Dadaism

9 Key excerpts on "Dadaism"

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  A Symphony of Possibilities

  A Handbook for Arts Integration in Secondary English Language Arts

  • Katherine J. Macro, Michelle Zoss, Katherine J. Macro, Michelle Zoss(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)

    (Publisher)

  4Dadaism, Found Poetry, and Close Reading in English Language Arts

  TOBY EMERT Agnes Scott College

  A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language.

  —HUGO BALL , Dada Manifesto (Sterling, 2016)

  T he Dadaists, members of an early twentieth-century arts movement, promoted the concept of anti-art and questioned the modes, methods, purposes, and effects of art (Ratliff, 2016, para. 2). The aggressive technological revolution of the First World War, epitomized by its military machinery, forever altered the scope of human destruction and mayhem. The Dadaists wished to represent the social and spiritual disfigurement they were witnessing as a result of the war and sought to create artwork that intended to deconstruct, decompose, and manipulate. They declared that art can be whatever the artist produces or assembles. “Dada doubts everything,” claims Tristan Tzara (1989, p. 92), one of the movement's central figures. Their aesthetic greatly influenced subsequent avant-garde movements, such as surrealism, as well as our contemporary understanding of the definition of artistic effort. Dada's style, which celebrates chance, eschews individual authorship, and urges imaginative recreation, provides us with practices that can be mined for application in the English language arts classroom.

  Translating Dada's Aesthetic for the English Language Arts Classroom

  In this chapter, I share a text-based response strategy that derives from the Dadaists’ inclination to repurpose and reinterpret: the found poem. Tzara (1989, p. 92) provided the following instructions for writing a found poem:

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  Curious Disciplines

  Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood

  • Sarah Hayden(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of New Mexico Press

    (Publisher)

  . . a lowdown skunk,” employs ominous imagery to portray Dada greedily harnessing artists’ minds, hands, and voices as vessels through which to achieve its agenda. 10 In a related rhetorical strand, the Dada spirit is frequently figured as a mode of existence, an amalgam of character trait and lifestyle. Thus Richard Huelsenbeck writes, “Dada is a state of mind that can be revealed in any conversation whatever, so that you are compelled to say: this man is a DADAIST—that man is not.” 11 Presenting the Dada impulse as timeless and eternal, Tzara denies that Dada is “modern” and declares: “You are mistaken if you take Dada for a modern school, or even for a reaction against the schools of today.” 12 This presentation of a primordial Dada is coun-tered by another, much more prevalent contextual- determinist account, within which Dada is born of the particular confluence of circumstances then present in Europe: “the fatal product of a state of affairs.” 13 Hanne Bergius suggests that “seeing man dismembered and dissected, turned into a fool’s commodity, the Dadaists were forced to abandon the belief in a closed, organic society where the artist had a clearly assigned place.” 14 This explanation of Dada as a necessary reaction to the world of its moment prevails today. As one prescient reviewer recognized in 1919: “it is the confirmation of a feeling of independence, a distrust of society, of every-thing which smacks of the herd.” 15 Within an ecosystem of art ethics, Dada is invoked to satisfy the needs of its time. Throughout its plastic, literary, and performative art practice, differences in ethos can be perceived in the various Dada centers. Berlin Dada’s particularly politi-cal and socially conscious complexion is reflected in its construction of the movement as a “Dada Club.” 16 In Paris, as Mileaf and Witkovsky observe, the Dada spirit was especially aware of, and engaged with, systems of bourgeois capitalism as they manifested in that city.

