Japan and Japanese Aggression, 1930-1939

Weimar Republic

OPTIONAL ASSIGNMENT - Art in the Interwar Years

Look at the slides below to learn a little bit about Dada Art.  Then there are instructions at the bottom for how to make your own Dada-style poem.

How to write Dada poetry 

(instructions taken from https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/dada/word-play/) 

Make Poetry with Chance

In 1920, one of the founding members of Dada, Tristan Tzara, wrote instructions for making a Dada poem, leaving the responsibility of selecting words and communicating ideas up to chance rather than the artist. Here are Tzara’s instructions:

TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

Follow Tzara’s instructions to make your own Dadaist poems from one or two paragraphs of a newspaper article. Write down three poems composed with this method. Read them aloud and reflect on the following: What are your favorite or least favorite word combinations? What is the effect of reading words that have been put together without logic?

You could even make this easier if you found a website or an app that would automatically scramble the words for you.  Then all you need to do is put in line breaks and punctuation.  However, I find the act of cutting and flipping the words to be kind of interesting, because then you know whether you're going to pick a long word or short word, etc.  But it's up to you.

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