chance

Skeptical of reason in the wake of the war, dadaists turned to chance as an antidote. The random and the accidental offered a way of letting go of conscious control. "The 'law of chance,'" Hans Arp wrote, "can be experienced only in a total surrender to the unconscious." Using chance as a technique for making works of art also presented a critique of the traditional notion of artistic mastery and technical excellence. Artistic creation was no longer firmly in the control of the artist, but instead was instead given over to arbitrary decisionmaking.