A hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for someone to conceive of going to a museum or an art gallery and seeing a urinal turned upside-down and signed with the fictitious name “R. Mutt.” This is Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp, produced in 1917. It was rejected from the exhibition for the Society of Independent Artists after a vigorous debate about whether or not it was, in fact, art. However, now, there’s no question—of course it’s art. So is a canvas, painted white, by Robert Ryman. A shark floating in a 23-ton glass tank of formaldehyde, by Damien Hirst. Iconic movements of today have their roots in a movement spearheaded by men like Duchamp: Dadaism.
Dadaism came into being exactly a century ago in Switzerland, where a group of painters, sculptors, poets, and other artists, disillusioned with World War One and the fervent nationalism that it had encouraged, met in the Cabaret Voltaire. There, they decided to fight the status quo that had been brought about by bourgeois society in the early 20th century. In order to do this, they were willing to ask uncomfortable questions that no one had before considered: what is the role of the artist? what is and what is not art? These kinds of questions are a major premise of Dadaist philosophy and have influenced numerous famous movements such as abstract expressionism and conceptual art. Indeed, a hundred years later, one can see the vestiges of Dadaism in modern politics.
No one agrees on how the name originated. Some believe that it originated from the Romanian word for yes (“da”), repeated multiple times for sarcastic emphasis by some Romanian Dadaists like Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco (sort of like how we say “yeah, yeah”). The more widely accepted theory, however, is that someone selected it at random from a French-German dictionary. In French, it means “hobbyhorse,” and it also common as a universal baby-talk word. These suggestions of childishness and naivete appealed to the Dadaists, who wanted to separate themselves from the rigidity of society.
A urinal certainly didn’t conform to societal formality, and it wasn’t considered art by many critics of the period. Fountain is an example of a ready-made, which is an everyday object that is stripped from its usual setting, slightly modified—though not always—and presented as art. It violated all precedents concerning its production and presentation. A mere thirty years earlier, John Singer Sargent was embroiled in one of art’s biggest scandals when he depicted a woman with only one shoulder strap on her dress in Madame X. However, what Duchamp was implying had much deeper implications than the image of an aristocratic woman who might have just had sex. The title evokes images of ornate fountains designed by great Renaissance or Baroque sculptors and mocks them. However, it was and still is difficult to defend the proposition that Fountain is not art. There is no operational definition of art. In 2004, a poll of 500 art critics named Fountain the most influential piece of art of the 20th century.
The reason for which pieces like Fountain are seen as so influential is clear in modern society. Dadaism is perhaps one of the most significant inspirations of other famous movements like surrealism and pop art. Pieces in almost every major art museum have found inspiration in Dadaism.
However, outside of the museum, Dadaist ideas have remained entrenched in our minds whether we consciously acknowledge it or not. Recently, the anti-establishmentarian view of government bureaucracy and aristocracy that took hold in 1916 has caught on in the minds of thousands of Americans. The popularity of candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump is mainly the result of mistrust in government and a new desire to redefine politics. As time progresses, we will perhaps see that the nature of politics in America will change, much as the nature of art was completely altered by Dadaism a hundred years ago.