by Greil Marcus
Work by El Lissitzky in use as a propaganda board at a factory, Vitebsk, USSR, 1919
The formal juxtaposition of the evening’s items—suggesting identifications between art and science, alchemy and housework, occultism and militarism, or a general vice versa—is a TV version of what, when the man in the costume was brought onto the stage, was called dada. Along with the attempt to reduce all forms to zero, the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated phenomena was the basic tactic of twentieth-century modernist art. The idea was that, to the degree aesthetic categories could be proven false, social barriers could be revealed as constructed illusions, and the world could be changed. Things are not as they seem: that was the message then, and that is the message now. The difference—so goes the legend of the 1910s and 1920s, when artists across Europe created new worlds on paper and canvas (worlds so violently new that, gazing at them today, one can read the official history of the century as little more than a desperate retreat from these terrifyingly obvious utopias, from the new worlds implicit in any El Lissitzky construction, any Man Ray photograph, any De Stijl design)—is that then the message was shocking, and now it is not even a message.
WHAT GOOD
“What good is thinking, writing or acting,” Henri Lefebvre wrote in 1973, “if one’s only achievement is to continue that long line of failures, self-destructions and fatal spells lasting from Jude the Obscure to Antonin Artaud?” What good indeed? “Are we to step out of history,” a college student named Steve Strauss wrote in 1967 in a paper I graded, “to join hands with eternal wastrels, fops, and dandies?” It’s easier said than done.
Leaving the road most taken we might step out and join Lefebvre’s long line almost anywhere: step into the champ libre, the freie strasse, most often the imaginary terrain of a parallel history—once the realm of heretics, alchemists, esoterics, since the French Revolution the domain of political conspiracies and aesthetic “avant-gardes,” perhaps little more than a place for naysayers to claim a position ahead of history while fighting a rear-guard action against it, against the Industrial Revolution, the middle class, the “bourgeoisie,” “mass man,” “mass society” (in a phrase, modern democracy)—a parallel history powered by the plain wish to break out of the story most told and most often condemned to travel with it like the bird on the rhinoceros, the naysayer’s wish circling back, finally, to meet no New Man, no new world, but only what little is left of the desire that set off the journey in the first place. “He could be found at the Livraria Catilina,” novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote of his character Gallileo Gall, revolutionary manqué of The War of the End of the World (he was a veteran of the Commune, washed up in Brazil at the end of the century),
in the shade of the palm tree of the Mirador of the Sorrowful, or in the sailors’ taverns of the lower town, explaining to anyone with whom he struck up a conversation that all virtues are compatible if reason rather than faith is the axis of life, that not God but Satan—the first rebel—is the true prince of freedom, and that once the old order was destroyed through revolutionary action, the new society, free and just, would flower spontaneously. Although there were some who listened to him, in general people did not appear to pay much attention to him.
Born in 1901 in Hagetmau, southwest France, Lefebvre first joined the line he would later curse in Paris, in the 1920s—the heyday of surrealism.
We are certainly barbarians, since a certain form of civilization disgusts us . . . Categorically we need freedom, but a freedom based in our deepest spiritual needs, in the most severe and human desires of our flesh . . . The stereotyped gestures, acts, and lies of Europe have run their disgusting circle. Spinoza, Kant, Blake, Hegel, Schelling, Proudhon, Marx, Stirner, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Nietzsche—this list alone is the beginning of your downfall.
So read “Revolution, First and Forever!,” a surrealist manifesto Lefebvre signed in 1925. This was the line of fatal spells (no less an attempt to cast one); Lefebvre soon left it, following the surrealists into the French Communist Party, and embarked on his great career as a Marxist social theorist.
MY FIRST
“My first article in the review Philosophies,” Lefebvre said in 1975, looking back to 1924, “[was a] portrait of Dada. It brought me a lasting friendship with Tristan Tzara . . . I had written, ‘Dada smashes the world, but the pieces are fine’ . . . Each time I ran into Tristan Tzara, he’d say to me: ‘So? You’re picking up the pieces! Do you plan to put them back together?’ I always answered: ‘No—I’m going to finish smashing them.’ ”
Lefebvre had written a review of Tzara’s 7 manifestes dada; the tone was snotty. Yes, Lefebvre had said, he preferred dada to surrealism, which “only bets small change”—literary reputations. Against the careerist pretensions of André Breton and his group, easily satisfied by scandal for scandal’s sake, by the applause or catcalls of tout le monde, dada at least reached for an absolute: “the end of the world.” But it was a puerile absolute, “solely the spirit-that-says-no,” “vainly proclaiming the sovereignty of the instant,” a “pseudo-sorcery”: “As Dada moves to escape all definitions, its negation defines itself all too powerfully as its own negation.” As philosophy dada was a slipknot, your basic Sophistry 1-A: everything I say is a lie.
