On a cold February evening in 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, Switzerland, a group of freethinking artists and poets put on a very strange performance. Three poets read the same poem simultaneously in three languages, and someone recited a Maori tribal spell while moving like a belly dancer. They called it Dada. Formed from the chaos of World War I, it was the "most revolutionary artistic movement of the twentieth century," Jed Rasula writes in Destruction Was My Beatrice. Romanian Tristan Tzara, one of the club's founders, said, "true dadas are against DADA." Favoring anti-art, they filled their movement with contradictions.
After Zürich, Dada showed up in war-torn Berlin. Here Max Ernst "leaped onto Dada like a hobo jumping a freight car." From there, "like a gunslinger in the Wild West," it showed up in Paris and drew the interest of André Breton, Jean Cocteau and Ezra Pound. The movement jumped to New York, attracting new artistic "hobos" like Marcel Duchamp, who was fond of turning everyday objects into art, and fellow visual artist Man Ray.
Rasula (This Compost) argues that Dada's irreverence has had an enduring influence, pointing to Charlie Chaplin (whom the Dadaists adored), the Marx Brothers and the early work of Robert Rauschenberg. Filled with fascinating details and memorable personalities, Rasula's history tells of a brief movement that spit in the eye of art yet captivated the world. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher