Pieces: Identity, Change & DaDa

One of the ways we might come closer to understanding the DaDa movement and its significance in capturing the “spirit” of modernity would be to look at its relationship to past traditions and the movements and motives that inspired it. In Hugo Ball’s "Flight out of Time", he stresses the importance that the realization of the Great War as a sombre reflection of man’s supposed triumph over nature really bared little significance in comparison to the chaos and destruction caused by depression. Man became “ordinary” as Ball describes, in the face of Capitalism and it was gradually more obvious that identity was always partial and contradictory, forced upon us by the ideological structures of inequality such as patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism. From this, came the DaDa movement which was as Raymond Williams describes in "The Politics of Modernism", “a violent rejection of tradition: the insistence on a clean break from the past.”[1] These ideas are exemplified in Ball’s essay "Lecture on Kandinsky" where he says that “world history splits into two parts.” There is no sense of progression between the past and the present but instead an “epoch before...and an epoch after” where “the meaning of the world disappeared.” It is unarguably a clear split, with no suggestion of foundations in the past summed up simply by Duchamp in an interview with John Perreault as “freedom.”[2] At this point I would like to introduce some examples of anti-art as a way of explaining the radical split with tradition to which Ball refers:



Fig1. Banksy, Custardized Oil #3, 2006, Oil on printed canvas, UK

Fig2. Duchamp, Marcel, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919, Chromolithograph, Paris

Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. is a perfect example of the split from convention that was the DaDa movement. It forces into ridicule the sense of establishment and natural beauty represented by the Mona Lisa and with the drawing on of a beard and moustache completely undermines any of the artist’s original work. The letters L.H.O.O.Q. inscribed on the bottom when read aloud in French are a homophone of “elle a chaud au cul,” meaning, “she has a hot ass.” The parodying of such a popular piece of Renaissance art is so striking because for us as the viewer, there is something of an untouchable air about this original painting, shrouded in mystery. For Duchamp to so easily undermine what the Mona Lisa represents is undoubtedly a great example of how the DaDa movement was split from past traditions. Williams classifies such examples as “active opposition to the established institutions, or more generally to the conditions within which these exist.”[3] I think what is particularly important is the recognition that DaDa stands very much alone in its inspiration and there is little logic in its connection to previous art forms. Ball makes this point clear in his essay that it was a radical split, a definite boundary with no connections to the past other than the social and political strife from which it was formed:
“The avant-garde, aggressive from the beginning, saw itself as the breakthrough to the future: its members were not the bearers of a progress already repetitiously defined, but the militants of a creativity which would revive and liberate humanity.”[4]

[1] Williams, Raymond, The Politics of Modernism (UK: Verso, 1996) p.52
[2] Duchamp, Marcel taken from an interview with Perreault, John, DaDa Perfume: An Interview with Duchamp (US, 1996) <>
[3] Williams, Raymond, Culture (UK: Fontana, 1981) p.70
[4] Williams, Raymond, The Politics of Modernism (UK: Verso, 1996) p.51