When Huelsenbeck posited Dada as an Existentialist phenomenon in 1957, claiming that the earlier movement ‘may be called the existential revolt, for all its elements can be understood through human existence’ (DE, p. 146), he expressed a feeling that had been relatively unexplored critically but that had existed as an undercurrent in the movement since its beginnings: Dada not only had philosophical content, but could also be used constructively as both a commentary on, and a positive, productive analysis of, the human condition. Huelsenbeck claimed that ‘the fact that the Dadaists said no was less important than the manner in which they said it’ (DE, p. 144), drawing the Dada protagonist close to Albert Camus’s rebel, ‘un homme qui dit non’ [a man who says no], but ‘s’il refuse, il ne renonce pas: c’est aussi un homme qui dit oui, dès son premier mouvement’ [though he rejects, he does not renounce: he is also a man who says yes, from the outset] (HR, p. 27). Through his short essay Huelsenbeck presented Dada as a self-aware movement that, in retrospect, increasingly drew near to French Existentialism. Fundamentally, Huelsenbeck chose to foreground aspects of Dada that are concerned with life as actively experienced and as a desire to take on the problematic of existence as a starting point.

Huelsenbeck had already boldly (and falsely) asserted in his Dada Manifesto 1949 that Jean-Paul Sartre had declared himself the ‘Nouveau Dada’ [New Dada] as part of a wider claim that Dada pre-empted the Existentialist gesture (in Motherwell 1989, p. 400), a sentiment that he would reiterate in Dada and Existentialism almost a decade later. Why, we might ask, would Huelsenbeck feel the need to twice falsify this link between Dada and Sartre? A desire to make associations with famous figures is frequently found in Dada writing, as exemplified by claims that Charlie Chaplin belonged to the movement, and in the false, prominent quoting of René Descartes on the cover of the third issue of the eponymous journal Dada (1918). But beyond Dada’s general love of linking itself with famous names, a relationship with Existentialism does confer a certain credibility: the French Existentialists’ incorporation of their opinions on Dada in their works opens up the possibility that they identified with Dada ideas, and indeed that Sartre should claim to be ‘the New Dada’. Camus refers to Dada in L’homme révolté [The Rebel] (1951), relating the oft-cited Dada sentiment that ‘les vrais dadas sont contre Dada’ [the true Dadas are against Dada] (HR, p. 122), and Simone de Beauvoir incorporates Dada into her consideration of the nihilist and negation (MA, pp. 69–70).

As these core Existentialist thinkers included Dada as part of their accounts of rebellion, so several Dadas would later express affiliation with Existentialist thought. Thus although Huelsenbeck was the only Dada to enunciate separately and coherently the relationship between Dada and Existentialism, traces of a desire to link the two movements can be found scattered across core Dada texts.

Hans Richter highlights shared tenets in his seminal text Dada Art and Anti-Art (1965). In a chapter ominously named ‘nihil’, he designates Marcel Duchamp’s readymades as evidence that ‘art has been “thought through to a conclusion”; in other words eliminated’, and in doing so Richter draws these works close to the nothingness that is left, all the while claiming that this notion of nothingness is ‘free from cynicism and regret’ (AA, p. 91). While these statements do not provide conclusive evidence that Existentialism constitutes a direct descendant of Dada, Richter certainly implies that it represents a desirable outcome. Furthermore, these thoughts express a sentiment similar to that found in Huelsenbeck’s particularly Existentialist statement: ‘the dada attitude is basically the paradox of forgetting the human in order to reveal it all the more penetratingly’ (DE, p. 139).

Hugo Ball also alludes to Existentialism in several places in his diary, Flight out of Time (1974), despite never explicitly mentioning the philosophy. Selected quotations demonstrate that he had a preoccupation with Existentialist concerns comparable that of to Richter and Huelsenbeck. Ball writes that:

What we call dada is a farce of nothingness in which all higher questions are involved […] the dadaist loves the extraordinary and the absurd […] He no longer believes in the comprehension of things from one point of view, and yet he is still so convinced of the unity of all beings […] he cultivates the curiosity of one who feels joy even at the most questionable forms of rebellion (FT, p. 65f, original emphasis).

