The Dada revolutions

Posted on by February 10, 2010 by Daniel Daboczy - Editor in chief

Without Dada there would be no surrealism, no fluxus, no pop art, no video art, no punk, no performance art, no slam poetry, no conceptual art.

It’s hard to grasp or to imagine what the world would be without the meetings at Cabaret Voltaire at the beginning of the last century. These meetings witch eventually come to stand as symbols to the changes in society and to experiments and movements in the art world, witch have led us to today’s conceptual and contemporary art scene. What would the art world look like without the birth of Dada? This anti-art witch not only changed the expectations of what art could be but also most importantly opened the doors for what art could become.

It occurs to me that the famous Romanian revolution from 1989, the first televised live revolution ever, is like the first Dada – meetings. This revolution is in its form very similar to the birth of Dada. It also sprung out of a frustration towards the existing society, it also started in closed underground meetings and it also started as a chaotic reaction without clear course or direction, only with a kind of utopian dream of freedom and change. But most importantly what they both managed to accomplish is that they opened the doors to what one and society could become.

And even if history is full of these kinds of events, events witch have changed the entire world, it’s still quite hard to pinpoint exact dates or places where one meeting or one group changed history. Personally I can remember to the day, when I first met Dada. When I first realized that everything could be possible. Because Dada for me is of course an art-movement, but most importantly it’s a state of mind, it always was. A way to be. It’s actually a kind of key to everything that might be. It opens up to every possibility imaginable. I can go so far as calling it the perfect kind of freedom.
And I am quite sure that the meetings at Cabaret Voltaire almost a hundred years ago, the meetings led by exiled Romanians where for the simple purpose to change the state of mind. In every way possible!

/ Daniel Daboczy