Dada Essay, Research Paper
In the second and third decades of this century, a new kind of artistic movement swept Europe and America. Its very name, “Dada”–two identical syllables without the obligatory “-ism”–distinguished it from the long line of avant-gardes which have determined the history of the arts in the last 200 years. Its proponents came from all parts of Europe and the United States at a time when their native countries were battling one another in the deadliest war ever known. They did not restrict themselves to being painters, writers, dancers, or musicians; most of them were involved in several art forms and in breaking down the boundaries which kept the arts distinct from one another. Indeed, the Dadaists were not content to make art. They wanted to affect all aspects of Western civilization, to take part in the revolutionary changes which were the inevitable result of the chaos of the First World War. They were not interested in writing books and painting pictures which a public would admire in an uninvolved manner; rather, they aimed to provoke the public into reacting to their activities: to the Dadaists, a violently negative reaction was better than a passive acceptance. The Dada movement was perhaps the most decisive single influence on the development of twentieth-century art, and its innovations are so pervasive as to be virtually taken for granted today. Because of its importance for both artistic and social history, Dada has become the subject of intense scholarly interest on the part of researchers in language, literature, art, music, theater, sociology, the history of ideas–in fact, every field which deals in some way with contemporary culture and civilization. And the single most important bibliographic resource for these scholars is the International Dada Archive at The University of Iowa.
What was Dada? Why is there a Dada Archive? And why, of all places, is it in Iowa?
Of all the influential artistic movements which flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, Dada is the one which most urgently requires an intensive and exhaustive effort to preserve and make available its documents. There are two reasons for this: the movement’s inherent importance for contemporary culture, and the ephemeral nature of its productions.
Contemporary art as we know it could not have come into existence without Dada. Virtually every artistic principle and device which underlies the literature, music, theater, and visual arts of our time was promoted, if not invented, by the Dadaists: the use of collage and assemblage; the application of aleatory techniques; the tapping of the artistic resources of the indigenous cultures of Africa, America, and Oceania; the extension of the notion of abstract art to literature and film; the breaking of the boundaries separating the different art forms from one another and from “everyday life”; the notion of art as performance; the expropriation of elements of popular culture; the notion of interaction or confrontation with the audience–everything which defines what we loosely call the “avant-garde.” One would be hard pressed to name and artistic movement since 1923 which does not, at least in part, trace its roots to Dada:
Surrealism, Constructivism, Lettrism, Fluxus, Pop- and Op-Art, Conceptual Art, Minimalism. But the effects of Dada are not limited to the world of the arts; its impact on contemporary life has been felt from the streets of Chicago to Madison Avenue. The style of political protest which came to the forefront in the late sixties–mock trials, Yippies, Guerrilla theater–can readily be traced back to the actions of the Dadaists in Zurich, Berlin, and Paris during and after the First World War. And commercial advertising as we know it today is indebted to the Dadaists’ experiments with collage and typography; indeed, two members of the Berlin Dada group founded a “Dada Advertising Agency,” and the Hanover Dadaist Kurt Schwitters designed newspaper and magazine advertisements which pioneered techniques which we now take for granted.
But beyond the inherent importance of the Dada movement, there are particularly urgent reasons why a Dada Archive is vital at this moment in history. The artist and writers of Dadaism did not aim to create eternal works of art and literature; they wanted to open the way to a new art and a new society by undermining and exposing what they saw as the stale cultural conventions of a decayed European civilization which had led the world into the conflagration of the Great War of 1914-18. The record of their effort is of immeasurable interest; but by the very nature of their program, the Dadaists left the documentation
of their movement to the mercy of the winds of chance. The record of an art which values action over stability, the moment of interaction or confrontation
between artist and public over the eternity of a published poem or an artwork in a museum, is in danger of disappearing forever. The Dadaists did publish
books which can be found in libraries, create paintings and sculptures which are displayed in the major museums of two continents. But the real spirit of Dada
was in events: cabaret performances, demonstrations, declarations, confrontations, the distributions of leaflets and of small magazines and newspapers which
appeared for one or two issues, and actions which today we would call guerrilla theater. But the documentation of these events was by no means as careful
as that of the “Conceptual Art” and the “happenings” of the sixties and seventies. The documentation does exist–in announcements and programs of
performances, in throwaway leaflets, in newspaper accounts, in the diaries and correspondence of the participants, their associates and audiences–but it has never until now been collected and made easily available to those who study the movement. (1) Add to all this the fact that these documents were written or
printed on the poor-quality paper of the World War I era, and the ephemeral nature of the record becomes still more striking. These documents must be
preserved and at the same time made available to scholars. This task is one being undertaken at The University of Iowa.
And why Iowa? One answer lies in a clear affinity between the Dada movement and this University. The internationalist, multilingual, multimedia nature of
Dada makes Iowa, with its International Writers’ Program, its Writers’ Workshop, its Center for Global Studies, its Translation Workshop and Center, its
dynamic programs in music, dance, art, theater, film, literature, and languages, an especially appropriate place to house the Dada Archive. A brief glance at
the history of Dada will make this affinity clear. (2)
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.
