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							Dada Text
		compiled by boboroshi for the Church of Euthanasia;
		sources listed at end of document under 'SOURCES'

(SOURCE 1)
Dada was not a movement added to all the other movements.
Rather it was an anti-movement which opposed not only all
the academicisms, but also all the avante-garde schools which
claimed to be releasing art from the limits which confined it.
Dada was a detonation of anger which showed itself in insults
and buffoonery.  'Dada began not as an art form, but as a disgust'
was Tristan Tzara's definition : disgust with a world racked by
war, with boring dogmas, with conventional sentiments, with
pedantry, and the art which did nothing but reflect this limited
universe.  Dada was born in a neutral country at the height
of the war [WWI - ed], and it appeared as a declaration of the
rights of fantasy. (p. 29)

Readings of phonetic or simultaneous poetry, performed in
horrific costumes and masks, hurled defiances at the public....
Dada had no programme, wanted nothing, thought nothing,
and created only with the intention of proving that creating
was nothing.  In a mocking attack on systems, Tzara
proclaimed 'Pure Idiocy', and announced : 'Intelligent man
has become an absolutely normal type.  The thing that we
are short of, that thing that is interesting now, the thing that is
rare because it possesses the anomalies of a precious being,
the freshness and the freedom of the great anti-man, that
thing is the *Idiotic*.  Dada is using its strength to establish
the idiotic everywhere.  Doing it deliberately.  And is constantly
tending toward idiocy itself.'

Dada filled its statement with incoherence, on the grounds that
life itself is incoherent, and played havoc with art because art
lovers had lost the idea of art as a game.  'All pictorial or
plastic art is useless; art should be a monster which casts
servile minds into terror' was Tzara's cry in his 1918 
Manifesto. (pp. 29-31)

[Marcel] Duchamp, the ascetic of non-sense, turned all his finds
into the result of an exercise in meditation.  In fact, what he did
was not exactly anti-art, but what he described as 'dry art', by
which he meant an art from which every aesthetic sentiment,
even emotion or judgement, was excluded.  'The worst danger is
that one might arrive at a form of *taste*, he said; to avoid both
good and bad taste, he set about the 'dehumanization' of art.  To
this end he used 'the irony of affirmation', in which he put
forward, with a glacial wit, absurd propositions intended to
disturb rather than to provoke laughter....  

Duchamp tried to destroy traditional ideas of painting and
sculpture by employing plays on words and plays on objects.
Sometimes he put forward entirely unprecedented creations....
Sometimes he defined new art forms....  He sought the 
collaboration of chance, and submitted his work to the 'regime
of coincidence'.  Beyond this, he examined the way in which a
common object could become something rare by the addition of
some personal detail.  This he called the readymade....  Although
he could have turned out any number of readymades, Duchamp
established a strict rule - 'Limit the number of readymades per
year' - and used a kind of moral algebra in their selection : 'to
dissociate the readymade, mass produced, from the invented -
this dissociation is an operation'. (p. 34-8)

Many surrealist principles were certainly developed during the
Dada period.  For instance, the printed *papillons*, wall stickers,
appeared first in 1920....  In 1920, too, we see the establishment
of the principle of 'intervention' in the meetings of opponents.
The dadaists burst in on a lecture by the former futurist Marinetti,
who was trying to launch 'tactilism', a movement based on touch, 
with works intended to be fondled and caressed.  They disturbed
the first production of *Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel* (1921) by 
Jean Cocteau, whom they loathed, by getting up in turn and yelling
'*Vive dada*'. (p. 44)

On March 1922, *Litterature* appeared under a new banner.
Francis Picabia set out its programme in an editorial note.  
'Do not admire yourself.  Do not let yourself be shut up  in a
revolutionary school which has become conventional.  Do not
allow commercial speculation.  Do not seek official glory.  Draw
your inspiration only from life, and have no ideal save that of
the continued movement of intelligence.' (p. 46)
=====

(SOURCE 2)
Originating in the neutrality of Zurich, the movement Dada was
born in 1916 as an instrument of revolt.  Youthful writers, poets
and artists joined forces to ridicule society and to pour scorn on
the pre-War artistic movements, including those of the avante-garde,
that had accompanied the passage to war.  Although complex,
contradictory and wide-ranging - 'a state of mind' rather than
a style or technique - Dada spread quickly to other European
capitals and to New York, where it was developed by Duchamp
and Picabia, among others.... (p. 65)

....an element of chance... - a factor which was an important matter
of principle to the Dadaists generally, and which was developed
particularly within the Zurich group.  ...Tzara advocated cutting 
words from a newspaper and pasting them together at random to 
make chance poetry; ...Janco... utilized chance in his constructions
of plaster and wire, and Arp himself used chance formulations of
cut-up words for his poetry at the this time.  The attraction of
chance for the Dadaists undoubtedly lay in its very opposition to
structural order.  In the context of the War, chance offered a
paradigm of the chaos they sensed all around them.  By abandoning
normal ordering processes, random configurations offered a whole
new set of possibilities, a new order.  This concept was later taken
up by the Surrealists; following Freud's diagnosis in *The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life* (1901), they believe that
chance actions were relevant for their demonstration of
unconscious motivations. (p. 65-6)

...as Arp later remarked, 'Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable
deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable
order.'  The rigities of geometry were in the end too restrictive
for him, since they mirrored the rational constructs of the mind.
Greater freedom and interest were to be found in nature's infinite
variety, even in the natural formation of a single leaf.  Consequently,
Arp decided to combine abstract and natural forms in a new
synthesis, while... Tauber went on to pursue the geometric logic of
form in her later abstracts. (p. 66-7)

[Berlin Dada]
...Berlin Dadaists.... ...felt that Dada should engage in life and 'pose
no longer before it'.  Huelsenbeck poured scorn on the 'bogus'
spirituality of Expressionism and its perpetrators. (67-8)
=====

