Lord Larehip

Well, that isn't punk. Punk NEVER wanted to make it big. Punk stood steadfastly against that. Rap wanted nothing more than to be mainstream. Punk wanted nothing more than to be shunned and reviled by the mainstream.


I’ve had an e-mail from Hannah tucked away, and I’m thrilled to finally respond. Hannah asked whether Dada was really an antiwar movement. There are dissertations about this topic, but I’ll attempt to do it justice in 300 words.
In short, yes: Dada was an antiwar movement. Can art be created independently of the time and political, economic and social conditions in which it’s conceived?
Smithsonian Magazine says that the word “Dada” can be translated as ‘yes, yes’ (Rumanian) ‘rocking/hobby horse’ (French) and loosely interpreted as “foolish naïveté” (German). The movement began in neutral Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire around 1916. According to the National Gallery of Art, this café was a haven for European artists. It was a safe place to respond to the seemingly nonsensical death toll that World War I was incurring. These responses varied from sound poetry recitations to performance pieces and exhibitions of sculpture and collage culled from everyday media.
Dada was a drastic departure from formal oil-on-canvas paintings. Artist Marcel Duchamp (noted for such works as “L.H.O.O.Q.” and “The Fountain”) found that traditional media and styles of art no longer sufficed: That art was “made for the eye, not the mind.” One of the movement’s forefathers, Hugo Ball, explained that Dada meant to wake up the people of the world who beheld “all this civilized carnage as a triumph of European intelligence.”
Dadaists as well as their critics called the movement anti-art. To the untrained ear and eye, the movement may have been just sound and fury, but it was a serious criticism of the inefficacy of governmental and societal leaders. It aimed to jolt society into a realization that it lived in a grotesque and senseless way. So is Dada still relevant today?

The Dada Antiwar Movement – The Blogs at HowStuffWorks

Two of the greatest shaping forces in twentieth century art were Cubism, and the First World War. We already know about Picasso and Cubism and how he and it changed the way artist have looked at things forever more. What we're not so conscious of is the way this pre-holocaust holocaust impacted art, which at that point in time, was primarily painting (it had an effect on movie-making too, but that's another story). We're accustomed to thinking of "the" anti-war movement as being a product of the 60's and 70's in reaction to the Vietnam War, but far more important in terms of art was the horror of young European artists of the post-World War One period, to that which had practically destroyed their continent. Out of this horror came Dada. It was first and foremost an anti-war movement as much as an art movement. To say the least it was anti-establishment, which included in that day and age, art. It was anti-tradition. It was, in fact, anti-anything-that-had-a-hand-in-plunging-the-world-into-war. At its best it was visionary and idealistic. At its worst, it was nihilistic. In Russia, it was akin to communism. Further west it espoused socialism. Further west still, in this country, it was tied up in a half a dozen other "isms" of one ilk or another.
We speak of the Dada movement in art sometimes with humour, sometimes with dismay, sometimes with a degree of disparagement. But whether we realise it or not, it changed "art" as much as Cubism. In fact it may have changed it more than Cubism because Cubism was largely a painting phenomena. Dada forever broadened the very definition of art, beyond painting, beyond sculpture, even beyond motion pictures. If nothing else it gave us performance art. It gave us multi-media art. It gave us art that very nearly defied definition. It made us look at ourselves as artists for the first time in history in terms of social relevance. Do we mean anything? Are we part of the problem or part of the solution. Is art a vehicle for social change? Should it be?

HumanitiesWeb.org - World War I and Dada

Sure I have. The artistic (anti-artistic) milieu created by dada was what enabled punk to exist. It was the freshly plowed field where the seeds of punk were sown. Your contention that this is not true is saying that punk came out of nowhere all the sudden. NOTHING ever emerges in the arts that way--ever.


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Of course the philosophy isn't dead. If that's what you think I am saying, you haven't understood a word I've said. And the art as far as punk music is concerned hasn't changed and that is exactly the problem.