Dada

“the streams buck like rams in a tentfountains spring up in the eyes of the wild boar.”

“Dadaism has launched an attack on the fine arts. It has declared art to be a magic opening of the bowels, administered an enema to the Venus of Milo, and finally enabled 'Laocoon and Sons' to ease themselves after a thousand-year struggle with the rattlesnake. Dadaism has reduced positive and negative to utter nonsense. It has been destructive in order to achieve indifference.”

“Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds.”

“Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.”

“Dada was given the Venus of Milo a clyster and has allowed the w:Laocoön and his sons to rest awhile, after thousands of years of struggle with the good sausage Python. The philosophers are of less use to Dada than an old toothbrush, and it leaves them on the scrap heap for the great leaders of the world.”

“In the good times of Dada, we detested polished works, the distracted air of spiritual struggle, the titans, and we rejected them with all out being.”

“I did exhibitions with the Surrealists [in Paris, circa 1929] because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.”

“Our cabaret 'Cabaret Voltaire' is a gesture.. .Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.”

“Dada was not a fashion, a style, or a doctrine.”

“Dada is an utterly a-religious attitude, like that of the scientist with his eye stuck on his microscope.”

“Dada exhibition. Another one! What's the matter with everyone wanting to make a museum piece out of Dada? Dada was a bomb... can you imagine anyone, around half a century after a bomb explodes, wanting to collect the pieces, sticking it together and displaying it?”

“Based on the metaphysical implications of the Dadaist dogma, [Hans Arp|Arp]'s reliefs between 1916 and 1922 are among the most convincing illustrations of that anti-rationalistic era.. .Arp showed the importance of a smile to combat the sophistic theories of the moment. His poems of the same period stripped the word of its rational connotation to attain the most unexpected meaning through alliteration or plain nonsense.”

“[N]ever has a group disposed of such equipment for saying nothing, and never has a group gone to such lengths to reach the public and bring nothing.”

“[Dada would] take away from art its pricelessness and make of it a new and engaging diversion, pastime, even dissipation.”

“There is a difference between sitting quietly in Switzerland [Dada in Zurich] and bedding down on a vulcano, as we did in Berlin.”

“Dada hurts. Dada does not jest, for the reason that it was experienced by revolutionary men and not by philistines who demand that art be a decoration for the mendacity of their own emotions.. .I am firmly convinced that all art will become dadaistic in the course of time, because from Dada proceeds the perpetual urge for its renovation.”

“[ Tinguely is a] Meta-Dadaist... [who had] fulfilled certain ideas of ours, notably the idea of motion.”

“Let's transplant the primitive soul to the ultramodern New York, inject his soul with the noise of the subway, of the 'el, and may his brain become a long street of buildings 224 stories high.”

“We, the founders of Dada-movement try to give 'time' its own reflection in the mirror.”

“Dada remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates...”

“Dada doubts everything. Dada is an armadillo. Everything is Dada, too. Beware of Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man's normal condition, is Dada. But the real dada's are against Dada.”

“Only a radical cleaning of social and artistic life as, in the domain of art, is already done by Dada, which is anti-sentimental and healthy to the core, since it is anti-art. Only unscrupulously striking down any systematically bred amateurism in any field, can prepare civilization for the New Vision's happiness which is greatly and purely alive in a dew people.”