Dada In Art and Politics (LONG History)
boboroshi
Dada Text
compiled by boboroshi for the Church of Euthanasia;
sources listed at end of document under 'SOURCES'
(SOURCE 1)
Dada was not a movement added to all the other movements.
Rather it was an anti-movement which opposed not only all
the academicisms, but also all the avante-garde schools which
claimed to be releasing art from the limits which confined it.
Dada was a detonation of anger which showed itself in insults
and buffoonery. 'Dada began not as an art form, but as a disgust'
was Tristan Tzara's definition : disgust with a world racked by
war, with boring dogmas, with conventional sentiments, with
pedantry, and the art which did nothing but reflect this limited
universe. Dada was born in a neutral country at the height
of the war [WWI], and it appeared as a declaration of the
rights of fantasy. (p. 29)
Readings of phonetic or simultaneous poetry, performed in
horrific costumes and masks, hurled defiances at the public....
Dada had no programme, wanted nothing, thought nothing,
and created only with the intention of proving that creating
was nothing. In a mocking attack on systems, Tzara
proclaimed 'Pure Idiocy', and announced : 'Intelligent man
has become an absolutely normal type. The thing that we
are short of, that thing that is interesting now, the thing that is
rare because it possesses the anomalies of a precious being,
the freshness and the freedom of the great anti-man, that
thing is the *Idiotic*. Dada is using its strength to establish
the idiotic everywhere. Doing it deliberately. And is constantly
tending toward idiocy itself.'
Dada filled its statement with incoherence, on the grounds that
life itself is incoherent, and played havoc with art because art
lovers had lost the idea of art as a game. 'All pictorial or
plastic art is useless; art should be a monster which casts
servile minds into terror' was Tzara's cry in his 1918
Manifesto. (pp. 29-31)
[Marcel] Duchamp, the ascetic of non-sense, turned all his finds
into the result of an exercise in meditation. In fact, what he did
was not exactly anti-art, but what he described as 'dry art', by
which he meant an art from which every aesthetic sentiment,
even emotion or judgement, was excluded. 'The worst danger is
that one might arrive at a form of *taste*, he said; to avoid both
good and bad taste, he set about the 'dehumanization' of art. To
this end he used 'the irony of affirmation', in which he put
forward, with a glacial wit, absurd propositions intended to
disturb rather than to provoke laughter....
Duchamp tried to destroy traditional ideas of painting and
sculpture by employing plays on words and plays on objects.
Sometimes he put forward entirely unprecedented creations....
Sometimes he defined new art forms.... He sought the
collaboration of chance, and submitted his work to the 'regime
of coincidence'. Beyond this, he examined the way in which a
common object could become something rare by the addition of
some personal detail. This he called the readymade.... Although
he could have turned out any number of readymades, Duchamp
established a strict rule - 'Limit the number of readymades per
year' - and used a kind of moral algebra in their selection : 'to
dissociate the readymade, mass produced, from the invented -
this dissociation is an operation'. (p. 34-8)
Many surrealist principles were certainly developed during the
Dada period. For instance, the printed *papillons*, wall stickers,
appeared first in 1920.... In 1920, too, we see the establishment
of the principle of 'intervention' in the meetings of opponents.
The dadaists burst in on a lecture by the former futurist Marinetti,
who was trying to launch 'tactilism', a movement based on touch,
with works intended to be fondled and caressed. They disturbed
the first production of *Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel* (1921) by
Jean Cocteau, whom they loathed, by getting up in turn and yelling
'*Vive dada*'. (p. 44)
On March 1922, *Litterature* appeared under a new banner.
Francis Picabia set out its programme in an editorial note.
'Do not admire yourself. Do not let yourself be shut up in a
revolutionary school which has become conventional. Do not
allow commercial speculation. Do not seek official glory. Draw
your inspiration only from life, and have no ideal save that of
the continued movement of intelligence.' (p. 46)
=====
(SOURCE 2)
Originating in the neutrality of Zurich, the movement Dada was
born in 1916 as an instrument of revolt. Youthful writers, poets
and artists joined forces to ridicule society and to pour scorn on
the pre-War artistic movements, including those of the avante-garde,
that had accompanied the passage to war. Although complex,
contradictory and wide-ranging - 'a state of mind' rather than
a style or technique - Dada spread quickly to other European
capitals and to New York, where it was developed by Duchamp
and Picabia, among others.... (p. 65)
....an element of chance... - a factor which was an important matter
of principle to the Dadaists generally, and which was developed
particularly within the Zurich group. ...Tzara advocated cutting
words from a newspaper and pasting them together at random to
make chance poetry; ...Janco... utilized chance in his constructions
of plaster and wire, and Arp himself used chance formulations of
cut-up words for his poetry at the this time. The attraction of
chance for the Dadaists undoubtedly lay in its very opposition to
structural order. In the context of the War, chance offered a
paradigm of the chaos they sensed all around them. By abandoning
normal ordering processes, random configurations offered a whole
new set of possibilities, a new order. This concept was later taken
up by the Surrealists; following Freud's diagnosis in *The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life* (1901), they believe that
chance actions were relevant for their demonstration of
unconscious motivations. (p. 65-6)
...as Arp later remarked, 'Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable
deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable
order.' The rigities of geometry were in the end too restrictive
for him, since they mirrored the rational constructs of the mind.
