Dadaland

     In Zurich, in 1915, disgusted by the butchery of World War I,
we devoted ourselves to the Fine Arts.  Despite the remote booming
of artillery we sang, painted, pasted, and wrote poetry with all our
might and main.  We were seeking an elementary art to cure man of the
frenzy of the times and a new order to restore the balance between
heaven and hell.  This art rapidly became a subject of general dis-
approval.  It was not surprising that the "bandits" were unable to
understand us.  In their puerile megalomania and power-madness,
they demanded that art itself must serve to brutalize mankind.
     The Renaissance taught men to arrogantly exalt their reason.
Modern times with their sciences and technologies have consecrated
men to megalomania.  The chaos of our era is the result of that
overestimating of reason.  We sought an anonymous and collective
art.  For an exhibition of our work in Zurich, in 1915, I wrote the 
following: "These works are constructed with lines, surfaces, shapes,
and colors.  They try to transcend the human and attain the infinite
and eternal.  They are a denial of human egotism...  Our brothers'
hands, rather than serving as our own, had become enemy hands.
Anonymity had been replaced by renown and masterworks, wisdom was
dead...  Reproducing means imitating, play acting, tightrope walking..."
     In 1915 Sophie Taeuber and I painted, embroidered, and did
collages; all these works were drawn from the simplest forms and
were probably the first examples of "concrete art."  These works
are Realities, pure and independent, with no meaning or cerebral
intention.  We rejected all mimesis and description, giving free
rein to the Elementary and the Spontaneous.  Since the arrangement
of planes and their proportions and colors seemed to hinge solely on
chance, I declared that these works were arranged "according to the
law of chance," as in the order of nature, chance being for me simply
a part of an inexplicable reason, of an inaccessible order.  Around
the same time Russian and Dutch painters were producing works rather
close to ours in appearance but with totally different aims.  They
were really a tribute to modern life, a glorification of the machine
and technology.  Although treated abstractly, they always contained
some residue of naturalism and deception.
     From 1916 to 1920 Sophie Taeuber was dancing in Zurich.  Here
are the lovely lines that Hugo Ball wrote about her in an essay
entitled "Occultism and Other Fine and Rare Things":

          She is bathed in the brightness of the sun and the miracle
          that replaces tradition.  She is full of inventiveness, whimsy,
          and caprice.  She danced to the "Song of the Flying Fish and
          the Sea Horses," an onomatopoetic lament.  It was a dance full
          of flashes and edges, full of dazzling light and penetrating
          intensity.  The lines of her body broke up, each gesture decom-
          posed into a hundred precise, angular, and sharp movements.  
          The buffoonery of the perspective, the lighting, and the atmos-
          phere is a pretext used by a hypersensitive nervous system for
          witty and ironic fun.  The figures of her dance are at the same
          time mysterious, grotesque, and ecstatic.

