Originally Posted by Lord Larehip
You mean you didn't know punk was dada?? You've heard of the band Cabaret Voltaire, right? You know what that is? It was a gallery where dada anti-art was first exhibited to the public in Zurich 1916. One of the founders, Marcel Janco, explained, “At the Cabaret Voltaire, we began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.” That's punk, man! The word "dada" is meaningless but is also Romanian for "yeah yeah" as in our "yeah whatever."
But the idea that dada is essentially meaningless or random is quite fitting for Dada itself as it rejected art with deeper meanings and rejected such concepts as a “masterpiece.” Dada art was deliberately superficial. What you saw was what you got. Whatever meaning you got from it was your interpretation alone. Another interpretation was just as valid. And if you got no meaning from it, that was just as valid as any meaning one found. Dada artists never tried to explain their pieces and often because they couldn’t, it was often randomly generated. While traditional art laughs at the child who paints a random image and, when asked it is, replies, “I won’t know until I’m done with it,” Dada embraced this attitude as the very core its philosophy and even adding, “And I probably still won’t know.”
People don't think very much about how important art is in political philosophy and discourse--not to mention war. There's a reason dada was embraced among the anarchists but despised by the Nazis. Max Ernst was even imprisoned by the Nazis for his art. The Nazi vision for Europe and the world was not political but aesthetic, artistic. They didn't view Jews so much as a political danger as they did vermin, an infestation, in need of liquidation for the good of all. They had no place in Hitler's perfectly ordered vision.
Look at Nazi art and buildings. Always neat, clean, orderly. Always perfect specimens of Aryan superiority. All the buildings Albert Speer designed for Hitler were grand, majestic, lots of marble and tall, sturdy columns with floors so clean and uncluttered they looked uninhabited. There was a place for everything and everything was in its place. And if you didn't fit in--Jew, Gypsy, non-white, retarded, homosexual, disabled, even old--the only place for you was a mass grave.
What did the Nazis use to gas inmates? Zyklon B, a prussic acid, used for what? As insecticide. Again, they were killing vermin. No political justification needed. There was simply no place for them in the Third Reich. They were not part of Hitler's aesthetics.
In 1937, the Nazis removed all dada art from Germany. Here, they list what they called entartete kunst or degenerate art and one can read "dada" and "Ernst." Another name listed is George Grosz, another big dadaist.
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Grosz depicted his fellow Germans as cruel, unfeeling, unthinking automatons driven only by greed and lust:
Ernst depicted "The Angel of Hearth and Home" as it danced across the barren European landscape bearing a striking resemblance to a swastika:
Dada was mostly anti-war and anti-politics, largely atheistic and anarchistic. Likewise were the punkers. One need only listen to DRI or Discharge (before the horrible "Grave New World") for proof. And who became the punks' biggest enemy? The Nazi skins. Remarkable how history repeats itself.
While punk might be over, the dada spirit lives on. Wherever there are conservatives and liberals--both cowards and hypocrites full of hate and cut from the exact same cloth--there will be war. And war there is war, there will be dada to rebel against it.
“…a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization...In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege.”
Ah but isn't that how it always goes?
Anti was founded by Gary Kail who also founded a punk-noise unit called Zurich 1916.
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