(SOURCE 3)
During World War I searches for a new fantastic subject matter
and content began to come into focus.  Zurich, in neutral
Switzerland, was the first important center in which arose an art,
a literature, and even a music of the fantastic and the absurd.  On
this city in 1915 converged a number of young men.... ...the leaders
[with women - ed] whose demonstrations, readings of poetry, noise 
concerts, art exhibitions and writings attacked the traditions and 
preconceptions of Western art and literature....  (they) expressed 
their reactions to the spreading hysteria and madness of a world
at war, in forms that were intended as only negative, anarchic,
and destructive.  From the very beginning, however, the Dadaists
showed a seriousness of purpose and a search for new vision and
content that went beyond any frivolous desire to outrage the
bourgeoisie.  This is not to deny that in the manifestations of Dada
there was a central force of mad humor.  This wildly imaginative
humor is one of its lasting delights - whether manifested in free
word-assocaition poetry readings drowned in the din of noise
machines, in mad theatrical or cabaret performances, in nonsense
lectures, or in paintings produced by chance or intuition 
uncontrolled by reason.  Nevertheless, it had a serious intent: the
Zurich Dadaists were making a critical re-examination of the
traditions, premises, rules, logical bases, even the concepts of
order, coherence, and beauty that had guided the creation of the
arts throughout history.

Hugo Ball, a philosopher and mystic as well as a poet, was the first
actor in the Dada drama. In the spring of 1916, he founded the
Caberet Voltaire, in Zurich, as a meeting place for these free spirits
and a stage from which existing values could be attacked.
Interestingly enough, across the street from the Cabaret Voltaire
lived Lenin, who with other quiet, studious Russians was planning
a world revolution.

The term Dada was coined in 1916 to describe the movement
then emerging from the seeming chaos of the Caberet Voltaire,
but its origin is still doubtful.  The popular version advanced by
Huelsenbeck is that a French-German dictionary opened at random
produced the word "dada," meaning a child's rocking horse or
hobby horse.  Richter remembers the *da, da, da da* ("yes, yes") 
in the Rumanian conversation of Tzara and Janco.  *Dada* in Fench 
also means a hobby, event, or obsession.   Other possible sources
are in dialects of Italian and Kru African.  Whatever its origin, the
name Dada is the central, mocking symbol of this attack on
established movements, whether traditional or experimental,
that characterized early twentieth-century art.  The Dadaists 
used many of the formulas of Futurism in the propagation of their 
ideas - the free words of Marinetti, whether spoken or written; the 
noise-music effects of Russolo to drown out the poets; the numerous 
manifestoes.  But their intent was opposite to that of the Futurists,
who extolled the machine world and saw in mechanization, 
revolution, and war the rational and logical means, however brutal, 
to the solution of human problems.

The Dadaists felt that reason and logic had led to the disaster of
world war, and that the only way to salvation was through political 
anarchy, the natural emotions, the intuitive, and the irrational.  
Their outlook in one respect was a return to Kandinsky's inner 
necessity, the spiritual in art, but Dada, at least in its inception, was 
negative and pessimistic.

Zurich Dada was primarily a literary manifestation, whose
ideological roots were in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, in the 
theater of Alfred Jarry, and in the critical ideas of Max Jacob
and Guillaume Apollinaire....  With few exceptions, the paintings
and sculptures of other artists [beyond Arps 'laws of chance' and
the works of Richter and Eggeling in photography and typographic
design - ed] associated with Zurich broke little new ground. 
(pp. 224-5)

The Zurich Dadaists were violently opposed to any organized
program in the arts, or any movement that might express the common 
stylistic denominator of a coherent group.  Nevertheless
three factors shaped their creative efforts.  These were *bruitisme*
(noise-music, from *le bruit* - "noise" - as in *le concert bruitiste*),
simultaneity, and chance.  *Bruitisme* came from the Futurists,
and simultaneity from the Cubists via the Futurists, although the
Dadaists thought these principles to be negative, destructive
forces.  Chance, of course, exists to some degree in any act of
artistic creation.  In the past the artist normally attempted to
control or to direct it, but it now beame an overriding principle.
All three, despite the artists' avowed negativism, soon became
the basis for their positive and revolutionary approach to the
creative act, an approach still found in poetry, music, drama
and painting. (p. 224)

[re: Duchamp's 'readymades']
In the readymades, Duchamp found forms that of their nature
raised questions concerning historical values in art....  The choice
of these readymades was never dictated by aesthetic delectation,
but rather it "was based on a reaction of *visual indifference*
with a total absence of good or bad taste... in fact a complete
anaesthesia."  The short sentence occasionally inscribed on the
readymade [e.g.' "in advance of the broken arm" upon a snow
shovel; "Pharmacy" upon a winter evening landscape in which
he'd inserted a red and yellow dot at the horizon, etc.] was 
important, in that it was not intended as a title, but "to carry
the mind of the spectator toward other regions, more verbal."...
Sometimes Duchamp added graphic details that, in order to satisfy 
his craving for word-play, he called "*ready-made aided*."  Then, 
"wanting to expose the basic antimony between art and 'ready-
mades' I imagined a *reciprocal read-made*: use a Rembrandt as an 
ironing board!" (p. 229)

[re: limiting production of ready-mades]
...  "for the spectator even more than for the artist, *art is a habit-
forming drug* and I wanted to protect my ready-made against such 
*contamination*"  He stressed that it was the very nature of the 
ready-made to lack uniqueness, and nearly every ready-made
existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.  Then
to complete this vicious circle, he remarked: "Since the tubes of
paint used by an artist are manufactured and ready-made
products we must conclude that all paintings in the world are
*ready-mades aided*." (p. 229)

