Economics of Dadaism

In 1914, both sides had planned on the First World War being a short one. Neither side had made any long term economic preparations, including stockpiling food, or even critical raw materials. The longer the War went on, the more advantage went to the Allies, with their advanced, more versatile economies and better access to global supplies. 
Europe was heavily affected by the losses faced in the War, though England fared much better in the outcome. Dissatisfaction was mounting, and visible throughout various mediums of art and music, the voices growing louder, and it had become imperial that the resources were mobilized in such a way that the short-term confidence of people was maintained, the long-term power of the political establishment was upheld, and the long-term economic health of the nation was assured. 
France was hit badly, with the German invasion capturing 40% of France’s heavy industries like steel and coal as early as 1914, and the civilian standard of living had fallen by half, since a third of the GDP had gone into the war effort. While considerable relief came in with the influx of American food, money, and raw materials, the arrival of over a million American soldiers in the next year brought heavy spending for food and construction materials. War contracts made some firms prosperous but on the whole did not compensate for the loss of foreign markets; there was a permanent loss of population caused by battle deaths and emigration. Shortages mounted, inflation had soared, banks had cut off credit and the provincial government was ineffective. 
This caused a deep-set resentment that led to dissent, which further flourished into several movements- in the literary as well as art world. One of these was the Dada movement, developed in reaction to the First World War, consisting of artists who rejected the logic, reason and aestheticism of modern capitalist society. Instead they expressed nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their work. Dada, or Dadaism, was an art movement of the European avant-garde. It developed circa 1915 in Zurich, Switzerland and flourished, with extensions of it popping up in France, and New York, circa 1915, and further continued to flourish in Paris from 1920 onwards. The art of the movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent with violence, war, and nationalism, and maintained political affinities with the radical far-left. he 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 which challenge accepted definitions of art. Cubism and the development of collage and abstract art would inform the movement's detachment from the constraints of reality and convention. 
Dada was an informal international movement, for many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that corresponded to the war. A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, a "reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."

In 1916, prominent contributors like Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings had, along with others, discussed art and put on performances in the Cabaret Voltaire expressing their disgust with the war and the interests that inspired it. This was the most appropriate plave to perform, as it had been named after famed French satirist Voltaire, whose novella mocked the idiocies of his country Most of these artists having later left Germany, found themselves in Switzerland, a country recognized for its political neutrality, where they decided to use abstraction to fight against the social, political and cultural ideas of that time. The Dadaists believed those ideas to be a by-product of bourgeois society, one so apathetic it would rather fight itself than challenge the status quo. 
One of the most common attributes of Dada art was that it was made using readily available, everyday objects, challenging the notion of creativity and by extension, art itself. These also required little manipulation by the artist. Another feature of if, already discussed was that it was nonsensical- in the most basic definition of the word- which extended to the poetry movement that was simultaneous. Poems that were not poems- they did not abide to the traditional format, nor to the meanings of the words or the phrases involved. This distinct characteristic later lent itself to the various art and music movements that Dada devolved into, most notably Surrealism. 

Miloni O., 
FYBA

Icon Credits:
Krutitka Shah
FYBSc