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  Modernisms

  A Literary Guide, Second Edition

  • Peter Nicholls(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Almost from the first, the Dadaists would occupy a deliberately ambiguous position, condemning the barbarity of war 246 From Fantasy to Structure: Dada and Neo-Classicism 247 while drawing on those same destructive energies to fuel their own anti-culturalism. Surrealist Andr´ e Breton would later remark that ‘Cubism was a school of painting, futurism a political movement: DADA is a state of mind.’ 2 The comment is helpful in so far as it warns us not to expect to find a clear aesthetic programme motivating Dada. Of more importance is the ironic habit of mind, an expression of anger, delib-erate stupidity, nonsense and black humour which prevents the Dada intelligence from settling comfortably into conclusions and convic-tions. The tone is there in Hans Arp’s retrospective account of Dada’s inception: In Zurich in 1915, losing interest in the slaughterhouses of the world war, we turned to the Fine Arts. While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we ver-sified, we sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the furious folly of these times. 3 As the apocalypse plays itself out, the Dadaists immerse themselves in the ‘Fine Arts’, fiddling while Europe burns. But this turn to cul-ture is also a turn against it, and the ‘elementary’ forms which Arp and his colleagues seek are ones which unleash a primal energy against the ‘civilised’ world’s lust for self-destruction. For the ‘Fine Arts’ enshrine those same moral and religious principles for which ‘the batteries rumbled in the distance’. Like Pound in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley , the Dadaists revile this cultural tradition (the war fought for ‘a few thousand battered books’), but unlike Pound, they find themselves ‘ losing interest in the slaughterhouses of the world war’.

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  The Long Voyage

  Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1987

  • Malcolm Cowley, Hans Bak(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  The progress of literature (and here progress does not imply improvement) is in large measure a series of reactions: romanticism against classicism, realism against romanticism; aestheticism against realism; Dada against the aesthetes. But given the fact that the literature of each nation starts from a different point and has a different course, the reactions, at a given moment, can hardly be the same. Thus, for American writers to revolt against Remy de Gourmont or Anatole France, is quite as foolish as for the French to revolt against the Ku Klux. And in this measure, your protest against an imaginary group of writers (I never met them) whom you term the American Dadas, is perfectly justified.

  However, the progress of literature is also a discovery of new truths and a rejection or re-affirmation of old principles. To this extent literature, like ethics and aesthetics, is international. If a Frenchman discovers a literary principle which is or seems new, and an American utilizes the principle, I can find no more objection to the act of the second than has been raised against Baudelaire’s utilization of Poe.

  […]

  Dada was in large measure a reaction against European writers whom you list as “the solemn romanticists, the shrill parnassians, the symbolists, the votaries of Bergson.… the pragmatists of Germany and the rhetoricians of Italy.” Translate this process into American letters, where only a few of these existed, and you have less than nothing.

  Dada was also a discovery: that nonsense is often the strongest form of ridicule, that associational processes of thought often have more place than the logical, that writing is often best when it is in the form of a play, that the language is capable of unexpected development, that the romantic movement is not dead, that defiance and assertiveness, carried to farthest extremes of bravado, are more to be admired than a passive mysticism, that what a man writes is a fundamental part of his life. And in this sense Dada is living still.

  You have been to Paris and have brought back the gossip of Monsieur X the poet and Monsieur Y the novelist. I have been to Paris and met Messieurs X and Y. Other American writers have been to Paris. Some of them meet Paul Fort and write polyphonic prose in his manner, some meet Paul Valéry and become classicists, some meet Soupault, Aragon or Tzara and write a Yankee Dada, some meet Jules Romains and his serious little group, study his treatises on Unanimism, adopt his more solemn thoughts and some of his virtues and are proud to be called the Unanimists of America. There are also Americans who go to Paris, meet many people of many schools, take the best of each, and retain the conviction to write about their own surroundings in their own manner, but you, Mr Frank, are not generally considered one of their number.

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  Encyclopedia of German Literature

  • Matthias Konzett(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  D

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315062471-99

  Dadaism

  The Dada movement began in 1916 in Zurich as a protest against World War I, which was raging beyond the borders of neutral Switzerland, and against the intellectual and cultural conditions that had led to this war. In February of that year, in the Holländische Meierei at Spiegelgasse 1, a group of young writers and artists, mostly citizens of the warring countries who had taken refuge from military conscription, founded the Cabaret Voltaire, a café/performance space that featured eclectic performances of music, poetry, and dance that represented the major artistic trends of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chief among the founders were the German writers Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck, the Romanians Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara, and the Alsatian Jean (Hans) Arp. Ball and Huelsenbeck brought a strong German Expressionist flavor to the early days of the movement; the cabaret performances included readings of the works of such German writers as Wedekind, Lasker-Schüler, and von Hoddis. Tzara brought to the mix a strong interest in the techniques of Italian futurism.

  The most distinctive elements of the Cabaret Voltaire performances were the chanting of primitivistic incantations such as Tzara’s Chants nègres (of supposedly African origin) and the recital of Ball’s sound poems. Indeed, the most famous image of Zurich Dada is a photograph of Ball reciting one of these poems, while dressed in an outrageous armor-like costume.

