Tzara

Dada, to me, is an artistic form of nonsense. Personally I don’t quite understand how normal everyday objects, or ready-mades, can be known as art. If that’s the case then my pen over a bowl of water can signify art. Although I understand the historical message behind dada, in the sense that the nonsense evolved from the emotions and events going on during World War I.

In Tristan Tzara’s manifestos I got the sense that he wanted to apply dada to people and the world. Also he gave a complex definition of what dada could be or what it’s understood to be by different people. In the following quote, “A work of art should not be beauty in itself, for beauty is dead; it should be neither gay nor sad, neither light nor dark to rejoice or torture the individual… it exists only subjectively, for each man separately… I speak only for myself since I do not wish to convince… and everybody practices art in his own way,” (77) Tzara applies a paradox between emotion and art. Art for the most part is emotional and when people view are they usually have a certain emotion that goes with a certain painting, sculpture, play, etc. Also Tzara mentions “a work of art should not be beauty in itself,” which I thought was ironic because by personal definition an artist strives to recreate beauty. The beauty could be found out of destruction or creation but still that lies with the artist and what their interpretation of beauty is. This leads me to my next point, which is when Tzara announces that he only speaks for himself and he doesn’t wish to convince anyone, seeing as though “everybody practices art in [their] own way.” This is a contradictory statement after mentioning what he knows art should or shouldn’t be. Although, I wonder if this was just another aspect of dada art because it wasn’t seen as something beautiful but it was also left up to the artist to practice it however he/she wanted to.

            Tzara applies this to the social world because he talks about art as a whole and not just dada. With that said, he applies this message to the general population. Also dada was made as an anti-war proposition for the general public and was used as an outlet against the war. So from the beginning dada was used to extend nonsense into the social world. In the social world at the time, World War I was something that was rejected and Dadaists wanted that to be shown within their art. So it’s understandable for Tzara to say that art should have nothing to do with beauty because the art the Dadaists were making were about their hatred for the war. Dadaists didn’t see the war as a work of beauty, so to Tzara the art he was creating wasn’t supposed to evoke any type of emotion but just nonsense.