Thus by the end of the war a Dada movement was growing in the
French capital, but it had primarily a literary nature.  While in
painting and sculpture Dada was largely an imported product,
in poetry and theater it was in a tradition of the irrational and
absurd that extended from Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme
to Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Apollinaire, and Cocteau.  Paris
Dada in the hands of the literary men consisted of frequent
manifestoes, demonstrations, periodicals, events, and happenings
more violent and hysterical than ever before.  The artists Arp,
Ernst and Picabia took a less active part in the demonstrations,
although Picabia contributed his own manifestoes.  The original
impetus and enthusiasm seemed to be lacking, however, and
divisive factors arose, led principally by Tzara and by Breton.
The early Dadaists, like the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution,
sought to maintain a constant state of revolution, even anarchy,
but new forces led by Breton sought a more constructive
revolutionary scheme based on Dada.  In its original form Dada
expired in the wild confusion of the Congress of Paris called
in 1922 by the Dadaists.  The former Dadaists, including Picabia,
who followed Breton, were joined by powerful new voices,
among them Cocteau and Ezra Pound.  By 1924 this group was 
consolidated under the name Surrealism. (p. 244)
========================================================

(SOURCE 4)
The Dada movement took form simultaneously during wartime in a 
number of art capitals, and among them, signficantly, were two 
neutralist centers, New York and Zurich.  This spontaneous revolt 
against reason in art represented many of the same deliberately 
infantile impulses that had surfaced in the primitivist art of 
Rousseau, in Jarry's theatrical grotesquerie, with its contemptuous 
bravado, and in the nostalgic fantasy world of de Chirico's paintings.  
One of the founders of the Zurich Dada group, the German poet Hugo 
Ball, significantly hailed the spontaneity and irresponsibility of 
childhood as a 'new' artistic model in a diary entry of 1916, which 
was the year of the official birth of the Swiss movement.  
"Childhood," he wrote, "as a new world, and everything childlike... 
and symbolic in opposition to the senilities of the world of the 
grown-ups."  In keeping with that defiant spirit, the nonsense 
vocable *dada*, meaning a child's hobbyhorse, was selected at 
random from a dictionary, probably by Hugo Ball and Richard 
Huelsenbeck, and came to symbolize the release of new psychic 
energies based on instinct, which the Zurich group celebrated.

By loudly proclaiming the uselessness of social action, the Dadaist 
artists acknowledged their sympathetic identification with the 
futility of those dying senselessly in the monstrous charade of World 
War I.  Dada began primarily as a wrecking enterprise, an art of 
protest directed against the insane spectacle of collective homocide.  
Yet its nihilism also embraced a sweeping summons to create a 
*tabula rasa* for art and presented serious creative options despite 
its disorder and anarchy.  Dada unlocked new sources of spontaneity, 
fantasy, and formal invention and left a lasting imprint both on the 
art of its time and on the future.,  Adapting the slogan of the 
revolutionary Bakunin that destruction is also creation, the Dadaist 
put art on the barricades, redefined the nature of artistic experience, 
and extended its material possibilities even when that meant 
accepting scandalous objects as works of art.

Official Dada came to birth as a collaborative activity in wartime 
Zurich.  There, in 1916, Hugo Ball gathered around him a group of
exiles from the war, a group that included the writer (and later 
psychiatrist) Richard Huelsenbeck; the Rumanian poet Tristan Tzara; 
the Rumanian painter Marcel Janco; the Alsatian painter and sculptor 
Hean (Hans) Arp; and Arp's future wife, Sophie Taeuber.  The 
following year their ranks would expand with the arrival of the 
German painter and later experimental filmmaker Hans Richter.  In 
an old quarter of the town, Ball and his fellow refugees founded the 
Cabaret Voltaire, inviting all the wartime disaffected to join their 
courageous new association of free spirits in order "to remind the 
world that there are independent men, beyond war and nationalism, 
who live for other ideals," in Ball's words.  Arp, a gifted poet as well 
as visual artist, eloquently described the spirit with which he 
entered into the mad games, playful entertainments, and somewhat 
more sober artistic activities of the Cabaret Voltaire group:

	In Zurich in 1915, losing interest in the slaughterhouse
	of the world war, we turned to the Fine Arts.  While the
	thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we
	pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our
	soul.  We searched for an elementary art that would,
	we thought, save mankind from the furious folly of
	these times.  We aspired to a new order that might
	restore the balance between heaven and hell.

In another revealing statement that prophesied the new prerogatives 
conferred upon fantasy and irrational association, and which also 
comically summarized the Dada contempt for the public's 
superstitious reverence toward traditional art, Arp wrote:

	Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of
	man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.
	Dada wanted to replace the logical nonsense of the men
	of today by the illogically senseless.  That is why we
	pounded with all our might on the big drum of Dada
	and trumpeted the praises of unreason.  Dada gave
	the Venus de Milo an enema and permitted Laocoon
	and his sons to relieve themselves after thousands of
	years of struggle with the good sausage python....
	Dada is senseless like nature.  Dada is for nature and
	against art.  Dada is direct like nature.  Dada is for
	infinite sense and definite means.

