THE DADA MOVEMENT
... organized parodies of guided tours, held at sites chosen because they were totally devoid of interest. In Cologne, a Dada exhibition was held not in a museum or gallery, but in the courtyard of a brewery and could be entered only through the men's restroom. Dada pamphlets and broadsides were distributed on city streets or showered from church balconies. Mock advertisements and announcements were inserted in newspapers. THE MANIFESTO The public, of course, was revulsed - which the Dadaists found wildly encouraging .Dada was intended to provoke an emotional reaction from the viewer (typically shock or outrage). If its art failed to offend traditionalists, Dada writing - particularly Tristan Tzara's manifestoes - proved a fine, nose-thumbing Plan B. An incomplete summary of the Dada publications began in June 1916 with ‘Cabaret Voltaire’, an anthology edited by Ball. It included work by Apollinaire, Arp, Cendrars, Huelsenbeck Kandinsky, Marineti, Modigliani Picasso and Tzara. This was followed by a series of illustrated books of poetry edited by Tzara, the series titled ‘Collection Dada’. Then between 1917 and 1921 Tzara edited the magazine ‘Dada’ which ran to seven issues. The second issue for example, contained work by Alp, Birot, de Chirico, Kandinsky and many others. And in 1919 Tzara co-edited a one-shot magazine, ‘Der Zeltweg’, with work by Arp, Giacometti, Schwitters and others. With the end of Cabaret Voltaire and the publication of Ball's anthology, Dada moved into a new phase. It started on a series of more consciously public abilities. The group of friends at the beginning had come together almost spontaneously and produced the cabaret, but with time the whole affair became more self- conscious. The act of giving itself a name was in a way a step nearer Dada's becoming one more artistic organisation, an aim far from the original intentions of the group. This inevitably caused tensions within the group, especially between the two chief figures Ball and Tzara. Ball was nervous of the way things were developing while Tzara could only see them with enthusiasm DADA SOIREES On 14 July the first public Dada soiree was held at the Waag Hall in Zurich. This evening, which included the reading of manifestos by Arp, Ball, Janco, Huelsenbeck and Tzara, ended in a near riot, according to Tzara. Immediately after this Ball left Zurich, and at the beginning of 1917 Huelsenbeck also left equally dissatisfied with the direction things were taking, though for slightly different reasons to Ball's. Tzara, a natural propagandist and an activist very conscious of being part of an aggressive European avant-garde, then took over administrative leadership of the group. Tzara wrote in his 'Zurich Chronicle' - '1917 July. Mysterious creation! magic revolver! The DADA movement is launched'. Not only does this coincide with the first issue of Dada magazine but also with Ball and Heulsenbeck having left Zurich and Tzara becoming the chief director of Dada. At the heart of the matter - the division within the group mentioned earlier - was a question very pertinent to the original ethic behind Dada. What Ball and Huelsenbeck were suspicious of was the way Dada was in fact creating yet another public system and style. No matter how anarchic and wild that style might become it was still a style, an orthodox stance and it was such orthodoxes that the early Dadaists had denounced in their calls for freedom, openness and decency. Ball wrote in his diary that art was 'not an end in itself ... but ... an opportunity for true perception and criticism of the times’ (5 June 1916). For Ball and Huelsenbeck art was a means to an end. lt was for this reason that Ball co-directed the Galerie Dada, because it had an educational aim. But for Tzara Dada was an end in itself, to be used then discarded when needs be. In 1917 there was a Dada exhibition at Galerie Coray Of work by Arp, Janco, Richter and Van Kees, and a show of Negro art. Then in March Ball was persuaded to return to Zurich briefly and until May he and Tzara organised Galerie Dada, using the Coray premises. The Galerie Dada showed paintings by Bloch, Baumann, de Chririco, Max Ernst, Feininger, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Kokoschka and Modigliani, along with paintings by children, Negro sculptures, and various 'artefacts' inlcuding embroidery. There was a series of lectures, including Ball on Kandinsky and E. Jollos on Klee. Three were soirées organised around particular themes. There were performances of plays, poetry, manifestos, music and dance. They even held afternoon teas for school parties and gave guided tours of the exhibition for 'local workmen'. After the closure of the Galerie Dada Tzara went on to organise many more Dada evenings with larger and larger audiences and with increasingly provocative and violent performances. These, along with exhibitions and lectures, continued until the end of the war and beyond it into 1919. The last and largest soirée was in April 1919, when, claimed Tzara, '1,500 persons filled the hall already boiling in the bubbles of bamboulas'. 'Dada has succeeded in establishing the circuit of absolute unconsciousness in the audience which forgot the frontiers of education of prejudices, experienced the commotion of the NEW'. END OF ZURICH DADA The sequel to this is that Ball retreated first into politics then into religion and mysticism. Huelsenbeck, moving to Berlin, devoted himself to political action, using art and Dada techniques as his weapons. And Tzara pushed forward with his concept of Dada as 'ghosts drunk on energy, we dig the trident into unsuspecting flesh', as 'a furious wind, tearing the dirty linen of clouds and prayers’, and that ' Dada is idiotic. Hurrah for Dada.’ Dada as blatantly anti-art and an aggressively 'nihilistic' force to shake everything up. There were no plans beyond this. No plans could be made until a new consciousness existed. In its way such 'nihilism' is as constructive an act as the most self-conscious constructions of artists like Ball and Huelsenbeck. It may even be argued that it is the healthier choice, certainly at that point in history. lf any folk wisdom can be found in this chronicle it must be that 'there's more ways than one to skin a cat.’ In January 1920 Tzara left Zurich for Paris. That plus the new freedom of movement that came with the end of the war meant that Zurich died as a centre of Dada activities. ln its four years it had seen the rapid development of many artistic possibilities that were to spread far beyond that city. THE BERLIN DADA Berlin in 1917: 1917 onwards within the city of Berlin there was a series of mutinies by the armed forces, of street battles political murders, soldiers’ councils, workers' councils, the brief Communist takeover of Berlln and all the hardships and cruelties that came with the ending of the First World War. Even with the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919 there was no end to the civil and intellectual strife. As happened elsewhere, a group of artists had already assembled whose views and attitudes were akin to the Zurich Dadaists. It only took Huelsenbeck to read his ‘First Dada Speech in Germany’ in February 1918 for Berlin Dada to be officially launched. In Germany the divisions and differing qualities of the Zurich Dada artists were to be seen on a national scale, but pushed even further and on a far greater and more ambitious scale. Berlin was to be the centre of political Dada, of the ‘art with a purpose’, while Cologne and Hanover were where Dada pursued art for its own sake, but it was their own concept of art not anyone else’s. The Berlin action began. A Club Dada was formed whose most prominent members were the painters and graphic artists George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Hannah Hoech, the poet and artist Raoul Hausmann, the poets Walter Mehring and Richard Huelsenbeck, and Johannes Baader, the arch demonstrator and action man of the group. But to define any of the members by the form taken by the bulk of their art is a mistake. As in Zurich, only more so, all these artists wrote manifestos, arranged meetings and performances and tried out all the possibilities of visual images, typography, words, sounds, and action. Though the Club Dada was not above its own human weaknesses and exclusivities, despite the apparent revolutionary openness. Kurt Schwitters for example was refused membership for being insufficiently political and having a ‘bourgeois face’. After the founding of the Club the Berlin Dada group pursued the same course of events as Zurich but this time they were up against a real opposition, not an Indulgent audience. Numerous magazines were published such as ‘Der blutige Ernst’ (Deadly Earnest, 1919) and ‘Jedermann sein eigner Fussball’ (Every man his own football, 1919). These were quickly banned by the authorities, but then reappeared under new titles like Die Pleite (Bankrupt, 1919-24). Jedermann sein… was charged with ‘seeking to bring the Armed Forces into contempt and distributing indecent publications. Other notable publications were the magazine ‘Der Dada’ (1919 20) and Huelsenbeck's ‘Dada Almanach’ and his famous pamphlet ‘En Avant Dada’. A series of readings was arranged by Club Dada between 1918 and 1920. These were not only held in Berlin but the trio of Huelsenbeck, Hausmann and Baader travelled as far as Dresden, Hamburg and Leipzig in Germany, and Prague and Teplice in Czechoslovakia to deliver their mixture of enraged polemic poetry and provoking absurdities. ln Prague, despite the fact that the Czechs wanted to beat them up as they were Germans, and the Germans believed they were Bolsheviks, and the Socialists threatened them with death and annihilation because they regarded [them] as ‘reactionary voluptuaries’, Huelsenbeck and Hausmann won over a massive audience. Baader had fled before the performance believing he would end his poetic career in a Prague morgue. The climax of the Dada events in Berlin was the First International Dada Fair in June 1920. Besides paintings and graphics by the Dadaists, the centerpiece of the exhibition was a stuffed effigy of a German officer with a pig’s head hung from the ceiling with a placard reading 'Hanged by the Revolution'. But possibly the ultimate act in the Berlin Dada's programme of protest with the maximum use of publicity was in 1923. This was when the poet and Dadaist Franz Jung hijacked a German freighter in the Baltic and presented it with its cargo to the Soviet authorities in Petrograd! Though Berlin Dada bad inevitably dissolved by 1923, due to the change in the times and pressures, and all the internal feuds that made the participants return to their own artistic careers, it had made its point and some major artistic work was achieved that is as fresh and powerful today as then. What is most memorable is the stunning development of photomontage by John Heartfield and also by Hausmann and Grosz. Equally outstanding was the use of typography in the Dada publications and the further and wilder development of sound poetry by Hausmann