Only twenty-three in 1924, Lefebvre already had one foot in history to balance the other in the long line of fatal spells. Fast on his feet, he wrote like an old man, smiling over the enthusiasms of his yet-to-vanish youth, ready for serious business: what is to be done? But in 1975, half a century on from Philosophies, looking back at his long-gone callow self, he sounded like a twenty-three-year-old: “No, I’m going to finish smashing them.” In 1967 he had written even odder lines, leaping out of a sober argument on technics and domination: “Modern art, literature, culture, were they not, one wartime day, blown up—simply because in the right place, at the right time, a young man set down a paradoxically potent little explosion, two redundant syllables, ‘Da-da’?” Those syllables were the pieces Lefebvre once promised to finish smashing. Now he held them in his mouth as if they were pieces of the philosopher’s stone. What was the old man talking about?
HE WAS
He was talking about the Cabaret Voltaire, launched in Zurich on 5 February 1916, in the midst of the First World War, abandoned five months after that. Its founders were Hugo Ball, twenty-nine, obscure German dramaturgist, poet, lapsed-Catholic mystic, Nietzsche acolyte, and future TV personality, and Emmy Hennings, thirty-one, German chanteuse. They were joined by an Alsatian artist named Hans (Jean) Arp; Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet; his countryman Marcel Janco, a painter; and Richard Huelsenbeck, a German poet and, when he got around to it, medical student. Formerly the cabaret had been a bar called the Holländische Meierei, run by one Jan Ephriam, in his younger days a sailor; today it is the Teen ’n’ Twenty disco. At the foot of the Spiegelgasse, in the old quarter, the city of Zurich has put up a plaque: under the chiseled word “DADAISMUS” someone has scratched “Ne passera pas”—“Dada will stand.”
It was a precious nightclub in which the artist’s promise to reveal the meaning of life was turned into a vaudeville show where all the acts appeared at the same time. “Dada has been mixed up with an art movement,” Huelsenbeck said a few wars later in 1971, “though it has nothing to present as an art movement if you think of Cubism, of Impressionism or whatever, these are all problems of form, of color, of something that is shown or devised or has the aim of being a work of art; now this we didn’t have at all. We had practically nothing except what we were.”
“The Cabaret Voltaire was a six-piece band,” Hans Richter wrote in 1964. “Each played his instrument, i.e., himself.” A young German painter, Richter arrived in Zurich in August 1916 after being wounded at the front; the Cabaret Voltaire was already there-were-giants-in-the-earth. Richter had missed it. Arp reports from the scene:
On the stage of a gaudy, motley, overcrowded tavern are several weird and peculiar figures representing Tzara, Janco, Ball,
Huelsenbeck, Madame Hennings, and your humble servant. Total pandemonium. The people around us are shouting, laughing, and gesticulating. Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups, poems, moos, and the miaowing of medieval Bruitists. Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop at the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost.
A year later all this was allegory, naming imitations and analogues all over the West. In New York, Arthur Cravan, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp took the tag; in Paris, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Francis Picabia, and a dozen more. A urinal was exhibited as the embodiment of the beautiful, the true, and the good, as art; a moustache and an obscene anagram were drawn on a postcard of the Mona Lisa. Such acts had effects; some people paid attention, some were irritated, and some were thrilled. Dada was received as nonsense with a straight face, or maybe vice versa, well-dressed young men in good cafes placing “KICK ME” stickers on the rumps of their working-class waiters, a privileged retort to the moral dilemmas posed by the world war (“Let’s party”), a joke finally settling into encyclopedias: “A complex international movement, Dada was essentially an attack on both artistic and political traditions. Its early performances were designed to outrage the conventional, but all manifestations had in common anti-social behavior, nihilism and a desire to shock . . .”
Thanks mostly to Tzara, a tireless promoter, the papers were full of it. “Up to October 15,” he wrote in 1919, “8590 articles on dadaism.” No one has ever checked the figure, which he probably made up, but he was probably right. Still, this had nothing to do with what happened in the Cabaret Voltaire, and it was not what Lefebvre was talking about. The entry in The Timetables of History isn’t far off, though: “1916. Visual Arts. Dadaist cult in Zurich.”
DADA WAS
Dada was a legend of freedom only after the fact; in the act it was a gnostic myth of the twentieth century.
It was a secret history not only of the Great War but of all the I-have-a-rendezvous-with-death poetry written to extract meaning from the war—on dada terms, to justify it. François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim is a version—with Jules and Jim, conventional bohemians, rational and passionate in their ways, both real people on the screen, and Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine, her face first glimpsed in a field of abandoned statues, dada: junk, unreal but irresistible, the fatal spell.
Much has been written about the Cabaret Voltaire as a protest against the war; the dadaists wrote a lot of it. Arp in 1948:
. . . disgusted by the butchery of World War I, we devoted ourselves to the Fine Arts. Despite the remote booming of artillery we sang, painted, pasted, and wrote poetry with all our might and main. We were seeking an elementary art to cure man of the frenzy of the times and a new order to restore the balance between heaven and hell. This art rapidly became a subject of general disapproval. It was not surprising to us that the “bandits” were unable to understand us. In their puerile megalomania and power-madness, they demanded that art itself must serve to brutalize mankind.
