dada movement

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DADA – Introduction Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of the First World War. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, began in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter, but the height of New York Dada was the year before, in 1915. Dada formed the foundation for Surrealism, influenced Pop Art, and was a prelude to post-modernism and a celebration of anti-art.The term anti-art was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 when he created his first ready-mades. Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. Origin The origin of the name Dada is unclear, some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara's and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words "da, da," meaning "yes, yes" in the Romanian language. Another theory says that the name "Dada" came during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French-German dictionary happened to point to 'dada', a French word for 'hobbyhorse'. Influences: In The Dada Painters and Poets, Robert Motherwell described Dadaism as “an organized insulting of European civilization by its middle-class young.” Dadaism expounded upon cultural and political expressions that had been fermenting in European and American avant-garde circles since at least the mid-1800s. It also selectively appropriated attitudes and art forms of Italian Futurism. Most of the manifestations of Dada can be traced to four main influences: Bohemianism, Anarchism, Futurism, and World War One. But mostly it was a reaction to the horrors of the war. It is characterized by a rejection of logic and reason, praise of nonsense, anarchy, intuition and irrationality. Dada is anti-war and antibourgeois – it’s a way of protest against capitalistic nationalism and colonialist interests which the Dadaists believed to be the causes for the war and against conformism that established itself in a war time society. The War decisively shattered any vestiges of respect for the social order, especially the institutions of religion and the military, held by those already disposed to question and criticize (i.e. the avant-garde). It precipitated transatlantic and European migrations of the key Dada individuals. First they went to the neutral havens of New York and Zurich, but most eventually returned to Berlin or Paris, the real crucibles and targets of protest for the nascent movement, even as it coalesced in exile. The influence of Dada spread to other European cities, through further migrations, traveling Dada performances and the numerous Dada publications. Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestos, art theory, theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.

Dada in Zurich In 1916, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Täuber, and Hans Richter, along with others, discussed art and put on performances in the Cabaret Voltaire expressing their disgust with the war and the interests that inspired it. Trilingual, neutral and geographically close, Zurich became a natural refuge for European avant-gardists during the War, and this is where Germans were to give the Dada movement both its name and typical characteristics. According to Hugo Ball, in “A Critique of the German Intelligentsia” (1919), pre-war German society was driven into two spheres: one of political power and action — the military, Junkers (aristocracy) and industrialists; and one of thought, ethics and morals — the idealistic, politically impotent intellectuals (the same condition more or less applied to the other European powers). It is significant that this schizophrenia (attributed by Ball to the Protestant Reformation) penetrated to the level of individuals. Many German artists and writers (including Ball) were initially swept-up in the war-mongers’ mentality of ‘comradeship’.Ball attempted to enlist in the early days of the War and, when refused on medical grounds, went to to the Front for two months as a civilian volunteer. This was after his involvement with the socialist anarchist publications Die Aktion and Die Revolution . Those who weren’t killed received searing lessons on the madness and depravity that European civilization was capable of. Ball’s shocking experiences fueled Nietzschean ideals dating from his 1912 – ’13 work for Die Revolution . His Dada activities may be read as an acting-out of Nietsche’s invocation that “he who wants to be a creator must first be an annihilator and destroy values.” Ironically, Ball was among the first Dadaists to burn out. Ball rejoined Emmy Hennings (who had been imprisoned for aiding draft dodgers) and the two went to Switzerland in order to escape the oppressive militarism of Germany. Richard Huelsenbeck later wrote of “The German university professor, a volume of Goethe clutched to his heart like a charm,” striding side-by-side with “saber-swinging officers.” In 1916, Ball and Hennings, after touring with a variety show, decided to open their own venue in Zurich, which they called the “Cabaret Voltaire.” They were joined in performances by the Romanian Tristan Tzara, and several other, lesser Dada figures.* At the earliest performances, conventional variety show acts were interspersed with readings of Expressionist, Symbolist and Futurist poetry. The arrival of Ball’s friend and Revolution colleague Richard Huelsenbeck was the catalyst fusing together these disparate elements