and Huelsenbeck. At the major retrospective exhibition of Dada (and Surrealism) at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1978 it was these works that were most moving, despite the antiseptic surroundings, while much else had become merely historical documents. MAX ERNST AND THE COLOGNE DADA Cologne was not so much the centre for a Dada group as the home town of the artist Max Ernst. He, with the help of friends like Johannes Baargeld and Hans Arp, produced a very special form of Dada in that city. He and his paintings and collages represented the positive side of Dada. Rather than concentrate on protest, as in Berlin, he chose to develop the side of Dada we find in the primitive forms of Arp's woodcuts and the religious chants of Hugo Ball's sound poems. Ernst wanted in his art a return to the illogical, chance, magic, fairy stories, the world of alarming dreams and primitive myths. His mysterious and unnerving collages are not concerned with contemporary politics but are echoes of something deeper and more eternal. Just as much as the Dada polemics of Berlin, Ernst's work was to awake and stimulate the minds of his audience but in a more subtle and long-lasting way. Of course Dada in Cologne went through the usual paces as elsewhere. A magazine edited by Baargeld, ‘Der Ventilator’, was banned by the British occupation forces as being subversive in 1919. Then Ernst edited his own one-shot magazine ‘Die Schammade’ (a combination of the German words for charade and witch-doctor) in 1920, including the Paris Dada poets Aragon, Breton and Eluard. Even a Dada Fair was put on in 1920, closed by the authorities and then reopened when the only offending work that could be found was by Albrecht Durer. The exhibition itself was made up of various disturbing object, collages and photomontages. Entry to the fair was through the gents’ toilet of a beer-hall. Added attractions were a girl dressed for her First Communion reciting obscene poems and a statue by Ernst at the entrance with an axe attached and an invitation to destroy it. The residence of Dada in Cologne ended when Ernst left for Paris in 1921. Ernst's own brand of Dada did not end there but continued and grew in his work for the rest of his life. THE PARIS DADA When Tristan Tzara left Zurich for Paris in January 1920 he was not just going to join and rally a group of like-minded contemporaries but to be part of a long established tradition of avant-garde art in that city. From Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Jarry right up to Apollinaire, Arthur Cravan and Jacques Vaché, the Paris art world was used to provocations, and so were the public. But whereas there had previously been these individual actions and artistic groups, Tzara, in bringing the official Dada stamp to Paris, was to instigate group action and provocation on a scale never known before. Like Zurich, Paris Dada was a much looser affair and involved a host of artists. The movement was predominantly a literary one, though various Dada painters like Ernst, Picabia and Man Ray did have exhibitions. The group of French poets associated with the magazine ‘Litterature’, such as André Breton, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, had invited Tzara to Paris. They had been in contact with Zurich since 1917 as had Pierre Reverdy, editor of Nord-Sud, and Albert Birot, editor of ‘Sic.’ Tzara's arrival took the action out of the magazines and into the streets or rather the halls. He and Picabia gave the French poets a formula already well praised and developed In Zurich and Berlin. But the fact that it had almost become a formula was the weakness of the Dada events held ln Pans between 1920 and 1922. The first Dada performance on 23 January 1920 established the ground rules of the game. The poets already mentioned along we Paul Eluard, Raymond Radiguet and Jean Cocteau read poems, read manifestos, and performed intentionally infuriating events. The audience in turn rioted and the matinee ended in pandemonium. After this both sides came prepared. The audience, often ready armed with eggs and fruit to throw at the performers, could have the 'pleasurable anticipation of a scandal’, as Ribemont-Dessaignes describes it. The Dada soirees were immensely popular and, as at the Salle Gaveau on 26 May 1920, drew massive audiences. Not only were the audiences drawn by the pleasure of active participation in the evening's performance but by the general public interest in the anti-establishment ideas and humour of the Dadaists. But the repetitiveness of the events, or rather the form of the events, led to a stagnation of the movement. The result was inevitably that Dada as an active movement degenerated and fell apart leaving the ground clear for Andre Breton's first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. The end of the story is not a particularly edifying one. After various failed attempts to change the course of Dada, a clear rift developed between the anarchic side represented by Tzara and Picabia and those French poets like Breton who at heart wanted a new theoretical programme. The feud culminated in a violent brawl between the two sides at a performance of Tzara’s play ‘Le couer a gaz’ in July 1923. During this Breton broke Pierre de Massot's arm with his walking stick and boxed Crevel’s ears. And this was the end of Dada. 