by Amir Syafiq

  We live in a media ecology like a fish in an aquarium where every single things are a medium – everything talks and communicates in its own language as how they present themselves to be what they are with what they can do which we can’t get away from just like the fish been surrounded by the water. Dadaism is much alike the world and its living thing, philosophically; where the art exist for its own sake by its own interest telling stories in each own ways only for the artists worth.

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 “I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way." – Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto 1918.

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  Some may see Dadaism as ugly forms of art just like how the Dadaists describe the people, the society and the politics through agitprop. It is also known for its anti-art and political driven ideology for Dadaism has no sense of need to be nailed along with other expensive piece of arts for the elites that all goes with the principle of arts. Dadaism is subversive and uneven yet very inclusive; it is on its own league and pay no respect to no one as Hugo Ball once said, “Every word that is spoken and sung here (the Cabaret Voltaire) represents at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.”   

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  The world first witnessed the formation of Dadaism short-lived arts not arts and artist not artist movement was back in the background World War 1, where Einstein’s theory is not more than just a science fictions and the time of Sigmund Freud put reality reasoning grips in unconscious states, this is when Dadaism was born, 1914 in Zurich, Berlin when many artists and writers including James Joyce were taking refuge there from combat. If the cubists had revolutionized artistic practice and the futurists had drawn a link between art and revolution, Dada was a sort of revolution against the very concept of art though Marcel Duchamp had this idea of Dada years before the official year when he thought of making arts for the mind, not for the eyes as he rejected all paintings after he tried his hands on Impressionism and Cubism as he said, “In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn,” he later wrote, describing the construction he called Bicycle Wheel, a precursor of both kinetic and conceptual art.

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  More ideas then set afoot in Dada as Anarchists and nihilists inhabited the political fringe, and a new breed of artist was starting to attack the very concept of art itself.

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  Dadaism does not only focus on painting and sculptures but writings and sound poetry  too as Tristan Tzara was a writer and also a poet, infamous for his “How to Write a Dadaist Poem”, and also considered as the leader of this avant-garde movement which at first was began as a kind of performance art  in which people would gather at a night-club, the Cabaret Voltaire, to look at avant-garde art, listen to classical and dance music, read poetry also a nonsense one, declaim about the end of art, and criticize the war and western civilization.

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  The cabaret also had witnessed the babbling of the ‘verses without words’, only gibberish sounds are made performance in 1916, the piece is called sound poetry, entitled ‘Karawane’ performed by Hugo Ball in a weird garments he designed for the performance  and later in 1922, followed by Kurt Schwitters’s  Ursonate. Sound poetry is basically a visual arts which evolved from visual poetry and concrete poetry. However, sound poetry was not really a favor at the moment, but as a Dadaist, perceptions over the acceptations that make Dadaism a great piece of art.

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  Even though the Dadaism movement is a history, but the idea of Dada is still live well until today and been used by many artists, regardless the painters, the sculptors, dancers, musicians and also the art performers like Marina Abramović  for instance, she is the so-called the grandmother of performance arts where in one of her performance, Rhythm 0, 1974, she let the audience  to hurt or please her with the stuffs she prepared on the table that would cut, stab, whip, burn and even a loaded gun. She was also stripped naked by the audience just to feel the sensation of the pain and the show lasted for six hours.

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  While in the music industry, the idea of Dadaism was carried by the German industrial band called Einstürzende Neubauten with the use of custom-built instruments, predominantly made out of scrap metal and building tools, and noises, in addition to standard musical instruments. The Dadaism influence can be heard in their ‘Autobahn’ track with full of building construction industrial sounds and pure noises.

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  In fact, Dadaism also lives in Malaysia and was carried by Fadly Sabran, a 2007 UiTM graduates. Most of his works are consist of mechanical absurdity with the living things assemblage with the idea of portraying human as unthinking robots. Most of his works are meant to be interactive, participatory, dynamic and customisable in anticipation by the shape of things to come with the use of electronic and other mediums such as video, sound, light, kinetic, movement, motion sensory and digital collage. His ‘Brain Damage’ work tells a story that the technology is much damaging to the human mind.

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  As stated before, Dadaism is not an art for the eye but for the mind. Some might bring pleasures some might bend the mind with its uneven proportions, disturbing sounds and nonsense poem with heavy political messages in order to go against the arts itself, and for those who don’t try to understand Dadaism may describe the piece as bullshit. Dadaists don’t pay any respects for those who don’t like it and don’t bother trying to care what people think of their works.