Once Tristan Tzara had joined the group, the Zurich Dadaists
directed still more aggressive assaults at the audience, who,
curiously, attended the public Dada demonstrations in the
tradition of the mass meetings that greeted the provocative
behavior of the Italian Futurists.  Poets recited inaudible
nonverse, drowned out by deafening noise-music, or *bruitisme*,
thus adopting directly the Futurists' strategy of insult and outrage.
Poems were made by picking from a bag words randomly cut
from newspapers.  Tzara's "accidental poems" coincided with Arp's
experiments in automatism in his collage compositions....  Bewildered 
spectators at Dada meetings found themselves called upon to 
function as chairmen and then ignored or humiliated.  Pandemonium 
was encouraged, perhaps as a parody and an exposure of the falsity 
of public rhetoric with its appeals to patriotism in support of the war.  
Today this kind of antic, more familiar and even stereotyped in the 
Happening, seems outdated.  In its time, however, Dada nihilism had 
more relevance as social criticism; moreover, it frequently resulted in 
bouts of inspired wit and verbal invention, and the liberation of 
significant new forms of poetry and art.... (pp. 167-8)

The chance compositions produced by Arp became the basis of
a primary Surrealist creative principle.  They were made by
tearing up fragments of paper, letting them fall on a surface at
random, and then gluing down the accidental arrangments.
Speaking of compositions made by such procedures, Arp declared: 

	"The 'law of chance,' which embraces all laws and is 
	 unfathomable like the first cause from which all life 
	 arises, can only be experienced through complte 
	 devotion to the unconscious." 

Arp's collages of the period, however, were actually closer to a 
more relaxed version of Cubism than to what the later 
Surrealists understood as "automatic" drawing. (p. 168)

The most enigmatic Dada intellectual and a primary innovator
was Marcel Duchamp, one of the legendary figures of 20th-century 
art.  Already... a master of Cubist idiom, Duchamp became a pioneer 
spirit of Dada, even though he never officially declared himself 
a Dadaist.  It was Duchamp who anticipated the Dadaists' most 
fertile and challenging conceptions, including the whole complex 
of anti-art ideas, which refuse to make elitist distinctions about 
the art object.  Duchamp tried instead to reconcile art experience 
to a society dominated by mass-produced, manufactured objects.  
The challenges posed by his art were evident as early as 1912 
when he showed his Cubist, mechanistic anatomies in *Nude 
Descending a Staircase, No. 2*...  This original and rather baffling 
picture outraged the orthodox Parisian Cubists, including the 
artist's brother Jacques Villon, as much as it scandalized American 
audiences in New York a year later in the celebrated Armory Show.  
With Duchamp's arrival in New York in 1915, and the formation 
of the periodical *291* under the auspices of the photographer 
and art impresario Alfred Stieglitz, New York Dada came to birth 
actually a year in advance of the Zurich events that gave the 
movement its name.  Overnight, Duchamp emerged as the leader 
of a new breed of iconoclasts.

Rejecting the decorative values of Cubism for a more ambiguous
content, Duchamp's mechanized nudes suggested a metaphor for 
the Conquest of Man by the Infernal Machine, in sharp contrast 
to the mechanized world that the Futurists, Leger, and other 
Cubists had uncritically celebrated.  The robot-like action of 
Duchamp's figures opened up startling vistas of paradox in what 
had heretofore seemed an iconographically neutral area.  
Duchamp turned away from the traditional image of the artist-
craftsman and his dependence on his sense impressions.  
Beginning in 1912, he struck out on a boldly independent course, 
breaking with what he contemptuously termed '"retinal" painting, 
meaning Impressionism, which he considered intellectually 
inferior since it appealed to the eye and the sense rather than 
to the mind.  "I was interested," he later said, "in ideas - not 
merely in visual products."...

The work of art could be painted, constructed, or merely
"designated," a word Duchamp applied to the Readymade, or 
common manufactured product he elevated to the level of an 
art object....  Duchamp thus broke down one of the primary 
attributes of the work of art, which defined its privileged fine 
arts status.  By associating art with non-art, he confused the 
traditional hierarchy of artistic values and produced objects 
and new ideas about art that remain profoundly disconcerting.  
With Fancis Picabia... his friend and associate in the New York 
Dada adventure, Duchamp insisted on challenging audience 
preconceptions about art and taste.  "There is no rebus, there 
is no key," wrote Picabia.  "The work exists, its only *raison 
d'etre* is to exist.  It represents nothing but the wish of the 
brain that conceived it."

The themes that appeared only tentatively with Duchamp's 
*Nude Descending a Staircase* received further definition in 
the following years in his familiar combination of mechanical 
form and imagery, erotic content, and esoteric titles.  *The Bride* 
and *The Passage from Virgin to Bride* both suggest human 
organs transposed into machines, alluding clearly to automated 
male and female sexual organs and sexual activities....  
Duchamp's erotic obsession, combined with an extremely 
complex iconography and erudite philosophical references, 
culminated in a "love-machine," a construction the artist 
mysteriously called *The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, 
Even*....  This intricate invention cannot be understood without 
first examining Duchamp's own notes of explanation, and 
without considering his effort to reappraise the world of 
common manufactured objects in the form of the Readymade.... 
(pp. 169-70)

With superb disdain for traditional art values, he conferred a 
kind of derisive prestige on found objects by the act of his choice 
of them.  It was a tribute to the power of his wit and ironic 
intelligence that Duchamp was able to make publicly acceptable 
such outrageous appropriations of banal objects from the crucible 
of used and disused objects....

The Readymades were the familiar mass-produced products of 
department and hardware stores or other commercial outlets.  
In addition, Duchamp signed a urinal "R. Mutt," entitled it 
*Fountain*, and submitted the piece unsuccessfully to the 
Independents Exhibition in New York in 1917.  The same 
paradoxical value he conferred on the Readymades and the 
mocking, intellectual gamesmanship their choice involved also 
motivated the *Large Glass*, his most remarkable invention....

