Dada vs Lettrism
ダダ / レトリスム
Dada comes from Avant-garde and Lettrism from Experimental Typography. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Dada
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Deliberately dislocates meaning and order, making authority itself the material of the joke.
Lettrism
A Paris-born movement that freed the letter from its duty of carrying meaning, treating sound and shape themselves as the material of the work. From surfaces paved with unreadable characters, to hypergraphy's proliferating signs, to marks scratched directly into film stock, it expanded the experiment of handling letters as physical matter.
| Dada | Lettrism | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1916–1920s | 1946–1970s |
| Family | Avant-garde | Experimental Typography |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Rotated type / Fragments of sound / Collisions of scale / Unbalanced margins | Surfaces paved with unreadable characters / Handwriting mixed with type / Hypergraphy of proliferating signs / Letters handled as painterly material |
| Best used for | Cultural events and statements that doubt common sense · Making voice, noise and collision come before meaning | Experimental type specimens and title sequences where letterforms are pure texture · Music and poetry scene printing and covers shown as density rather than reading |
| Type | Collide weights, directions and cases in one plane | Invented alphabets, asemic glyphs and salvaged type mixed without hierarchy |
| Composition | Keep one reading path; rotate and sever the rest | All-over fields of signs with no reading path; density itself is the composition |
| Material | Letterpress black, red, off-white; bind the accidents with repetition | Ink, paint and scratched film or paper—letters applied as physical marks |
| Caution | Not decorative messiness. Decide which authority or custom you are objecting to. | Laying out unreadable letters as decoration alone drops the claim and leaves pattern. One legible word left in the field reinstates the meaning the work exists to suspend. |