You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a meme (typically humorous images that are spread around on the internet), but this print of the Mona Lisa here with a moustache drawn on it is actually from 1919, created by Marcel Duchamp only one year after the end of the First World War. It may just seem funny or just a bit quirky, but this piece was a part of a much wider revolutionary movement against the established order. Already before the First World War, people had begun to question long accepted truths in new radical ways, whether it was rejecting reason in favour of Freud’s theories on the unconscious mind, turning capitalism on its head by embracing communism or by depicting reality through Cubism. Yet all of these were still very much still theories in the world of pre-1914, something which would all change when the great powers of Europe went to war.
History is often seen as being separate to that of art by both historians and artists alike, though this assumption is not only incorrect but impedes us from gaining a greater insight into the past and human life generally. For these subjects are symbiotic, one helping us to understand the other. Many historians, however, tend to overlook the likes of art when it comes to understanding the past, preferring to instead observe sources that provide more concrete and unbiased evidence, such as those that have been written down. Yet what researchers, to their detriment, miss out on, is that art is an expression of a point in time, conveying emotions that words alone are frequently unable to transcribe. Statistics for instance, inform us that the First World War was a human catastrophe that left over 15 million dead and some 23 million wounded, but they don’t really tell us much else. Instead, we need something more, like art, if we are to get to grips with how such a calamity affected people emotionally.
Of course, many people don’t see the point in studying emotions, yet the way that people felt as a result of the misery inflicted by First World War is what chiefly lead to the world that we live in today. In that regard, whether artworks are an accurate interpretation of events is irrelevant because it is people’s emotions, often represented through art, that lead to change. Indeed, you could say that finding the ‘truth’ in history or art doesn’t matter. Instead, what’s perhaps more important is finding out how people questioned their own truths – and in the Europe of 1919 such quandaries were in abundance.
Following so much death and destruction after the war, millions of people, particularly in Europe, became disillusioned with their pre-war conceptions of how they should live and what they should consider to be true, whether it be notions of Empire, class hierarchies, capitalism, reason, or democracy. Intellectuals, politicians and everyday people began to question that if what had gone before 1914 was so good and rational, then how did it lead to the senseless mass slaughter of the trenches? Suddenly the radical theories that existed before the war didn’t seem so crazy after all and within just a few years new ideas of communism, fascism and anarchism were put into practice across continental Europe and China. Nevertheless, such active rejection of established truths had already begun to permeate deep into the arts during the war through the likes of Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball – who you could say were out to enlighten people through intense initial confusion.
Ball and Hennings, as were a few others around this time, were sick of how willing people were to continue to rationalise the war. In 1916 for instance, they both recited poems to a large crowd in total gibberish and as expected, the crows thought it was complete nonsense. This however, was a clear message – if you think this poetry to be irrational, then why do you so willingly rationalise the senseless of the war? In fact, so passionate was Ball when it came to espousing this sentiment that he even wrote a short manifesto titled ‘Dada’. Interestingly, in line with his irrational ethos, the title didn’t actually mean anything. That same year he also set up and released a magazine under the same name, ‘Dada’, that was filled with random collages, sculptures and drawings (you can download these historical magazines for free online if you want to get a better insight). It was the beginning of what became to be known as the Dada movement and though it only lasted until the mid-1920s, it was to prompt a wave of artistic irrationality, also loosely labelled as the ‘irrational art movement’, that continues to this day. *In that regard, if you want to see a great example of this kind of style in a modern setting, then I highly recommend visiting the works of collagists such as Rachel Hughes who appeared in Edition 8 of the Magazine.
In their attempt to discover a new reality, some artists, much like many of the present-day artists featured in this magazine, began to dig deep in their quest to discover a new reality. One person in particular, Giorgio de Chirico, who himself was a Dadaist, began to recreate city streets in a new more hallucinatory style, something which began to give other artists ideas. As mentioned earlier in the magazine, there was a literary fringe movement going on around this time known as automatic writing, which sought to access the author’s subconscious, or unconscious as it was also known, mind. A growing number of artists however, wanted to express this subconscious realm in more visual terms and some, such as Max Ernst, saw Chirico’s hallucinatory works as a source of inspiration – and so surrealism was born. At the time, surrealism was seen as incredibly revolutionary and counterpoint, as was the likes of expressionism, cubism and Dadaism was before it, to what art should be. Intriguingly, many still believe that there are fundamental truths when it comes to art and that things have to subsequently look a certain way in order to for them be considered art. Well, as you might have seen on in this page, if you’re one of these thinkers, then let me present to you an artwork that was just as shocking to people then as it is now.
Looking for a new and more radical way to prompt people into questioning society’s established ideals, Marcel Duchamp decided to take a leaf from Ball’s book, or magazine rather, by deciding to do what many Art historians signify as being the height of the era’s artistic irrationality. In a time where people were still just about getting their head around Van Gough’s expressionism, with all its colours and unrealistic depictions, Duchamp went ahead and put a urinal on display in Manhattan’s renowned 291 Art Gallery. It was shocking, but also evocative and made people question not only what they had thought to be art but also the truths they had come to accept in their own lives – and here lies a message we can all learn from.
I mean, should you accept something to be true just because it has been long established? After all, just because you are able to rationalise something, doesn’t necessarily mean that you should, as bear in mind that war, genocide, segregation, slavery and discrimination were all accepted truths at one point. In this sense, it’s perhaps worth remembering that life, in a manner that is no different to art, is subjective, so just because you believe something to be true, it doesn’t mean someone else will. Nevertheless, we humans seem to have a deep unwillingness to accept or realise this psychological fact; something which has not only closed us off from one another for centuries but has shut us away from having new life experiences as individuals. Hence what arguably matters isn’t truth but perspective - and a willingness to view something from a variety of different ones. Indeed, by querying what you may have long believed to be true then so might you discover a newfound appreciation not only for art but the world.
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