Dada and Surrealism: Where Two Art Movements Meet

Introduction: Two Movements, One Lineage

Distinct artistic movements, genres, and philosophies, Dada and Surrealism do cross over and share considerable points of reference. Dada made its mark on the art world first, with its genesis in Switzerland during the First World War ("Dada and Surrealism" 1). Dada was never constrained by visual media, with poets and performance artists at the forefront of the largely political and reactive movement ("Dada and Surrealism" 1). To call Dada avant-garde, or progressive, would be an understatement, because Dada transformed the ways people thought about and created art. Art was no longer about creating aesthetic beauty or pleasing a patron, but about actively challenging social norms, politics, and even what it means to be human. Dada art can be provocative, but is not necessarily so, with some artists using their medium to question and even "humiliate" art itself (Rubin 11). The politics of Dada have been dubbed "anarchic," but are just as much ironic given the anti-art and anti-establishment sentiments brewing within its artistic circles in Europe (Papanikolas 1). Dada laid the groundwork for several other artistic movements that followed, including Surrealism.

Surrealism has a definitive starting point: the publication of André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. With Breton's manifesto, Surrealism quickly became known as a more "programmatic" and formal movement compared to its looser precursor in Dada (Rubin 12). Breton begins his definition by explaining the core elements of Surrealism—its emphasis on dream states and the subconscious or unconscious mind, and an acknowledgement of profound discontent with materialism and mundane, established reality: "Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way" (Breton 1). Far less political in tone and focus than Dada, Surrealism drew far more heavily from the prevailing research in psychology and psychoanalysis ("Dada and Surrealism" 1). Yet like Dada, Surrealism was also about the absurd and especially about locating absurd paradoxes in human existence. Dada focused a little more on absurdities in social and political life, including within the art community, while Surrealism focused more on the peculiarities of the human imagination and altered states of consciousness. Both movements have survived, planting seeds that have flourished across several other genres and eras.

Philosophical Foundations and Historical Contexts

Both Dada and Surrealism have the capacity to be conceptual, using media to convey a message that goes beyond the sum of its visual parts. Yet surrealist artists do aim for an aesthetic harmony that is evident in works by Magritte and Dalí. It is almost as if Dada seeks to destroy, and Surrealism seeks to put the pieces back together again—albeit in an unconventional, illogical, psychedelic, or phantasmagorical way. There seems to be more anger embedded in Dada work than in surrealist art. Both movements were products of their times, embedded firmly in their social, political, and historical contexts. World War I and its extreme violence initially gave rise to Dada, which was also influenced by Marxist theory and nihilist philosophy ("Dada and Surrealism" 1). Surrealism emerged as the artistic counterpart and synthesis of the flourishing of psychoanalysis, spiritualism, and secular humanism during and after World War II (Ades and Gale 1). The turning inward of psychoanalysis and the Jungian dream landscape characterized Surrealism, making it an inadvertent predecessor to the psychedelic counterculture movement of the 1960s. Dada, by contrast, tended to be more extraverted, concerned with political, social, and economic institutions and their implications for human potential.

Neither Dada nor Surrealism would make overt, literal statements about war or the human mind. Dada was not protest art, even if it sprang from the visceral wellspring of horrors that reverberated during and after the total war era. Similarly, surrealist art was not made to pander to psychoanalysts or to serve as a counterpart to psychoanalytic techniques. Artists like Duchamp, Dalí, Miró, and Magritte manipulated materials in ways that empowered the viewer to take a more active role in perceiving art and to allow art to be a catalyst for individual and collective change. Their audiences may have seemed limited at the time, but their goal was to reach deep into the recesses of the global mind and change the ways all people view and interact with art. The use of non-Western or pre-industrial elements as symbols in early twentieth-century art did not represent a romanticizing of those civilizations, especially when viewed through the biased European eye. Rather, the goal was to show that the presumed superiority of European civilization rests on false premises.

Breaking Boundaries: Multimedia, Readymades, and Iconoclasm

Dada and Surrealism both broke the boundaries of what constitutes "art," not only in terms of employing multimedia techniques and methods in their visual constructions, but also by including non-visual art forms such as literature, performance, music, and poetry. The range of installations, collages, and assemblages produced by both movements is alone remarkable. There are no strict boundaries or provisions for either Dada or Surrealism, even though the latter did produce a manifesto. The artist is free to deliver a message, tell a story, or evoke an emotion in whatever way works best. Being unrestricted in execution meant that the variety and scope of work created during both movements is profound. There are no single defining visual features of either genre—only core philosophies. Those philosophies are similar in their ultimate goals and different in their means, methods, and focal points.