  Sometime between May and June, the participants in the Cabaret Voltaire began referring to their activities by the name “Dada,” which first appeared in print in early June. The origins of the name were much contested among the participants, and in later years Tzara vied with Huelsenbeck over credit for “discovering” the word. The truth will probably never be known. However, the most enduring version of the story—that Tzara discovered the word by randomly opening a German-French dictionary and pointing at the French word for “hobbyhorse”—is almost certainly a fabrication. In any case, “Dada” soon became the name not only of the developing movement, but also of a short-lived gallery and the international journal that Tzara edited in Zurich and later in Paris. The word was rich in overtones for the various participants: it was among the first speech sounds emitted by infants, it meant “yes yes” in many Eastern European languages, and it was even the name of a hair lotion sold in Zurich.

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  Knowing from the Inside

  Cross-Disciplinary Experiments with Matters of Pedagogy

  • Tim Ingold(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Dialogue is normally dependent upon an exchange between two living beings. Education is about life, about growth through participation and instilling a degree of trust in established mores and protocols. Here one interlocutor is dead, but treated as if alive. The whole thing is more like a shamanic ritual than a conventional lesson, while consciously mimicking the latter. It is deliberately obscure and disruptive, reminiscent of Kaprow’s use of graffiti-strewn toilets as sites of learning, and reversing the roles of teachers and learners. The element of the absurd in this performance is barely acknowledged in Biesta’s analysis. Yet it is crucial, I believe, to the quality of experience and provocation that Beuys intended with the work – that is, to question by transgressing normal behaviours, in this case of gallery going. Dada and Absurd Art, Then and Now Perhaps it would be helpful at this point to draw more deeply on the history of the absurd in Dada. The writer and poet André Breton, a champion of Dada, described it as ‘the marvellous faculty of attaining two widely separate realities 202 Knowing from the Inside without departing from the realm of our experience, drawing them together and drawing a spark from their contact’ (cited in Adès 1974: 30). Dada is a very particular form of art. Not all art functions in this way. In the early twentieth century Dada took the form of unlikely material combinations such as Duchamp’s ready-mades. It introduced an anti-aesthetic out of a need to disorient art and public alike. Meaning emerges in Dada through the chance juxtapositions of fragments of sentences, materials and objects drawn from everyday life. The museum and gallery also played roles that were far from neutral, to the point that the process of a work’s creation and the context in which it was experienced conspired in the disruption together with the work itself.

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  The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk

  • John Melillo(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The sonic abstraction in Dada performance typifies the wider Dadaist critique of and in language. Noise emerges as a “simulacrum of a semiosis” (McCaffery 1998: 164), the negative image of meaning-making. Such a simulating—which is also a dissimulating—distorts the social force of language by undoing its signifying conventions. The power of statement is reduced to mere sound and chance. In this way, the noise of Dada inserts a kind of nothing—a nothing filled with other sounds, the sonorousness of life—into meaning, rationality, and beauty. As Ball alludes to in his search for “atonement,” the Dadaists take to task the Shelleyean cliché that poets are “legislators of the world.” Poetry fails when it meets with destructive modernity. A causal connection between “rational” language and total war provides Ball and other Dadaists with the impetus for a total revaluation of language as such. In the act of negating meaning and rationality, they also reveal them to be versions of noise: mere nothing sounds. Tristan Tzara in 1918 sums up this movement of language into noise:

  If I cry out:

  Ideal, ideal, ideal,

  Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge,

  Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,

  I have given a pretty faithful vision of progress, law, morality, and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom.

  (“Dada Manifesto” [1918] in Motherwell 1951) The desire to escape such language of the “ideal” and of “knowledge” by refiguring it as a resounding “boomboom” drives the bruitist poetics of Dada. “The Thought Is Made in the Mouth”

  This oppositional urge marked the Dadaist synthesis of other European avant-garde movements, in particular Italian Futurism and German Expressionism, with forms of popular cabaret, American mass culture, and (secondhand) African and Oceanic poetry. Dadaist internationalism and eclecticism strongly informed their critical stance toward modernity. Its initial milieu was the bars, galleries, and theaters frequented by an international set who were in neutral Zurich to avoid military service, work in the black market, or simply escape from the nationalism and jingoism in their home countries. Other famous residents at the time included Vladimir Lenin and James Joyce. During and after the war, the Dadaists—in particular Tzara—began to construct an international network of associates by sharing journals and pamphlets through the mail. Many artists took up the challenge of Dada in Europe, America, Japan, and across the globe.

