Dada

Dadaism:

The Dada art movement started out as a reaction against the whole world due to its war-like atmosphere that was present during the origins of this movement. The Dada was ironically an anti-art movement because it embodied both a strong negative and a very destructive element. Artists and writers started to use the shock and protest elements combined with nonsense to strongly emphasize the rebellion against the horrors of World War 1.  They rejected everything that was traditional and sought to achieve a sort of freedom when it came to the arts.

The Dada was started by the poet known as Hugo Ball who opened the place called Cabaret Voltaire which was situated in Zurich for painters, poets and musicians. Ball alongside a young poet from Romania; Tristan Tzara,  Hans Arp and Richard Huelsenbeck started exploring how to create literature with nonsense in it. Tzara contributed a lot in this movement because of the rate he was publishing the Dada manifestos in which they created the perfect definition of the word chaos. The Dada art was characterized by its intention of causing emotional reactions which typically were in the form of either outrage or shock, its art contained a lot of abstractions and Expressionism (these two were its main influences) which was followed by Cubism and on a minor scale, Futurism gave its contribution as well.

Like the element of which this movement was built on: chaos, the movement spread throughout the world at an incredible fast pace thus there was a range of art in which they were either ‘pointless’ and just random works to actual meaningful visual arts which greatly influenced graphic design. Two artists of the Dada movement Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch invented the technique called photomontage which basically is the manipulation of photographs to create juxtapositions in the imagery.

Kurt Schwitters:

An important figure of the Dada was the Germanic artist, Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) created a magazine called “Merz”which was pin-pointed from the phrase ‘kommerz’ (commerce). His ‘Merz’ compositions contained a lot of photographs and recycled images and found materials to create a lot of different elements by combining color against another color and different  forms and textures with each other. His designs were very complex and they matched the “nonsense” part of Dada very well. Although he tried to join the Dadaists because he was "an artist who nails his pictures together," his appeal to enroll as one of them was refused because they said that he was too conservative.

He also wrote and designed poetry that combined sense with nonsense. He added Constructivism as an influence in his works after he contacted Theo van Doesburg whom in return invited Schwitters to Holland to promote the Dada.  Later on they worked on a book design that involved typographic forms to be used as the characters. Schwitters throughout his career published 24 issues and the 11^th one was particularly focused on advertising.

Flask, D. (2015). Dada : Design Is History. [online] Designishistory.com. Available at: http://www.designishistory.com/1850/dada/ [Accessed 28 Jan. 2015].

Guity-novin.blogspot.com, (2015). A History of Graphic Design: Chapter 45; Dadaism; The meeting point of all contradictions. [online] Available at: http://guity-novin.blogspot.com/2011/08/chapter-44-dadaism-meeting-point-of-all.html [Accessed 28 Jan. 2015].