Arthur Cravan via a feigned exchanges of letters. She wrote an imposing description of the world title fight that the black Johnson fought with the 'white hope' Jim Jeffries. While the public yells hatefully 'die nigger! die!' Johnson just kept getting more determined in his mission to beat Jeffries and with him this public.

Dadaists were comparable with this boxing negro. What in the world inspired these people, these artists, to drive people with miniature steam engines on their high hats sneezing and wheezing into a frenzy. How do you come up with the idea to recite strongly philosophical pamphlets dressed like a high heartedly dandy in front of a public that boos you.

It is because dada is more a life style than an art form.

More than an art form life styles remain uncomprehensible. That is why libraries have been filled with books on the history, the origins, the whereabouts and the purpose of dada and the dadaists. Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia and Theo van Doesburg - to name some of the more enigmatic ones - are unruffled in more or less understandable art historic prose. Yet they remain riddles. The same is valid for the less known and artistically less recognized Arthur Cravan. Even now art historians, philosophers and sociologists set themselves into writing another explanatory book, even when in the case of Antonia Logue it is a novel. The only thing they seem to explain are the dadaist products we now call art.

Zaal Rosehaghe
Dada soirée
Dada Holland
Life = art
Dada stands for diversity
History of dada
Dada Zurich
Dada Berlin and Paris
The end of dada
Heritage of dada
The dadaist

Updated 3 april 2001; Comments to Martin Woestenburg.

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