The acts of defiance incorporated in Duchamp's elaborate 
mythology of sex and technology both in the *Large Glass* 
and in his signed Readymades achieved memorable public 
scandals in his famous reproduction of the *Mona Lisa* with 
a moustache drawn on it....  He entitled this "assisted" 
Readymade *L.H.O.O.Q.*, which when said quickly in French 
sounds like *elle a chaud au cul*, or "she's got hot pants."...  
(Rose Selavy, Duchamp's female alter ego, is a pun in French: 
*Eros est la vie*, or "Eros is life.") (pp. 169-72)

In 1923, when he stopped work on the *Large Glass*, 
Duchamp virtually abandoned art for chess, occasional 
experiments in optics and mechanics, or assisting the 
Surrealists in exhibition installations.  His explorations with 
chance, the designation of the manufactured Readymade as art, 
and his many acute observations on the problem of art and 
anti-art were particularly influential and today continue to 
shape the conceptions of contemporary art. (p. 173)

Between 1918 and 1920 Dada spread from Zurich into 
Germany, creating not so much a consistent artistic style as 
a wave of liberating nihilism.  In Berlin, Dada took its most 
overt political form, shaped by the sense of disillusionment 
of the desperately harsh postwar years.  In Zurich, Tzara had 
insisted that Dada meant nothing, but in Germany, he said, 
Dada "went out and found an adversary."  There it was linked 
with Communism, and militantly involved itself in urgent 
political issues.  Although Berlin Dadaists produced little 
significant painting, their contribution to the development of 
collage and caricature was unique.  George Grosz, whose origins 
were in German Expressionism.... created savage satires on the 
corrupt bourgeoisie, clergy, military, and bureaucracy of Berlin 
that are grotesque, subhuman, and altogether memorable.

Also in Berlin were artists who used photographic images 
directly....  [Hoch, Rausmann, others] found in photo-collage a 
dramatic mode of registering their crushing indictment of 
capitalism and militarism in the period between the wars, 
when the dissident Nazi movement came to birth....  By 
incorporating commonplace object fragments taken directly 
from life, Schwitters posed the question of non- or anti-art 
content, but in a manner different form Duchamp's.  He also 
extended the material possibilities of artistic expression.  And 
in a subtle, poetic way, he commented on contemporary 
materialism by collecting in structures of indubitable artistic 
merit the detritus of society. (173-4)

The description Ernst made of his initial discovery of the 
hallucinatory power of commonplace materials is the first 
direct acknowledgement by a 20th-century artist of the 
appeal of the unconscious:

	One rainy day in 1919... my excited gaze is provoked
	by the pages of a printed catalogue.  The advertizements
	illustrated objects related to anthropological, microscopical,
	psychological, mineralogical, and paleontological research.
	Here I discover elements of a figuration so remote that
	its very absurdity provokes in me a sudden intensification
	of my faculties of sight - an hallucinatory succession of
	contradictory images, double, triple, multiple.... By simply
	painting or drawing, it suffices to add to the illustrations
	a color, a line, a landscape foreign to the objects
	represented - a desert, a sky, a geological section, a floor,
	a single straight horizontal expressing the horizon, and so
	forth.  These changes, no more than docile reproductions
	of *what is visible within me*, record a faithful and fixed
	image of my hallucination.  They transform the banal
	pages of advertisement into dramas which reveal my
	most secret desires. (p. 176)

...Ernst's original paintings and constructions in illusionistic form 
of the early 1920's dramatize the growing differences between 
Dada disgust and protest, and the Surrealist affirmation of a new 
reality that was becoming evident in other art of the period.  
They represent the true beginnings of Surrealist painting even 
before Breton had officially codified the movement in his first 
manifesto....

Breton brought focus to and soon thoroughly dominated the 
[Surrealism] movement, proving himself as effective a
propagandist as he was a gifted poet and insatiably curious 
intellectual. With his cerebral interests, the poet had grown 
weary of the Dadaist provocations and infantile rebellion.  He 
felt it was time for intellectuals to act more constructively, and 
he built Surrealism out of the ruins of Dada, whose unrelieved 
pattern of nihilism had become sterile and self-defeating.  
In negating everything else, Dada logically had to end by 
eliminating itself.  The February 1920 *Bulletin Dada* carred 
a prophetic inscription in large type: "The real Dadaists are 
against Dada.  Every one is a director of Dada." (p. 177)

Vestiges of Dada and Surrealist ideas can be discerned in 
subsequent artistic movements of the 1950's and 1960's: in 
assemblage, in Europe's so-called New Realism, and in Pop Art 
and Happenings, which incorporated elements of Dada to pass 
ironic comments on a rampant and reckless consumer society.  
But the original inspiration has become so diffused as to merge 
imperceptibly into a vocabulary of international art forms and 
pass quietly into common intellectual currency.  Yet the Dada 
and Surrealist vision, its compelling urge to reorient reality to 
the extravagant needs of the psyche and to fabricate a world 
more consoling than the actual, can never be extinguished 
entirely.  The mysticism and sense of revolt has surfaced 
unexpectedly in the immoderate scale of Earthworks of recent 
years, or in the hermeticism and riddles of Conceptual Art, not 
to mention even more current works of a new fantastic order 
burgeoning Expressionism....  Here, as in the case of Duchamp, 
the whole point of the aesthetic idea lies in concept.  Albert Camus, 
implying that Surrealism was inadequate either as philosophy or 
as a plan of action, described the movement in this way: "Absolute 
revolt, total insubordination, sabotage on principle, the humor and 
cult of the absurd -- such is the nature of Surrealism, which 
defines itself, its primary intent, as the incessant examination of 
all values."

