The Tate puts it this way:

As the artist Hans Arp later wrote: ‘Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.’ The founder of Dada was a writer, Hugo Ball. In 1916 he started a satirical night-club in Zurich, the Cabaret Voltaire, and a magazine which, wrote Ball, ‘will bear the name ‘Dada’. Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada.’

It was a lot more, quite political, publishing manifestos and culminating in an openly communist political platform which was closer to that of anarchism, the choice people having at that time being the warmongering imperialism of the European elite, with the connivance of the American captains of industry, open anarchy with which Dada was aligned, communism or withdrawing from the world.

The societal group for the chop in all cases, as it is today, was the bourgeoisie, the middle-class and its morality.

It’s a measure of the journey your humble correspondent has undertaken that he was once a dedicated dadaist, expressing itself in a number of us forming Anarchist Revolutionary Students in Education, our acronym naturally suggesting the writing material on which we penned our demands – best quality toilet roll. We sent the Vice-Chancellor a list of demands, twenty loo sheets long, our most reasonable demand being to erect a plaque outside the building in honour of Monty Python, I believe but I can’t remember for sure.

Also quite naturally, we held our board meetings in the loo and started up a company named Futile Enterprises [Truly Ruly] but the group disintegrated when our company, which produced novelty items for demonstrations, was in grave danger of actually trading and turning a profit, a most undadaist outcome.

Sadly, we later grew up.

Filed under: Arts & culture