The Beauty of Dadaism's Absurdity

  

The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dali.

    Dadaism has always been something that fascinates a lot of people. How the people at that time responded to such a horrific event, World War I, with an absurd and complex form of art is such an interesting labyrinth to wander around. 

But why does this specific Art and Literature Movement interest a lot of people, you may ask? Let your walk be guided through each room where the beauty of art is stored.

    It can be collectively agreed that World War I must be such a nightmare to live through, the senseless murder, violence, slaughter, and fear of death haunted people in their sleep. At that time, it felt as if the ones fighting for the war were merely toy soldiers being lined up and played by the government.

This nightmare of a reality would make you question so many things. Is there any meaning behind all of this? But Dadaism wasn’t there to give you meaning, it is even thought that you can say it did the furthest thing from that. Some would like to describe Dadaism and the historical aspect behind it as people who consider themselves as non-artists making non-arts in a world where art was meaningless, or at the very least, insignificant.

    Dadaism was so absurd and meaningless that you would question, how is this art? Many questioned the exact same thing the first time one learned about it. If it’s meaningless what’s the point of it being art? Why would you consider something as meaningless as gibberish poems or Duchamp’s Fountain as something so revolutionary?

Marcel Duchamp Fountain, 1917, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz

    However, if anyone were there to be at that period of time, watching how the old values brought the horror I see in the modern world, they would be sick of it too, just like the brave and radical artists at that time. They fought against logic and order with the absurdity and spontaneity of their art.

That’s the beauty of it, it’s beautiful how the artists have the artistic ability to create something so simple or so complex as a piece of art that changes our perspective of art itself. Dadaism also has such a huge impact on modern literature thanks to its preposterous and fresh view of what can be considered art. Dadaism rejects everything, including itself, allowing new meaning or no meaning at all for art.

If Tristan Tzara suggested that future poets should cut out random words from newspapers or magazines and randomly arrange them after drawing each word from a bag to create their art and think of it as “genius nonsense”, why would we ever deny him?

    Thanks to Dadaism, humanity realizes that no art is shallow and truly meaningless, even when the artists themselves reject its meaning. We learned that there’s something so beautiful in the absurd arts that were created under the absurd state of society. How art has always been there to give you some sense of warmth, whether it’s the relieving warmth of the morning sun or the scorching hot summer sun, you get to decide.

Sweet child, we have reached the last room, and in this room, there’s nothing but a sentence written on its wall,

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” - Cesar A. Cruz.