In other words, instead of war for war’s sake, or art for war’s sake, or even war for art’s sake, art for art’s sake, or anyway art for the good of humanity. Such notions might have made the papers in 1916, but they were hardly the stuff of legend, let alone myth: rather, old-fashioned romanticism or knee-jerk bohemianism. Writing in 1920, Huelsenbeck had a different idea—or a different voice:
We had all left our countries as a result of the war . . . We were agreed that the war had been contrived by the various governments for the most autocratic, sordid and materialistic reasons; we Germans were familiar with the book J’accuse, and even without it we would have had little confidence in the decency of the German Kaiser and his generals. Ball was a conscientious objector, and I had escaped by the skin of my teeth from the pursuit of the police myrmidons who, for their so-called patriotic reasons, were massing men in the trenches of Northern France and giving them shells to eat. None of us had much appreciation for the kind of courage it takes to get shot for the idea of a nation which is at best a cartel of pelt merchants and profiteers in leather, at worst a cultural association of psychopaths who, like the Germans, marched off with a volume of Goethe in their knapsacks, to skewer Frenchmen and Russians on their bayonets.
The Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1986
That last sentence is pure dada, or at least the sort of dada this book pursues: a voice of teeth ground down to points, more suited to manifestos and hit singles than to poems, a near-absolute loathing of one’s time and place, the note held until disgust turns into glee. But as dada, that voice surfaced only in Berlin, in 1918 and for a year or two after. It was not the kind of dada one could have found in the Cabaret Voltaire, which this book also pursues. There, in 1916, an experiment was performed in which the language by which the war was justified was destroyed. In the story dada told, this destruction was a necessary preliminary to the discovery of a language so plain the very act of speaking it would grind one’s teeth down to points.
A DISCIPLE
A disciple of Kandinsky—and a follower of Thomas Müntzer, Bakunin, and Kropotkin—Hugo Ball was always torn between defilement of authority and abasement before it. Experimenting with narcotics in 1915, he wrote in his diary: “I can imagine a time when I will seek obedience as much as I have tasted disobedience: to the full.” He reached for a private megalomania to set against the public megalomania of the epoch: “I could not live without the conviction that my own personal fate is an abbreviated version of the fate of the whole nation”—by which, as a good German philosopher, he meant the fate of the whole world.
Well before Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire, he wrote a dirty poem about the Virgin Mary, “Der Henker” (The Hangman). He wanted to fuck her, he said. But that was also before he began his diary, in which he testified that this was nothing.
I once used to carry a skull with me from city to city; I had found it in an old chapel. They had been digging up graves and had exposed hundred-year-old skeletons. They wrote the dead person’s name and birthplace on the top of the skull. They painted the cheekbones with roses and forget-me-nots. The caput mortuum that I carried with me for years was the head of a girl who had died in 1811 at the age of twenty-two. I was in fact madly in love with the hundred-and-thirty-three-year old girl and could hardly bear to part from her . . . This living head here
(Emmy Hennings, from 1913 Ball’s mistress, after 1920 his wife, after 1927 his widow)
reminds me of that dead one. When I look at the girl, I want to take some paint and paint flowers on her hollow cheeks.
Certain passages from Ball’s diary appear in almost every history of dada; this one never does.
BALL
Ball defined the terms of the Cabaret Voltaire in advance. On 25 November 1915 he wrote:
People who live rashly and precipitately easily lose control over their impressions and are prey to unconscious emotions and motives. The activity of any art (painting, writing, composing) will do them good, provided that they do not pursue any purpose in their subjects, but follow the course of a free, unfettered imagination. The independent process of fantasy never fails to bring to light again those things that have crossed the threshold of consciousness without analysis. In an age like ours, when people are assaulted daily by the most monstrous things without being able to keep account of their impressions, aesthetic production becomes a prescribed course. But all living art will be irrational, primitive, and complex; it will speak a secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox.
Seven decades on, this translates easily—but as with Arp and Huelsenbeck on dada as protest, one has to pare away the conventional to find the element around which the story turns. First off there is borrowed Freudianism—art as psychoanalysis, art as cure, plus enlightened solipsism versus brainwashed mass s
ociety. The embrace of the irrational and primitive is just 1915 cafe talk: a blurb for expressionism and cubism, a leap on the band-wagon of Filippo Marinetti’s then-hot futurism, a ride leading straight to Breton’s surrealism. But Ball’s last words—“it will speak a secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox”—remain strange. This was what Lefebvre would respond to. It was the heart of the vaudeville show, a reach for the gnostic myth; everyone who made it felt it.
They were never masters of the paradox, but simply messengers—or, as the years went on, victims. For the rest of their lives (save for Ball, the members of the Cabaret Voltaire sextet lived a long time) they returned again and again to their few days in the Zurich bar. They tried to understand what happened to them. They never got over it.
THIS IS
This is the best evidence—the only real evidence—that something actually happened in Zurich in the spring of 1916, something the art-history version of dada can only cover up.
