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Considered by many as anti-art and scandal-happy, the Dada movement shook up the art world in the early part of the 20th century but has since been largely forgotten, overshadowed by Surrealism.
The Pompidou Centre's Dada exhibition, the first in France for a generation, restores the rebellious movement to a place in the collective memory and also attempts to show its multiple aesthetics as a creative rather than simply destructive force, a label with which the once world-sweeping phenomenon has often been saddled.
Born during the first world war, the movement had a strong pacifist streak and believed that a civilisation embroiled in mass killing and destruction deserved contempt. All western values were questioned. The rules no longer held any truth, whether in politics or art. Hence, the artist's job was to destroy the old assumptions to make way for the new.
Among the most prominent of the Dadaists was Marcel Duchamp, whose L.H.O.O.Q., showing the Mona Lisa with moustache and beard, is the exhibition's signature piece. By irreverently defacing the da Vinci masterpiece, Duchamp was thumbing his nose at western civilisation.
Likewise, his Fountain (below), a urinal with a bit of black paint, created a stir. Who, after all, was the artist? Duchamp or the manufacturer of the urinal?
The artist, of course, Dadaists replied. Reacting to the advent of the assembly line and technological developments, Dadaists believed it was more than fair game to incorporate industrial-made objects into art - it was a necessity.