Dada Life on Clubhouse

Description

There is no consensus on the origin of the movement's name; a common story is that the German artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a paper knife (letter-opener) into a dictionary and it landed on "dada", a colloquial French term for a hobby horse. Jean Arp wrote that Tristan Tzara invented the word at 6 p.m. on 6 February 1916, in the Café de la Terrasse in Zürich. Others note that it suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group. Still others speculate that the word might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning (or no meaning at all) in any language, reflecting the movement's internationalism.

The roots of Dada lie in pre-war avant-garde. The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 to characterize works that challenge accepted definitions of art. The Dadaist movement included public gatherings of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. The hope is that the written work of great minds influence Dada's rejection of the tight correlation between words and meaning.