The genius and universality of Surrealism, however, lay in its 
affirmations rather than its presumed negations.  It was Dada 
and not Surrealism that engaged in provocative gesture for its 
own sake, and in "total insubordination, sabotage on principle," 
as Camus put it.  Breton's Surrealism imposed a concrete 
philosophical system and a program upon Dada's open-ended 
assumptions, systematically exploring the subconscious mind in 
the search for a higher reality behind our common-day 
perceptions of objects.  This search was linked to a reformist 
impulse and a rather muddled identification with social revolution.  
Breton incorporated the ideas of chance, automatism, and the 
irrational, which had already erupted in Dada, into orthodox 
Freudian and Marxist viewpoints within his own typically French 
and ingeniously structured theoretical principles.
(p. 195)

In his celebrated, albeit originally scandalous, flag paintings..., 
[Jasper] Johns revealed his nature as Neo-Dadaist, an artist 
who elevated commonplace objects to the status of fine art but 
not by the simple act of selection such as that performed by 
Duchamp....  Instead of a Readymade, Johns presented an 
exquisitely hand-painted image of a universally familar artifact, 
thereby compounding the already ironic relationship created 
by the original Dadaists between art and life.  While as caught 
up in sly aesthetic games as Duchamp, Johns differed from his 
mentor in that he played them in a wholehearedly affirmative 
spirit. (p. 302)
=====

(SOURCE 5)
In retrospect we can see that it was but a short step from this 
to the destructive violence of the First World War - described 
by the Futurists in their Manifesto as 'the only health giver of 
the world' - and from there to the Cafe de la Terrasse in Zurich, 
in neutral Switzerland, the headquarters of the Dadaist 
movement founded in 1916 and led by the Roumanian Tristan 
Tzara and Hans Arp.  Given a world which by then could be 
seen to be intent on committing genocide with guns, bombs, and 
poison gas, it is easy to appreciate why this movement should 
have been as anarchic and nihilistic as it was.  Rather than 
tamely submitting to inherited notions of reverence and 
respect for order and restraint as a distinguishing characteristic 
of art, its members dedicated themselves to the destruction of 
all traditional aesthetic disciplines.  It was in pursuit of these 
ideas that Marcel Duchamp exhibited a china lavatory bowl as a 
piece of sculpture in 1917 and that Guillaume Apollinaire's one 
and only play, *The Breasts of Tiresias*... was performed in Paris 
in 1917/18.

During the war-torn years the Dadaists in Zurich and their friends 
abroad could fairly claim to have been attempting to do for art 
(including dramatic art) what Nietzsche some twenty years earlier 
had already done for inherited culture and religion in the West.  
Arguing in his essays and books the need to reject all cultural 
and moral values (especially religious ones), Nietzsche had 
postulated in *Also sprach Zarathustra* (1883-92) the arrival of 
a new era ordered and controlled by 'supermen'.  Yet as the long 
and hideous nightmare of the war came to its abrupt end in 1918, 
following political revolutions in Russia and Germany, much of 
Nietzsche's heroic romanticism had come to ring as hollow in the 
ears of the war's survivors as the stage rhetoric of the old actor-
managers; for if the war had done nothing else for art, it had 
revealed all too clearly how feeble modern man actually was, 
and how frail was his continuing hold on civilized life.  The way 
ahead begged questions at every turn; and where dramatic art 
was concerned only the cinema seemed to know with any 
certainty where it was going. (p. 223)
=====

(SOURCE 6)
Dada was not, strictly speaking, an art movement - in fact, it 
stood for the repudiation and abolition of art - and its energies 
related for the most part to poetry, typography, public relations 
and an idiosyncratic subspecies of the performing arts.  Nurtured 
in a neutral country and galvanized by occasional visits by 
Picabia, Zurich Dada established prototypes of avant-garde 
activity which have still yet to be superceded: among them cafe-
theater, the mixed-media happening, concrete poetry, automatic 
writing and the use of aleatory [chance-determined - ed] 
procedures in art, poetry and music.... in 1917 Arp got into the 
habit of closing his eyes, underlining words or sentences in the 
newspaper with a pencil, and going from there to write a 
complete poem.  "A sentence from a newspaper gripped us 
as much as one from a prince among poets," he wrote in 1953.

Implicit in all this was contempt for the discredited bourgeois 
society, which had allowed language to be debased by the 
mendacities of wartime and art to become a matter of routine.  
"In that wonderful Dada time," Arp wrote later, "we hated and 
despised the finicky, laborious habits of work.  We couldn't 
stand the otherworldly look of the 'titans' as they wrestled with 
problems of the spirit."  Oil painting, in particular, had a rough 
ride with Dada.  "When closely and sharply examined, the 
most perfect picture" - Arp is again the speaker - "is a warty, 
threadbare approximation, a dry porridge, a dismal moon-
crater landscape."  History has not always been kind to the 
Dadaists, and much of what they did now looks what they 
least wanted it to be: arty.  In Zurich particularly the fact of 
Swiss neutrality makes the big talkers seem, in retrospect, 
both sheltered and effete.  What still commands our respect 
is the constructive element; and what was provided by artists 
who would have come through in any case.  Arp spoke for them 
when he said later that "we were looking for an art based on 
fundamentals, one which would cure the madness of the age.  
We wanted a new order of things to resore the balance 
between heaven and hell.  Something told us that power-crazed 
gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening 
men's minds."...

There is an obvious contradiction between the grandiose 
program of Dada and the sweet good taste which is uppermost 
in the so-called Dada collages of Arp.  In his painted wooden 
reliefs of the same period he indulged a play instinct which, 
once again had nothing to do with an aesthetic of desperation.  
But the point of these beguiling little works is that they 
reintroduce into serious art a repertory of forms for which 
Cubism had had no place. (pp. 180-1)

It was fundamental to an alternative art that magic could be 
made from the humblest of materials.  "We 'painted,'" said 
one of the pioneers of Zurich Dada, "with scissors, adhesive 
plaster, sacking, paper."  In Zurich this sprang from a conscious 
polemical preference; but the time was approaching when art 
would simply be compelled, in a defeated Germany, to work 
from an aesthetic of scarcity - in other words, with just about 
anything that came to hand. (p. 181)

...German Dada was carried on in a society that was teetering 
toward total collapse.  It was the work of men with nothing 
to lose, and its notional trajectory was not at all that of the 
traditional work of art dealer-> collector -> museum.  Its life 
span was estimated as nearer to that of the newspaper, or the 
public meeting, or the telegram marked "Urgent."  Its function 
was to negotiate with chaos for terms of truce.  It borrowed 
from the techniques of the handbill and the poster, and it 
counted on the cooperation of observers whose situation was 
so desperate that they just couldn't afford not to understand.  
We should remember this when we try to imagine how the 
steeplechase of image and idea must have looked to those 
who had run into it in the heyday (1919-22) of German Dada.