Both Dada and surrealist artists employed ordinary objects, known as "readymade" pieces, but Dada was practically defined by its use of such items. The most prolific and renowned readymade artist was Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp's portfolio spans genres far beyond the readymade and even beyond Dada, but with works like "Bottlerack," "Fountain," and "Bicycle Wheel," Duchamp definitively established himself as the de facto master of the readymade. Of these three works, "Bicycle Wheel" was the first to appear on the global art stage, in 1913. The titular object is positioned atop an ordinary stool, into which Duchamp constructed a functional hole allowing the wheel to perch and even be spun by the viewer. "Bottlerack" was completed in 1914, and "Fountain" in 1917. "Bottlerack" takes the concept of "Bicycle Wheel" a step further, because Duchamp does not modify the readymade item at all but simply places it before the viewer in a gesture of Dada iconoclasm and anti-art sentiment. Likewise, "Fountain" is a mere urinal, embellished only with a crass piece of bathroom graffiti: a man's name, "R. Mutt." All three epitomize the principle of the readymade in the Dada vocabulary: they are "man-designed, commercially produced, utilitarian objects endowed with the status of anti-art by Duchamp's selection and tilting of them" (Rubin 17). Perhaps Duchamp invites the viewer to contemplate the difference between the curves, materials, forms, and meaning of the readymade versus what typically passes for sculpture in art salons. More likely, given the Dada zeitgeist, Duchamp presents the readymade with a more poignant discursive intent: to force the viewer to question aesthetic norms and traditions, to challenge the role and purpose of art, and to see all lived objects in a new light.

No Duchamp work, and perhaps no other work at all, captures the iconoclasm of the Dada movement more than "L.H.O.O.Q." In this strangely named work, Duchamp does what had not been done effectively before: he boldly defaces one of the world's most famous and iconic paintings. Duchamp takes an image of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and draws a moustache on it in pencil. The act is certainly provocative, brash, and seemingly childish, but it is "more than just a Dada attack on high art" (Rubin 19). Rubin claims that Duchamp was "drawing attention to a sexual ambiguity in Leonardo's life and work" (19). Like Surrealism, Dada sometimes had a purpose beyond the airing of grievances about prevailing political or social affairs.

Duchamp, Man Ray, and the Overlap Between Dada and Surrealism

Altering classical works of art like the Mona Lisa became something of a trend in both Dada and Surrealism—one of the few clear visual, conceptual, and methodological points of commonality between the two movements. Sometimes the technique of altering famous works blurs the distinction between Dada and Surrealism altogether. Man Ray's work, for example, often straddles the boundary between the Dada and the surreal. His 1924 "Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres's Violin)" achieves something remarkably similar to what Duchamp does with "L.H.O.O.Q." Here, Man Ray takes Ingres's painting and adulterates it judiciously, drawing not a moustache but the cut-outs found on the body of a cello or violin. The result accentuates the curves of the female form, drawing the viewer's attention to the similarities between the female body and the instrument while also evoking erotic and sensual sentiments. Like Duchamp, Man Ray interjects questions about human sexuality through an unusual medium that draws on the pastiche of the past in a quintessentially postmodern manner. Man Ray did in fact collaborate with Duchamp on many occasions, and the two artists ended up fusing some of the methods of Dada and its iconoclasm with the psychoanalytic tendencies of Surrealism.

Conclusion: Art as a Tool for Consciousness

For the surrealist and the Dadaist alike, the acts of making and experiencing art function as tools toward the evolution of human consciousness or at least personal enlightenment. Whereas Dada is iconoclastic and confrontational first and foremost—especially in the work of Duchamp—Surrealism aims for a more personal, intuitive, emotional, or intellectual response. The goals, strategies, and art-making practices of these two groups of artists differ less than it may initially seem. Both aim to change the way people think about reality and human existence. Even if Dada demands a new insight into material life and Surrealism into psychic life, both use art as a tool and not as an end in itself. The inherent beauty in even the most aesthetically pleasing Dalí or Miró composition is not the end goal of the art, but a pleasing side effect.

The word "beauty" appears only once in Breton's Manifesto. Beauty is valuable insofar as it achieves the greater goal of thinking, feeling pleasure, or learning something new—but beauty is not circumscribed by conventions, norms, and rules. It took Dada to directly confront beauty norms in art, by radically deconstructing the physical, formative, and conceptual elements of the art world. Surrealism picked up the pieces torn asunder by Dada and used them as the alphabet for a new visual language—the self-same visual language of the dream or hallucination.

Works Cited

Ades, Dawn, and Matthew Gale. "Surrealism Unlocked." Oxford Art Online. 2003. https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T082410

Breton, André. Manifesto of Surrealism. 1924. https://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm

"Dada and Surrealism." Oxford Art Online, 2018. http://www.oxfordartonline.com/page/dada-and-surrealism

Dalí, Salvador. "Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire." 1940.

Duchamp, Marcel. "Bicycle Wheel." 1913.

Duchamp, Marcel. "Bottlerack." 1914.

Duchamp, Marcel. "Fountain." 1917.

Duchamp, Marcel. "L.H.O.O.Q." 1919.

Man Ray. "Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres's Violin)." 1924.

Magritte, René. "La Condition Humaine." 1933.

Miró, Joan. "Dutch Interior I." 1928.

Papanikolas, Theresa. Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Rubin, William S. Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage. The Museum of Modern Art: Distributed by New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Conn., 1968.