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I say unto you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we are not
sentimental. We are a furious Wind, tearing the dirty linen of clouds
and prayers, preparing the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition.*
We will put an end to mourning and replace tears by sirens screeching
from one continent to another. Pavilions of intense joy and widowers with
the sadness of poison. Dada is the signboard of abstraction; advertising
and business are also elements of poetry.
INTERNATIONAL
DADA ARCHIVE |
Dada
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| The movement was founded in 1916 in Zurich,
a neutral city in the middle of a war-torn Europe, by a group of exiles
from countries on both sides of the conflict. Some were draft dodgers; most
were pacifists; all found refuge on Swiss soil and were outraged by the
slaughter taking place on all sides. In February, in a tavern a few paces
from Lenin's home in exile, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, and
others founded the Cabaret Voltaire, dedicated to presenting, in Ball's
words, "the ideals of culture and of art as a program for a variety
show." (3) Some two months later, under circumstances about which the
participants themselves have never agreed, the name "Dada" was
chosen for the movement which was growing out of the cabaret's activities.
(The most popular version of the story is that the word was picked at random
from a French-German dictionary. For decades afterwards, the founders disagreed
as violently--or as gleefully--about the meaning of the word as about the
manner of its discovery.) The evenings at the cabaret, prototypes for Dada
performances throughout Europe, combined presentations of the art, drama,
and poetry of the different avant-gardes which had swept the continent since
the turn of the century--Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism--with the often
chaotic, often whimsical creations of the Zurich Dadaists themselves. Poems
were recited simultaneously in French, German, and English. Ball, dressed,
in a bizarre cardboard costume, chanted his sound poetry. Richard Huelsenbeck
punctuated the proceedings with a continual drumbeat. It would be hard for
us to find much that was overtly political in the early Dada performances
and publications, but from the beginning the movement dedicated itself to
attacking the cultural values which its members believed had led to the
world war. The tools for this attack, radical at the time, are familiar
to us all as the most basic concepts of the modern arts: chance, collage,
abstraction, audience confrontation, eclectic typography, sound and visual
poetry, simultaneity, the presentation and emulation of tribal art--all
things which we have taken for granted since the sixties at latest. When the war ended and it was again possible to travel freely, the majority of the Dadaists left Switzerland and spread their movement throughout Europe, most notably to Berlin and Paris. In Berlin, during the closing months of the war, Richard Huelsenbeck joined forces with a group of writers and artists on the fringes of the Expressionist movement who eagerly adapted the name and spirit of Dada. The situation there was radically different from that in staid, peaceful, affluent Zurich. Following the collapse of the German Empire, society was in a state of complete disorder. A variety of leftist factions battled the forces of the still unstable Weimar Republic. Poverty was everywhere. In this context, the majority of the Berlin Dadaists opted for an overtly political movement, vaguely allied with the factions of the left. But their techniques, logical extensions of the cabaret programs of the Zurich years, were hardly those of orthodox communism. Various members disrupted services at the Berlin cathedral, demonstrated at the National Assembly at Weimar, distributed leaflets and manifestoes expounding a series of increasingly bizarre and whimsical demands, displayed posters consisting of randomly arranged letters of the alphabet, and even declared a section of Berlin to be an independent "Dada Republic." They also engaged in more ostensibly conventional activities--theater and cabaret performances, lecture tours, exhibitions, the publication of books and periodicals--but always with a flair for the unexpected, the unconventional. Their journals would appear for one or two numbers, hastily distributed to outrace the censors, and once banned by the authorities, reappear under new titles. The biting caricatures of George Grosz and the photomontages of Raoul Hausmann and John Heartfield satirized in a far-from-gentle manner the contradictions and injustices of German society in this crucial transitional period. Unfortunately, the faith of these Berlin Dadaists in the avant-garde's role in the German revolution was as mistaken as that of the Russian avant-garde in the new Bolshevik regime at about the same time. Where the Bolsheviks mercilessly crushed the Russian avant-garde, the German Communists, whose revolution was defeated, merely abandoned the Dadaists. Some of the Berlin participants, like Grosz, Heartfield, and Wieland Herzfelde, lost patience with the apparent lack of seriousness on the part of their colleagues and devoted themselves to more orthodox modes of political action and propaganda. The others, after the demise of Berlin Dada, followed their own independent directions. |
