Whether in the form of literature, sculpture, music or performance, art is a way to evoke a feeling in an audience. Common feelings include wonder, boredom or “What on earth is that? What a goddamn waste of time. How high were they when they made that nonsense garbage?”
There have been some notable examples of works that elicit such a reaction, like John Cage’s musical piece “4’33”” which has three distinct movements, all of which are silent. Another work is the portrait of Justin Bieber by British YouTube artist Fox Bronte, made entirely of pubic hair.
Art can get weird. But when did this weirdness really begin?
Dadaism probably had something to do with it. It’s kind of hard to explain what Dadaism really is. Thankfully a Dada artist Hugo Ball captures the essence of what this movement is all about in this section of his 1916 poem “Karawane”:
“blago bung blago bung
bosso fataka
ü üü ü
schampa wulla wusso olobo
hej tatta gorem”
The rest of the poem goes into even more detail about the real nuances and facets of the movement, but you get the point with that excerpt.
Dadaism is all about making anti-art. It rejects the common perceptions and conventions of non-anti-art because non-anti-art was an indulgence of the excesses of the bourgeoisie.
Essentially the movement consisted of these anti-artists who pasted together incoherent newspaper and magazine collages, stuck bicycle wheels on stools and raved and ranted about the true value of art in society.
According to one account, on some day in 1917, Dada anti-artist Marcel Duchamp bought a standard Bedfordshire model urinal from J. L. Mott Iron Works in New York City. He flipped the urinal upside down, signed “R. Mutt 1917” on the side, entitling the work Fountain. He then paid a submission fee to send it to the Society of Independent Artists, which Duchamp helped found.
The rest of the Society looked at this urinal supposedly made by “R. Mutt” and decided that they weren’t going to show this scatological aesthetic in their art show even though their constitution said that they were to accept all submissions after the artist paid his or her fee.
Duchamp felt pretty disrespected, so he ditched the Society and kept on making his own anti-art. These later works included a seminal abstract work made from his own bodily fluids known as Paysage fautif and a paintingthat depicts the subject of the Mona Lisa with a mustache known as L.H.O.O.Q.
Duchamp then got bored with art because there’s only a finite amount of times one can shake up the art world, so he dedicated the rest of his life to playing chess.
So why did all this stuff happen? Well, Dadaism was formally founded in 1916, two years after WWI, and WWI really, really sucked. The war that was supposed to end by Christmas 1914 was still going, with no end in sight. Death, desolation and destitution reverberated through European society, and artists didn’t know what to do.
How do you use art to represent incomprehensible suckiness?
Start by inventing a nonsense language for your new free-form poetry and by buying urinals.
These artists felt lost, so they threw away all former artistic conventions. While this may create a fascinating art movement, it did little to fix the conflicts that caused their disillusionment.
Don’t despair through wallowing and withdrawal. Despair through action. And maybe things won’t suck as much.
(There are four years to go.)