Ball foregrounds an interest in subjectivity of perspective, while maintaining an underlying interest in humanity as a whole. Both concerns are shared by Sartre: the former in the emphatically individual creation of values, and the latter in that Sartre feels that ‘s’il est impossible de trouver en chaque homme une essence universelle qui serait la nature humaine, il existe pourtant une universalité humaine de condition’ [if it is impossible to find in every man a universal essence that we might call human nature, there does exist, however, a human universality of condition] (EH, p. 59, original emphasis), and that ‘en créant l’homme que nous voulons être, [on] crée en même temps une image de l’homme tel que nous estimons qu’il doit être’ [in creating the individual that we want to be, [we] create at the same time an image of the individual that we think they should be] (EH, p. 31f). Furthermore, these theories link with Camus’s statement that ‘je me révolte, donc nous sommes’ [I rebel, therefore we are] (HR, p. 38). This relationship between the individual and humanity, and specifically through rebellion, draws Ball’s remarks close not only to Huelsenbeck, but also to Sartre and Camus.

A final theoretical cross-over is that of Ball and Heidegger, for their focus on the individual’s being in time, and specifically the notion of being ‘thrown’ into time. In his Flight out of Time, Ball expresses a simultaneous need for otherness and authenticity, something that I will be seeking to foreground throughout my text. The element of being ‘thrown into’ and desiring a ‘flight out of’ time are varyingly echoed across Dada and Existentialist literature, with an increased attention on self-alterity. For example, on attempting to settle into life in Zurich Tzara stated that ‘je devins peu à peu un étranger pour moi-même’ [I gradually became a stranger to myself] (in Buot 2002, p. 35); Camus explained that the absurd individual describes themselves as ‘toujours […] étranger à moi-même’ [always […] outside of myself] (MS, p. 36); and Sartre claimed that ‘l’homme est constamment hors de lui-même’ [the individual is always outside of themselves] (EH, p. 76). As an expansion of this latter theory, Sartre stated in his earlier work that ‘la fuite hors de soi est fuite vers soi, et le monde apparaît comme pure distance de soi à soi’ [the flight outside of oneself is a flight towards oneself, and the world appears as pure distance between the self and itself] (EN, p. 288). These statements imply a fundamental Existential question: is it necessary to be an outsider, even to oneself, in order to be able to redefine the human condition?

In this book I take up Huelsenbeck’s invitation and re-evaluate the development of Dada through and as a form of Existentialist philosophy. In so doing I consider Huelsenbeck’s suggestions for aligning the two movements, bearing in mind smaller references from other Dadas, and branching out from his analysis to examine a range of Dada works and Existentialist texts. In order to present Dada as a form of proto-Existential(ist) philosophy I approach the comparison through a broadly chronological arrangement, additionally lending a temporal overlap of Dada and French Existentialism, and thus creating a solid ground for convergence of the two philosophies and their respective legacies.

The book recognises its self-imposed predominant focus on French atheistic Existentialism. The logical extremity of atheistic Existentialism, as well as its connections with Dada views on religion, is my primary reason for foregrounding it over its religious counterpart. My choice to analyse Dada alongside French Existentialism also resides in its strong links with literature, something which is predominantly absent in, for example, its German counterpart. This literary output allows additional access to, and alternative angles on, Existentialist thought, as well as inspiring a close correlation for a textual reading of the two movements. Further to this, Jeff Malpas notes that ‘philosophy in France has always tended to spill over what might be thought to be its disciplinary boundaries, never remaining within the confines of the academy alone’ (in Crowell 2012a, p. 294). This blurring is perfectly suited both to Dada’s tumultuous relationship with the academy and its desire to break down boundaries between the arts themselves. A final, simpler reason for the pairing of Dada with French Existentialism is the strong affinity with Sartre shown by Huelsenbeck in ‘Dada and Existentialism’, the text from whose combination this book takes its inspiration.

