Dada

In February 1916, in neutral Zurich, a small group of expatriate artists and poets — refugees from a Europe tearing itself apart in the First World War — opened a cabaret. They called it the Cabaret Voltaire. The Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, the German poet Hugo Ball, the Alsatian sculptor Hans Arp, the German painter Marcel Janco: they gathered every night, performed sound poems made of pure nonsense syllables, read manifestos, wore costumes built from cardboard. The audience was confused. The performers were not joking, and they were not entirely serious either. That was the point.

Tzara, in 1918, wrote what is probably the movement's most useful self-description: "Dada means nothing." They picked the word, the legend goes, by sticking a knife into a French-German dictionary at random. The name itself was a refusal of meaning — a sound a baby might make, a French word for hobby-horse, syllables that could be anything because they were nothing.

The deeper claim was political and moral. The same European civilisation that had produced Beethoven and the Louvre and the Sorbonne had also produced the trenches, the mustard gas, the casualty lists that ran for pages of newsprint every morning. To make beautiful art, in 1916, was to be complicit with the machinery that was killing nine million people. The only honest response was to dismantle art itself — its categories, its hierarchies, its claim to ennoble. Dada produced collages from torn newspapers, sculptures from urinals (Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, 1917 — submitted to a gallery, signed with a fake name, rejected by the jury, now one of the most-studied works of twentieth-century art), poems generated by pulling words out of a hat. Whatever a respectable artist would not do, Dada did. Whatever a respectable artist would do, Dada parodied.

After 1918, the movement spread — Berlin Dada under John Heartfield and Hannah Höch sharpened the political edge into anti-Nazi photomontage; New York Dada under Duchamp and Man Ray pushed toward conceptual art; Paris Dada gathered the writers (Breton, Aragon, Éluard) who would, by 1924, abandon Dada for a more programmatic successor: Surrealism. By the mid-1920s Dada was, in its original form, over.

But "over" is the wrong frame. Dada was the first movement to establish that the gesture could be more important than the object; that the artist's position could be more important than the artist's skill; that an idea, framed and presented, could constitute a work. From this proposition descends conceptual art, performance art, much of postmodernism, every Banksy stunt, every MSCHF drop, and the entire field of contemporary art understood as a series of attention-grabbing positions rather than skilled productions. Anti-design, punk graphic design, and the deliberately broken layouts of late-2010s fashion all have Dada in their lineage. The movement that said it meant nothing is one of the most consequential artistic positions of the past century.