According to Schwitters, ‘Dada subsumes all big tensions of our time under the biggest common denominator: Nonsense … Dada is the moral gravity of our time while the public collapses with laughter. As do the Dadaists.’
Kurt Schwitters, Konstruktion für edle Frauen (Construction for Noble Ladies), 1919. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Kurt Schwitters, Mz 334 Verbürgt rein, 1921. Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd
Dada relished contradictions. A famous Dada saying claimed that whoever is a Dadaist is against Dada. In his Manifeste Dada 1918, Tristan Tzara informs us that, as the editor, he wants to emphasise that he feels unable to endorse any of the opinions expressed since he was against manifestos in principle. But also against principles. Theo van Doesburg called Dada the ‘art form on account of which its producer doesn’t take a stand for anything. This relative art form is accompanied by laughter.’
In his admirable book Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism Richard Sheppard explains:
The word Dada is used at three levels. At the first level, it names an amorphous bohemian movement. At the second level it characterises a complex of existential attitudes, which, while varying from person to person, are vitalist and involve the achievement of balance amid fluctuating opposites. But at the third level, it is used by some of the Dadaists to name a life force that is simultaneously material, erotic and spiritual, creative and destructive.‡
My particular sympathy goes to the second level. In my young years I envisaged a sphere within which all contradictions and opposites were contained in such a way that the centre of the sphere would be the meeting point of the centres of all the opposites – you could call it the ultimate nothingness, or God. To live with, and balance out, the contradictions seems a noble goal. It was as a child that I unwittingly encountered Dada in its funniest form. At home, my mother sang, to her own embarrassment, a Berlin cabaret song from the 1920s that starts with the memorable line ‘I’ll tear out one of my eyelashes and stab you dead with it’, and ends with the intention to order a fried egg ‘and sprinkle you with spinach’. It was much later that I realised that sense and nonsense need to be partners in order to mirror the absurdity of this world.
As for the third level, mysticism – Christian, Zen or Tao – had been crucial to Arp, Ball and Baader. The Dadaists of New York, Paris or Cologne, however, didn’t have much use for it. Mysticism was within the reach of, but not central to, Dada. And where it was pursued it was often handled, in the Dadaist mode, with some irony.
*
It is strange that the comic side of Dada has been all but ignored by some commentators. This reminds me of the fact that at the bicentenary of Haydn’s death in 2009 there were several tributes that didn’t mention his musical sense of humour. The impressive catalogue of the Dada exhibition at Rolandseck, the place where Hans Arp spent his final years, includes a list of Dada-related topics: mysticism, psyche, philosophy, literature, art, language, soirée, Africa, mask, dance and revolt. Laughter is missing. Has there ever been a major avant-garde movement that was so closely tied to laughter and the grotesque? Laughter was the Dadaists’ favourite instrument, a joint anarchic impulse. Aggressive, sarcastic, sardonic, it could also be, as in Arp’s case, serene. By laughing, Dadaists protested against those who took laughter as an indecent aberration in the tradition of the Aprocryphal saying, ‘A fool laughs overly loud; a wise man makes do with a faint smile’ (Ecclesiasticus 21:20). Traditionalists see Dadaists as silly people. To a degree, they are right. Silliness was liberation from the constraints of reason. It has the potential to be funny, to provoke laughter, and make people realise that laughter is liberating. To Dadaists, Charlie Chaplin was the greatest artist of the world.
Two concepts, Carl Gustav Jung’s ‘Trickster’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘Carnival’, can help to illuminate Dada mores, mirth and poetry. The ‘Trickster’ is presented as a creature simultaneously sub- and superhuman while Bakhtin’s ‘Carnival’ signifies ‘an escape from humanly opposed, officially sanctioned norms’.§ It generates ‘cosmic humor’ and juxtaposes opposites. Raoul Hausmann mentioned the sanctity of nonsense and ‘the jubilation of Orphic absurdity’.
There is another view of laughter that might have saved the Dadaists from a more uncivilised sort of aggression. According to the sociologist Norbert Elias, whoever laughs doesn’t bite.