'There was no point in continuing,' as Richter wrote in his account of those years. THE NEW YOK DADA All the histories of Dada include a section on what they call New York Dada. Of course this depends on what definition of Dada you work by, but certainly it is a debatable question whether such a movement existed in any real sense. Dada was essentially a European movement, a reaction to particular pressures and a resulting development of current ideas and artistic techniques. Central to the claim for a New York Dada is the presence there of the French artist my Marcel Duchamp from 1915 onwards. Certainly his his works along with those of the American painter and photographer Man Ray show a contempt for all traditional concepts of art, as do the writings and drawings of Francis Picabia who was In New York in 1915 and 1916. And like other capital cities New York contained artists who could be associated with some aspects of Zurich Dada. But though some of the works may have had a surface resemblance to those of the Dadaists in Europe, their emphases is wholly 'anti-art' rather than anti-social. There were no events or manifestos. It all stayed safely in the studio or an the art collection of American millionaire Walter Arensberg. The only publication that could be called Dada was ‘New York Dada’ in 1921, a four-page one-shot magazine that included a statement by Tzara and art work by Duchamp. The only only time Duchamp and Ray were involved In Dada events was during their stay in Paris after the war. Duchamp’s work will be discussed in detail later in the essay. Of all the surviving documentation, it is the motley assortment of Dada periodicals that can best give us a taste of the variety of Dada expression while at the same time reflecting the ephemeral nature of Dada's strategies. For these periodicals were a far cry from the traditional weekly or monthly review of the arts that was a cultural institution of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As with all of Dada's manifestations, they violated every convention of the literary-artistic review. To call some of them "'periodicals" may be a misnomer, since they appeared at highly irregular intervals; and indeed, some were never planned to appear more than once. In Germany especially, where censorship was severe, the editors knew that their radical publications would be forbidden after the first issue, so they simply distributed a first number of one "periodical" and when it was banned, published the first number of their next periodical. A Dada journal could change its title with every issue. The different issues of the Dutch review. Mecano were assigned colors instead of numbers. Some Dada reviews were published in multiple versions to circumvent censorship in the different countries in which they were distributed. In their content, the Dada reviews reflected the widest variety of Dada's activities, not only in literature and the visual arts, but also in music, philosophy, politics, architecture -- even in advertising. Some of the Dadaists' wildest typographical experiments took place in the pages of these journals. On the other hand, sometimes there was no written text at all -- one number of Kurt Schwitters's review Merz was a suite of lithographs by Hans Arp; another number was a phonograph recording. Perhaps most interesting, and most revealing of Dada's strategies, is the fact that the issue exists in two different versions, designed to fully represent the internationalist flavor of the movement while avoiding the strict censorship that still prevailed in France in December 1918. Young German artists and writers had been among the key participants in Dada from the beginning, and Tzara wanted to include their works in his review; but the fervent nationalism that held sway in France, a country that had been at war with Germany only a month earlier, made it certain that any publication containing German contributions would be denied entry by the authorities. In order to keep his review truly international, while at the same time making it available in Paris -- in 1918 still the world center for the artistic avant-garde -- Tzara used a subterfuge that continued to create bibliographic confusion until 1975. He included works by Germans on two pages: poems by Ferdi nand Hardekopf and Jakob von Hoddis, an essay by Richard Huelsenbeck on the visual works of the Alsatian poet and painter Hans (or Jean) Arp, and two illustrations by Hans Richter, entitled "Gesicht 1 u. 2" ("Face 1 and 2"). But anyone perusing Iowa's copy of Dada 3 will search in vain for the written contributions. Richter's illustrations are there, with the French title "Bois." The remainder of the two pages consists of writings by the French poets Philippe Soupault and Pierre Albert-Birot, the Italian Futurist Camillo Sbarbaro, and by Tzara himself. Tzara had secretly printed the issue in two versions: an international version including German writings, and a version for French consumption, in which the German works were replaced by pieces in French and Italian. Tzara's stratagem succeeded in that it permitted Dada 3 to be read in Paris, where it was noted with intense interest by members of the literary avant-garde. Thus, the trick of the dual versions paved the way for the enthusiastic reception that the young Romanian was to receive in the French capital a year later. When Tzara left Zurich for Paris in January 1920, his arrival was eagerly awaited by a group of young French poets including Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, and Philippe Soupault. Since the previous year, these three had edited a small literary magazine with the matter-of-fact title Litterature. Although their intention from the outset had been to produce an innovative