1. Dada was a broad cultural movement that was geared toward the rejection of artistic standards and aesthetics and advocated irrationality, randomness, nonsense, and CHANCE. Begun in Zurich during World War I by a group of artists in exile—among them Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Hans Arp—Dada engaged in forms other than the visual arts—including poetry, theater, and music—and expressed its ideas through manifestos, journals, performances, and demonstrations as well as through artworks. Protesting the barbarism that was sweeping across modern Europe as well as bourgeois values, aesthetics, and intellectual rigidity, Dada was not so much an artistic movement as a coming together of often destructive antiart gestures. Marcel Janco, a Romanian artist, recalled: “We had lost confidence in our ‘culture.’ Everything had to be demolished. We would begin after the tabula rasa.” [1]

Although Dada never coalesced into a true movement—in keeping with its original spirit, perhaps—its radical cynicism and nihilism would nevertheless continue to serve as a critical catalyst throughout the history of twentieth-century modern art.

2. There is no direct connection between the historical Dada and Xiamen Dada, an artists’ collective that Huang Yong Ping helped found in 1986. An interesting comparison can be drawn, however, between Dada’s origin in Zurich and the fact that Huang’s latter-day Dada group was based in Xiamen, a rather provincial port city in southeastern China, far away from Beijing, the political capital and the center of the emerging Chinese AVANT-GARDE of the 1980s. Xiamen Dada’s strategies—manifestos, staged events, guerrilla actions, and so forth—and its antiart tendencies also clearly follow the precedent of its European predecessor. It goes without saying that the historical context was radically different, but it may be argued that these artists, all coming of age during the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent reform and schooled in Socialist Realism, found themselves faced with aesthetic and intellectual strictures parallel to those faced by the early twentieth-century Dadaists in an endgame of bourgeois culture. (See section 2 of Huang’s writings and Fei Dawei’s essay “Two-Minute Wash Cycle: Huang Yong Ping’s Chinese Period,” in this volume.)


[1] Marcel Janco, “Dada at Two Speeds,” trans. Margaret I. Lippard, in Dadas on Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 36.

Chance

Avant-Gard