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Knowledge Mushohwe
Dadaism, a cultural movement that was born during the war and matured after the fall of the Nazi regime, was a direct protest against human suffering, propagating the idea of rejecting what passes off as rationality in both art and the wider society. Dadaism was a direct confrontation against the ideals of society and a rejection of set standards.

With it nothing was ever right or downright wrong; the boundaries of sagacity were replaced by open-mindedness laced with negative energy.

The art part of Dadaism still arouses interest today, some seven decades after it passed the baton to other art movements, most notably, its cousin, surrealism.

Other art principles and movements, including simultaneism, futurism, ultraism and paroxysm may have had similar if not greater impact, but Dadaism still bares the same fascination today as when it first started off.

There are two reasons why Dadaism has had greater impact than other art movements — it initiated and moulded a new exploration of the fragment form, and it rejected language’s role as the ultimate, universal organised system of communication.

Dadaism did not work in isolation to promulgating ideas at odds with societal expectations, a theoretical manifestation rooted in works from the mid 1800s more than justified the works of the irrational artists.

Nihilism, derived from the Latin word ‘nihil’ meaning ‘nothing’, started off as a total rejection of political and religious establishments, then eventually the disavowal of the traditional values of family or any organizational structures within society.

Nihilists’ line of thinking mirrored that of the modern terrorist, declaring that the socially acceptable societal structures were so bad and unacceptable that destroying them was somehow enviable for their own sake.

Nihilism sought to play God, like anarchists justifying total destruction as some sort of good omen for the world.
Rather unfortunately, Nihilism is surrounded by moods of despair, a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness and a misguided sense that life finally comes to an end in the nothingness of death.

Armed with relativism and subjectivism, Nihilism suggests that moral norms and what can be passed off as the truth can neither be vindicated nor be verified, subtracting all basis of making a distinction between right and wrong, and by extension, good and evil.

The Dada movement principally rejected all social, moral and aesthetic norms while proclaiming that the only ‘real’ entity in the world was the chaos created by the war.

The terrible effects of the First World War provided the backdrop for Dadaists to tell society that the world was without reason as they shared ideas around absurdity, anti-reason, anti-patriotism, anti-aestheticism, and anti-bourgeoisism.

Marcel Duchamp, the Dada artist who famously exhibited a urinal under the title ‘The Fountain’, also created a peculiar oil and wire on glass composition called, ‘The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors’

Though the latter was damaged in transit on its way to the exhibition, none of its aesthetic appeal was lost because the standards previously employed to evaluate artworks were not applicable here.

Other Dadaists simply and randomly threw paints and other objects on flat or uneven surfaces as their expression of purposelessness and irrationality.

Two other artists Morton Schamberg and Elsa Loringhoven went further by fusing a miter box with plumbing equipment and labeling their work, ‘God’.

Dadaists and Nihilists can to some extent be excused for thinking so little about life and the world in general.
The war had such a terrible impact on both the artists and the society around them that pessimism could be afforded just a little justification.

Nonetheless they were dead wrong because they did not count on societal systems repairing themselves, evolving and working well for humankind.

The world may not be perfect, it may be downright unfair to some but its total destruction, or celebration and promotion of chaos has never sounded like a solution.

Interestingly, a hint of Nihilism can be seen today in political cartoons appearing in Zimbabwe’s privately-owned newspapers.
A rejection of the status quo, and abhorrence of the opposition and a sense of hopelessness for the future dominates political commentary in the so-called independent newspapers.

Such compositions look and sound questionable and susceptible to criticism particularly because they do not mirror prevailing socio-political patterns in the country.

If for example Zanu-PF leaders are so bad and unfit to govern, how to they manage to get so many votes?
It also becomes pointless to declare that the country is doomed with a Zanu-PF government when every statistic shows that the economy is getting better and the electorate is willing to provide a seal of approval again and again.

The newspapers and their staff have been saying Zimbabwe has no future with Zanu-PF for years and years and they will probably continue to say the same as more ‘futures’ come and go.

Tristan Tzara, a Romanian Dada poet whose ideas helped lay the foundation of the movement, remarked in 1922, “Dada draws no conclusion, no pride, no benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the realization that it’s no use, that all this doesn’t matter. What interests a Dadaist is his own mode of life… Like everything else, Dada is useless.”

The statement sounds like a part of a suicide note but he was partly right.
In a world where rationality has proved its significance, Dadaism may well be a good point of discussion, but as a way of life, as values to live by, it is truly useless.