Text e. Futurism: Time Enters the Frame

Futurism is early 20th-century movement in art that pointedly rejected all traditions and attempted instead to glorify contemporary life, mainly by emphasizing its two dominant themes, the machine and motion. Their paintings were the expression of a tremendous enthusiasm for technical innovations and – as the name ‘Futurism’ suggests – a great faith in the future. The Futurist artists broke up the picture-surface into facet-like fragments.

The principles of futurism were originated by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and published by him in a manifesto in 1909. The following year the Italian artists Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini signed the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. Futurism was characterized by the attempted depiction of several successive actions of positions of a subject at the same time. The painters tried to capture the fleeting images that passed across the retina in seconds by combining several impressions in a single painting as in a multiple-exposure photograph. Thus a running dog will have twelve legs and the hand of a violinist a plethora of lithe fingers. Behind this form of representation, which to our eyes looks rather like a comic, there lay the attempt to bring an extra dimension to static painting: time or, more precisely, the course of an action over a period of time. The result resembled somewhat a stroboscopic photograph or a high-speed series of photographs printed on a single plate. Interesting examples are Severini's Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) and his Armored Train (1915, Collection Richard S. Zeisler, New York City).

Although futurism was short-lived, lasting only until about 1914, its influence can be seen in the works of the painters Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, and Robert Delaunay in Paris and the constructivists in Russia. The futurist worship of the machine survived as a fundamental part of Fascist doctrine.

Marinetti's Futurist vision – communicated in the manifestos as well as in frequent lectures, theatrical performances, and readings – rejected conventional morality and traditional values, including poetic values, which he saw as timid, nostalgic, and sentimental. Futurism turned away from the 19th-century romantic interest in nature toward a 20th-century fascination with technology, speed, and city life. His substitution of the image of the modern racing car for the classical winged symbol of poetry (a sculpture which was seen as the epitome of Western beauty) demonstrates his intent not to kill poetry but to remake it in modern terms.

Text f. Dadaism: The Sense of Nonsense

Dada or Dadaism is early 20th-century art movement, whose members sought to ridicule the culture of their time through deliberately absurd performances, poetry, and visual art. Dadaists embraced the extraordinary, the irrational, and the contradictory largely in reaction to the unprecedented and incomprehensible brutality of World War I (1914-1918). Their work was driven in part by a belief that deep-seated European values – nationalism, militarism, and even the long tradition of rational philosophy – were implicated in the horrors of the war. Dada is often described as nihilistic – that is, rejecting all moral values; however, dadaists considered their movement an affirmation of life in the face of death. They believed that any faith in humanity's ability to improve itself through art and culture, especially after the unprecedented destruction of the war, was naive and unrealistic. As a result, the dadaists created works using accident, chance, and anything that underscored the irrationality of humanity: for example, making poems out of pieces of newspaper chosen at random, speaking nonsensical syllables out loud, and displaying everyday objects as art.

The dada movement acquired a name and a recognizable identity only in 1916, but the work of several artists anticipated dada's spirit a few years earlier. In 1913 French artist Marcel Duchamp made the first of his ready-mades, in which he elevated everyday objects, such as a bicycle wheel, a urinal or a bottle rack, to the status of sculpture simply by exhibiting them in a gallery and pronouncing them art. In so doing he wanted to make it clear that art only becomes ‘art’ in a recognized place of exhibition. What we perceive as ‘art’ consequently depends not only on the work itself, but also on the context of its presentation. Duchamp’s cryptic and laconic action may be the pithiest questioning of the concept of art and the art market that has ever happened. Duchamp and French artist Francis Picabia took up temporary residence in New York City in 1915, where they created playful paintings, drawings, and sculptures that depicted figures in the form of mysterious machinery – a jab at new technology. Their work drew the attention of a small but active circle of sympathetic American patrons, writers, and artists, including photographer Man Ray.

Dadaism was launched in earnest in February 1916 when Hugo Ball, a German poet and musician, and his wife, performer Emmy Hennings, opened the ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ in Zürich, Switzerland. As a neutral country, Switzerland was a haven for opponents to the war, and from the beginning the Cabaret attracted an international group of artists and intellectuals. They soon rallied under the banner of dada, a term whose origin remains in dispute. German writer (and later psychologist) Richard Huelsenbeck claimed that he and Ball chose it as a stage name for a female dancer in the Cabaret; but Romanian-born French poet Tristan Tzara, who became dada's chief promoter, also claimed authorship. In any case, the name dada, French for “rocking horse”, won general support for its ambiguity and evident inanity. In a manifesto of 1918, Tzara proclaimed, “DADA MEANS NOTHING.”

Nightly events at the ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ were intentionally outrageous and drew in part on futuristically inspired performances in every artistic genre as an act of rebellion against the cultural values that the war had more than called into question. Bruitist concerts, sound-poems, absurd textual readings, actors’ costumes made out of everyday objects – all these irritated and shocked public. Intelligibility was at a minimum, and appearances were often outlandish. French artist Jean Arp was an occasional participant in the ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ and described one evening’s performance as ‘Total pandemonium’: “The people around us are shouting, laughing, and gesticulating. Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups, poems, moos…Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an oriental dancer. [Romanian artist Marcel] Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost”. Dadaists promoted the art of children, the insane, non-Westerners, and any other people outside the accepted norms of European society. These events were, although the word had not yet been invented, the first happenings. With works which shamelessly took all previously accepted values into the realms of the absurd, and had nothing to do with what was generally called art, the artists wanted to “protest against man’s stupidity and vanity”, and force him to think, or to rethink. “The head is round so that thoughts can change direction”, as Francis Picabia put it.

Within a year of its founding in 1916, the focus of dada shifted. The ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ lasted only five months, and Ball quit the movement in 1917. Tzara remained active in Zürich, publishing the magazine Dada, but Huelsenbeck returned in 1917 to Berlin, the war-ravaged capital of Germany, where dada became far more political. While Huelsenbeck proclaimed “The dadaist considers it necessary to come out against art, because he has seen through its fraud as a moral safety valve”, other German dadaists produced the movement’s first substantial body of visual artwork in the form of photo collage. Using images cut out of newspapers and commercial packaging, artists Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and Hannah Höch made brutally satirical collages attacking German society and government. German artist George Grosz created equally biting drawings that indicted a society in deep disarray after losing the war.

Other centers of dada activity in Germany include Cologne, where Max Ernst made paintings and collages, and Hannover, where Kurt Schwitters assembled sculpture from bits of commonplace debris. Schwitters’s projects, which he called Merz, (a made-up word), culminated in a work called Merzbau (1923-1936, destroyed), an assemblage of cast-off objects that almost entirely filled his studio and family home. Dada's last stronghold was Paris, to which nearly all its major participants – Tzara, Ernst, Picabia, Duchamp, Man Ray, and Arp – moved between 1919 and 1922.

By the end of 1922 the dada movement had begun to fall apart. Quarrels developed between some members, and others seemed to tire of maintaining a stance of outrage against society. In Paris the dadaists were joined by a group of writers, including Frenchmen André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and Philippe Soupault, who transformed dadaist interests in irrationality and chance into a new movement known as surrealism. Dada's influence was also felt in a number of later movements. They include a group of 1960s performance artists known as Fluxus; the pop art movement, which incorporated images from popular culture; and the conceptual art movement, which viewed ideas in themselves as art.