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)