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“Dada doubts everything.” (Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love, p. 7)
The word Dada is the French word for a rocking horse. Searching for a name for their fledgling movement, they threw open a dictionary and pointed to the first word they saw. They chose the name randomly to mirror their belief in irrationality, chance and the ultimate futitlity of life.
They created works using chance and irrationality. They wrote poems from pieces of newspaper chosen randomly or by picking words out of a hat. They displayed everyday objects as art.
“Dada carried to its logical conclusion the notion that everything has come about by chance; the result was the final absurdity of everything, including humanity.” (Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? p. 199)
The best representative of Dada is Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). In 1913, Duchamp exhibited a bicycle wheel turned upside down and mounted on a kitchen stool. “The Bicycle Wheel… had more to do with the idea of chance. It was simply letting things go by themselves. To set the wheel turning was very soothing…it reminded me of the movement of flames.” (Marcel Duchamp, Apropos of Readymades)
This was the first of what came to be known as readymades, ordinary objects made into art simply by exhibiting them as art. His most famous readymade was a urinal entitled Fountain and signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt.
 “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it, and thereby created a new thought for that object.” (Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Microsoft Encarta® Reference Library)
Duchamp retired from art in 1923 to play chess and to create an occasional piece of art.
Dada led to the art movement known as Surrealism.
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