     I met Eggeling in 1915 at Mme. Wassilief's studio in Paris.  Mme.
Wassilief had organized a canteen in her two studios, and artists could
eat supper there cheaply.  Friends returning from the front would tell
us about the war, and when our depression got too strong for us a
young woman with a a lovely voice would sing: "En passant par la
Lorraine avec mes sabots..."  A drunken Swede accompanied her on
the piano.  Every night my brother and I would walk the miles of
darkness separating Montmartre from the Wassilief studio near the
Gare Montparnasse in a Paris threatened by the Germans.  Eggeling
lived in a humid and sinister studio on Boulevard Raspail.  Modigliani
lived across from him and he would often drop in on Eggeling to recite
Dante and get drunk.  He also took cocaine.  One evening it was decided
that I and several other innocents were to be initiated into the "Arti-
ficial Paradises."  Each of us gave Modigliani a few francs to stock up
on the drug.  We waited for hours.  Finally he returned, jovial and
sniffling; he had devoured all the cocaine by himself.  Eggeling rarely
painted in those days; he would spend hours talking about art.  I ran
into him in Zurich in 1917.  He was seeking the rules for a sculptural
counterpoint, having already composed and designed the primary
elements.  He was tormenting himself to death.  On huge rolls of paper
he had formulated a sort of hieratic script with the help of unusually
beautiful and finely proportioned figures.  These figures grow, subdivide,
multiply, move, tangle from one group to the next, vanish, reappear in
part, organizing into stately construction in accordance with the
architecture of vegetal forms.  He and his friend Hans Richter had
already managed to adapt his invention to film making.
     Hiding out in his quiet little room, Janco devoted himself to a
zig-zag naturalism.  I can forgive this secret vice of his, for he
evoked and fixed the Cabaret Voltaire on canvas.  On the stage of a
gaudy, motley, overcrowded tavern there are several weird and peculiar
figures representing Tzara, Janco, Ball, Huelsenbeck, Madame Hennings,
and your humble servant.  Total pandemonium.  The people around us are
shouting, laughing, and gesticulating.  Our replies are sighs of love,
volleys of hiccups, poems, moos, and miaowing of medieval Bruitists.
Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer.  Janco
is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping.  Madame Hennings,
with a Madonna face, is doing the splits.  Huelsenbeck is banging away
nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale
as a chalky ghost.  We were given the honorary title of Nihilists.  The
managers of stultification applied this name to anyone who refused to go
their way.  The big stars of the dada movement were Ball and Tzara.  Ball,
I think, is one of the greatest German writers.  He was gaunt and lanky
and his face was like a pater dolorosus.  Around that time, Tzara wrote
the Twenty-five Poems, which belong to the greatest poetry ever written
in France.  Later we were joined by Doctor Serner, adventurer, detective-
story writer, ballroom dancer, dermatologist, and gentleman burglar.
     I would meet with Tzara and Serner at the Odéon and in Zurich's
Café de la Terrasse to work on a cycle of poems: The Hyperbola of the
Crocodile-Hairdresser and the Cane.  This kind of verse was sub-
sequently dubbed "Automatic Poetry" by the surrealists.  Automatic
poetry emerges directly from the poet's guts or any other organ that has stored
up reserves.  Neither the Postilion of Longjumeau, nor the Alex-
andrine, nor grammar, nor aesthetics, nor Buddha, nor the Sixth
Commandment could interfere.  The poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters,
yodels at will.  His poems are like nature: they stink, laugh, and rhyme
like nature.  Trivia, or at least what people call trivia, are as precious
to him as sublime rhetoric, for in nature a broken twig is as beautiful
and as important as a star, and it is men who arrogate for themselves
the right to judge what is beautiful or ugly.
     Dada objects are made of found or manufactured elements, simple
or incongruous.  The Chinese several millennia ago, Duchamp and Picabia
in the United States, and Schwitters and myself during World War I,
were the first to invent and spread these games of wisdom and acumen
that were meant to cure human beings of the sheer madness of genius
and to lead them back more modestly to their proper place in nature.
The natural beauty of these objects is as inherent as that of a bouquet
of flowers picked by children.  Thousands of years ago a Chinese
emperor sent his artists into the most distant lands to seek stones
of rare and fantastic shapes which he collected and placed on pedestals
next to his vases and his gods.  It is clear that this game will never
suit our modern thinkers-- careerists who lie in wait for art collectors
like a hotel porter waiting for his clients at a station.
     Are you still laughing wildly as you sing your diabolical song of
the windmill of Hirza-Pirza and shake your Gypsy locks, my dear Janco?
I haven't forgotten the masks you made for our "Dada Demonstrations:"
they were terrifying and usually painted blood red.  With cardboard,
paper, horsehair, wire, and cloth, you created languorous foetuses,
Lesbian sardines, and ecstatic mice.  In 1917 Janco produced abstract
works whose significance has been growing all this while.  He was a
passionate man who had faith in the evolution of art.
     Auguste Giacometti was already a success by 1916; yet he loved
the dadaists and often took part in their demonstrations.  He looked
like a well-to-do bear; and, doubtless sympathizing with the bears of
his native region, he wore a bearskin cap.  One of his friends revealed
to me that the lining of this cap concealed an enviably fat bankbook.
Once, during a dada evening, he awarded us a thirty-yard-long memento,
painted in all the colors of the rainbow and covered with sublime
inscriptions.  One night we decided to modestly create some private
publicity for dada.  We made the rounds of all the bars on Limmatquai,
Giacometti cautiously opened the door of each and said in a loud and
clear voice: "Long live dada!" and then just as carefully closed the
door.  The patrons opened their mouths in amazement, dropping their
sausages.  What could be the meaning of that mysterious cry uttered
by a decent and mature man who didn't look like a practical jokester
or a foreigner?  At the time, Giacometti was painting blossoming stars,
cosmic blazes, sheaves of flame, burning chasms.  What interested us
about his paintings was that they arose out of color and pure imagination.
Giacometti was also the first artist to attempt a mobile art work; he
created it with a pendulum clock transmuted by forms and colors.  
Despite the war it was a lovely era which we will always remember
as idyllic when the next world war comes and we are changed into
hamburgers and scattered to the four corners of the world.
     

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