Neo-Dada

Neo-Dada was an art movement that included audio, visual and literary forms. It shared ways and goals with the earlier Dada movement. This style mixed fun, iconoclasm, and appropriation in its works.

In the United States, the term Neo-Dada became well-known through Barbara Rose in the 1960s. It mainly described artworks from that time and the decade before. The movement also had an international reach, particularly in Japan and Europe, and helped start other art forms like Fluxus, Pop Art, and Nouveau réalisme.

Artists working in Neo-Dada often used modern materials and popular images. They reacted against the strong personal feelings found in Abstract Expressionism. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, they rejected traditional ideas about what makes something beautiful or aesthetics.

Trends

More people became interested in the original Dada art style after books like Robert Motherwell’s The Dada Painters and Poets (1951) came out. Some of the original Dada artists did not like the name Neo-Dada. They thought it just copied their ideas without making anything new.

Artists like Piero Manzoni created strange artworks, such as signing an egg with his thumbprint. Others used everyday objects in new ways. Richard Stankiewicz made sculptures from scrap materials, and Jean Tinguely built machines that fell apart on purpose. Robert Rauschenberg made “combines,” like a painted quilt on a wall. Arman showed groups of everyday things like dice and bottle tops. Daniel Spoerri glued used meals to tables and hung them on walls.

Poems

In the Netherlands, poets linked to the magazine Barbarber used everyday items like newspaper ads and typewriter test sheets to find poetry. Writers in Belgium, such as C.B. Vaandrager, Hans Verhagen, and Armando, filled another magazine with daily conversations and word games. They thought a poet's job was to show interesting parts of normal life, not to make up new stories.

Artists in the Dutch Nul group, like Jan Schoonhoven, aimed for a style without personal feelings. They showed parts of the world in a simple way, focusing on reality. This style shared ideas with Pop Art and avoided strong personal feelings. Concrete Poetry and text mixing also used ideas from earlier artists like Raoul Hausmann and H.N. Werkman.

Main article: Dutch Nul group
Main articles: Concrete Poetry, Wiener Gruppe

Artists linked with the term

Many artists were connected with the Neo-Dada movement. Some of them include Genpei Akasegawa, Arman, Joseph Beuys, Jaap Blonk, Lee Bontecou, George Brecht, John Cage, César, John Chamberlain, Christo, Merce Cunningham, Jim Dine, Jacques Halbert, Dick Higgins, Kommissar Hjuler, Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Yves Klein, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Piero Manzoni, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Neo-Dada Organizers, Robin Page, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle, Ushio Shinohara, Daniel Spoerri, Richard Stankiewicz, Jean Tinguely, Jacques Villeglé, Wolf Vostell, and Masunobu Yoshimura. These artists used fun and surprising ways to make art feel more like everyday life.