![]() ![]() Why is this? “The thing about Dada is that it’s not very good,” smiles Sharp. Unlike other avant-garde movements of the 20th century, Dada still exists on the periphery. A hundred years on, Tom hands potential new clients their own ‘Trickster Manifesto’ during initial meetings, although true to Dada “not everybody gets it.” We even-in the spirit of Hugo Ball-did a cut up of all the text from the previous year’s festival campaign and repurposed it, letting chance turn it into a new message.”Īnother classic Dada artefact was the manifesto, read out to unsuspecting audiences at events in Berlin, Zurich, and Paris, it was the movement’s way of directly criticising the bourgeoisie. In their branding work for the D&AD Festival 2016, Sharp applied the techniques of Dadaist poetry. “We created so many messages and statements and images about creativity that it became pointless to look for meaning or a definitive point of view. The Beautiful Meme, D&AD Festival Identity Tristin Tzara’s Unpretentious Proclamation is still shocking today, as a myriad font weights and sizes challenge our notions of good design. But out of the murk of jumbled typography and confused statements comes a sense of coherence and a challenge to values. In poetry by Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara, nonsense words are combined with empty statements to make poetry that looks and sounds downright bizarre. “The thing I liked about KLF, discordianism and Dada was this thread of challenging meaning, and the idea of the meaningless having meaning.” As a young writer, it was this that excited Sharp. Unique to Dada as an artistic movement is its relation to words instead images. But the approach of the Dadaists was a revelation to the outsider writer, and its discovery allowed him to marry the visual and the written word. Sharp spent his student days listening to British rave pastiche act The KLF and reading up on 1970s pseudo-religion ‘discordianism’. In 2014 Tom Sharp founded The Beautiful Meme, giving the London design scene a welcome injection of madness. There is one agency who have taken up the mantle. Its legacy proliferated throughout the art world, but despite an emphasis on the printed word and communication, it’s surprisingly rare to find graphic designers who cite the movement as an influence. It may look like jibberish written down, but read aloud it forms spectacular sounds that go beyond traditional understandings of language and meaning.ĭadaist poetry is one manifestation of a style that influenced artists from Jack Kerouac to Talking Heads. “Gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori,” begins Hugo Ball’s celebrated 1916 sound poem. ![]()
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