My Dive into a Dadaism Pioneer
So, I heard about this "dadaism pioneer" thing a while back and figured, why not see what all the fuss was about? Sounded kind of artsy and rebellious, you know? I thought maybe I could get some cool ideas or something. Big mistake, or maybe not, depends how you look at it.
I started by looking up some of these pioneers. Guys like Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp. I watched some videos, read a few articles, tried to get my head around what they were doing. They were all about breaking rules, being anti-art, making noise, that kind of stuff. Sounded fun at first. I saw they were doing things like making poems by pulling words out of a hat. Seriously, that was a thing. Someone would cut up a newspaper article, chuck the words in a bag, pull 'em out one by one, and boom, that's your poem.
So, I thought, okay, I can do that. I got an old magazine, a pair of scissors, and a paper bag. I felt pretty cutting-edge, let me tell you. I snipped out a bunch of words, shook the bag like I was making a cocktail, and then started pulling them out. The first "poem" I made went something like: "The... then... cat... for... shiny... under... maybe." Profound, right? I tried a few more times. Each one was just a jumble of nonsense. It wasn't "aha, this is so random it's brilliant!" it was more like "well, that's five minutes I'm not getting back."
Then I looked at some of the visual art. Collages made of random scraps, everyday objects presented as art, like that urinal thing. I tried making a collage. I grabbed some old receipts, a bit of aluminum foil, a picture of a dog from a pet food ad, and glued it all onto a piece of cardboard. My kid took one look at it and asked if it was for the recycling bin. That kind of burst my Dada bubble.
It all got me thinking. Were these pioneers genuinely on to something, or were they just messing around and people decided it was genius later? It really reminded me of this one job I had a few years back. Not an art job, not even close. It was a regular office gig, super corporate, super boring. One day, the big boss decided we all needed to be more "innovative." So, they hired this consultant, a real smooth talker with a PowerPoint full of buzzwords.
- We had to do "icebreakers" that involved sharing our "spirit animal."
- Then we spent an entire afternoon in a stuffy conference room trying to build the tallest possible tower out of uncooked spaghetti and marshmallows. Spaghetti! And marshmallows! For a team of adults who were supposed to be, you know, working.
- The consultant kept yelling things like "Think outside the box!" and "Embrace the chaos!"
I remember sitting there, sticky marshmallow goo on my fingers, looking at our pathetic, leaning tower of pasta, and thinking, "This is the dumbest thing I have ever done." The whole day was a write-off. No great innovations came out of it. We just wasted a ton of spaghetti and everyone went back to their desks feeling slightly more cynical about "corporate creativity."
And that’s kind of how my Dadaism experiment felt. Like I was being told to embrace chaos and randomness, but it just felt forced and a bit silly, like that workshop. Maybe the original Dada pioneers were reacting to a world that felt as nonsensical as that spaghetti tower challenge. Maybe their chaos was a genuine response to the chaos around them, the wars, the stiff old traditions. But me, just cutting up magazines in my kitchen? It didn’t feel very pioneering. It felt like I was just making a mess.
So, my journey with this Dadaism pioneer stuff didn't exactly turn me into the next big thing in anti-art. I mostly just learned that some things that look easy are actually hard, and some things that look profound are maybe just... a bit random. And that sometimes, a pile of cut-up words is just a pile of cut-up words. Still, it was an experience, I guess. At least I didn't have to use any marshmallows this time.