Greater freedom and interest were to be found in nature's infinite
variety, even in the natural formation of a single leaf. Consequently,
Arp decided to combine abstract and natural forms in a new
synthesis, while... Tauber went on to pursue the geometric logic of
form in her later abstracts. (p. 66-7)
[Berlin Dada]
...Berlin Dadaists.... ...felt that Dada should engage in life and 'pose
no longer before it'. Huelsenbeck poured scorn on the 'bogus'
spirituality of Expressionism and its perpetrators. (67-8)
=====
(SOURCE 3)
During World War I searches for a new fantastic subject matter
and content began to come into focus. Zurich, in neutral
Switzerland, was the first important center in which arose an art,
a literature, and even a music of the fantastic and the absurd. On
this city in 1915 converged a number of young men.... ...the leaders
[with women - ed] whose demonstrations, readings of poetry, noise
concerts, art exhibitions and writings attacked the traditions and
preconceptions of Western art and literature.... (they) expressed
their reactions to the spreading hysteria and madness of a world
at war, in forms that were intended as only negative, anarchic,
and destructive. From the very beginning, however, the Dadaists
showed a seriousness of purpose and a search for new vision and
content that went beyond any frivolous desire to outrage the
bourgeoisie. This is not to deny that in the manifestations of Dada
there was a central force of mad humor. This wildly imaginative
humor is one of its lasting delights - whether manifested in free
word-assocaition poetry readings drowned in the din of noise
machines, in mad theatrical or cabaret performances, in nonsense
lectures, or in paintings produced by chance or intuition
uncontrolled by reason. Nevertheless, it had a serious intent: the
Zurich Dadaists were making a critical re-examination of the
traditions, premises, rules, logical bases, even the concepts of
order, coherence, and beauty that had guided the creation of the
arts throughout history.
Hugo Ball, a philosopher and mystic as well as a poet, was the first
actor in the Dada drama. In the spring of 1916, he founded the
Caberet Voltaire, in Zurich, as a meeting place for these free spirits
and a stage from which existing values could be attacked.
Interestingly enough, across the street from the Cabaret Voltaire
lived Lenin, who with other quiet, studious Russians was planning
a world revolution.
The term Dada was coined in 1916 to describe the movement
then emerging from the seeming chaos of the Caberet Voltaire,
but its origin is still doubtful. The popular version advanced by
Huelsenbeck is that a French-German dictionary opened at random
produced the word "dada," meaning a child's rocking horse or
hobby horse. Richter remembers the *da, da, da da* ("yes, yes")
in the Rumanian conversation of Tzara and Janco. *Dada* in Fench
also means a hobby, event, or obsession. Other possible sources
are in dialects of Italian and Kru African. Whatever its origin, the
name Dada is the central, mocking symbol of this attack on
established movements, whether traditional or experimental,
that characterized early twentieth-century art. The Dadaists
used many of the formulas of Futurism in the propagation of their
ideas - the free words of Marinetti, whether spoken or written; the
noise-music effects of Russolo to drown out the poets; the numerous
manifestoes. But their intent was opposite to that of the Futurists,
who extolled the machine world and saw in mechanization,
revolution, and war the rational and logical means, however brutal,
to the solution of human problems.
The Dadaists felt that reason and logic had led to the disaster of
world war, and that the only way to salvation was through political
anarchy, the natural emotions, the intuitive, and the irrational.
Their outlook in one respect was a return to Kandinsky's inner
necessity, the spiritual in art, but Dada, at least in its inception, was
negative and pessimistic.
Zurich Dada was primarily a literary manifestation, whose
ideological roots were in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, in the
theater of Alfred Jarry, and in the critical ideas of Max Jacob
and Guillaume Apollinaire.... With few exceptions, the paintings
and sculptures of other artists [beyond Arps 'laws of chance' and
the works of Richter and Eggeling in photography and typographic
design - ed] associated with Zurich broke little new ground.
(pp. 224-5)
The Zurich Dadaists were violently opposed to any organized
program in the arts, or any movement that might express the common
stylistic denominator of a coherent group. Nevertheless
three factors shaped their creative efforts. These were *bruitisme*
(noise-music, from *le bruit* - "noise" - as in *le concert bruitiste*),
simultaneity, and chance. *Bruitisme* came from the Futurists,
and simultaneity from the Cubists via the Futurists, although the
Dadaists thought these principles to be negative, destructive
forces. Chance, of course, exists to some degree in any act of
artistic creation. In the past the artist normally attempted to
control or to direct it, but it now beame an overriding principle.
All three, despite the artists' avowed negativism, soon became
the basis for their positive and revolutionary approach to the
creative act, an approach still found in poetry, music, drama
and painting. (p. 224)
[re: Duchamp's 'readymades']
In the readymades, Duchamp found forms that of their nature
raised questions concerning historical values in art.... The choice
of these readymades was never dictated by aesthetic delectation,
but rather it "was based on a reaction of *visual indifference*
with a total absence of good or bad taste... in fact a complete
anaesthesia." The short sentence occasionally inscribed on the
readymade [e.g.' "in advance of the broken arm" upon a snow
shovel; "Pharmacy" upon a winter evening landscape in which
he'd inserted a red and yellow dot at the horizon, etc.] was
important, in that it was not intended as a title, but "to carry
the mind of the spectator toward other regions, more verbal."...
