HANNAH HOCH - Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919. One of the most important works of the Dada movement. Dada is 100 years old this year.
Dada was one of the first Euro-Am counter-cultures, involving artists across disciplines from all over Europe and New York city. Emmy Hennings, Hugo Ball, Baroness Elsa, Man Ray, Sophie Tauber, Hannah Hoch, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Mina Loy, Raoul Hausenbeck, Gabrielle Buffet, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel and Suzanne Duchamp - artists, writers, singers, dancers, performance artists, poets - totally changed our world. What i love about Dada is that these artists took their world apart - a world bound and strangled in stultifying and self-destructive traditions - and re-built it in ways no one had ever thought of before. They were viewing their world thru new lenses, and they wanted to believe that by doing this, they could change the world. And they did.
Dada and Surrealism (along with labor and social justice movements) helped people to break out of the rut of thinking things had to be a certain way just coz they’d always been that way before, and from there we get the 40 hour work week, Civil Rights, the Peace Movement, Women’s Lib, Gay Liberation, the Trans Movement, marriage equality. People like me now have a chance to actually live the lives we were born to live. Gender bending was a part of Dada too, for instance Marcel Duchamp and Georgia O’Keefe quite prominently crossdressed together.
Not to say that Dada didn’t suffer from sexism, it certainly did, but compared to the Futurists, Dada boys were feminists. Women had a place at the Dada table, even if it was way at the end. But some women, like Sophie Tauber, Hannah Hoch, and particularly Baroness Elsa, could not be kept out of the limelight, they were too talented, too important as artists, or in Baroness Elsa’s case, too important as a person who embodied Dada as a lifestyle. None of the men could touch Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven for her ability to live Dada. Her costumes, her performance art, her poetry, was beyond the capabilities of anybody else around her. And without Emmy Hennings fame as a singer, the Dada Cabaret Voltaire would never have come into being.
The Dadaists were some of the first Euro-Am people who said “why do we do things in this way? why do men always wear suits? why do we have these traditions? why must we all be monogamous? why do we let anybody besides the artists themselves decide whether or not something is art?
