December 2017
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
3h 39m
English
In 1916, a group of artists working in Zurich, Switzerland, named themselves by the nonsense word “Dada.” Led by the poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), they promoted an art of rejection and extreme behavior, using poetry, theater, painting, and sculpture to attack what they saw as the entrenched bourgeois values that had driven Europe into World War I.
• Irrationality. Poetry, performances, and artworks deliberately undermined common sense.
• Spontaneity. Artists embraced spontaneous behavior and extemporaneous outpourings.
• Novelty. New experimental forms, such as readymades, photomontage, and multimedia, emerged from a willingness to accept anything as art.
• Humor. A sense of the absurd was used to ridicule and undermine ...