German Dada had nothing but the name in common with 
Zurich Dada.  Fundamentally, Zurich Dada was a sub-
department of the entertainment industry.  Genuine 
revolution was not to be expected from evenings on which 
the young Arthur Rubenstein played the piano music of 
SaintSaens and other performers evoked the Parisian *cafe-
chantant* as it had been in the lifetime of Talouse-Lautrec.  
"In Zurich," Richard Hulsenbeck wrote later, "people lived 
as they would have lived in a health resort, running after 
women and longing for the coming of night that brought 
with it pleasure barges, colored lights and music by Verdi."  
Hulsenback.... was poet, performer, coeditor with Hugo Ball 
of the Dada periodical *Caberet Voltaire*, and a most ferocious 
champion of what in Switzerland passed for jazz.  He fancied 
himself as a writer of nonsense verse...., but did not agree 
with another Dadaist, Tristan Tzara, that "Dada means nothing."  
And when he got back to Berlin in January, 1917, he saw to it 
that, as he said, "in Germany Dada lost its art-for-art's sake 
character with its very first move." (pp. 181-2)

"Dada was not a 'made' movement," George Grosz wrote, "it was 
an organic product, which began as a reaction against the 
head-in-the-clouds attitudes of so-called high art, whose 
disciples brooded over cubes, and over Gothic art, while the 
generals were painting in blood."

This was the state of mind in which Hulsenbeck and 
Raoul Hausmann wrote their Dada manifesto in Berlin in 
April, 1918.  It called for an international revolutionary 
union of all creative men and women; for progressive 
unemployment through the mechanization of all fields of 
activity; for the abolition of private property; for the 
provision of free daily meals for creative people and 
intellectuals; for the remodeling of big-city life by a 
Dadaist advisory council; and for the regulation of all 
sexual activity under the supervision of a Dadaist sexual 
center.  These proposals were put forward at what George 
Grosz called "the time of the turnip": a period in which it 
was nothing unusual for the supply of potatoes to give out 
and be replaced by turnips normally used as cattle fodder.  
The Allied blockade brought starvation daily nearer; the 
German Army was getting more and more demoralized; there 
had been the beginnings of mutiny in the German Navy as 
early as July, 1917; 400,000 munition workers had been on 
strike in Berlin.  It was, if ever, a time for desperate measures; 
and we cannot blame the Berliners who thought of Zurich as a 
city not so much neutral as neutered.

Much of Berlin Dada is a matter of legend.  There were bold 
single acts which nobody followed up, as when Johannes 
Baader climbed up to the pulpit in Berlin Cathedral and treated 
the congregation to a Dadaist harangue.  There were projects 
well over the frontiers of fantasy, as when that same Baader 
planned a five-story-high "Dio-Dada-Drama" which was to 
encapsulate "The Greatness and the Fall of Germany."  There 
were prosecutions for antimilitarist activity.  There were 
publications which have clung to history as burrs cling to the 
jacket of a hunter.  Alternative art reached its point of maximum 
immediacy in the Berlin of 1918-20....  Berlin is a quick-witted, 
skeptical city in which a certain lapidary derision stands high 
among conversational qualities; and in the photomontages in 
question that trait is carried over into art. (p. 182-3)

[re: Max Ernst]
Already as a study he had realized that the untaught 
scribblings of children, mad people, obsessives of all kinds 
might have more to contribute to modern art than anything 
that was taught in the academies.  As it was by extension 
of a long-held position that Max Ernst spoke out in 1919 
against "Everyman," who "loves Everyman's expressionists 
but turns away in disgust from the graffiti in public 
lavatories."...

...He spoke of himself in November, 1918, as "a young man 
who aspired to find the mythos of his own time"; he had 
studied abnormal psychology at an early age; and he knew 
that what had applied to individuals before 1914 might well 
apply to whole societies when World War I at last came to an 
end.  In life he was antipaternalism personified and had an 
especial horror of the word "duty"; if Dada could do away 
with the structures of obedience which had for so long been 
mandatory among Germans, so much the better.

Max Ernst was not so anxious to do away with art as to extend 
full membership to forms of statement which had previously 
been denied admission.  This was, of course, typical of Dada; 
but he brought to his Dada works a steely determination, a 
malicious humor with overtones of intellectual terrorism, 
and a gift for verbal embellishment which was quite the 
equal of anything that had been done in that line elsewhere.  
At the same time he had an existence of his own outside of 
Dada, and interests which were independent of it.... Above 
all, his work was quintessentially modern in that he used, 
to still unsurpassed effect, the device of the quick cut.

The quick cut was a combination of ellipsis, on the one hand, 
and a well-calculated jump in the dark, on the other.  
Fernand Leger was quite right when he said in 1914 that 
modern man could be distinguished from earlier man by the 
fact that the number of impressions with which he had to 
deal was a thousand times greater.  Leger himself tackled 
this problem both by rigorous selection and by fragmentation 
or overlapping images which would have formerly been 
shown complete.  But only after a complete break with 
previous pictoral tradition could the kind of quick cutting 
which was perfected by Max Ernst become incorporated in 
the act of reading a picture.  To that extent, and by making a 
certain nimbleness of mind mandatory among those who 
looked at new art, Dada created a climate in which Max Ernst 
could go to work. (p. 185-6)

Max Ernst was against Authority, as such, and it never 
worried him that Cologne Dada was more than once in trouble 
with the police.  But he was not a political activist.  He stood 
somewhat apart, therefore, from the Berlin Dadaists when 
they took (often from the most innocent of motives) a straight 
Communist line.  He was his own man....

