dada
UK[ˈdɑːdɑː]US[ˈdɑːdɑː]
n
An early 20th-century avant-garde art movement characterized by a spirit of anarchic revolt against traditional social and artistic values, often employing absurdity, chance, and found objects.
n
The style or works associated with this movement.
Etymology
The term "Dada" was purportedly chosen at random from a French-German dictionary in Zurich around 1916, coinciding with the movement's embrace of nonsense and irrationality as a protest against the logic and nationalism seen as responsible for World War I. The chosen French word "dada," meaning a child's word for a hobbyhorse or a rocking horse, perfectly embodied the movement's desired qualities of childish playfulness, absurdity, and a deliberate rejection of sophisticated adult reason. This seemingly arbitrary, playful name for a radical artistic and literary movement illustrates its core philosophy: the creation of meaning through chance and the subversion of conventional aesthetic and cultural logic. The word's journey from a simple nursery term to the label for a groundbreaking avant-garde movement encapsulates the Dadaist intent to dismantle and rebuild artistic expression from a point of primal, often chaotic, creativity.
Analysis
The word "dada" is a simplex, non-compositional loanword. It does not contain separable morphemes in English. Its origin is from the French language, where it functions as a reduplicative, childish term for a hobbyhorse.
Examples
The Dada artist Marcel Duchamp famously submitted a urinal as a sculpture.
Their poetry readings, full of nonsensical sounds, were pure Dada.
The exhibition explores the lasting influence of Dada on contemporary art.