*
Compared to Dada’s achievement in the visual arts, its literary strengths have remained less evident. Major artists who started as Dadaists – Ernst, Schwitters, Arp, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia – have been exhibited worldwide, and Hannah Höch is belatedly identified as one of the finest female artists of her time. As most Dadaists were dual talents, one can find some verbal counterpoints in what they produced visually. The techniques of photomontage, collage and assemblage permeated some of their poetry as well: words were arranged at random, or used against their meaning, or employed as an abstract succession newly invented, a quasilanguage that needed to be declaimed, and listened to. And to be seen as well, as long as typography was employed to enliven the visual impression of the page.
In the opening Dada Manifesto of 1916, Hugo Ball said that Dada poems aimed to dispense with a language that had been ravaged and had become unacceptable. In Arp’s words, Dada poetry ‘doesn’t try to depict anything, nor does it interpret’. To Emmy Hennings, the poet Arp appeared to have come from another planet, ‘most mysterious yet thoroughly acceptable’. While performing his poems he was said to have had a hold on the public similar to that of Grock, the great and deeply affecting clown, who needed only to utter two words, ‘nicht möglich’ (‘impossible’), to enrapture the crowd.
Another literary genre, one that Dada shared with other movements of the time, is the manifesto. A large number of mostly short-lived periodicals helped make Dadaism known in many countries disseminating Ball’s, Huelsenbeck’s, Tzara’s, Picabia’s, Doesburg’s and Schwitters’s speeches, articles and buffooneries. One of the most comprehensive of these publications was Huelsenbeck’s Dada Almanach of 1920. The picture on its cover follows the example of Duchamp’s bearded Mona Lisa by depicting a mustachioed Beethoven.
*
In 2016, Zurich, better known for its commercial power than for its anarchic leanings, was celebrating a Dada season. In this jubilee year, the city exuded more than a whiff of carnivalesque excitement. The Zurich Festival, almost entirely dedicated to Dada, included three Dada soirées and a multitude of theatrical and academic events. Its crowning glory might well have been the performance of the Symphony for nine Harley-Davidsons, Trumpet and Synthesiser by the octogenarian avant-garde composer Dieter Schnebel. It was performed at the Münsterhof, a square in Zurich’s inner city that had just been designated a traffic-free zone. The event included a hooting scherzo and a motorcycling ballet, and was conducted by Steffi Weismann, a woman in red overalls braving the rain. Another attractively Dadaesque venture was the organisation of dinner encounters in ten private houses. The paying guests were informed only in the afternoon where the dinner would take place. During the evening there would be surprise readings, literary experiments, music and improvisation. Guests were expected to participate.
Two exhibitions opened the season. The first, small but exquisite, was more than an exhibition: it offered a reconstruction of Dadaglobe, an anthology of international Dadaism the publication of which had been abruptly cancelled in 1921. A joint project by Tzara and Picabia, it had assembled a multitude of contributions that were relocated in recent years mainly thanks to the work of Adrian Sudhalter who, in the catalogue, enlightens her readers with a sharply perceptive account of the project’s history. A rival enterprise called Dadaco had come to nothing due to a lack of funds. Reasons for the cancellations of Dadaglobe, on the other hand, have remained obscure. Possible causes were personal quarrels, Picabia’s and Tzara’s ill health, Picabia’s noisy parting from Dada, and censorship that mistook the large influx of international letters and material for a political
threat. The fact that the project was not mentioned again remains conspicuous.
The Kunsthaus Zürich did itself proud with a catalogue that assembles the complete remains of Dadaglobe. Within the quickly multiplying Dada literature it occupies a place of honour.
Dada Universal, graffiti. Landesmuseum Zürich, 2016
The second exhibition, which had no catalogue, was mounted in a large barn right next to the railway station. It belonged to the Landesmuseum Zürich and was, in true Dada fashion, demolished as soon as the exhibition closed. The premises were ideal. The interior was completely black. One of the shorter walls served as a kind of blackboard for visitors who were encouraged to provide graffiti with white chalk. By the last day of the exhibition, however, every inch of all the walls was magnificently covered with words or drawings. There was a constant presentation of films ranging from Hans Richter’s abstract rectangles to Mary Wigman’s Witch’s Dance. In glass cases, Dada-related objects were displayed and juxtaposed. What the curators Stefan Zweifel and Juri Steiner accomplished was greatly appreciated by a predominantly young public but also, it seems, by a visiting group of psychoanalysts.
