Dada: Beyond the Manifesto

The Dada Manifesto is a short text that was written on July 14, 1916 by Hugo Ball and read the same day at the Waag Hall in Zurich, for the first public Dada party.

In this manifesto, Hugo Ball expresses his opposition to Dada becoming an avant-garde artistic movement. He stayed active in the Dada movement for another six months, but the manifesto created conflict with his friends, notably Tristan Tzara.

Why “Dada”?

“I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own.”

What does Dada represent?

“To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also—poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists.

How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada.”

Basically, the aim of Dada art and activities was both to help to stop the war and to vent frustration with the nationalist and bourgeois conventions that had led to it. Their anti-authoritarian stance made for a complicated movement as they opposed any form of group leadership or guiding ideology. It started as a response to WW1. 

Key characteristics of Dada art:

Dada art is nonsensical to the point of whimsy. Almost all of the people who created it were ferociously serious, though. Abstraction and Expressionism were the main influences on Dada, followed by Cubism and, to a lesser extent, Futurism.