Links Between

Dadaism is all about links.  The movement grew through links between various artists.  These artists, all who had by chance assembled in one location initially beginning the moment of Dada, were always moving around.  The distance in which they relocated varied from artists to artist.  Some remained in their home country after Zurich, while others crossed the Atlantic and made their way in to the art world beginning to surface on American soil.  The one thing that each and every one of these artists maintained is contact with multiple artists from around the western world.

Nowadays, most careers come through connections that you have with various people.  This was almost the same in the lives of Dadaists, but it was more in terms of learning rather than getting a high paying job.  They wrote between each other constantly, talking about different ideas they had, and discussing what was going on around them.  Although they varied in location, the artists were all facing chaos in their everyday lives.  They were searching for escape.  

These links that they created led to many collaborative works, like the Francis Picabia piece L'oeil cacodylate, or the later work The Reunion, between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp.  These links were an important aspect to the short-lived movement we call Dada.  

The Dada artists did not limit the communications to simply just Dadaists, but they interacted with multiple other artists that were involved in various movements.  That is why we see an integration of games that the Surrealists used.  

Last week, we played a game that I am going to refer to as a game of links.  The object is to have two nouns, one at the beginning and one at the end.  Between these two nouns on paper is 6 lines.  The point is to start with the first noun, and create 6 levels of connections to link it to the end word.  The links can rhyme, be a synonym, or any link your mind creates.  For example:  I flipped through a biography I was reading on Marcel Duchamp by Calvin Tomkins, and chose two nouns at on two random pages, Draw and Inscription.  Although these two are very similar my links went like this: Draw, Saw, Wood, Forest, Height, Kite, Paper, Inscription.  

To offer an alternate way to see different links, write down 6 different nouns on a sheet of paper, and have another person create the links between them. This way is a little bit harder, causing the mind to have to step even further out of the box in order to find some connection.  Graziano chose to write: Pizza, Pharmacy, Glass, Concept, Farewell, Stone.  And the connections went something like this: Pizza (store) Pharmacy (see) Glass (Duchamp/art) Concept (leave) Farewell (death) Stone.

Now, if someone else was given these set of words, they would see different connections, and the same goes for the first process. 

The purpose of this is that it shows there are always links around us.  Everything is linked in some way.

Now...what exactly does this have to do with Dada and what I was writing about before??? Let's see. 

Dada art was being created by chance, opposition to the world, dissatisfaction with the production of art objects in the early 20th century.  It is the art of randomness, of freedom, and people associate those two things with separation when in reality the world is about links.  The Dadaists created because they were linked to the other movements, and did not necessarily want to follow the guidelines that were set.  And this variation of links that each artist obtained did not just disintegrate when the Cabaret Voltaire began and the artists associated themselves to this "anti-art".  Links are eternal, and never ending.