"What's the point?" - Dada by Starsky

Gavin and me just had a conversation on how distance can sometimes help you build relationships and help you explore topics otherwise ignored. We both have a friend who lives far from San Francisco [G: Miami; me: Switzerland], and we both have the same kind of daily talk/brainstorm/reflection relationship with them.My “long-distance friend” is Astara, alias Starsky [starskai]. Since the beginning of the semester, we’ve been having daily conversations on what our future could look like, and what, of our past, will we take with us into the next circle. We also talk about art, and school; about holidays, and dreams; places, and people. But it’s not the topic to make it interesting: the joy and curiosity that she can convey is what makes it different.
A couple of weeks ago, I told Starsky that I would have liked her to write a post about whatever she preferred.
Here, is her view on Dada, Starsky's favorite art style. In four brief paragraphs you'll find the definition, the history, and the "point" of this fascinating movement.

Reading highly recommended.

STARSKY ON DADA

“We’re all part of a tireless quest for a new way of thinking, feeling, and knowing… 

New art is a new-found freedom!” –Hans Richter

Dada is an artistic revolt against art.

 Contradictory though it may sound, Dada was a major form of artistic expression that manifested in poems, paintings, photography, prose literature, sculpture, mechanical objects, and plays in the time after WWI. Dada artists said they enjoyed real freedom. The important thing is that they didn’t simply enjoy it, but they left proof of it.

To understand Dada you must understand where it came from. As close as we can tell, Dada arose as a reaction to the brutality of the first World War as experienced by neutral Swiss citizens, like Hugo Ball, who is attributed for creating the movement in 1916 in Zurich with the Café Voltaire. The fact that Dada began life in Zurich and not in New York or Paris is significant, for the movement owes many of its characteristics to the peculiar atmosphere prevailing in that city at the time.

“Modern Art” as you probably think of it, how it exists today, began with Dada. They were the first to create the “useless object”. It was precisely because they were useless that they found them moving, lyrical, and just funny. Hans Richter wrote that “the Uselessness Effect shows us objects from what one might call their human side… Objects are BEINGS, like us, because they ARE.” Duchamp, the Dada-ist who is most famous for his object art, exhibited his works for shock value, and nothing more. He wished to tear the beholder away from his stagnant, meaninglessness of his habitual attitude towards art by proclaiming that a urinal, a bicycle wheel, a shovel, is art. 

What I love about Dada is how unforgiving it is while still retaining a sense of humor. It teaches, reprimands, but most importantly- asks questions. Dada is considered many things, but the best explanation I have found is that it is a “unification of opposites”. They said that the interplay of opposites and affinities is the only true form of creation. For example, a poem made of non-existent words. 

Some will always ask “What’s the point?” 

and the Dada-ist will reply, “That is the point.” 

To Oskar Panizza - George Grosz