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Title: Dada
Author: Nick Heath
Date: November 25, 2009
Language: en
Topics: history, dada, art, France, Germany, social movements, World War I
Source: Retrieved on 8th June 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/dada
Notes: This originally appeared in Virus, a magazine produced by members of the Anarchist Federation in London

Nick Heath

Dada

“In Zurich, not involved in the slaughterhouses of the world war, we

dedicated ourselves to the fine arts. While in the distance gunfire

rumbled, we glued paper, read our works, wrote poetry, and sang at the

top of our voices” — Hans Arp

Dada was a direct response to the cataclysmic events of the First World.

Mass slaughter, like none ever seen before, highlighted the

irrationality of capitalism and the warfare state like a flare lighting

a battlefield by night. The nightmare could only be answered with a

rejection of the values of a society that had allowed this to happen. In

Dada this rejection was organised around a denial of the artistic and

cultural values of the old society. As such it was to have a key role in

influencing some of the artists involved for more than fifty years, as

well as influencing later movements like surrealism and the anarchist

cultural activities of the 1960s.

It was in the centre of Zurich in neutral Switzerland that artists

gathered together to shelter from the horrors of the ongoing war. Here

they organised events at the nightclub the Cabaret Voltaire.

In 1915 Hugo Ball and his companion Emmy Hennings set up the Cabaret

Voltaire, and were joined by other artists like Tristan Tzara, Marcel

Janco, both of Romanian origin, Richard Huelsenbeck and Jean Arp, from

France and Germany. They looked for radical criticisms of present

society and the art that it produced. Hugo Ball published The Dada

Manifesto where he stated that “Dada is a new tendency in art… Dada

comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means

‘hobby horse.’ In German it means ‘good-bye,’ ‘Get off my back,’ ‘Be

seeing you sometime.’ In Romanian: ‘Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s

it. But of course, yes, definitely, right…’”

Ball wanted to use a nonsense word to ridicule the pretensions of the

old world of art. As he said “How does one become famous? By saying

dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy.

Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that

smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered,

moralistic, Europeanised, enervated?”

The Dada project involved music, written works read out, displays of art

works, and much else, all at the same time or succeeding each other.

This radical departure has now been adopted to a wide extent by artists

in modern times. Dada pioneered the sound poem, the simultaneous poem,

the collage, all now taken up

“We know what Dadaism had done with politics, it had destroyed it with a

stroke of the pen, ignored it. The movement revolted against power of

all sorts,in favor of liberties of all sorts”, wrote the Dadaist Georges

Ribemont-Dessaignes. In actual fact, many of those involved in Dada had

some knowledge of anarchism and were involved with it to a lesser or

greater extent. Hugo Ball had translated Bakunin. Hans Richter had

connections with the Zurich anarchist group and Tristan Tzara, who had

first become acquainted with the anarchist movement in Bucharest was to

say “It is obvious that the anarchistic nature of Dadaism, together with

the idea of a moral absolute that the movement placed beyond any

practical contingency, was bound to keep the Dadaists away from

political struggles”. Ribemont-Dessaignes surely means by the term

politics the machinations of political parties rather than the

revolutionary politics of anarchism.

Tristan Tzara summed up the Dada attitude in the Dadaist Manifesto of

1918 : “Let everyone proclaim that we have a great work of destruction

and negativity to accomplish. Sweep and clean. The cleansing of the

fellow will take place after a period of total madness and aggression,

the mark of a world left for too long in the hands of bandits who are

tearing apart and destroying the centuries”.

In the face of the barbarism and destruction they were seeing the Dada

group embraced spontaneity (including in relation to revolution) the joy

of living and the joy of creation despite the most adverse conditions.

Dada negation echoed the old maxim of Bakunin: “ The urge to destroy is

also the urge to create”. It attacked all the forces of oppression- be

they political, economic, cultural or moral. It proclaimed confidence in

the masses, rejection of specialisation, rejection of the State. As

Tzara was to state “We were firmly against the war without therefore

falling into the facile trap of Utopian pacifism, We knew that we could

not get rid of war without getting rid of its roots”…” This war was not

our war; to us it was a war of false emotions and feeble

justifications…Dada was born of a moral need, of an implacable will to

achieve a moral absolute…Honour, Country, Morality, Family, Art,

Religion, Liberty, Fraternity, etc- all these notions had once answered

to human needs, now nothing remained of them but a skeleton of

conventions”. Whilst Dada had originally had friendly relations with the

Futurists, this ended when they learned of their extreme nationalism and

militarism.

