ABSTRACT
The evolution of Dada, first described by Roman Jakobson in 1921 in an essay of the same name, embraces the ‘destabilization of identity’ of the modern era.1
Migrations and immigrations, war and political upheaval coincided with the developing theories in relativity in philosophy and physics. Western man was unloosed from his empirical roots that over the course of centuries had been built on growth, capital and the exploitation of natural resources and human enslavement. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), perhaps the most renowned of his ‘Readymades’, presented not only a critique of mass consumption and manufacturing that obliterated the individualism of craft, but also challenged the viewer’s perception of reality itself within changing contexts. In their ‘traveling mode’ Duchamp’s reclaimed everyday objects became ‘art’ because he claimed it so, and with each reincarnation of their display, different exhibition sites, different forms (such as photography), they took on new meaning.
