👋 Hi, I’m Mallory, Dada Engineer.
The Dada art movement is based on purposeful irrationality and the negation of tradition. The purpose of dada is to challenge societal norms and intentionally evoke emotions from disgust to confusion. It is an affront to classicism, and--like any good art--scandalized those who saw it.
Dada was ahead of its time, but its influence lives on: sometimes still, rejecting reason and embracing absurdity creates something beautiful from the mundane. At the heart of Dadaism was the subversive use of commonplace items. Sometimes political, sometimes just subversive... the lesson here is that water can be made into wine, a toilet into a water fountain, and art can be made from ambiguity, from madness. It's time for a revival. 👻
Pictured below are famous works of two prominent Dadaists of the early 1900s.
Duchamp's Toilet Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres