The Effects of the Dada on Punk Rock
'Dada' is a term with several definitions. Dada has been defined as "a not-quite-naked prank, a jape clothed in the barest g-string of aesthetic authority, a Bronx cheer in three-part harmony..." (Greil 198). Dada has also been called "a traffic accident; it was a cult. Dada was a mask, eyes without a face. Dada was a religion, spawn of ancient heresies, Dada was a war, but over souls, not bodies" (Greil 238). Dada was "the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, freaks and irrelevancies: LIFE" (Turner 434). Dada uses such abstract concepts to define what it was, but what does it all mean, why was it formed, and what did it set out to accomplish? It is through these preliminary definitions which I gained my inspiration to spend an entire semester addressing this topic, what is Dada, and how this movement is similar to and how it influenced the punk rock movement sixty years later. Dada was basically an anti-art movement established, as stated by its founding members, by means of immaculate conception. In 1915, Dada grew out of a place called the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich with contributors such as Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Ha
ns Arp (the list goes on) being the active players. The fundamentals of Dada were that it formed as a response to World War I; it was a radical cultural revolution; it was based on the common ethic of 'anti-art'through which new individual forms of expression arose. This movement of Dada spread to New York, with a concentration at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery at '291'. In Berlin, the movement was called Club Dada (1918-1923), while in Hannover, the prime influence on Dada was one man, Kurt Schwitters. This movement also spread to Koln with mainly Max Ernst, Johannes Baargeld, and Hans Arp, and to Paris as Sub-Dada. The movement spread in the confusion of a world that would bring about such tragedy as that of World War I and its trench warfare. According to Dadaist Hans Richtner, "the confusion was only a cover. The provocations, demonstrations and oppositions were only a means to provoke the bourgeois' rage and bring them to a rude awakening." This universal rejection of conventions in art and thought sought to shock society into self-awareness, most often through art forms such as mechanomorphic works, ready-mades, and photomontage pieces. This condemnation of society and reality, amongst other common characteristic
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Approximate Word count = 829
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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