Dada

Dada erupted in neutral Zurich on February 5, 1916, when Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings opened the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub-turned-laboratory for poetry, noise, and performance staged as open revolt against the carnage of the First World War. If reason and nationalism had produced the trenches, the Dadaists reasoned, then absurdity, chance, and mockery were the only honest artistic response. The name itself — arrived at by chance, legend has it, via a dictionary knife-stab — suited a movement built on refusing to mean anything at all. From Zurich, Dada spread rapidly: Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray developed a drier, more conceptual "anti-art" in New York, submitting a urinal titled Fountain to a supposedly open exhibition in 1917; Berlin Dadaists like Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, and George Grosz turned photomontage into savage political weapon against Weimar-era militarism and profiteering; and Kurt Schwitters built his own one-man movement, Merz, out of collected rubbish. Tristan Tzara, arriving in Paris in 1919, tried to install Dada as a lasting international program, but the group's contempt for consistency proved its undoing — Francis Picabia publicly quit in 1921, and by 1924 André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto absorbed most of the remaining Parisian Dadaists into a new movement. Short-lived and deliberately incoherent, Dada nonetheless invented the vocabulary — readymades, chance operations, photomontage, performance as artwork — that Surrealism, Fluxus, Pop Art, and Conceptual Art would spend the rest of the century unpacking.