[Kurt Schwitters] did, admittedly, sit out the vicissitudes of 
postwar Germany in his house in Hanover, unaffected by 
the commitments of Dadaists elsewhere.  This was the more 
enraging to the activists in that Schwitters was in many 
ways the ideal (and potentially the supreme) Dadaist.  Others 
got up on platforms and made fools of themselves, more or 
less.  Schwitters survives, through a gramophone recording, 
as one of the most extraordinary performers of the century.  
When he read his "Primeval Sonata" - a long poem made up 
entirely of wordless sounds - it was as if there had come into 
existence a completely new mode of human expression, by 
turns hilarious and terrifying, elemental and precisely 
engineered.  Others dreamed of reconciling art and language, 
music and speech, the living room and the cathedral, the 
stage and the unspoiled forest.  Schwitters had the sweep of 
mind not only to dream of these things, but to carry them out, 
within the physical limits available to him.  All this he did in 
the name of an invented concept which he called "Merz."

Merz (derived from the second syllable of the German word 
*Kommerz*) was a working name which Schwitters used to 
identify all his activities (and himself, also, at times: one of 
his publications was sign Kurt Merz Schwitters).  "Everything 
had broken down," Schwitters wrote of the beginning of Merz, 
"and new things had to be made out of fragments.  It was 
like an image of the revolution within me - not as it was, but 
as it might have been."  Schwitters was a one-man encyclopedia 
of Dada preoccupations.  He was painter, collagist, sculptor, poet, 
performer, typographer, visionary architect.  He was the 
consummation of Dada.  As much as anyone, he completed the 
union of art and nonart which had always been fundamental to 
Dada.  In intention he was one of our century's greatest 
reconcilers: as a roller-back of boundaries he has still to be 
surpassed.  It was never easy, and it is now impossible, to see 
his achievement in its totality.  That achievement was summed 
up in the union of the arts which he effected in his own houses, 
first in Hanover, later in Norway, and finally, on a much-
diminished scale, in England.  What he did in each case was to 
remake the language of living.  The house was taken over, room 
by room and later upward through the ceiling.  It was reshaped 
in various radical ways and filled slowly and consistently with 
material objects which were neither architecture, nor painting, 
nor reading matter, but an as-yet-unnamed amalgam and 
crossbreeding of all four of them.  Like Duchamp's *Large Glass*, 
the first Merz building (in Hanover) had an elaborate program 
which was conceived and added to in a spirit of irony; but 
whereas the *Large Glass* is Voltairean in its mockery and its 
power to disconcert, Schwitters was by nature a healer, and the 
lesson of his works is that men are free to remake the world 
from its beginnings.  This applies to individual elements within 
the world - the theater, for instance: every experimental theater 
owes something to Schwitters - and it applies to our environment 
in its totality.

Schwitters' paintings and collages can be read as an effort of 
reconciliation, insofar as they often draw upon the achievement 
of others, notably on the constructed objects produced by 
Picasso and, more generally, on Synthetic Cubism, with its 
overlapping flat planes and its mainly rectilinear structure.  
Sometimes they stand for the antiaesthetic attitudes of Dada 
-- as, for instance, in *Revolving*, where the materials are as 
brutish as they could be. Yet the effect of *Revolving* is to 
create from those materials a reminder that our much-
battered world is part of a planetary system which goes on 
revolving no matter how grievously we misgovern ourselves.  
Sometimes, equally, they elaborate ideas explored elsewhere 
by Dada: the strange power which resides in printed matter 
that has been removed from its original context, for instance.  
And sometimes they draw on other forms of art: on the color 
theories of Robert Delaunay, or the affinities with nature of 
Franz Marc, or the collapsing cosmos of Kandinsky....

Dada as a collective venture did not take over the world, as 
had been hoped by some of its more extravagent supporters.  
And by 1922 it had evolved - in Paris, above all - into a 
primary literary movement that was marked over and over 
again by spectacular clashes of temperament.  But it is to 
the credit of Dada that it acted as the lever on which whole 
new departments of modernity swung into view.  Perhaps 
Richard Hulsenbeck spoke truer than he knew when he said 
in1919 that "Dada is the only savings bank that pays 
interest in eternity." (p. 187-91)

Dada was an emergency operation.  Based on an economy of 
starvation and on the total rejection of the past, it was 
international and even intercontinental in its development.  
It responded to a situation in which the end of the world as 
it had previously existed for art could reasonably be regarded 
as imminent.  In such a situation, ad hoc materials alone 
were appropriate.  Surrealism was hardly less radical in its 
program; but, in spite of that, Surrealist art was largely a 
matter of old-style paintings on canvas which were put on 
offer in old-style galleries in a world bent on "going back to 
normal."  It is also pertinent that Dada was opposed to the very 
idea of "a career in art" and that with one or two exceptions 
the Dadaists were not people whose gifts would support a long 
lifetime of continuous effort...."  (p. 199)

==========
SOURCES

1
_Surrealist Art_, by Sarane Alexandrian, Thames and Hudson, 1985.

2
_Abstract Art_, by Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, 1986.

3
_History of Modern Art 
(Painting/Sculpture/Architecture/Photography)_, by H. H. Arnason,
Prentis-Hall, 1986.
 
4
_Modern Art From Post-Impressionism to the Present_, by Sam Hunter, 
H.N.Abrams, 1985.

5
_A History of Theatre_, by GWG Wickham, Univ. of Cambridge, 1985.

6
__The Meanings of Modern Art_, by Museum of Modern Art 
(Sheehan/Byrne), Harper and Row, 1981.