Sometimes Duchamp added graphic details that, in order to satisfy
his craving for word-play, he called "*ready-made aided*." Then,
"wanting to expose the basic antimony between art and 'ready-
mades' I imagined a *reciprocal read-made*: use a Rembrandt as an
ironing board!" (p. 229)
[re: limiting production of ready-mades]
... "for the spectator even more than for the artist, *art is a habit-
forming drug* and I wanted to protect my ready-made against such
*contamination*" He stressed that it was the very nature of the
ready-made to lack uniqueness, and nearly every ready-made
existing today is not an original in the conventional sense. Then
to complete this vicious circle, he remarked: "Since the tubes of
paint used by an artist are manufactured and ready-made
products we must conclude that all paintings in the world are
*ready-mades aided*." (p. 229)
Thus by the end of the war a Dada movement was growing in the
French capital, but it had primarily a literary nature. While in
painting and sculpture Dada was largely an imported product,
in poetry and theater it was in a tradition of the irrational and
absurd that extended from Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme
to Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Apollinaire, and Cocteau. Paris
Dada in the hands of the literary men consisted of frequent
manifestoes, demonstrations, periodicals, events, and happenings
more violent and hysterical than ever before. The artists Arp,
Ernst and Picabia took a less active part in the demonstrations,
although Picabia contributed his own manifestoes. The original
impetus and enthusiasm seemed to be lacking, however, and
divisive factors arose, led principally by Tzara and by Breton.
The early Dadaists, like the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution,
sought to maintain a constant state of revolution, even anarchy,
but new forces led by Breton sought a more constructive
revolutionary scheme based on Dada. In its original form Dada
expired in the wild confusion of the Congress of Paris called
in 1922 by the Dadaists. The former Dadaists, including Picabia,
who followed Breton, were joined by powerful new voices,
among them Cocteau and Ezra Pound. By 1924 this group was
consolidated under the name Surrealism. (p. 244)
========================================================
(SOURCE 4)
The Dada movement took form simultaneously during wartime in a
number of art capitals, and among them, signficantly, were two
neutralist centers, New York and Zurich. This spontaneous revolt
against reason in art represented many of the same deliberately
infantile impulses that had surfaced in the primitivist art of
Rousseau, in Jarry's theatrical grotesquerie, with its contemptuous
bravado, and in the nostalgic fantasy world of de Chirico's paintings.
One of the founders of the Zurich Dada group, the German poet Hugo
Ball, significantly hailed the spontaneity and irresponsibility of
childhood as a 'new' artistic model in a diary entry of 1916, which
was the year of the official birth of the Swiss movement.
"Childhood," he wrote, "as a new world, and everything childlike...
and symbolic in opposition to the senilities of the world of the
grown-ups." In keeping with that defiant spirit, the nonsense
vocable *dada*, meaning a child's hobbyhorse, was selected at
random from a dictionary, probably by Hugo Ball and Richard
Huelsenbeck, and came to symbolize the release of new psychic
energies based on instinct, which the Zurich group celebrated.
By loudly proclaiming the uselessness of social action, the Dadaist
artists acknowledged their sympathetic identification with the
futility of those dying senselessly in the monstrous charade of World
War I. Dada began primarily as a wrecking enterprise, an art of
protest directed against the insane spectacle of collective homocide.
Yet its nihilism also embraced a sweeping summons to create a
*tabula rasa* for art and presented serious creative options despite
its disorder and anarchy. Dada unlocked new sources of spontaneity,
fantasy, and formal invention and left a lasting imprint both on the
art of its time and on the future., Adapting the slogan of the
revolutionary Bakunin that destruction is also creation, the Dadaist
put art on the barricades, redefined the nature of artistic experience,
and extended its material possibilities even when that meant
accepting scandalous objects as works of art.
Official Dada came to birth as a collaborative activity in wartime
Zurich. There, in 1916, Hugo Ball gathered around him a group of
exiles from the war, a group that included the writer (and later
psychiatrist) Richard Huelsenbeck; the Rumanian poet Tristan Tzara;
the Rumanian painter Marcel Janco; the Alsatian painter and sculptor
Hean (Hans) Arp; and Arp's future wife, Sophie Taeuber. The
following year their ranks would expand with the arrival of the
German painter and later experimental filmmaker Hans Richter. In
an old quarter of the town, Ball and his fellow refugees founded the
Cabaret Voltaire, inviting all the wartime disaffected to join their
courageous new association of free spirits in order "to remind the
world that there are independent men, beyond war and nationalism,
who live for other ideals," in Ball's words. Arp, a gifted poet as well
as visual artist, eloquently described the spirit with which he
entered into the mad games, playful entertainments, and somewhat
more sober artistic activities of the Cabaret Voltaire group:
In Zurich in 1915, losing interest in the slaughterhouse
of the world war, we turned to the Fine Arts. While the
thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we
pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our
soul. We searched for an elementary art that would,
we thought, save mankind from the furious folly of
these times. We aspired to a new order that might
restore the balance between heaven and hell.
In another revealing statement that prophesied the new prerogatives
conferred upon fantasy and irrational association, and which also
comically summarized the Dada contempt for the public's
superstitious reverence toward traditional art, Arp wrote:
Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of
man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.
Dada wanted to replace the logical nonsense of the men
of today by the illogically senseless. That is why we
pounded with all our might on the big drum of Dada
and trumpeted the praises of unreason. Dada gave
the Venus de Milo an enema and permitted Laocoon
and his sons to relieve themselves after thousands of
years of struggle with the good sausage python....
Dada is senseless like nature. Dada is for nature and
against art. Dada is direct like nature. Dada is for
infinite sense and definite means.
Once Tristan Tzara had joined the group, the Zurich Dadaists
directed still more aggressive assaults at the audience, who,
curiously, attended the public Dada demonstrations in the
tradition of the mass meetings that greeted the provocative
behavior of the Italian Futurists. Poets recited inaudible
nonverse, drowned out by deafening noise-music, or *bruitisme*,
thus adopting directly the Futurists' strategy of insult and outrage.