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  1922

  Literature, Culture, Politics

  • Jean-Michel Rabaté(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Then there was always a big fuss, and the students, who in Switzerland as elsewhere are the stupidest and most reactionary rabble … gave a preview of the public resistance which Dada was later to encounter on its triumphant march through the world. (Huelsenbeck 1981, 23–4) 9 The imperialism of Huelsenbeck’s account of Dada is as ironic here as the militarism of Marinetti’s Futurism was utterly sincere; the “triumph- ant march” of Dada throughout Europe could be considered, if anything, more an infiltration than an act of conquest. Even so, it was through the language of conquest and reaction that the Dada movement tended to articulate and perform its cultural work, whether such conquests were invoked negatively, in breaking radically with the ideology of German Dada, Futurism, and Raymond Roussel 133 nationalism and imperialism, or ironically, in satirizing it. No less ironic was the movement’s polemical absorption of the language of capitalism: a 1919 issue of the Berlin journal Der Dada, edited by Raoul Hausmann, voices an appeal on behalf of the specious Central Office of Dadaism to “Put your money in Dada!” As the article’s mock-agitprop rhetoric insists, “dada is the war loan of eternal life … dada is as effective in the small and the large brains of apes as it is in the backsides of statesmen” (Central Office of Dadaism 1919, 86). Slander and polemic were ingrained within the very medium of Futurism and Dada alike, part of the basic currency of either movement. The year closed in characteristically scandalous fashion. The avant-garde dialectic of slander and affiliation found full public exercise in December 1922, when a group of former Parisian Dadaists rallied in support of a play by Raymond Roussel, the reclusive French author whose prewar novel Locus Solus had just been staged, at great expense and to disastrous effect, at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris.

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  Regarding the Popular

  Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture

  • Sascha Bru, Laurence Nuijs, Benedikt Hjartarson, Peter Nicholls, Tania Ørum, Hubert Berg, Sascha Bru, Laurence Nuijs, Benedikt Hjartarson, Peter Nicholls, Tania Ørum, Hubert Berg(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Folklore Dada, Carnival and Revolution Debbie Lewer (University of Glasgow) Dada scholarship has been alert for some time to the broadly "carmvales- que" dimensions of the movement The abundant love of masks and pseudonyms, absurdity, games and hoaxes and the transgression of natural boundaries all present memselves as ready evidence. Mikhail Bakhtin's semmal Rabelau and Ms World provides a seductive filter through which to view them.^ The rich European tradition of the Fool as a ffgure in art, philosophy and vernacular culture accommodates just as readHy much of Dada's activity. It is clear that the Dadaists themselves understood the popular secular traditions and the power of the Fool. Within Christian tradition, the Fool's origins He in the book of Psalms where the essence of his foolishness is his denial of God: "The fool says in his heart: 'there is no God'". (Dixit mspiens in corde suo: Non est deus, Psalms 12, 14).' Such demal also sheds light on Dada's copious and intentionally provocative blasphemy, itself one of many forms of Dada's hierarchical inversions.* In the "Oberdada", Johannes Baader wrote a note to Tristan Tzara saluting him with the Nietzschean pun "Lieber Tzara Tustra!", and informed him Th 1S essay is an extended version of papers presented at the annual Association of Art His- torians Conference 2010 (Glasgow, UK) and at the European Avant-Garde and Modern- ism Conference 2010 ( P o L n , Poland). It is related to a larger research project generously supported by a Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and by my aca- demic hosts at the Kunsthistoosches Institut, University of Bonn, Germany. 1 For two good studies, see Richard Sheppard, "Tricksters, Carnival and the Magical Figures of Dada Poetry" in Richard Sheppard, Moderns - Dada - Postmodern.™, Evanston 2000, 292-303 and Hanne Bergius, "Dada as "Buffoonery and Requiem at the Same Time'", in: Debbie Lewer (ed.), Postlmpresstomsm to World War II, Maiden 2006, 366-80.

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