German Dada

The situation was a little different in Germany, where in Berlin another

Dada group was created when Huelsenbeck returned there. Max Ernst who

had been involved in Dada in Zurich returned to Cologne where he set up

another Dada group with Johannes Baargeld. The Dadaists contributed to

Die Aktion, the great artistic-political review edited by Franz

Pfemfert. Revolution was breaking out in Germany and Dada could not

remain as gloriously detached as it had been in Zurich. German Dada

contributed in its own way to the insurrectionary ferment with the

savage caricatures of George Grosz, the paintings of Otto Dix and the

college and typographical variations of Baader. Photomontage was

pioneered by German Dada.

In the Spartakist uprising in Berlin in 1919 Dada made its own

particular intervention. They marched into the working class

neighbourhoods singing antimilitarist songs and were met with much

amusement. As the Dadaist Mehring was to say :” Our Dadaist procession

was greeted with delight as spontaneous as the on y danse of the Paris

mob in front of the Bastille”. For this the authorities arrested them

for seeking to bring the armed forces into contempt, and one of them,

Herzfelde, got eight months in jail. By 1922 Dada was dead in Germany.

Some of its members had identified with the Bolsheviks, mistakenly

identifying them with the real spirit of the Russian Revolution. Grosz,

Heartfield and his brother Herzfelde became members of the Communist

Party whilst Ernst returned to Paris. The impact of Dada in Germany was

important enough for Hitler to fulminate against it in Mein Kampf

calling it “spiritual madness” and “art Bolshevism”.

Whilst some Dadaists were absorbed by politics others sought to carry on

the cultural revolution they had pioneered. Their disagreements with the

cult of proletarian art were summed up thus:

“To those who seek to create a proletarian art, we pose the question:

‘What is proletarian art?’ Is it art made by the proletarians

themselves? Or art dedicated to the service of the proletariat? Or art

designed to awaken (revolutionary) proletarian instincts? There is no

art made by proletarians because a proletarian who creates art is no

longer a proletarian but an artist. An artist is neither a proletarian

nor a bourgeois and what he creates belongs neither to the proletariat

nor to the bourgeoisie, but to everyone” This appeared in the

Proletkunst Manifesto signed by Arp, Tzara, van Doesburg and Spengermann

which under its seemingly favourable title actually attacked the

bridling of artistic creation to an ideology.

The struggle to steer a path between “art for art’s sake” and the

strictures of “proletarian art” was a difficult one and was never

adequately resolved with divisions within Dadaism itself. The “cultural

revolutionist” (for want of a better term) current of Dada, which

preserved its original intentions, was castigated by the Bolsheviks as

bourgeois or anarchist, whilst the bourgeois themselves called them

Bolsheviks or anarchists!!

Dada in France

As we have already seen, Max Ernst had gone to Paris at the end of the

war. Other members of Dada also congregated there like the only fully

fledged American Dadaist Man Ray, along with other Europeans who had

returned from New York like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. They

continued the epic struggle of Dada against establishment art. They were

joined by Tzara and reinforced by among others, Andre Breton, Louis

Aragon, Benjamin Peret, Paul Eluard, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Philippe

Soupault. They continued the Dada pursuits of antimilitarism and

anticlericalism. Actions included the mock trial of Maurice Barres, the

raving nationalist and anti-Semite.

Breton was establishing his leadership of a movement that he would take

in a more political direction. This was resented by Tzara, Picabia and

others who saw Breton’s efforts to give Dada a clear direction as

anathema to the original spontaneous spirit of Dada. Breton wanted to

move from the “destructive” phase of Dada to a more “constructive”

approach. Out of these divisions emerged the new movement of surrealism.

But that’s another story…..

Dedicated to the late Jim Duke, who carried on the work of Dada