Poems were made by picking from a bag words randomly cut
from newspapers. Tzara's "accidental poems" coincided with Arp's
experiments in automatism in his collage compositions.... Bewildered
spectators at Dada meetings found themselves called upon to
function as chairmen and then ignored or humiliated. Pandemonium
was encouraged, perhaps as a parody and an exposure of the falsity
of public rhetoric with its appeals to patriotism in support of the war.
Today this kind of antic, more familiar and even stereotyped in the
Happening, seems outdated. In its time, however, Dada nihilism had
more relevance as social criticism; moreover, it frequently resulted in
bouts of inspired wit and verbal invention, and the liberation of
significant new forms of poetry and art.... (pp. 167-8)
The chance compositions produced by Arp became the basis of
a primary Surrealist creative principle. They were made by
tearing up fragments of paper, letting them fall on a surface at
random, and then gluing down the accidental arrangments.
Speaking of compositions made by such procedures, Arp declared:
"The 'law of chance,' which embraces all laws and is
unfathomable like the first cause from which all life
arises, can only be experienced through complte
devotion to the unconscious."
Arp's collages of the period, however, were actually closer to a
more relaxed version of Cubism than to what the later
Surrealists understood as "automatic" drawing. (p. 168)
The most enigmatic Dada intellectual and a primary innovator
was Marcel Duchamp, one of the legendary figures of 20th-century
art. Already... a master of Cubist idiom, Duchamp became a pioneer
spirit of Dada, even though he never officially declared himself
a Dadaist. It was Duchamp who anticipated the Dadaists' most
fertile and challenging conceptions, including the whole complex
of anti-art ideas, which refuse to make elitist distinctions about
the art object. Duchamp tried instead to reconcile art experience
to a society dominated by mass-produced, manufactured objects.
The challenges posed by his art were evident as early as 1912
when he showed his Cubist, mechanistic anatomies in *Nude
Descending a Staircase, No. 2*... This original and rather baffling
picture outraged the orthodox Parisian Cubists, including the
artist's brother Jacques Villon, as much as it scandalized American
audiences in New York a year later in the celebrated Armory Show.
With Duchamp's arrival in New York in 1915, and the formation
of the periodical *291* under the auspices of the photographer
and art impresario Alfred Stieglitz, New York Dada came to birth
actually a year in advance of the Zurich events that gave the
movement its name. Overnight, Duchamp emerged as the leader
of a new breed of iconoclasts.
Rejecting the decorative values of Cubism for a more ambiguous
content, Duchamp's mechanized nudes suggested a metaphor for
the Conquest of Man by the Infernal Machine, in sharp contrast
to the mechanized world that the Futurists, Leger, and other
Cubists had uncritically celebrated. The robot-like action of
Duchamp's figures opened up startling vistas of paradox in what
had heretofore seemed an iconographically neutral area.
Duchamp turned away from the traditional image of the artist-
craftsman and his dependence on his sense impressions.
Beginning in 1912, he struck out on a boldly independent course,
breaking with what he contemptuously termed '"retinal" painting,
meaning Impressionism, which he considered intellectually
inferior since it appealed to the eye and the sense rather than
to the mind. "I was interested," he later said, "in ideas - not
merely in visual products."...
The work of art could be painted, constructed, or merely
"designated," a word Duchamp applied to the Readymade, or
common manufactured product he elevated to the level of an
art object.... Duchamp thus broke down one of the primary
attributes of the work of art, which defined its privileged fine
arts status. By associating art with non-art, he confused the
traditional hierarchy of artistic values and produced objects
and new ideas about art that remain profoundly disconcerting.
With Fancis Picabia... his friend and associate in the New York
Dada adventure, Duchamp insisted on challenging audience
preconceptions about art and taste. "There is no rebus, there
is no key," wrote Picabia. "The work exists, its only *raison
d'etre* is to exist. It represents nothing but the wish of the
brain that conceived it."
The themes that appeared only tentatively with Duchamp's
*Nude Descending a Staircase* received further definition in
the following years in his familiar combination of mechanical
form and imagery, erotic content, and esoteric titles. *The Bride*
and *The Passage from Virgin to Bride* both suggest human
organs transposed into machines, alluding clearly to automated
male and female sexual organs and sexual activities....
Duchamp's erotic obsession, combined with an extremely
complex iconography and erudite philosophical references,
culminated in a "love-machine," a construction the artist
mysteriously called *The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even*.... This intricate invention cannot be understood without
first examining Duchamp's own notes of explanation, and
without considering his effort to reappraise the world of
common manufactured objects in the form of the Readymade....
(pp. 169-70)
With superb disdain for traditional art values, he conferred a
kind of derisive prestige on found objects by the act of his choice
of them. It was a tribute to the power of his wit and ironic
intelligence that Duchamp was able to make publicly acceptable
such outrageous appropriations of banal objects from the crucible
of used and disused objects....
The Readymades were the familiar mass-produced products of
department and hardware stores or other commercial outlets.
In addition, Duchamp signed a urinal "R. Mutt," entitled it
*Fountain*, and submitted the piece unsuccessfully to the
Independents Exhibition in New York in 1917. The same
paradoxical value he conferred on the Readymades and the
mocking, intellectual gamesmanship their choice involved also
motivated the *Large Glass*, his most remarkable invention....
The acts of defiance incorporated in Duchamp's elaborate
mythology of sex and technology both in the *Large Glass*
and in his signed Readymades achieved memorable public
scandals in his famous reproduction of the *Mona Lisa* with
a moustache drawn on it.... He entitled this "assisted"
Readymade *L.H.O.O.Q.*, which when said quickly in French
sounds like *elle a chaud au cul*, or "she's got hot pants."...