into full-blown Dada performances (though they hadn’t yet got the name). Ball wrote, “What we are celebrating is both buffoonery and a requiem mass,” and, “Every [nonsense] word … spoken and sung here says … that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.” Dadaism was not formally proclaimed as a movement until Ball, Tzara and Huelsenbeck read respective manifestos at the Cabaret Voltaire in mid-summer 1916. In the context of activities prior to and since the discovery of the name Dada, and in view of the nonsensical, taunting nature of the manifestos, the significance of this proclamation is dubious. Rather, it was symptomatic of the self-absorbed nature of Zurich Dadaism, which tended to obscure (to say the least) any serious social concerns its adherents later purported to be addressing through their Dada antics. The costliest battles of the War raged during this period, with casualty rates in excess of 100,000 per day. Huelsenbeck later wrote, “In the term Dada we concentrated all the rage, contempt, superiority and human revolutionary protest we were capable of.” And, “Dada was the ironic and contemptuous response to a culture which had shown itself worthy of flame-throwers and machine-guns.” In this kind of grandiose delusion, the Zurich Dadaists revealed themselves to be suffering from a far worse shock than they were ever able to inflict on their audiences of middle-class Swiss university students. And it wasn’t too long before the more politically astute Dadaists tired of maniacal prating in bizarre costumes before the bemused Swiss students, and decamped back to Berlin (Huelsenbeck), or left the Dada fold permanently (Ball).

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919, collage of pasted papers, 90×144 cm, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Cologne In Cologne, Ernst, Baargeld, and Arp launched a controversial Dada exhibition in 1920 which focused on nonsense and anti-bourgeois sentiments. Cologne's Early Spring Exhibition was set up in a pub, and required that participants walk past urinals while being read lewd poetry by a woman in a communion dress. The police closed the exhibition on grounds of obscenity, but it was re-opened when the charges were dropped.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz New York Like Zurich, New York City was a refuge for writers and artists from the First World War. Soon after arriving from France in 1915, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia met American artist Man Ray. By 1916 the three of them became the center of radical anti-art activities in the United States. American Beatrice Wood, who had been studying in France, soon joined them, along with Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Arthur Cravan, fleeing conscription in France, was also present for a time. Much of their activity centered in Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, 291, and the home of Walter and Louise Arensberg. The New Yorkers, though not particularly organized, called their activities Dada, but they did not issue manifestos. They issued challenges to art and culture through publications such as The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada in which they criticized the traditionalist basis for museum art. New York Dada lacked the disillusionment of European Dada and was instead driven by a sense of irony and humor. In his book Adventures in the arts: informal chapters on painters, vaudeville and poets Marsden Hartley included an essay on "The Importance of Being 'Dada'". During this time Duchamp began exhibiting "readymades" (everyday objects found or purchased and declared art) such as a bottle rack, and was active in the Society of Independent Artists. In 1917 he submitted the now famous Fountain, a urinal signed R. Mutt, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition only to have the piece rejected. First an object of scorn within the arts community, the Fountain has since become almost canonized by some as one of the most recognizable modernist works of sculpture. The committee presiding over Britain's prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, for example, called it "the most influential work of modern art." As recent scholarship documents, the work is likely more collaborative than it has been given credit for in twentieth-century art history. Duchamp indicates in a 1917 letter to his sister that a female friend was centrally involved in the conception of this work. As he writes: "One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture." The piece is more

in line with the scatological aesthetics of Duchamp's friend and neighbour, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, than Duchamp's. In an attempt to "pay homage to the spirit of Dada" a performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli made a crack in The Fountain with a hammer in January 2006; he also urinated on it in 1993. Picabia's travels tied New York, Zurich and Paris groups together during the Dadaist period. For seven years he also published the Dada periodical 391 in Barcelona, New York City, Zurich, and Paris from 1917 through 1924. By 1921, most of the original players moved to Paris where Dada experienced its last major incarnation. Netherlands In the Netherlands the Dada movement centered mainly around Theo van Doesburg, best known for establishing the De Stijl movement and magazine of the same name. Van Doesburg mainly focused on poetry, and included poems from many well-known Dada writers in De Stijl such as Hugo Ball, Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters. Van Doesburg and Thijs Rinsema (nl) became friends of Schwitters, and together they organized the socalled Dutch Dada campaign in 1923, where Van Doesburg promoted a leaflet about Dada (entitled What is Dada?), Schwitters read his poems, Vilmos Huszàr demonstrated a mechanical dancing doll and Nelly Van Doesburg (Theo's wife), played avantgarde compositions on piano. Van Doesburg wrote Dada poetry himself in De Stijl, although under a pseudonym, I.K. Bonset, which was only revealed after his death in 1931. 'Together' with I.K. Bonset, he also published a short-lived Dutch Dada magazine called Mécano. Berlin Dada A few months after his return, Huelsenbeck fired the first shot of a new Dada campaign, this time from the heart of enemy territory. In an essay “The New Man” (again recalling Nietzsche) Huelsenbeck declared, “one thing must end … the overfed pig … of intellectuality.” The word dada did not appear in the essay (indicative of Huelsenbeck’s lingering ambivalence), and the aimless disaffection of Zurich Dadaism gave way to Expressionist imprecations and white-hot irony. In February 1918, Huelsenbeck lectured on Zurich Dada to a Berlin artists gathering, concluding his remarks with, “Politics are only a step away,” and a reference to the Russian Revolution. He, Franz Jung (publisher of a radical journal), the caricaturist George Grosz, John Heartfield (who had anglicized his name as an antiwar protest) and Raoul Hausmann formed a “Club Dada” on the spot. At their first meeting a “Berlin Dada Manifesto” signed by all of the above (plus Tzara and Janco from Zunch) was proclaimed. The gist of it was 1. A distancing of Dada from Futurism (while acknowledging its influence); 2. Attacks on Expressionism (an “anaemic abstraction”) and on “literary hollow-heads’ … theories for improving the world”; and 3. Graphic references to the continuing carnage of the war: “The highest art … repeatedly gathering its limbs together … the best artists … collecting the shreds of their body … with bleeding heart and hands.”