More exhibitions were to follow. The large and perplexing survey of Francis Picabia’s work, also at the Kunsthaus, offered a complete overview of his deliberate strategy of irony and contradiction. André Breton, one of Picabia’s staunchest allies, described it in his final tribute: ‘An oeuvre based on the sovereignty of caprice, on the refusal to follow, entirely based on freedom, even to displease.’ It was Picabia’s tough luck that his contemporary Pablo Picasso gave an example of an artist remaining in command in spite of all his Protean changes of tack. Picabia didn’t have, and didn’t seem to want, an aesthetic self. Appropriately, he hated ‘taste’: ‘My great fear is to be taken seriously, to become a great man, a master.’ Which didn’t prevent him from producing some striking works of art.
Even as a child he embodied the enfant terrible. By the time he was fifteen he had acquired a skill so brilliant that he copied his father’s collection of Spanish paintings, replacing the originals with his reproductions. He then sold the originals to finance his stamp collection.
Not unlike Picasso, Picabia (1879–1953) was a craftsman of staggering virtuosity. Both liked to produce at great speed. With Picabia speed became, as he said, ‘a wild desire’, also indulged when driving automobiles, of which he seems to have owned 127. (Among artists affiliated with Dada, Picabia was the wealthiest by far.) The notion of movement and speed becomes apparent in his masterly abstract pictures of 1912–13. Here, as in the paintings of his close friend Marcel Duchamp, Cubism is being galvanised by the Futurist impetus of frenzied motion. The very large abstractions La source and Edtaonisl seem to me his supreme achievements. Inch by inch, they are full of invention, a term hardly applicable to his work in general, as he elsewhere preferred to use prefabricated shapes and images: picture postcards were turned into Impressionist and Pointillist canvases, technical drawings were wittily distorted, and photographs from girlie magazines were slickly presented as paintings. (In his later work, the urge to offend through kitsch reveals a mixture of cynicism and contempt.)
Hardly less astonishing is the following period, 1914–15, of ‘Machinist’ paintings and drawings, described by Picabia as a ‘pinnacle of mechanical symbolism’ – pre-Dada creations of a peculiar distinction that include words and titles linking them to some of his writings, including Unique eunuque and La veuve joyeuse. Mechanomorphs continued to figure deliciously in the nineteen issues of the magazine 391, which Picabia masterminded.
I shall not dwell on the lowest point of Picabia’s activity, the trashy paintings of the war years 1939–45, and remain grateful for the fact that within the minimum of nine – hugely varied – phases of his rollercoaster output there is hardly one that doesn’t include a major work.
The comprehensive and sumptuous catalogue, assembled by Anne Umland of New York’s MoMA and Cathérine Hug of the Kunsthaus Zürich, seems destined to remain the principal source of reference. Rachel Silveri’s extensive and painstaking account of Picabia’s life mentions his propensity for anti-Semitic and proto-Fascist remarks but also his verve in hosting vastly successful soirées, fêtes and galas at Cannes’s Casino aux Ambassadeurs that could include monkeys and palm trees if not lions and panthers. Altogether, the amount of excellent female editors and enablers connected to Zurich’s Dada enterprise deserves special attention.
The association of Zurich’s Galerie Gmurzinska with the art of Kurt Schwitters dates back nearly five decades.
Francis Picabia, Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic), 1913. The Art Institute of Chicago
Francis Picabia, Parade amoureuse, 1917. Mr and Mrs Morton G. Neumann
At the very premises that had housed the short-lived Galerie Dada a century earlier, seventy of Schwitters’s works were presented in a most unusual fashion. The late architect Zaha Hadid had turned the gallery space into a dreamscape of fluid forms that vividly demonstrated the hold Schwitters’s Merzbau, his own architectural venture, had on her imagination. While Schwitters, with all his Dadaist leanings, remained an artist in pursuit of form and balance, his pictorial compositions also show a superlative control of colour. I remember the huge Schwitters exhibition in Paris in 1994 at the Centre Pompidou where, surrounded by collages, the viewer got the impression of being confronted by the rarefied palette of a painter. In Schwitters’s work in his final years, humour and playful grace may have disappeared. It is harsher and gloomier but, as time has proved, hardly less distinguished.