(Rose Selavy, Duchamp's female alter ego, is a pun in French:
*Eros est la vie*, or "Eros is life.") (pp. 169-72)
In 1923, when he stopped work on the *Large Glass*,
Duchamp virtually abandoned art for chess, occasional
experiments in optics and mechanics, or assisting the
Surrealists in exhibition installations. His explorations with
chance, the designation of the manufactured Readymade as art,
and his many acute observations on the problem of art and
anti-art were particularly influential and today continue to
shape the conceptions of contemporary art. (p. 173)
Between 1918 and 1920 Dada spread from Zurich into
Germany, creating not so much a consistent artistic style as
a wave of liberating nihilism. In Berlin, Dada took its most
overt political form, shaped by the sense of disillusionment
of the desperately harsh postwar years. In Zurich, Tzara had
insisted that Dada meant nothing, but in Germany, he said,
Dada "went out and found an adversary." There it was linked
with Communism, and militantly involved itself in urgent
political issues. Although Berlin Dadaists produced little
significant painting, their contribution to the development of
collage and caricature was unique. George Grosz, whose origins
were in German Expressionism.... created savage satires on the
corrupt bourgeoisie, clergy, military, and bureaucracy of Berlin
that are grotesque, subhuman, and altogether memorable.
Also in Berlin were artists who used photographic images
directly.... [Hoch, Rausmann, others] found in photo-collage a
dramatic mode of registering their crushing indictment of
capitalism and militarism in the period between the wars,
when the dissident Nazi movement came to birth.... By
incorporating commonplace object fragments taken directly
from life, Schwitters posed the question of non- or anti-art
content, but in a manner different form Duchamp's. He also
extended the material possibilities of artistic expression. And
in a subtle, poetic way, he commented on contemporary
materialism by collecting in structures of indubitable artistic
merit the detritus of society. (173-4)
The description Ernst made of his initial discovery of the
hallucinatory power of commonplace materials is the first
direct acknowledgement by a 20th-century artist of the
appeal of the unconscious:
One rainy day in 1919... my excited gaze is provoked
by the pages of a printed catalogue. The advertizements
illustrated objects related to anthropological, microscopical,
psychological, mineralogical, and paleontological research.
Here I discover elements of a figuration so remote that
its very absurdity provokes in me a sudden intensification
of my faculties of sight - an hallucinatory succession of
contradictory images, double, triple, multiple.... By simply
painting or drawing, it suffices to add to the illustrations
a color, a line, a landscape foreign to the objects
represented - a desert, a sky, a geological section, a floor,
a single straight horizontal expressing the horizon, and so
forth. These changes, no more than docile reproductions
of *what is visible within me*, record a faithful and fixed
image of my hallucination. They transform the banal
pages of advertisement into dramas which reveal my
most secret desires. (p. 176)
...Ernst's original paintings and constructions in illusionistic form
of the early 1920's dramatize the growing differences between
Dada disgust and protest, and the Surrealist affirmation of a new
reality that was becoming evident in other art of the period.
They represent the true beginnings of Surrealist painting even
before Breton had officially codified the movement in his first
manifesto....
Breton brought focus to and soon thoroughly dominated the
[Surrealism] movement, proving himself as effective a
propagandist as he was a gifted poet and insatiably curious
intellectual. With his cerebral interests, the poet had grown
weary of the Dadaist provocations and infantile rebellion. He
felt it was time for intellectuals to act more constructively, and
he built Surrealism out of the ruins of Dada, whose unrelieved
pattern of nihilism had become sterile and self-defeating.
In negating everything else, Dada logically had to end by
eliminating itself. The February 1920 *Bulletin Dada* carred
a prophetic inscription in large type: "The real Dadaists are
against Dada. Every one is a director of Dada." (p. 177)
Vestiges of Dada and Surrealist ideas can be discerned in
subsequent artistic movements of the 1950's and 1960's: in
assemblage, in Europe's so-called New Realism, and in Pop Art
and Happenings, which incorporated elements of Dada to pass
ironic comments on a rampant and reckless consumer society.
But the original inspiration has become so diffused as to merge
imperceptibly into a vocabulary of international art forms and
pass quietly into common intellectual currency. Yet the Dada
and Surrealist vision, its compelling urge to reorient reality to
the extravagant needs of the psyche and to fabricate a world
more consoling than the actual, can never be extinguished
entirely. The mysticism and sense of revolt has surfaced
unexpectedly in the immoderate scale of Earthworks of recent
years, or in the hermeticism and riddles of Conceptual Art, not
to mention even more current works of a new fantastic order
burgeoning Expressionism.... Here, as in the case of Duchamp,
the whole point of the aesthetic idea lies in concept. Albert Camus,
implying that Surrealism was inadequate either as philosophy or
as a plan of action, described the movement in this way: "Absolute
revolt, total insubordination, sabotage on principle, the humor and
cult of the absurd -- such is the nature of Surrealism, which
defines itself, its primary intent, as the incessant examination of
all values."
The genius and universality of Surrealism, however, lay in its
affirmations rather than its presumed negations. It was Dada
and not Surrealism that engaged in provocative gesture for its
own sake, and in "total insubordination, sabotage on principle,"
as Camus put it. Breton's Surrealism imposed a concrete
philosophical system and a program upon Dada's open-ended
assumptions, systematically exploring the subconscious mind in
the search for a higher reality behind our common-day
perceptions of objects. This search was linked to a reformist
impulse and a rather muddled identification with social revolution.
