The Dada anti-art movement emerge in the latter years of World War 1. Outraged at the world that produced World War 1, the rationality to justify the war and the industrial capitalism that promoted the war, Dadaism exploded on the art stage.
The Dada movement was composed of painters, filmmakers, photographers, writers, performance artists, sculpture artists and puppeteers who demanded an artistic alternative to the art and rationality of a world that produced World War 1. They wanted to challenge any thought or action that contributed to the horror of WW1. Spontaneous eruption was preferred to the calculated creative process of existing art. This eruption was a wave of negative design against the existing societal customs and artistic conventions they thought were the foundation of an immoral and murderous society and government. Against this corrupted rationality there could only be an onslaught of absurdity in every form of artistic expression.
The Dadaists were a burning flame from about 1916 to 1924 but they were influential in the Surrealist movement that sprang up after them and even later in the late 20th Century. The 1960's saw the rise of the Pop Art movement looking like a reformed Dadaist art movement.
The Dada movement created chaos in the art world and that chaos was also a whirlwind of liberating creativity released from narrow confines of the acceptable art world. Dada redefined what art could be and became a force of freedom against every type of culture and government that was always trying to shape the artistic expression into a propaganda tool of conformity and obedience.