“To think of Dada as
a system, despite itself, means simultaneously to rethink the notion of a system
itself”
-Dafydd Jones
To Systematize Dada contradicts the ideals and beliefs the
founders sought to achieve and maintain because they viewed themselves as
anti-theoretical. The philosophy is
not traditional in structure but rather is open and fluid, which makes it difficult
to describe unanimous qualities that united the movement. A poet, Hugo Ball, laid
the foundations of Dada with his opposition to Nazi Germany’s military
campaigns and strategies. He saw the
power of rationalism displaced and the destruction brought on by the war. Dadaists
collectively embraced nonsense to narrate what they felt was an immoral use of
reason to justify the atrocity of the war. Dadaists believed that the chaotic,
grotesque, and unfinished contained more truth in content than the harmonic,
ordered, and symmetrical. Dadaists unanimously refused to establish a clear
framework and rejected the title, “school.” A goal of Dada was to refine the
mould of social interaction in a new understanding of life: a concrete and lived
experience driven by the ambition of understanding the nature of reality. They
wanted to show that their society is being covered up and reasoned away through
a fictitious social order imposed by the government.