Breton incorporated the ideas of chance, automatism, and the
irrational, which had already erupted in Dada, into orthodox
Freudian and Marxist viewpoints within his own typically French
and ingeniously structured theoretical principles.
(p. 195)
In his celebrated, albeit originally scandalous, flag paintings...,
[Jasper] Johns revealed his nature as Neo-Dadaist, an artist
who elevated commonplace objects to the status of fine art but
not by the simple act of selection such as that performed by
Duchamp.... Instead of a Readymade, Johns presented an
exquisitely hand-painted image of a universally familar artifact,
thereby compounding the already ironic relationship created
by the original Dadaists between art and life. While as caught
up in sly aesthetic games as Duchamp, Johns differed from his
mentor in that he played them in a wholehearedly affirmative
spirit. (p. 302)
=====
(SOURCE 5)
In retrospect we can see that it was but a short step from this
to the destructive violence of the First World War - described
by the Futurists in their Manifesto as 'the only health giver of
the world' - and from there to the Cafe de la Terrasse in Zurich,
in neutral Switzerland, the headquarters of the Dadaist
movement founded in 1916 and led by the Roumanian Tristan
Tzara and Hans Arp. Given a world which by then could be
seen to be intent on committing genocide with guns, bombs, and
poison gas, it is easy to appreciate why this movement should
have been as anarchic and nihilistic as it was. Rather than
tamely submitting to inherited notions of reverence and
respect for order and restraint as a distinguishing characteristic
of art, its members dedicated themselves to the destruction of
all traditional aesthetic disciplines. It was in pursuit of these
ideas that Marcel Duchamp exhibited a china lavatory bowl as a
piece of sculpture in 1917 and that Guillaume Apollinaire's one
and only play, *The Breasts of Tiresias*... was performed in Paris
in 1917/18.
During the war-torn years the Dadaists in Zurich and their friends
abroad could fairly claim to have been attempting to do for art
(including dramatic art) what Nietzsche some twenty years earlier
had already done for inherited culture and religion in the West.
Arguing in his essays and books the need to reject all cultural
and moral values (especially religious ones), Nietzsche had
postulated in *Also sprach Zarathustra* (1883-92) the arrival of
a new era ordered and controlled by 'supermen'. Yet as the long
and hideous nightmare of the war came to its abrupt end in 1918,
following political revolutions in Russia and Germany, much of
Nietzsche's heroic romanticism had come to ring as hollow in the
ears of the war's survivors as the stage rhetoric of the old actor-
managers; for if the war had done nothing else for art, it had
revealed all too clearly how feeble modern man actually was,
and how frail was his continuing hold on civilized life. The way
ahead begged questions at every turn; and where dramatic art
was concerned only the cinema seemed to know with any
certainty where it was going. (p. 223)
=====
(SOURCE 6)
Dada was not, strictly speaking, an art movement - in fact, it
stood for the repudiation and abolition of art - and its energies
related for the most part to poetry, typography, public relations
and an idiosyncratic subspecies of the performing arts. Nurtured
in a neutral country and galvanized by occasional visits by
Picabia, Zurich Dada established prototypes of avant-garde
activity which have still yet to be superceded: among them cafe-
theater, the mixed-media happening, concrete poetry, automatic
writing and the use of aleatory [chance-determined - ed]
procedures in art, poetry and music.... in 1917 Arp got into the
habit of closing his eyes, underlining words or sentences in the
newspaper with a pencil, and going from there to write a
complete poem. "A sentence from a newspaper gripped us
as much as one from a prince among poets," he wrote in 1953.
Implicit in all this was contempt for the discredited bourgeois
society, which had allowed language to be debased by the
mendacities of wartime and art to become a matter of routine.
"In that wonderful Dada time," Arp wrote later, "we hated and
despised the finicky, laborious habits of work. We couldn't
stand the otherworldly look of the 'titans' as they wrestled with
problems of the spirit." Oil painting, in particular, had a rough
ride with Dada. "When closely and sharply examined, the
most perfect picture" - Arp is again the speaker - "is a warty,
threadbare approximation, a dry porridge, a dismal moon-
crater landscape." History has not always been kind to the
Dadaists, and much of what they did now looks what they
least wanted it to be: arty. In Zurich particularly the fact of
Swiss neutrality makes the big talkers seem, in retrospect,
both sheltered and effete. What still commands our respect
is the constructive element; and what was provided by artists
who would have come through in any case. Arp spoke for them
when he said later that "we were looking for an art based on
fundamentals, one which would cure the madness of the age.
We wanted a new order of things to resore the balance
between heaven and hell. Something told us that power-crazed
gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening
men's minds."...
There is an obvious contradiction between the grandiose
program of Dada and the sweet good taste which is uppermost
in the so-called Dada collages of Arp. In his painted wooden
reliefs of the same period he indulged a play instinct which,
once again had nothing to do with an aesthetic of desperation.
But the point of these beguiling little works is that they
reintroduce into serious art a repertory of forms for which
Cubism had had no place. (pp. 180-1)
It was fundamental to an alternative art that magic could be
made from the humblest of materials. "We 'painted,'" said
one of the pioneers of Zurich Dada, "with scissors, adhesive
plaster, sacking, paper." In Zurich this sprang from a conscious
polemical preference; but the time was approaching when art
would simply be compelled, in a defeated Germany, to work
from an aesthetic of scarcity - in other words, with just about
anything that came to hand. (p. 181)
...German Dada was carried on in a society that was teetering
toward total collapse. It was the work of men with nothing
to lose, and its notional trajectory was not at all that of the
traditional work of art dealer-> collector -> museum. Its life
span was estimated as nearer to that of the newspaper, or the
public meeting, or the telegram marked "Urgent." Its function
was to negotiate with chaos for terms of truce. It borrowed
from the techniques of the handbill and the poster, and it
counted on the cooperation of observers whose situation was
so desperate that they just couldn't afford not to understand.