avant-garde publication that would set itself apart from the many other literary reviews in the capital, Litterature in fact remained, during the first year of its existence, rather safely within the conventions of such magazines. Thus, the first number included works by many of France's best - established writers, among them Andre Gide, Paul Valery, and Pierre Reverdy. And there was certainly no trace of innovation in the magazine's format: a plain yellow cover bearing the title and the usual publication data. Meanwhile, though, Dada had taken Paris by storm, and the young editors of Litterature were among the most active participants in the movement, which Tzara had transplanted from Switzerland. By 1920, Litterature was clearly being transformed into a Dada publication. The conservative yellow cover remained, but the contents came more and more to belie the packaging, and the title seemed to become more an ironic joke than a description of the journal's contents. (Indeed, at one point the editors resolved to publish no more literary texts in their magazine -- a resolution they were unable to maintain.) Number 13 (May 1920) was entirely devoted to the manifestos read at three Dada lecture-performances in February of that year. Other numbers pub lished in 1920 and 1921 combined contributions by established literary figures with items that displayed the strategies characteristic of Dada. The device of the circulating inquiry, common to many European periodicals, was turned on its head as writers representing the literary establishment as well as the avant-garde were asked to respond to increasingly absurd questions, from the conventional "Why do you write?" (no. 9) to "Are there still people who enjoy life?" (no. 17) and culminating in the quasi-scientific survey in which 11 writers affiliated with Dada were asked to rate without comment some 200 individuals and institutions (mostly literary and artistic figures, but also including such diverse individuals as Mohammed, Edison, and the unknown soldier) on a scale of -25 to 20 ("-25 expressing the strongest aversion, 0 indicating absolute indifference"). The results of this survey were presented in tabular form in no. 18 (March 1921). Number 20 (August 1921), the last issue of the first series of Litterature, consisted of documents from the "trial" held by the Dada movement in judgment of Maurice Barres in May of that year. The Dadaists felt that Barres, a writer who had been an intellectual hero for many of them, had betrayed their ideals by adopting a fer vently nationalistic stance during the war years. The mock trial, which Barres, needless to say, did not attend, led to a major split among the Paris Dadaists. One faction, centered on the editors of Litterature, considered the trial a serious political and intellectual action; the other, headed by Tzara, approached the event with the absurdist humor typical of previous Dada performances. Naturally, the conduct of the two factions at the tribunal differed accordingly, and the resulting rift was never fully healed. Number 21 of Litterature, which completed the compilation of documents from the Barres trial, was never published, al though the page proofs have been preserved." There followed a gap of more than half a year, and when the new series of Litterature appeared, it was a radically different publication. In format, the new version was more distinctively Dada. The plain yellow covers were replaced by whimsical, sometimes humorously erotic cover drawings by Man Ray and Francis Picabia, with typography that often incorporated puns on the title. Two of the most prominent contributors to the new series, Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, had been at the center of New York Dada; and their fragmentary, pun filled writings and their whimsical iconoclastic artwork typified the Dada spirit as much as anything in the old series. But, at the same time, it was clear from the very first number that the editors, and particularly Breton (who soon took exclusive direction of the magazine), had some serious new concerns that were leading them in a new direction. That direction would come to be called Surrealism. Number 1 of the new series (March 1922) includes several revealing items: a report by Breton of three dreams, foreshad owing the intense interest of the Surrealists in the hidden world of dreaming; a note by Tzara (his last contribution to Litterature) on Lautreamont, a nineteenth-century writer the Surrealists were to regard as one of their chief precursors; and a rather scanty interview by Breton with Sigmund Freud, anticipating the great importance that the relatively new field of psychoanalysis was to hold for the as yet unnamed movement. Litterature survived into 1924, by which time Dada in Paris was dead as a movement, and the early Surrealist experiments in the unconscious and the occult were well under way. Besides Litterature and Dada (which Tzara brought with him to Paris), a multitude of other, mostly short lived, periodicals flourished among the Paris Dadaists. Virtually every partici pant in the movement produced his own little magazine, many of which appeared for only one or two issues. Two of the most interesting were Paul Eluard's Proverbe (1921-22) and Francis Picabia's Cannibale (1920). One hundred fifty miles from Berlin, in the semiprovincial city of Hanover, a writer and artist named Kurt Schwitters developed his own, quieter version of Dada. Blackballed, in effect, by the majority of Berlin Dadaists, Schwitters created Merz, whose name he took ...