Dada -- A Rebellious History: A Rebellious History

Author: Michelle Karatsu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: On February 8, 1916, a group of conscientious objectors who opposed being killed in war carelessly inserted a paper knife into a Larousse French dictionary in Zurich. This led to the formation of an international group named "Dada," named after a meaningless word, and the subsequent Dada movement. Under the banner that encompassed all nihilistic things, Dada sought to subvert moral standards, civil systems, speculative structures, aesthetic criteria, dogmatic logic, linguistic norms, and even religious beliefs—all of which they considered to be vague peaks. This unique and anti-establishment group, through their distinctive celebratory rituals, contributed to the development of modern art in a destructive sense and ultimately paved the way for the birth of surrealism. In 1921, Parisian university students threw a paper man symbolizing Dada into the Seine River to "drown," marking the end of this fleeting movement. In this book co-authored by Henri Baer and Michelle Karatsu, the historical panorama of the subversive Dada movement is presented, along with a of some vivid details of the movement, restoring the disruptive actions and mental states of key figures such as Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp, and Tristan Tzara at the time, outlining the three-dimensional lines of this rebellious history of Dada.