Dada Movement/Jean Tinguely

Dada (or Dadaism) was a cultural movement in the arts (visual art, literature, theater, etc.) that began during World War I. It began in Zurich, Switzerland, which was a neutral country, and was most active between 1916 and 1920. Dadaism was a rejection of the standards in art at the time. They used their art for politics by creating "anti-war" art. According to Wikipedia, Dada was (I really can't explain it as well as it is explained here):

• 
  "...a protest against the barbarism of World War I,
• the bourgeois interests that Dada adherents believed inspired the war, and
• what they believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society.

Dada was an international movement, and it is difficult to classify artists as being from any one particular country, as they were constantly moving from one place to another.
Dada thought that reason and logic had led people into the horrors of war, so the only route to salvation was to reject logic and embrace anarchy and irrationality. However, this could also be thought of as the logical side of anarchy and rejection of values and order; it is not irrational to embrace the systematic destruction of values, if one thinks them to be flawed.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art — it was "anti-art". It was anti-art in the sense that Dadaists protested against the contemporary academic and cultured values of art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art were to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning — interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada is to offend.

Ironically, Dada became an influential movement in modern art, a commentary on order and the carnage Dadaists believed it wreaked. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics they hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics."

Jean Tinguely was a Swiss artist involved in the Dada movement. His philosophy was that, "though machines made of scrap metal have no purpose they can have a meaning." (http://www.swissworld.org/eng/swissworld.html?siteSect=605&sid=4046359&rubricId=14050)

It is also important to note that Dada was an influence in the emergence of Surrealism (Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti) and Pop Art (Andy Warhol (see photos in blog), Jasper Johns (see photos in blog), Robert Rauschenberg, and Takashi Murakami - I know I saw something by each in my museum visits!).