As part of their Dadaist shock tactics, the spectacle of this carnage — hideous mutilations preserved in living flesh by adept battlefield surgery — became manifested in the graphic works and paintings of Grosz and Otto Dix and, somewhat more obliquely, with the invention of photo montage. The new medium, practiced by Hausmann and Hannah Hoch as well as by Grosz, could simultaneously express the anarchic confusion of modern life, and portray the Frankenstein monsters lurching among those who survived the war unscathed (Hoch, Cut with a Kitchen Knife and Grosz, Remember Uncle August the Unhappy Inventor, both 1919). Depending on whose description we are to believe, Berlin Dada performances were either as ineffectual as those of Zurich (J. Willet, “Dada infects wartime Berlin”) or, “It was like the outbreak of a revolution. If we hadn’t been in personal danger [from the audiences], we would have had a splendid opportunity of studying mass psychology” (Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer). Johannes Baader ratcheted the public aggression of Berlin Dadaism to new Berlin Dada A few months after his return, Huelsenbeck fired the first shot of a new Dada campaign, this time from the heart of enemy territory. In an essay “The New Man” (again recalling Nietzsche) Huelsenbeck declared, “one thing must end … the overfed pig … of intellectuality.” The word dada did not appear in the essay (indicative of Huelsenbeck’s lingering ambivalence), and the aimless disaffection of Zurich Dadaism gave way to Expressionist imprecations and white-hot irony. In February 1918, Huelsenbeck lectured on Zurich Dada to a Berlin artists gathering, concluding his remarks with, “Politics are only a step away,” and a reference to the Russian Revolution. He, Franz Jung (publisher of a radical journal), the caricaturist George Grosz, John Heartfield (who had anglicized his name as an antiwar protest) and Raoul Hausmann formed a “Club Dada” on the spot. At their first meeting a “Berlin Dada Manifesto” signed by all of the above (plus Tzara and Janco from Zunch) was proclaimed. The gist of it was 1. A distancing of Dada from Futurism (while acknowledging its influence); 2. Attacks on Expressionism (an “anaemic abstraction”) and on “literary hollow-heads’ … theories for improving the world”; and 3. Graphic references to the continuing carnage of the war: “The highest art … repeatedly gathering its limbs together … the best artists … collecting the shreds of their body … with bleeding heart and hands.” As part of their Dadaist shock tactics, the spectacle of this carnage — hideous mutilations preserved in living flesh by adept battlefield surgery — became manifested in the graphic works and paintings of Grosz and Otto Dix and, somewhat more obliquely, with the invention of photo montage. The new medium, practiced by Hausmann and Hannah Hoch as well as by Grosz, could simultaneously express the anarchic confusion of modern life, and portray the Frankenstein monsters lurching among those who survived the war

