Zurich Marks Beginnings Of Dada Movement

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30978, 7 February 1966, Page 13

Zurich Marks Beginnings Of Dada Movement

(N Z.P A.-Reuter—Copyright} ZURICH, Feb. 6. Mayor Emil Landolt, of Zurich, last nUht unveiled a plaque showing a human navel to mark the beginning of the Dida anti-art movement in the city 50 years ago. But, true to the spirit of dada. the occasion was not taken seriously. The Mayor leaned out of a window in the old house where it all began, to tell a

huge crowd packed into a narrow street about the background of dada. But after a few sentences he was interrupted by the blaring of a dada band and the drumming of tomtoms. Creaking noises came from the window of a house across the seven-foot wide street where Lenin is supposed to have lived before the Russian Revolution. Dada was named by the! Rumanian-born French poet, I Tristan Tzara, who opened a|

dictionary at random and picked the first word he saw. It was “dada”, the French word for a hobby-horse—both a child’s toy and an adult’s obsession. The dada movement gave rise to surrealism, which made positive use of dada principles and sought- to organise the images thrown up 'from the subconscious mind, i Dada’s spirit is still alive i today in many manifestations I from American pop art to the | “theatre of the absurd.”