Finally, in Zurich’s splendid Museum Rietberg, Dada objects were exquisitely displayed next to specimens of African sculpture. (In 1915, Carl Einstein had been the first to refer to ‘primitive’ African sculpture as art.) The juxtaposition had a revelatory effect. To see Hannah Höch’s spellbinding collages Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (From an Ethnographical Museum) in such a context was a moving experience. In Berlin, this exhibition was shown in a larger format in autumn 2016.
*
Hannah Höch, Aus der Sammlung: Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (From the Collection: From an Ethnographic Museum). Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
Dada was not a fashion, a style or a doctrine. It was more than a footnote to cultural history. We can better understand it as a condition, a spirit, a productive state of mind that has remained alive. Looking for core elements within the chaotic non-structure of Dada, I would mention paradox, chance, abandon, protest, aggression, anti-nationalism, humour, irony, bluff, art and mysticism. To be sure, art has been attacked and derided by a number of Dadaists. Yet the most impressive results of its activities seem to me to belong to the visual arts, while, for a majority of Dadaists, mysticism doesn’t appear to have been an issue. Neither was political engagement, a peculiarity of Berlin Dada. Depending on the composition of ingredients, different types of Dadaists emerged. But there is also the distinction between relentless, full-time Dadaists such as Tzara and those for whom Dada was a necessary complement. Hans Richter said that the desire for anarchy, chaos and surrender to chance and the desire for order had governed his life since at least 1917.¶ I would readily list myself among those to whom the dance amid contradictions constitutes an essence of life.
In most of the post-1945 art movements, I can see traces of Dada. There are links to the happenings of Fluxus during the 1960s, to the Stuttgart group of Max Bense and various other units of concrete poetry, to Vienna’s Aktionismus, to Monty Python, and to punk. (A punk rock band even called itself Cabaret Voltaire.) On my personal list of honorary Dadaists I wouldn’t like to miss the name of Jean Tinguely, the sculptor both funny and cosmic (in his Metamachines). The self-destruction in 1960 of his interconnected objects in the garden of New York’s MoMA was a quintessential Dada event. I should further mention Gary Larson’s cartoons, Philip Guston’s late cartoons and paintings, some of Mauricio Kagel’s later compositions (10 Marches to Miss the Victory), and György Ligeti’s Aventures et
Nouvelles aventures, a ravishing modern glossolalia, as well as his opera Le Grand Macabre. Not to forget Virgil Thomson’s Piano Sonata for Gertrude Stein in three movements on four pages, all on white keys. Greetings also to James Joyce, a Zurich contemporary of the Dadaists, and to Daniil Kharms of the Oberiu group in Leningrad.
*
There seems to me more than a little resemblance between the world a hundred years ago and our present frame of mind. Mercifully, our world is not, at this moment, consumed by an all-out war. But it has plunged into a deep crisis. There is an overbearing feeling of menace, of being faced with a number of threats of supreme magnitude: the changing climate, atomic weapons, cyber criminality, terrorism, nationalism, demagoguery, overpopulation, xenophobia. Karl Kraus, Viennese moralist, satirist and critic, put it in a nutshell: ‘Das Chaos sei willkommen, denn die Ordnung hat versagt’ (‘As order has failed, let chaos be welcome’). The buzz that Dada can generate these days in Zurich is best illustrated by the following. In February 2016, the Kunsthaus invited the people of Zurich to attend a fancy-dress ball coinciding with the Dadaglobe exposition. No fewer than nine hundred disguised Neodadaists turned up.
* Hans Richter, Dada Profile (Zurich, 1961).
† ‘Thanks to an ancient, closely guarded monastic secret, even the aged can learn to play the piano with no trouble at all.’ (My translation)
‡ Richard Sheppard, Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism (Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 197.
The Lady from Arezzo Page 2
