The Importance of Unimportance: The Significance of Dadaism

‘Dadaism’ was an attempt to make sense of post war irrationality; born out of a disgust for the world and the view that conventional thinking had led Europe to war and carnage. As a 20^th century movement it channelled its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art, proposing an attitudinal shift that meant that a prerequisite ‘process’ was no longer required for a piece of art to be simply deemed a piece of art. It achieved such through giving the unimportant and everyday deep philosophical importance. And for this I return to the previously, if not briefly explored Marcel Duchamp who himself made the concept of art malleable.

This is not to say that Duchamp’s re-evaluation of the artistic concept was a product of a stern political revolutionist, but a self amusement or retaliatory mock at the stuffy art world of post war France. Key to this mock were the ‘Readymades’, a series of seemingly banal, industrially produced synthetic objects which Duchamp presented rather idiosyncratically as art without any strong alteration. By rejecting the “unnecessary” aesthetics and hedonism in art that focused on raw mediums such as that by the likes of Henri Matisse which Duchamp named “retinal” art, a form of visual ‘feeding’, art began to take on a new significance. As Duchamp himself says, “my idea was to choose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see.^”  

The ‘Readymades’ were publicly confrontational, not only in their configuration but their delivery. Upon arriving in America Duchamp purchased a snow shovel, but instead of signing it with ‘by’ Marcel Duchamp, he used ‘from’. This transition from ‘by’ to ‘from’ importantly represents the detachment of the artist from their role in the creative process. Duchamp wanted to cause a stir in the way people viewed the role of the artistic creator. No longer were artists in his eyes Frankenstein-like “Modern Prometheus’” in which natural materials are given the “spark of life”, nurtured from the beginning to the end of the developmental process. The objects in question are removed from this journey; subjects of prefabrication.

Perhaps Duchamp’s most recognised ‘Readymade’ is ‘Fountain’, a mass produced urinal which he signed and dated with the pseudonym ‘R. Mutt 1917’ in black paint. ‘Mutt’ being a play on ‘Mott’, the name of the store from which he purchased the urinal, and ‘R’ referring to ‘Richard’, a colloquial word which in France semantically links to ‘moneybags’, thus reinforces Duchamp’s mocking ‘poke’ at the bourgeois art community. The ubiquitous had now been translated into an artistic form. The revolutionary centred in the fact that the non-aesthetic had been given an aesthetic sculptural function, liberating it from any function it had prior to this transformation.

This new assertion that any object could be artwork if an artist willed not only did and still does hugely influence art practice but can also be looked at in a different context. The act of freeing something from its prescribed ‘function’ or ‘essence’ parallels the ideas rooted in the Existentialist movement that was also gaining traction in the 20^th century. Jean-Paul Sartre’s doctrinal position of “existence precedes essence” I think has great prevalence when considering the Dadaist work of Duchamp. Its rejection of predefinition such as that previously posed in ancient philosophical concepts like Plato’s ‘Essentialism’ can also be seen in Duchamp’s liberating of the ‘Readymades’ in which as long as the artist says so, they can be anything. Thus Duchamp and his ideas are multidisciplinary, moving from the sphere of art to impacting the continuous debate that Sartre is engaging with surrounding selfhood, identity and what it means to be human.

When reading Sartre’s exposition of Existentialism in his novel ‘Nausea’ these links became clearer. Beneath the post war ennui that heavily saturates the text lays the same concepts that Duchamp unearths with his controversial urinal. As Antoine writes “when it is dark, the objects and I will come out of limbo” he is suggesting that it is human sight and perception that damagingly assigns something its ‘essence’, leaving it in this “limbo”. Therefore like Duchamp, Sartre acknowledges that we must ‘free up’ how we perceive our surroundings if we are to gain any sense of freedom ourselves.

Yet in essence, if you strip away all the philosophical elements and conjectures surrounding Duchamp’s urinal, you are left with the question that people continuously seem to arm themselves with when visiting modern art galleries today: ‘Is it Art?’. My view, yes it is. I think it is a redefinition of what constitutes art. Concept over visual communication, idea over medium. And therefore if you were to visit the Tate in London today, you would see Duchamp’s Fountain, although a replica, firmly in the presence of the other artistic greats.  

Twitter: @eleanorgustard

                                          'Fountain'