The Dadaist and Cubist art movements are clearly radical forms of opposition to traditional forms of art: in this, they share a commonality. However, at the same time, Dadaist and Cubist art possess their own logic of transgression and antagonism.
In the case of Dadaism, their rejection of traditional art appears to be more radical: in part a reaction, according to most art historians, to the atrocities of the First World War, Dadaism reflects a desire to reject all values held by a society that could produce such a catastrophe. Accordingly, the scope of Dadaism’s intervention into art is limitless: it is not only an engagement with painting, but with all forms of visual art, as well as the written word. Cubism, when compared to Dadaism, despite its own radicality, seems almost tame as compared to Dadaism’s rejection of traditional art: Cubism in this respect recalls a form of experimentation with the potentials of painting. Abstraction in Cubism is what is decisive, as Cubism appears to be more of an affirmation of the potentialities of painting than the nihilism and despair of Dadaism.
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This difference can be made more lucid when considering archetypical works of both genres: from Cubism, Georges Braque’s “Fruit Dish and Glass” and from Dadaism, Hannah Hoch’s “Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany.” The former work takes a traditional subject of painting, the still life, and then distorts it through the lens of Cubism. The fruit dish and glass are in a way deconstructed through the Cubism’s emphasis on basic or primary forms that are somehow inherent to all that we perceive. As opposed to a rejection of traditional art themes, Braque’s work expresses a desire to approach them from a new perspective according to a specific conceptual language. Cubism, in this sense, is a play of perspectives that unleashes new potentials regarding how we can aesthetically approach traditional subject matters for artists. The latter, in contrast, presents the nihilistic streak of Dadaism. As opposed to a new perspective, Hoch’s work overflows the senses, annihilating any consistent perspective. The use of collage in the work throws together a heterogeneous series of images to create a singular piece of art. Hoch’s work links together seemingly unrelated objects and ideas: by placing them out of their context, this arguably challenges their very meaning. This is the antagonistic side of Dadaism, its overthrowing of bourgeois values, that is lacking in the more experimental approach of Cubism.
Russian Constructivism historically emerges bound to a precise politico-ideological context, that of communism. To the extent that communism is a bold utopian project in direct antagonism with the bourgeois world order that thrives on class conflict, communism, as the resolution of class conflict through the abolition of classes, carries the aim of eliminating any traces of the previous world-view. This extends to art: a new form of art, free of bourgeois class influences, must be developed for the proletariat. The Constructivists’ work aims to fulfill precisely this objective. Rodchenko’s “Hanging Construction” is thus immediately striking in its novelty, but also its clear reference to proletarian motifs. In Rodchenko’s work, we can see a question being asked: what should be the new subject of proletarian art? Unable to resort to bourgeois tropes, Rodchenko goes to the image of the proletariat itself. The hanging construction, presented as art, recalls objects from the factory, symbolizing class struggle and a new world. The metallic bluntness of the object aims to subvert bourgeois conceptions of beauty: the proletariat is also capable of having his own aesthetic language.
Dali, emerging from the surrealist movement, has an entirely different source of inspiration: the surrealists take the psychology of Freud and the theme of the unconscious as its point of departure. Crucial to Freud’s theory is the notion that the unconscious is continually suppressed by society: it is a fantastical and often horrific world that must be repressed. Accordingly, the aim of the surrealists becomes to unleash precisely this unconscious world. Dali’s “Accomodations of Desire” almost resembles the unconscious being cracked open and displayed to the world: the bizarre nature of the images, from the lion’s head to various distorted and almost monstrous humanoid figures, shows the disconnected and unruly world of the unconscious. In this sense, a work such as Dali’s becomes almost therapeutic in the psychoanalyst sense of the term: opening the unconscious to the conscious level through art confronts the viewer with that which the viewer himself suppresses. This is a world that resembles our own, but one that is at once entirely different, operating in line with its own irrational logic of desire.
