Story by Bella Wexler, Illustration by Mallika Sunder

In the wake of World War I, western culture and politics seemed to unravel. From the psychological to the sociological to the scientific, the only thing of which people could be certain was the erosion of certainty in its entirety.

Swiss nightclub, the Cabaret Voltaire, was one place in which the nonsensical subconscious was indulged, and voice and audience were given to a generation’s complete distrust for existence as it once was. In mockery and defiance of the belief that the war at hand embodied advancements in European intellect, Hugo Ball took the stage. The poem he recited aloud to the club was profound and meaningless in denotation. He strung together random syllables rhythmically to produce verses in no language whatsoever. And with this proclamation of gibberish, Dadaism was born. 

Dadaism is the artistic and literary movement of the early twentieth century known for its irrationality and rejection of all conventions. It is Marcel Duchamp ditching painting to instead spin a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool, or submitting a urinal turned on its side to a prestigious art show. It is Hugo Ball following through on his assertion that “the image of the human form is gradually disappearing from the painting of these times and all objects appear only in fragments....The next step is for poetry to decide to do away with language” (Trachtman 2006). These senseless “Sound Poems” he coined reflected anarchist ideologies and helped usher them into the foreground of creative society. Dadaism was intended to shock and, as Tristan Tzara put it in his 1920 Dadaist Manifesto, “sweep, sweep clean” the shambles of post-World War human minds (Poetry Foundation). This shameless embrace of pointlessness unleashed the potential for artists to create beyond the confines of a canvas or aspirational order, yielding to further post-impressionist movements such as Surrealism which collided dream and reality through a variety of media.

Living a century since the first World War, we are familiar with the feelings of loss, confusion, and frustration that fueled the onset of Dadaism. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a deepening of systemic inequities, feelings of hopelessness as new variants emerge, and the utter subversion of normalcy. Any potential end in sight is shakily uncertain. With all that we continue to navigate in these disheartening and woefully confusing times, maybe it’s the twenty-first century’s turn to knock over a urinal, spew some gibberish, and name it art.

Works Cited

Grovier, Kelly. “The Urinal That Changed How We Think.” Www.bbc.com, 11 Apr. 2017, www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170410-the-urinal-that-changed-how-we-think.

“Hugo Ball Artworks & Famous Performances.” The Art Story, www.theartstory.org/artist/ball-hugo/artworks/.

Poetry Foundation. “Poetry Foundation.” Poetry Foundation, 2019, www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/dada.

Trachtman, Paul. “A Brief History of Dada.” Smithsonian, Smithsonian.com, May 2006, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/dada-115169154/.