Rasula 2015

Rasula, Jed. Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

"Tzara’s characterization of Dada as a virgin microbe is apt. Wherever it migrated, however briefly in some cases, it didn’t necessarily need a cabaret, a club, or even a group to take hold; an individual could suffice. Dada took on a peculiar glow, as though it were a radioactive element emitting a hal- lucinatory pulsation. That’s why there’s little sense in making Dada out to be a unified enterprise, with a single collective focus. Its identity multiplied with its occasions and its participants. " (xv)

dada as "agent of destruction, but Dada’s alliance with Con- structivism reflected its newfound role as creative agent." (xvi)

"Without Dada we would have no mash-ups, no samplings, no photomontages, no happenings—not even Surrealism, or Pop art, or punk . . . Without Dada, modern life as we know it would look very, very different—in fact, barely even modern." (xvii)

Cabaret Voltaire

Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball, founded in Zurich, 1916

influence of primitivism -- art, masks, fetishes from Africa and Oceanic tribes

Tristan Tzara, youngest of the group -- a teenager

"Arp performed scenes from Alfred Jarry’s notorious play Ubu Roi, which had scandalized Paris in 1896 with its very first word: merdre (“shit” in English but deliberately mispelled)—an occasion witnessed by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who wondered, “What more is possible? After us the Savage God.” Jarry is the supreme prankster of literature, and the fact that Arp sampled Ubu Roi at the cabaret offers a clue to the kind of humor that appealed to him. His poems are unfailingly whimsical; Arp drew vocabulary for them from newspapers, eyes closed, finger pointing to a spot on the page. When he sent a longer sequence called The Cloud Pump to the printer, he deliberately wrote it out in small obscure handwriting to prompt typesetter’s errors, errors he faithfully preserved in subsequent printings." (17)

flagging energies in the early days revived by discovery/play with "simultaneous poetry"

"For the cabaret’s rendition of simultaneous poetry, Huelsenbeck, Janco, and Tzara went onstage, bowed formally like a yodeling trio, and performed their collaborative composition “The Admiral Looks for a Place to Rent” in German, English, and French simultaneously, with a drum, whistle, and rattle as accompaniment. These were conspicuously the main combatant languages. Tzara provided a conceptual itinerary for the piece in his ex- planatory “Note for the Bourgeois,” citing the visual precedence of Cubist artists Picasso, Braque, Picabia, and Delaunay, as well as the typographic innovations of the poet Mallarmé and the calligrams of Apollinaire." (20-21)

"Dada meant something different to each of the participants, but for Ball it named this predicament of using culture to escape from culture—a zany bootstrapping operation." (26)

Magic Bishop and Mr. Aspirin

Cabaret closed in July 1916; swanky new location in an old guildhouse

rising importance of dance; influence of Rudolf Laban, who ran a dance school nearby and wanted to liberate dance from subservience to music and drama

opening of Galerie Dada -- replacing boisterous cabaret atmosphere with cultural elitism

"Whereas Tzara had been swept up in the bear-baiting side of Dada, following in the footsteps of the Futurist Marinetti, for Ball those liturgical cadences he’d performed in costume epitomized Dada. He’d gone into the endeavor obsessed with the notion that a reckless or abusive relation to language was responsible for the war, but the revelation of “verses without words,” poems consisting of nothing but sounds, moved him closer to a reverential outlook on Dada." (42)

dada brings Ball back to Christianity; he would turn back to Catholicism in 1920

"Ball still harbored dreams from before the war, when he was in Kandin- sky’s circle, and Dada was as close as he’d come to realizing them. This set him apart from the others in his cohort, for whom Dada was beginning to seem like a precious stone in a fairy tale—the key to the kingdom, but what kingdom? Tzara felt there was nothing magical about Dada; it was simply a vocational opportunity, one that he tackled with the diligence of an aspiring law clerk. Ball didn’t have career ambitions like Tzara, but he had many in- terests ranging from politics to mysticism, with Dada tantalizingly dangling midway between the two." (44)

Fantastic Prayers

Huelsenbeck in Berlin -- generating dada interest

• founding of Neue Jugend, with George Grosz, Wieland Herzfield, and John Heartfield

reading at Neumann gallery announcing appearance of dada in Berlin, followed by formal press release on founding of Club Dada

joining of Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch, Walter Mehring, Franz Jung

Dada Hurts

"What the Berlin Dadaists had in common (most of them being artists, after all) was their disdain for art institutions like the academies, juries, dealers, and complicit art stylists who promoted an elitist mystification of Kunst und Kultur (art and culture). The Berlin Dadaists repudiated the art racket, monopolized by “the professional arrogance of a haughty guild,” ob- served Herzfelde. The kaiser patronized the most conservative art, casting over even French Impressionism an aura of ill repute. The Dadaists regarded such patronage as part of a larger delusion evident in German glorification of the military. Conventional art, from the Dadaist perspective, amounted to “a large-scale swindle” and “a moral safety valve.” “Dada is forever the enemy of that comfortable Sunday Art which is supposed to uplift man by remind- ing him of agreeable moments,” Huelsenbeck wrote, adding “Dada hurts” to drive the point home." (65)

"A Dadaist was not an artist but a monteur, the German word for “mechanic,” and the Dadaists called the work they produced montage, a cognate term for assembly-line work. Photomontage and collage would have a huge effect on global culture in the years to come and would become ubiquitous from the s to the Internet age. Heartfield and Grosz had started doing cut-and-paste works soon after they met. Höch and Hausmann were also immersed in collage. Baader fol- lowed suit. Erwin Blumenfeld, like others only momentarily affiliated with Dada, also excelled at the new technique before he rose to eminence as a fashion photographer. Much ink has been spilled identifying who originated the technique, but in fact the explosion of print material in the nineteenth century stimulated ordinary people to cut and paste without claiming the results as art. Picasso snipped bits of newspaper and glued them onto his paintings during the heyday of Cubism before the war. But it was in the Berlin Dada circle that photomontage took wing, “an explosion of viewpoints and an intervortex of azimuths” in Hausmann’s heady evocation." (69)

"While those who attended its soirées might think of Dada as an artistic venture, for most the name circulated in the newspapers as a vaguely revolutionary threat, even a plausible political organization. In any case, programmed Dada evenings were chock-full of unmitigated aggression. Insulting the audience was de rigueur (“you’re not going to hand out real art to those dumbbells, are you?”). The Dadaists were out to pick fights, with bared fists. But they also put on skits" (71)

famous skit of a race between a woman on a typewriter and a woman at a sewing machine

Hausmann: "His forte was sound poetry, which he likely heard about from Huelsenbeck’s account of wordless poems in Zurich. His explo- ration of “optophonetics,” as he called it, persisted beyond Dada. Hausmann had no interest in the singsong sonorities favored by Ball or the faux Afri- canisms of Tzara. He wanted to reach a primal place, where language had yet to evolve and the human animal vocalized without words. He pioneered a method of making sound effects by enunciating each letter, vocalizing type samples from a print shop or random letters strung together. These resources were the launchpad for producing all manner of sounds from what he called the “chaotic oral cavity.”" (73)

First International Dada Fair; turned out to be relatively staid compared to usual dada antics

• Höch's "Cut with the Kitchen Knife..": one of the most visible works from the fair

Haussmann, "Mechanical Head: The Spirit of Our Times"

closing of the Fair in August 1921 -- ended dada in Berlin; Haussmann announced a cessation of activities

Huelsenback, compiled "'Dada Almanac -- only comprehensive portfolio compiled by a dadaist in the movement's heyday