In Paris, meanwhile, Tristan Tzara served an emissary role similar to that of Huelsenbeck in Berlin. His arrival from Zurich had been joyfully awaited by a
group of young French writers connected with the review_Litt rature–among them Louis Aragon, Andr Breton, and Paul Eluard. These men and their
colleagues sponsored a series of public performances which included readings of manifestoes, performances of plays, skits, and music, and most importantly
(and in true Dada tradition), confrontation and undercutting of the audience’s expectations. Announcements of these events would promise such treats as the
“presentation of Dada’s sex” and the head shaving of all the leading Dadaists. The public which came in the vain expectation that these promises would be
kept provided the sort of violent reaction in which the members of the Paris movement, and especially Tzara, so delighted. Dada achieved its greatest
“successes” in Paris; it was reported and hotly debated not only in small literary reviews, but also in the major newspapers and magazines, as well as in every
caf in the city. Its performances were well attended, if often by largely hostile audiences. The Dadaists, after all, were not looking for approval from the
public; they wished to provoke them, to confront them, to make them think, notice, react. It is in these terms that their success must be measured; and
success, for a time, they had. But like the Berlin movement, Paris Dada was soon split. The Litt rature group grew tired of Tzara’s anarchistic approach,
which, to them, soon became repetitious. Eventually it was the different factions of Dadaists who interrupted one another’s events. Breton and his associates
went on to seek a more “positive” approach to the problems raised by Dada; by the end of 1923, Dada in Paris had given way to the new Surrealism, which
had assimilated many aspects of Dada’s program and problematics.
Since the legendary Armory Show of 1913, the exhibition which introduced modern art to America, there had existed in New York a group of French and
American artists and writers whose ideas and methods were in many ways parallel to those of the movement developing in Zurich. New York, like Zurich,
was a haven for European refugees from the war. Attracted to the circle of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the poet-businessman Walter Conrad
Arensberg, artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia shared many notions remarkably similar to those of the Dadaists: interest in
primitive art, the adoption of photographic materials for artistic purposes the artistic treatment (sometimes exalting, sometimes ironic) of the machine, the
utilization of chance and found objects. After the war, Picabia visited Zurich and then became a key figure in Paris Dada; Duchamp, visiting Paris, also had
extensive contact with the Dadaists. Recognizing the affinity of this movement with the activities of the Stieglitz and Arensberg circles, the French artists
persuaded the New York group to become an “official” Dada center. Based more on private gatherings than on the public performances around which Dada
in Zurich, Berlin, and Paris revolved, this “official” New York Dada movement lasted less than a year and published only a single issue of its review. But its
participants have continued to exert a profound influence on the arts in America and France down to the present time. American poets, composers, and
painters like William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, George Antheil, and Charles Sheeler, while never direct participants in the movement, display in their
works numerous telltale signs of their contact with the New York and Paris Dadaists. (Indeed, visitors to the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art will find that even
Iowa’s own Grant Wood, who was in Paris during part of the Dada era, created some machine constructions and other works which show distinct traces of
the Dada spirit!)
Dada centers sprouted throughout and beyond Europe. In Hanover, Kurt Schwitters’s collage art and poetry, based on the simplest materials of everyday life
(string, newspaper headlines, streetcar tickets) was too “bourgeois” for some of the more narrowly political Berlin Dadaists; so he embodied the spirit of
Dada in his own, one-man movement, which he called “Merz”–a meaningless syllable taken from the middle of the name of a major Hanover bank. At the
same time, Schwitters collaborated in performance and lecture tours with members of the Berlin group like Raoul Hausmann, Hannah H ch, and Johannes
Baader, whose notions of Dada were more akin to his own. In Cologne, Hans Arp, Max Ernst, and Johannes Baargeld (”John Cash”–a pseudonym, of
course) were the central figures in a movement which focused on provocative, collaborative artworks. Their chief publication, Der Ventilator, was banned
by the British occupation forces after five issues. Their most notorious exhibition was held in the courtyard of a brewery and reached through the men’s
restroom; it included some of the most shocking of all Dada constructions, and Max Ernst obligingly provided a hatchet with which viewers were told to
destroy his sculpture. A Dutch Dada movement developed in tandem with De Stijl, a school of design and architecture whose emphasis on simplicity,
geometry, and primary colors has affected the appearance of every major city in the world. Elsewhere, writers and artists took up the call of Dada in places
as remote as Croatia, Argentina, and Japan.
By 1923 Dada was, for all practical purposes, dead as a movement. Most of its participants, however, continued to be active, artistically and otherwise, for
the better part of the next 50 years. They took an astounding variety of social and artistic directions, from religious conversion (Hugo Ball) to direct action on