We should remember this when we try to imagine how the
steeplechase of image and idea must have looked to those
who had run into it in the heyday (1919-22) of German Dada.
German Dada had nothing but the name in common with
Zurich Dada. Fundamentally, Zurich Dada was a sub-
department of the entertainment industry. Genuine
revolution was not to be expected from evenings on which
the young Arthur Rubenstein played the piano music of
SaintSaens and other performers evoked the Parisian *cafe-
chantant* as it had been in the lifetime of Talouse-Lautrec.
"In Zurich," Richard Hulsenbeck wrote later, "people lived
as they would have lived in a health resort, running after
women and longing for the coming of night that brought
with it pleasure barges, colored lights and music by Verdi."
Hulsenback.... was poet, performer, coeditor with Hugo Ball
of the Dada periodical *Caberet Voltaire*, and a most ferocious
champion of what in Switzerland passed for jazz. He fancied
himself as a writer of nonsense verse...., but did not agree
with another Dadaist, Tristan Tzara, that "Dada means nothing."
And when he got back to Berlin in January, 1917, he saw to it
that, as he said, "in Germany Dada lost its art-for-art's sake
character with its very first move." (pp. 181-2)
"Dada was not a 'made' movement," George Grosz wrote, "it was
an organic product, which began as a reaction against the
head-in-the-clouds attitudes of so-called high art, whose
disciples brooded over cubes, and over Gothic art, while the
generals were painting in blood."
This was the state of mind in which Hulsenbeck and
Raoul Hausmann wrote their Dada manifesto in Berlin in
April, 1918. It called for an international revolutionary
union of all creative men and women; for progressive
unemployment through the mechanization of all fields of
activity; for the abolition of private property; for the
provision of free daily meals for creative people and
intellectuals; for the remodeling of big-city life by a
Dadaist advisory council; and for the regulation of all
sexual activity under the supervision of a Dadaist sexual
center. These proposals were put forward at what George
Grosz called "the time of the turnip": a period in which it
was nothing unusual for the supply of potatoes to give out
and be replaced by turnips normally used as cattle fodder.
The Allied blockade brought starvation daily nearer; the
German Army was getting more and more demoralized; there
had been the beginnings of mutiny in the German Navy as
early as July, 1917; 400,000 munition workers had been on
strike in Berlin. It was, if ever, a time for desperate measures;
and we cannot blame the Berliners who thought of Zurich as a
city not so much neutral as neutered.
Much of Berlin Dada is a matter of legend. There were bold
single acts which nobody followed up, as when Johannes
Baader climbed up to the pulpit in Berlin Cathedral and treated
the congregation to a Dadaist harangue. There were projects
well over the frontiers of fantasy, as when that same Baader
planned a five-story-high "Dio-Dada-Drama" which was to
encapsulate "The Greatness and the Fall of Germany." There
were prosecutions for antimilitarist activity. There were
publications which have clung to history as burrs cling to the
jacket of a hunter. Alternative art reached its point of maximum
immediacy in the Berlin of 1918-20.... Berlin is a quick-witted,
skeptical city in which a certain lapidary derision stands high
among conversational qualities; and in the photomontages in
question that trait is carried over into art. (p. 182-3)
[re: Max Ernst]
Already as a study he had realized that the untaught
scribblings of children, mad people, obsessives of all kinds
might have more to contribute to modern art than anything
that was taught in the academies. As it was by extension
of a long-held position that Max Ernst spoke out in 1919
against "Everyman," who "loves Everyman's expressionists
but turns away in disgust from the graffiti in public
lavatories."...
...He spoke of himself in November, 1918, as "a young man
who aspired to find the mythos of his own time"; he had
studied abnormal psychology at an early age; and he knew
that what had applied to individuals before 1914 might well
apply to whole societies when World War I at last came to an
end. In life he was antipaternalism personified and had an
especial horror of the word "duty"; if Dada could do away
with the structures of obedience which had for so long been
mandatory among Germans, so much the better.
Max Ernst was not so anxious to do away with art as to extend
full membership to forms of statement which had previously
been denied admission. This was, of course, typical of Dada;
but he brought to his Dada works a steely determination, a
malicious humor with overtones of intellectual terrorism,
and a gift for verbal embellishment which was quite the
equal of anything that had been done in that line elsewhere.
At the same time he had an existence of his own outside of
Dada, and interests which were independent of it.... Above
all, his work was quintessentially modern in that he used,
to still unsurpassed effect, the device of the quick cut.
The quick cut was a combination of ellipsis, on the one hand,
and a well-calculated jump in the dark, on the other.
Fernand Leger was quite right when he said in 1914 that
modern man could be distinguished from earlier man by the
fact that the number of impressions with which he had to
deal was a thousand times greater. Leger himself tackled
this problem both by rigorous selection and by fragmentation
or overlapping images which would have formerly been
shown complete. But only after a complete break with
previous pictoral tradition could the kind of quick cutting
which was perfected by Max Ernst become incorporated in
the act of reading a picture. To that extent, and by making a
certain nimbleness of mind mandatory among those who
looked at new art, Dada created a climate in which Max Ernst
could go to work. (p. 185-6)
Max Ernst was against Authority, as such, and it never
worried him that Cologne Dada was more than once in trouble
with the police. But he was not a political activist. He stood
somewhat apart, therefore, from the Berlin Dadaists when
they took (often from the most innocent of motives) a straight
Communist line. He was his own man....
