Cafe Voltaire – DADA to go – Juan Petry 2022
Cafe Voltaire – DADA to go – Juan Petry 2022
Cafe Voltaire was a key hub for the Dada movement in the early 1900s. Located in Zurich, Switzerland, the cafe was a gathering place for artists, writers and thinkers, who were exploring new ways of expression in the aftermath of World War I. The Dadaists rejected traditional values and conventions, instead embracing an experimental and often anti-rational approach to art and life. This philosophy is reflected in the cafes name, which refers to a famous 18th-century French Enlightenment thinker known for his critiques of conventional thinking. Cafe Voltaire was a place where people could come to discuss new ideas and explore alternative ways of living. Today, the cafe remains an important symbol of the Dada movement and its impact on 20th-century art and culture.
Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centers in Zürich, Switzerland at the Cabaret Voltaire (circa 1916); New York Dada began around 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected traditional Western cultural values and beliefs. A precursor to Surrealism, Dada was also influenced by Cubism and Futurism. Its purpose was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, Dada rejected reason, logic, aesthetics, and moral rationality, while embracing irrationality and nonsense. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored them. If art is to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada was intended to have no meaning. As Hugh Thomas points out: „Dada defys expectations of meaning.“
One of its central principles was invoked by Marcel Duchamp when he took a urinal and signed it R. Mutt 1917; he intended it as a provocation against established values and conventions—and artists—including those represented by conventional museums and galleries. Rejecting what they saw as false standards in art—such as perfection of form—the members of dada sought randomness through chance operations like automatic writing or drawing with their eyes closed so as not better contradict themselves or lost control over their artistic expression rather than true randomness which may arise from outside forces beyond their control such as dice rolls but merely help them create more coherent works such as poems from randomly selected phrases from different pages of another book instead having those phrases just thrown together on paper.
This series of objects contains only 20 pieces. Linked to Amazing Citizens in Civil Wars, it is a hommage to DADA as a progressive movement of creative people in times of reconstruction.
No matter how you look at history, circling around the same system becomes a spiral through time. We can and should learn something from the artists of DADA, and begin to rebuild constructively, even while demolishing the old, through clever selection of the achievements of our culture. As always, technology can hinder or support, the direction is given by man himself, provided he is a free one.
Even the content you are reading now is DADA, out of an artificial intelligence content creator (AI), and becomes in this context as well a piece of DADA art.
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