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The Halfway Post’s Approach to “Dadaist” Political Satire, Explained
Maybe “Dadaist” is an obscure reference when I call myself that, but, because I love Wikipedia, here’s the Wiki on it!
Dada was a brief 1910s and 20s art movement for which the pompous failures of monarchies, the horrors of trench warfare in WWI, and the shattering of nationalistic empires inspired a bunch of pacifist absurdists who fled their warring nations to neutral Switzerland to agree that the only reasonable reaction to such catastrophe was insurrectionary nonsense.
They created what I think might poetically describe as “revolutionary gibberish art,” which was a clear break from the rationalism, romanticism, and nationalism of the Belle Époque. It led eventually to more well known and longer lasting movements like surrealism, expressionism, and, some argue, most modern art.
Fundamentally, Dadaism was an aesthetic of absurdity for absurdity’s sake. Some famous early Dadaist masterpieces include recitations of literal gibberish poetry in a lobster costume and Duchamp’s signed urinal. Dadaists also kind of revolutionized the artform of collage doing things like cutting up newly affordable and convenient photography of aristocrats and political leaders, and putting their heads on the bodies of obese men in bathing suits at the beach. That was somewhat artistically…