[Kurt Schwitters] did, admittedly, sit out the vicissitudes of
postwar Germany in his house in Hanover, unaffected by
the commitments of Dadaists elsewhere. This was the more
enraging to the activists in that Schwitters was in many
ways the ideal (and potentially the supreme) Dadaist. Others
got up on platforms and made fools of themselves, more or
less. Schwitters survives, through a gramophone recording,
as one of the most extraordinary performers of the century.
When he read his "Primeval Sonata" - a long poem made up
entirely of wordless sounds - it was as if there had come into
existence a completely new mode of human expression, by
turns hilarious and terrifying, elemental and precisely
engineered. Others dreamed of reconciling art and language,
music and speech, the living room and the cathedral, the
stage and the unspoiled forest. Schwitters had the sweep of
mind not only to dream of these things, but to carry them out,
within the physical limits available to him. All this he did in
the name of an invented concept which he called "Merz."
Merz (derived from the second syllable of the German word
*Kommerz*) was a working name which Schwitters used to
identify all his activities (and himself, also, at times: one of
his publications was sign Kurt Merz Schwitters). "Everything
had broken down," Schwitters wrote of the beginning of Merz,
"and new things had to be made out of fragments. It was
like an image of the revolution within me - not as it was, but
as it might have been." Schwitters was a one-man encyclopedia
of Dada preoccupations. He was painter, collagist, sculptor, poet,
performer, typographer, visionary architect. He was the
consummation of Dada. As much as anyone, he completed the
union of art and nonart which had always been fundamental to
Dada. In intention he was one of our century's greatest
reconcilers: as a roller-back of boundaries he has still to be
surpassed. It was never easy, and it is now impossible, to see
his achievement in its totality. That achievement was summed
up in the union of the arts which he effected in his own houses,
first in Hanover, later in Norway, and finally, on a much-
diminished scale, in England. What he did in each case was to
remake the language of living. The house was taken over, room
by room and later upward through the ceiling. It was reshaped
in various radical ways and filled slowly and consistently with
material objects which were neither architecture, nor painting,
nor reading matter, but an as-yet-unnamed amalgam and
crossbreeding of all four of them. Like Duchamp's *Large Glass*,
the first Merz building (in Hanover) had an elaborate program
which was conceived and added to in a spirit of irony; but
whereas the *Large Glass* is Voltairean in its mockery and its
power to disconcert, Schwitters was by nature a healer, and the
lesson of his works is that men are free to remake the world
from its beginnings. This applies to individual elements within
the world - the theater, for instance: every experimental theater
owes something to Schwitters - and it applies to our environment
in its totality.
Schwitters' paintings and collages can be read as an effort of
reconciliation, insofar as they often draw upon the achievement
of others, notably on the constructed objects produced by
Picasso and, more generally, on Synthetic Cubism, with its
overlapping flat planes and its mainly rectilinear structure.
Sometimes they stand for the antiaesthetic attitudes of Dada
-- as, for instance, in *Revolving*, where the materials are as
brutish as they could be. Yet the effect of *Revolving* is to
create from those materials a reminder that our much-
battered world is part of a planetary system which goes on
revolving no matter how grievously we misgovern ourselves.
Sometimes, equally, they elaborate ideas explored elsewhere
by Dada: the strange power which resides in printed matter
that has been removed from its original context, for instance.
And sometimes they draw on other forms of art: on the color
theories of Robert Delaunay, or the affinities with nature of
Franz Marc, or the collapsing cosmos of Kandinsky....
Dada as a collective venture did not take over the world, as
had been hoped by some of its more extravagent supporters.
And by 1922 it had evolved - in Paris, above all - into a
primary literary movement that was marked over and over
again by spectacular clashes of temperament. But it is to
the credit of Dada that it acted as the lever on which whole
new departments of modernity swung into view. Perhaps
Richard Hulsenbeck spoke truer than he knew when he said
in1919 that "Dada is the only savings bank that pays
interest in eternity." (p. 187-91)
Dada was an emergency operation. Based on an economy of
starvation and on the total rejection of the past, it was
international and even intercontinental in its development.
It responded to a situation in which the end of the world as
it had previously existed for art could reasonably be regarded
as imminent. In such a situation, ad hoc materials alone
were appropriate. Surrealism was hardly less radical in its
program; but, in spite of that, Surrealist art was largely a
matter of old-style paintings on canvas which were put on
offer in old-style galleries in a world bent on "going back to
normal." It is also pertinent that Dada was opposed to the very
idea of "a career in art" and that with one or two exceptions
the Dadaists were not people whose gifts would support a long
lifetime of continuous effort...." (p. 199)
==========
SOURCES
1
_Surrealist Art_, by Sarane Alexandrian, Thames and Hudson, 1985.
2
_Abstract Art_, by Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, 1986.
3
_History of Modern Art
(Painting/Sculpture/Architecture/Photography)_, by H. H. Arnason,
Prentis-Hall, 1986.
4
_Modern Art From Post-Impressionism to the Present_, by Sam Hunter,
H.N.Abrams, 1985.
5
_A History of Theatre_, by GWG Wickham, Univ. of Cambridge, 1985.
6
__The Meanings of Modern Art_, by Museum of Modern Art
(Sheehan/Byrne), Harper and Row, 1981.
EOF
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