unscathed (Hoch, Cut with a Kitchen Knife and Grosz, Remember Uncle August the Unhappy Inventor, both 1919). Depending on whose description we are to believe, Berlin Dada performances were either as ineffectual as those of Zurich (J. Willet, “Dada infects wartime Berlin”) or, “It was like the outbreak of a revolution. If we hadn’t been in personal danger [from the audiences], we would have had a splendid opportunity of studying mass psychology” (Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer). Johannes Baader ratcheted the public aggression of Berlin Dadaism to new levels. He got himself declared insane by the authorities (apparently with some justification) after writing a pacifist letter to the king of Prussia. Berliners sarcastically called the certification a ‘hunting permit’, for he was then able to carry out antics such as shouting “Christ is a sausage” from the pulpit of the Berlin cathedral during a service with impunity. Baader later toured Germany and Eastern Europe with a Dada troupe that was repeatedly assaulted by gate-crashing right wing thugs, causing him to abandon the tour. The last major Berlin Dada event was the Internationale Dada-Messe [fair] of 1920. The most political Berlin Dada protagonists, including Grosz and Heartfield, were in fact using the movement as a weapon just so long as it served their purpose. They joined the KPD (German communists) and their work published under the Dada banner began to show an increasingly unDada-like, articulate political focus. At the Dada-Messe, this culminated in anti-militarist displays such as a mannequin with a pig’s head dressed as a German officer and a depiction of disfigured vets parading in front of shops (by Dix), which netted the group a police raid, seizure of exhibits and criminal charges.

Cover of Anna Blume, Dichtungen, 1919

Paris and the end of Dada Under Tzara’s leadership, the Zurich movement became more resolutely concerned with aesthetic issues, to the exclusion of socio-political references. Ball disapprovingly wrote, “One should not turn a whim into an artistic school.” Tzara’s Dada review was published in both French and German editions. Tzara had begun making overtures to Paris, and was already receiving negative feedback for fraternizing with Germans. Apollinaire refused to contribute to Dada, on the grounds “that I don’t find that review’s attitude towards Germany clearcut enough.” Picabia arrived in Switzerland in 1919 (for an alcoholism cure), acclaimed by Tzara: “Long live Picabia the anti-painter just arrived from New York, the big sentiment machine…”, and Tzara used a number of Picabia’s machine-drawings, including “Reveil Matin,” produced by inking watch parts. He followed Picabia to Paris in early 1920, where they published the final two issues of Dada (Picabia had previously made a New York – Paris round trip in 1913 –’15, and probably modeled the idea for Stieglitz’s 291 after Apollinaire’s Les Soirees de Paris ). In France after the armistice, tensions eased (unlike in Germany), and any lingering sentiments of radical socialism were subsumed by internecine squabbles. The starting point of Paris Dadaism was a desire to reassert the hegemony of the French avant-garde, which had become a complacent caricature, overtaken by international developments. This would be accomplished by a programmatic discrediting of the old avant-garde.

The notion that Dadaism could be a legitimately French movement was kindled by the work of Duchamp and Picabia, both still regarded as belonging to Paris, and of Apollinaire (who died in the 1918 flu epidemic). The most prominent Paris Dadaists, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, originally followed the high bourgeois avant-gardism of Paul Valery’s Nouvelle Revue Française . In 1919 they launched a similar review, Litterature (the name suggested by Valery). By then, they had received Tzara’s Dada manifesto of 1918, and were duly impressed.

They felt Dadaism was a means to register their disgust over the War, which had been openly supported by the avant-garde establishment. However, in Litterature they employed subversive and ambiguous tactics to undermine the very avant-garde which had already bestowed its stamp of approval on them, and was therefore bitterly resented by Breton and the others.

The focus of Paris Dadaism was described by Georges Ribemont-Dessaigne as a need to “show the end of an intellectual conception, the collapse of the Absolute.” By doing this, it would serve notice to the bourgeoisie that “affirmation, construction [and] hope… [are] under suspended sentence of death.” Soupault and Aragon most wanted to serve this notice to the academician and fascistic deputy Maurice Barres (whose bourgeois nationalism they had once followed), and they proceeded with his mock trial. The trial exposed deep fissures between the outsiders and the Parisian Dadaists; Picabia walked out and broke completely with Dadaism (publishing an article to that effect), while Tzara attempted to obstruct the proceedings. Dawn Ades, in Dadaism and Surrealism Reviewed, attributed this schism (as manifested in the reviews Dada and Litterature ) to differences of their respective backgrounds: the Parisian avant-garde was highly complex, self-perpetuating and incestuous; while Zurich and New York were vacuums where the exiles had been able to cut their cultural ties and act with an aggressive and outspoken freedom. Purging rituals, such as the mock trial (which was conducted in all seriousness, despite Tzara’s “big and little shits” testimony) were inimical to the outsiders’ fastidiously groomed conception of Dadaism. Mutual denunciations, and violent disruptions of the rivals’ soirees brought the Paris Dada manifestation swiftly to an end.

Man Ray, c. 1921-22,Rencontre dans la porte tournante, published on the cover of Der Sturm, Volume 13, Number 3, 5 March 1922