Should creatives be more dada? What we can learn from a movement that defied societal structures

The visuals for this article were created by Sophie Douala, Yutaka Satoh, Choque Le Goff and Katrijn Oelbrandt inspired by the work of Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

It’s Nice That is partnering with the Tate Modern for its Sophie Taeuber-Arp exhibition this summer (from 15 July – 17 October 2021), you can book tickets directly here.

The practitioners who founded dada have made it purposefully difficult to describe. A movement started in Zurich in 1916 as a reaction to the harsh displays of the First World War, in the broadest sense dadaists fought with creativity to defy societal structures. Often, this was by portraying pure nonsense. Dadaists rejected any kind of logic encouraged by capitalism, and any medium – from dance to publishing, sculpture, poetry and collage – was welcomed. It’s name, too, is an example of the movement’s avoidance of describing itself. Translations of the term range from “hobby horse” in French, to “be seeing you sometime” and “get off my back” in German alone. Dada has so many different meanings, it can also mean nothing at all.

The breadth of dada presents multiple forms of art, yet in an approach that was anti-art in itself. As Hugo Ball, who is largely credited as the movement’s founder, described: “For us, art is not an end in itself… but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticisms of the times we live in.” Rather than create artworks to distract viewers from the chaos the war had ignited across Europe, artists from Zurich, Hanover, Paris, Cologne and later New York, chose to utilise absurdist creativity and satire to display exactly what was wrong with the world. This bold creative rejection can be seen in Tristan Tzara’s piece encouraging people to create their own dada poems (by cutting up the words in a newspaper article and shaking them together in a bag), to the pioneering photomontages of Hannah Höch and, famously, a repurposed urinal in Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917.

In both Lucie and Experimental Jetset’s practices, it is the broad ideology of dada that both keep in mind when planting the seed of an idea. While outlining how the studio have adopted the idea of “collage” in its visual communication, Experimental Jetset remain hesitant in terms of looking to dada as any kind of “creative strategy”. Dadaist’s purposeful approach in making the movement so broad in execution and ideas makes it, of course, difficult to define, but also means it can be an uneasy practice to adopt today. “We really dislike this whole idea of turning dada into a ‘visual approach’,” the group explain. “Not that we think that dada is too ‘sacred’ to touch – far from that. The dadaists themselves were no purists either. People like Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg were (among other things) practicing graphic designers – so we certainly think dada and graphic design are closely related.”

Yet relating back to the studio’s earlier point that dada is inspiring in its want to marry art with the everyday, Experimental Jetset also point out that “dadaists (and other early-modernists) would have absolutely HATED the word ‘creatives’ – as this word suggests that there is somehow a sort of separate ‘creative’ class, like some sort of distinguished caste or rank. After all, the word ‘creatives’ automatically presupposes that there is also such a thing as ‘non-creatives’,” they explain. Therefore, while considering the ideals of dada while creating, Experimental Jetset advise keeping in mind that: “For the early-modernists, ALL workers should be seen as artists… a point of view that tears down the borders between manual labour and intellectual labour, between the specialist and the amateur, between arts and crafts, between low culture and high culture, between poetry and technology, between word and image, between time and space, between theory and practice, and ultimately between subject and object.”

In Lucie’s case however, it is more the dadaists adoption of satirical humour to display society’s structures she takes inspiration from. To any creatives wanting to expand the meaning of their works it is a sense of “not overthinking things,” that the artist encourages, as well as taking more personal steps to be “economically self-reliant, learning to say no and thinking outside of the box in terms of representation and creation,” she says. “There are a lot of changes that need to happen in the art industry and the dada philosophy can really help in the current global context. A door closes,” Lucie concludes, “use the window.”

Sophie Taeuber-Arp at the Tate Modern runs until 17 October 2021. To pre-book tickets head here.