What Is Dadaism? Art Movement Definition and Film Impact

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Published: June 4, 2024 | Last Updated: June 12, 2025

Origins and Goals of Dada

Cabaret Voltaire opened on 5 February 1916. It was a small nightclub in Zurich where artists, poets, and performers gathered to experiment and provoke.

Writers Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, both German refugees, founded it as a home for political dissent and absurd performance (you could call them a precursor to performance art). Refugees, poets, and painters gathered to reject the logic and nationalism that had led Europe into World War I. These artists wanted to reject the culture that produced mass slaughter. Dada was born out of this rupture.

The name “Dada” was chosen at random, possibly from a French-German dictionary. That randomness was the point. Dada embraced chance, irrationality, and contradiction. Artists used nonsense to expose the failures of reason and the hypocrisy of modern society. They staged performances, printed manifestos, and created objects that refused to fit into any traditional art system.

Visual Style and Key Artists

If you think post-modernism is sometimes fragmented, it doesn’t hold a candle to Dadaism. Dada had no fixed style, but it relied on fragmentation, everyday materials, and humor.

Artists created collages using bus tickets and maps. They built sculptures from scrap metal and printed poems from random word clippings. Their goal was to remove control from the artist’s hand and to reject institutions that decided what counted as art.

Key figures include:

• Marcel Duchamp, who submitted a urinal titled Fountain (1917) as a sculpture (although he might not have been the one to actually make it – see later in this article)
• Hannah Höch, who made sharp photomontages critiquing gender and class norms
• Jean Arp, who created abstract, biomorphic forms by dropping shapes onto paper
• Kurt Schwitters, who used found objects to build layered collage environments
• Francis Picabia, who painted mechanical diagrams that mocked both industry and culture

Centers of the Dada Movement

Dada took different forms in different cities.

In Berlin, it became political. Writer and activist Richard Huelsenbeck, satirical painter George Grosz, and photomontage pioneer John Heartfield used Dada to attack the German military, capitalist elites, and media propaganda. Their work turned absurdity into a political weapon.

In New York, Dada was more personal. Duchamp and Man Ray worked independently, focusing on ideas over form. They developed the readymade and used photography to question originality.

Cologne and Hanover had their scenes, often blending with Constructivism and abstract art. In Paris, Dada slowly merged with Surrealism under André Breton’s influence. Each version remained rooted in opposition to artistic norms, authority, and logic.

Manifestos and Experimental Writing

Dada’s rebellion wasn’t just visual. Writers like Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara pushed language to collapse. Ball’s sound poems stripped meaning down to rhythm and syllables. He performed them in costume, reciting phonetic sounds like “gadji beri bimba.”

These were rejections of language as a tool of culture and propaganda.

Tristan Tzara became the movement’s main theorist. He cut up newspapers and rearranged the words into new poems. He wrote Dada manifestos that mocked seriousness and rejected coherence. In one, he stated that art should belong to the artist alone, not the public, not institutions. These experiments reshaped literature, performance, and visual design.

Dada in Film

Dada ideas entered film in the 1920s through artists like Hans Richter, Man Ray, and René Clair. These films rejected narrative. They used rhythm, shape, and absurdity instead of plot. They treated cinema like a moving canvas rather than a storytelling machine.

Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921) used rectangles in motion to explore time and visual tension.

Clair’s Entr’acte (1924) included nonsensical sequences and optical tricks.

These films disrupted the viewer’s expectations and rewired cinema as a medium of disorder.

Who made Fountain?

Dada reshaped modern art. It made room for randomness, collage, and found material in painting, sculpture, and design. Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) was central to this shift.

He submitted a porcelain urinal under the pseudonym “R. Mutt” to the Society of Independent Artists, which rejected it. Duchamp resigned in protest. He later said the name came from a plumbing company, Mott, and may have also referenced the comic strip Mutt and Jeff.

Alfred Stieglitz photographed the urinal before it vanished, and that image became central to 20th-century art history.

The authorship of Fountain remains disputed. Some scholars argue that Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, an outspoken Dada artist known for using plumbing parts and industrial debris in her work, may have been the true creator.

She often used pseudonyms and had a record of producing provocative readymades before Duchamp. Art historian Irene Gammel and others have documented this possibility, noting that Duchamp never firmly claimed sole authorship of the work. The debate exposes how gender bias shaped the history of modern art.

The truth may never be confirmed, but the question reflects Dada’s own challenges to originality, authorship, and control. Fountain became a mirror for the art world’s values, revealing how credit and meaning are assigned.

Dada Legacy in Contemporary Media

Dada’s influence is evident in Pop Art’s irony, in Fluxus events, and in the work of American artist Robert Rauschenberg, whose “Combines” blurred the line between painting and sculpture using everyday debris.

Claes Oldenburg, known for soft sculptures of giant hamburgers and household objects, extended Dada’s absurdity into the commercial age with humor and scale.

Its effects also appear in meme culture, found footage, glitch aesthetics, and conceptual performance. From punk rock to internet remix videos, the spirit of Dada persists in art that resists clarity or mocks its own form.

Summing Up

Dadaism broke every rule it could find. It rejected logic, tradition, and cultural authority. Artists used absurdity, randomness, and protest to dismantle the systems they blamed for war and corruption. The movement never offered answers. It only opened space for chaos, critique, and change. Its effects are still visible today, in the ways we write, perform, edit, and question the meaning of art itself.