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Title: Dadaism Author: Tristan Tzara Language: en Topics: Dada, anti-art Notes: From “Dada Manifesto” [1918] and “Lecture on Dada” [1922], translated from the French by Robert Motherwell, *Dada Painters and Poets*, by Robert Motherwell, New York, pp. 78- 9, 81, 246–51; reprinted by pernlission of George Wittenborn, Inc., Publishers, 10l8 Madison Avenue, New York 21, N.Y.
There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the
work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced
for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which
laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy
seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the
crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is
printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the
glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing,
riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with
a mania for improvement.
I say unto you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we are not
sentimental. We are a furious Wind, tearing the dirty linen of clouds
and prayers, preparing the great spectacle of disaster, fire,
decomposition.* We will put an end to mourning and replace tears by
sirens screeching from one continent to another. Pavilions of intense
joy and widowers with the sadness of poison. Dada is the signboard of
abstraction; advertising and business are also elements of poetry.
I destroy the drawers of the brain and of social organization: spread
demoralization wherever I go and cast my hand from heaven to hell, my
eyes from hell to heaven, restore the fecund wheel of a universal circus
to objective forces and the imagination of every individual.
Philosophy is the question: from which side shall we look at life, God,
the idea or other phenomena. Everything one looks at is false. I do not
consider the relative result more important than the choice between cake
and cherries after dinner. The system of quickly looking at the other
side of a thing in order to impose your opinion indirectly is called
dialectics, in other words, haggling over the spirit of fried potatoes
while dancing method around it. If I cry out:
Ideal, ideal, ideal,
Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge,
Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,
I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and
all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have
discussed in so manv books, only to conclude that after all everyone
dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to
his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity; a private bell
for inexplicable needs; a bath; pecuniary difficulties; a stomach with
repercussions in life; the authority of the mystic wand formulated as
the bouquet of a phantom orchestra made up of silent fiddle bows greased
with philtres made of chicken manure. With the blue eye-glasses of an
angel they have excavated the inner life for a dime’s worth of unanimous
gratitude. If all of them are right and if all pills are Pink Pills, let
us try for once not to be right. Some people think they can explain
rationally, by thought, what they think. But that is extremely relative.
Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the
anti-objective impulses of men and systematizes the bourgeoisie. There
is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides
us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first place.
Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, he has
demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of these
opinions? Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease. To this
element philosophers always like to add: the power of observation. But
actually this magnificent quality of the mind is the proof of its
impotence. We observe, we regard from one or more points of view, we
choose them among the millions that exist. Experience is also a product
of chance and individual faculties. Science disgusts me as soon as it
becomes a speculative system, loses its character of utility-that is so
useless but is at least individual. I detest greasy objectivity, and
harmony, the science that finds everything in order. Carry on, my
children, humanity ... Science says we are the servants of nature:
everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my
children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins ... I am
against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have
none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one’s own littleness,
to fill the vessel with one’s individuality, to have the courage to
fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of
an infernal propeller into economic lilies.... Every product of disgust
capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the
fists of its whole being engaged in destructivc action: Dada; knowledge
of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of
comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which
is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social
hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets:
Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions
and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada;
abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of
prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and
unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of
spontaneity: Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the
other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph
record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether
it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined,
enthusiastic; to divest one’s church of every useless cumbersome
accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous
waterfall, or coddle them -with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn’t
matter in the least-with the same intensity in the thicket of one’s
soul-pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of
archangels. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and
interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques,
inconsistencies: LIFE
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I don’t have to tell you that for the general public and for you, the
refined public, a Dadaist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only
a manner of speaking. When these same people get close to us, they treat
us with that remnant of elegance that comes from their old habit of
belief in progress. At ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you
ask me why, I won’t be able to tell you.
Another characteristic of Dada is the continuous breaking off of our
friends. They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender
his resignation from the Dada movement was myself. Everybody knows that
Dada is nothing. I broke away from Dada and from myself as soon as I
understood the implications of nothing.
If I continue to do something, it is because it amuses me, or rather
because I have a need for activity which I use up and satisfy wherever I
can. Basically, the true Dadas have always been separate from Dada.
Those who acted as if Dada were important enough to resign from with a
big noise have been motivated by a desire for personal publicity,
proving that counterfeiters have always wriggled like unclean worms in
and out of the purest and most radiant religions.
I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don’t
expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you
exist. You haven’t the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my
children happy. But in your hearts you know that isn’t so. You will say:
I exist to guard my country, against barbarian invasions. That’s a fine
reason. You will say: I exist because God wills. That’s a fairy tale for
children. You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will
always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will
never understand that life is a pun, for you will never be alone enough
to reject hatred, judgments, all these things that require such an
effort, in favor of a calm level state of mind that makes everything
equal and without importance. Dada is not at all modern. It is more in
the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference.
Dada covers things with an artificial gentleness, a snow of butterflies
released from the head of a prestidigitator. Dada is immobility and does
not comprehend the passions. You will call this a paradox, since Dada is
manifested only in violent acts. Yes, the reactions of individuals
contaminated by destruction are rather violent, but when these reactions
are exhausted, annihilated by the Satanic insistence of a continuous and
progressive “What for?” what remains, what dominates is indifference.
But with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.
I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the
Nothing can be uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that
is why it will be valid for everyone, since everyone is important only
for the individual who is expressing himself.--I am speaking of myself.
Even that is too much for me. How can I be expected to speak of all men
at once, and satisfy them too?
Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one
doesn’t like. What’s the use of giving them explanations that are merely
food for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves
and their little possessions, their income, their dog. This state of
affairs derives from a false conception of property. If one is poor in
spirit, one possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage
logic, a point of view that can not be shaken. Try to be empty and fill
your brain cells with a petty happiness. Always destroy what you have in
you. On random walks. Then you will be able to understand many things.
You are not more intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent
than you.
Intelligence is an organization like any other, the organization of
society, the organization of a bank, the organization of chit-chat. At a
society tea. It serves to create order and clarity where there is none.
It serves to create a state hierarchy. To set up classifications for
rational work. To separate questions of a material order from those of a
cerebral ordcr, but to take the former very seriously. Intelligence is
the triumph of sound education and pragmatism. Fortunately life is
something else and its pleasures are innumerable. They are not paid for
in the coin of liquid intelligence.
These observations of everyday conditions have led us to a realization
which constitutes our minimum basis of agreement, aside from the
sympathy which binds us and which is inexplicable. It would not have
been possible for us to found our agreement on principles. For
everything is relative. What are the Beautiful, the Good, Art, Freedom?
Words that have a different meaning for every individual. Words with the
pretension of creating agreement among all, and that is why they are
written with capital letters. Words which have not the moral value and
objective force that people have grown accustomed to finding in them.
Their meaning changes from one individual, one epoch, one country to the
next. Men are different. It is diversity that makes life interesting.
There is no common basis in mens minds. The unconscious is inexhaustible
and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as mysterious as the
last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew it, we could not
reconstruct it.
What good did the theories of the philosophers do us? Did they help us
to take a single step forward or backward? What is forward, what is
backward? Did they alter our forms of contentment? We are. We argue, we
dispute, we get excited. The rest is sauce. Sometimes pleasant,
sometimes mixed with a limitless boredom, a swamp dotted with tufts of
dying shrubs.
We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched
beyond measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want
now is spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than
anything else. But because everything that issues freely from ourselves,
without the intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must
intensify this quantity of life that readily spends itself in every
quarter. Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not
the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it.
Life is far more interesting. Dada knows the correct measure that should
be given to art: with subtle, perfidious methods, Dada introduces it
into daily life. And vice versa. In art, Dada reduces everything to an
initial simplicity, growing always more relative. It mingles its
caprices with the chaotic wind of creation and the barbaric dances of
savage tribes. It wants logic reduced to a personal minimum, while
literature in its view should be primarily intended for the individual
who makes it. Words have a weight of their own and lend themselves to
abstract construction. The absurd has no terrors for me, for from a more
exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd to me. Only the
elasticity of our conventions creates a bond between disparate acts. The
Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is the
intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work;
the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements
and in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a
lacework of words and sentiments.
Dada tries to find out what words mean before using them, from the point
of view not of grammar but of representation. Objects and colors pass
through the same filter. It is not the new technique that interests us,
but the spirit. Why do you want us to be preoccupied with a pictorial,
moral, poetic, literary, political or social renewal? We are well aware
that these renewals of means are merely the successive cloaks of the
various epochs of history, uninteresting questions of fashion and
facade. We are well aware that people in the costumes of the Renaissance
were pretty much the same as the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi
was just as Dada as we are. You are mistaken if you take Dada for a
modern school, or even for a reaction against the schools of today.
Several of my statements have struck you as old and natural, what better
proof that you were a Dadaist without knowing it, perhaps even before
the birth of Dada.
You will often hear that Dada is a state of mind. You may be gay, sad,
afflicted, joyous, melancholy or Dada. Without being literary, you can
be romantic, you can be dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny,
transfigured, vain, amiable or Dada. This will happen later on in the
course of history when Dada has become a precise, habitual word, when
popular repetition has given it the character of a word organic with its
necessary content. Today no one thinks of the literature of the Romantic
school in representing a lake, a landscape, a character. Slowly but
surely, a Dada character is forming.
Dada is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its
faults, with its personal differences and distinctions which it accepts
and views with indifference. We are often told that we are incoherent,
but into this word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard
for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent. The gentleman who decides to
take a bath but goes to the movies instead. The one who wants to be
quiet but says things that haven’t even entered his head. Another who
has a precise idea on some subject but succeeds only in expressing the
opposite in words which for him are a poor translation. There is no
logic. Only relative necessities discovered a posteriori, valid not in
any exact sense but only as explanations. The acts of life have no
beginning or end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That
is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada.
Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic
strikes me as a boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken
language is ample and adequate for us, but for our solitude, for our
intimate games and our literature we no longer need it.
The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but of a
disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3ooo
years have been explaining everything to us (what for? ), disgust with
the pretensions of these artists-God’s-representatives-on-earth, disgust
with passion and with real pathological wickedness where it was not
worth the bother; disgust with a false form of domination and
restriction en masse, that accentuates rather than appeases man’s
instinct of domination, disgust with all the catalogued categories, with
the false prophets who are nothing but a front for the interests of
money, pride, disease, disgust with the lieutenants of a mercantile art
made to order according to a few infantile laws, disgust with the
divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly (for why is it more
estimable to be red rather than green, to the left rather than the
right, to be large or small?). Disgust finally with the Jesuitical
dialectic which can explain everything and fill people’s minds with
oblique and obtuse ideas without any physiological basis or ethnic
roots, all this by means of blinding artifice and ignoble charlatans
promises.
As Dada marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in
itself. From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no
pride, no benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the
realization that it’s no use, that all this doesn’t matter. What
interests a Dadaist is his own mode of life. But here we approach the
great secret.
Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to
races and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is
nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites
meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply
at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
Like everything in life, Dada is useless.
Dada is without pretension, as life should be.
Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a
virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the
spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.