Some 110 years ago and amidst the First World War the Dada movement hit the stage of the art world at Zurich’s „Cabaret Voltaire“ and set in motion short-lived but in the long-term highly influential idea of art: performative practices, music, political satire, collages and decollages were part of Dada’s radical art. At at time when war was waged, militarism dominated and nationalism peaked, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber and Richard Huelsenbeck, to name only a few, attacked the societal and political system that enabled the war and the bellicosities that preceded it.
Until September 13 the Centrum für Verfolgte Künste in Solingen specifically focuses on the political dimension of Dada and with „“Unlock your heads at last! Dada as political art between the world wars“ presents the polyphony of Dada. Artists like Otto Dix, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Marta Hegemann or Kurt Schwitters, besides the aforementioned founding figures, gave diverse expressions to their anti-bourgeois, anti-war and sometimes anarchist view on society, politics and social ills. The exhibition is accompanied by the present catalogue, published by Hirmer, that further elaborates on its main topics, namely Dada as political art, the First International Dada-Fair, the Dada performances and its revolutionary art and language. Of the four very informative essays Hanna Bergius’s discussion of the First Dada-Fair is particularly captivating: organized by Raoul Haussmann, George Grosz and John Heartfield it presented 180 works by 32 artists in Berlin and Bergius along major works in the exhibition explains how the artists tried to destroy the hypocrisy of the middle classes by their own means. Grosz’s „Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen“ (1917-19), Dix’s cripple parade „45% Erwerbsfähig!“ (1920) or Johannes Baader’s assemblage „Deutschland Größe und Untergang...“ (1920) held up a mirror to the German society, its militarism, the magnates capitalizing on exploitative employment and its nationalism. Bergius also discusses the exhibition’s reception and shows how it mirrored cultural conservatism and foreshadowed later denouncements as „degenerate art“.
With its particular focus on the political in Dada „Unlock your heads at last!“ shows how artistic radicalism, creativity and savageness resulted in a powerful commentary social circumstances that still resonates today.
