Nuts and bolts

Absurd art, poetry made up of incomprehensible language or scrappily concocted picture collages. Dadaism or Dada, showed something unique to the world, and gave it a voice, at the start of the 20th century. We can still find traces of the movement to this day, including in the design of chess sets.

When World War I broke out in 1914, the world changed. Wars were not infrequent, but the scale of this one was unprecedented. New weapons and techniques, such as poison gasses, caused an unimaginable number of deaths amongst soldiers as well as citizens. Politicians ignored criticism of their way of warfare, with its trenches and young boys used as meek cannon fodder. Germany and its comrades as well as the allied forces were convinced the war would end soon. They were wrong. Four years later, half of Europe was ruined financially as well as emotionally and millions of lives were lost. For this reason the participating countries ended up calling it the Great War, after it had ended.

Youth against the regime
During this Great War, groups of young artists used absurd writings and unconventional art to oppose the ruling regime. Many –mainly- young Germans and French men fled to the impartial Switzerland, fearing they would be drafted for the war otherwise. In 1916, a movement came into being in Zurich, for which these men invented the word ´dada´. This baby sound expressed their aversion to the war and the traditional society in which they lived. The Dadaists were not a homogeneous group and the movement varied from city to city. In Switzerland they acted in absurd performances that left their spectators outraged. Soon the audience expected these absurdities though, and the Dadaist concept didn´t work anymore.

In the end, Dadaism didn´t live to see more than six years. From Zurich, the movement spread out to the rest of Europe and the United States. In New York, the visual arts were the most important form of expression, contrary to the more textual Dadaists in Europe. Dadaist artists used very normal, everyday materials to create completely different and unusual projects and turn them into an art form.

After its official downfall in 1921, Dadaism´s power did not disappear. As a reaction to the new mass production of chess games, artists started to experiment with the traditional shapes of chess pieces. Josef Hartwig, a German visual artist of the Business Schools, was one of the first to experiment. In 1923 he designed the Bauhaus chess set, focussing on the functionality of the chess pieces instead of their aesthetics.

So very normal, yet so very odd
The concept of creating unusual projects out of everyday materials or resources, the essence of Dadaism, affected the design of chess games. The Chessmen Museum is home to a chess set made in Germany, in which nuts and bolts have been used to create chess pieces. This idea was repeated more than once throughout the 20th century, again by the visual artists of New York, who were inspired by Dadaism. Chess, which is a mental exercise, couldn´t be more unlike building materials and therefore has nothing to do with nuts and bolts at all. Creating new objects out of these traditional materials, with no reference to their original function, is typically Dada.

By Marjolein Overmeer