Thematically, the book’s chapters comparatively analyse aspects of both movements through a set of key terms—choice, alienation, responsibility, freedom, and truth—but also moving from in-depth analysis of individual artists and works, through crucial events, to the death and dispersion of Dada into Neo-Dada, postmodernism, and beyond. Martin Gaughan suggests that ‘there is a tendency in Dada criticism to equate the radical gesture with cultural critique without attempting to account for the levels at which the gesture might possibly be operating’ (in Foster 1996, p. 57). My monograph addresses these levels of gesture in order to synthesise the usefulness of both the radical gestures and their commonly held cultural critique, as well as suggest alternative interpretations of Dada’s ‘critique’ of society.

The dialogue I initiate between these two movements is designed to reassess Dada through an Existentialist lens. Therefore while the events and lives of Dada and its adherents are considered, this does not extend to the Existentialist equivalent. The inclusion of Existentialist content fluctuates to suit the intensity of analysis of Dada, with the intention of sharpening focus on Dada, rather than comparing the movements in a more reductive manner. The Existentialist content will be taken from a core corpus of works of Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and, to a lesser extent, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Chapter 2 opens the artistic-philosophical debate in an analysis of the concept of choice through discussions of individuality, subjectivity, and identity. These notions are approached via an analysis of several works of Sophie Taeuber, a lesser-known but prolific and interdisciplinary Dada artist whose work in masking provides an ideal springboard for a comparison between Dada and Existentialist values of the individual. Manifestations of physical and mental selfhood are scrutinised across Taeuber’s Dada Köpfe [Dada Heads] (1918–1920), König Hirsch [King Stag] puppets (1918), dance and costumes, as well as her ‘self-portraits’ taken with the Dada-Köpfe, alongside a selection of work from other Dadas that responds to a similar exploration of the self through their emphasis on masks and masking, and as expressions of individuality and subjectivity in their own right. The chapter considers whether the deceptive simplicity of the works of Taeuber and her Dada associates hides a greater comment on avant-garde notions of the self, and additionally elucidates the Existentialist value of work that extensively and deliberately transcends the boundaries of artistic media. I begin to assess Dada art alongside Existentialist concepts such as Sartre’s ‘look’, Camus’s thoughts on silence and music, and Beauvoirian ambiguity. Using this analysis I posit that the self is a complex and multifaceted construction based in various ways of masking, unmasking and remasking, a manipulation of ‘truth’ to allow for a being founded on individual, subjective choice.

Chapter 3 moves from plastic art to film, assessing the medium in relation to notions of alienation and reality, alongside Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s theories of perception, as well as briefly incorporating Gilles Deleuze’s writings on cinema as an interrogation of movement over time. The chapter investigates the way in which our perception of space and time changes with Dada’s extensive manipulation of the film reel, as well as the effect on the filmic experience in its own right. Through this I identify the medium of film as a means of perpetually (re)constructing meaning through simultaneous, multifaceted memories or remanence. This second chapter continues to draw upon notions of individuality highlighted in the first chapter, while contributing theories on the use of alienation in Dada work. I suggest that through these films alienation is presented in a positive sense, a way of viewing and constructing the self from an external position, a productive distance from the self within itself. I have chosen to discuss a selection of French Dada films for their volatile engagement with narrative and the destruction thereof: Man Ray’s Le Retour à la raison [Return to Reason] (1923), and Emak Bakia [Leave Me Alone] (1926), Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Le Ballet mécanique [Mechanical Ballet] (1924) and René Clair and Francis Picabia’s Entr’acte [Interval] (1924).

Chapter 4 discusses Dada and Existentialist views on responsibility and justice through examples of trials represented in their respective literatures. The notion of responsibility as defined in Existentialist thought is examined with a view to its broader connections with the concept of the individual’s compulsion to choose, to assert and therefore own their own morality. This is carried out through a comparative analysis of Dada’s mock trial of Maurice Barrès (1921) and Camus’s trial of his protagonist Meur...