Long Live the Dada!

June 17, 2021

Written by: Wang Jingyu

Why Dada?

The obsession of artist Zheng Hong Xiang with Dada both literally and technically proffer one clue: Dada is still relevant today. Zheng has cut out part of the painting and filled in fur in one series of his works while in other cases he drew the three-dimensional words “DADA” boldly, replacing the heads of the protagonists. This article thus aims to conduct a retrospective on the famous art movement and to determine if the hasty conclusion that Dada is still relevant today holds firm.

King of the Jungle, Zheng Hong Xiang, Oil on Canvas, Fur, 2016

Beast, Zheng Hong Xiang, Oil on Canvas, Fur, 2016

DA DA!, Zheng Hong Xiang, Oil on Canvas, 2016

Animal Factory No. 1, Zheng Hong Xiang, Oil on Canvas, Fur, 2016

Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. 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.” And so forth.

——Dada Manifesto (Manifeste DaDa) by Hugo Ball (1886-1927) , 1916[1]

The official birthplace of the Dada movement is the Cabaret Voltaire, an artistic nightclub located in Zürich, Switzerland, founded by Hugo Ball with his companion Emmy Hennings (1885-1948). It was Hugo who read out the “Dada Manifesto” to the public on July 14, 1916. The nightclub acted as an active hub attracting a loosely affiliated group of artists who had been frustrated by the turmoil of the WWI and escaped to the neutral nation of Switzerland.

The wording of the manifesto clearly shows that the art movement had no intention of defining itself well, and the selection of a randomly chosen name spelled that out clearly for all to see. The guiding principle appeared to be anti-establishment or anti-structure. Ironically, Dada became quickly integrated into the art establishment and structure of the art world of the 1920s and 1930s. Although its internal drives appeared to be a self-destructive mechanism, Dada rapidly expanded its influence across many important cities including New York, Berlin, and Paris. Although Dada defied everything including itself it became the structured anti-structure rallying cry across the art world between the wars. It was not so much argued against after the Second World War as it was forgotten. Dada’s ghosts, however, linger with the ongoing emergence of new movements including surrealism, avant-garde (Dada is sometimes called European Avant-garde) and even the Fluxus during the 1960s. In some ways deconstruction carries on the anti-structural elements of Dada in fields like architecture, linguistics, sociology and other areas of creative academic thought. Dada faded but has echoed on through the decades.

Dada was born out of the response to the prevailing bourgeois aesthetic in the atmosphere of confusion and void in the closing stages of World War I and during its aftermath. Nihilism lies at the heart of the art movement as it values nonsense, unconsciousness as well as randomness, which permeate all kinds of art formats it has inspired. In the words of another important figure of Dadaism, “Dada is a state of mind. You can be happy, sad, melancholy or Dada”, wrote Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), a Romanian and French poet, essayist, performance artist and a central figure during the Dada movement [2]. The credo foretold the diversity of formats and emphasizes a “state of mind” that is intended to spread out across the world. Take Berlin as an example, when Dada arrives in this city it becomes more correlated with political propaganda and is action-oriented. The early practices of the Dada movement conducted by Hugo Ball were mainly presented as performances of sound poems, linking up literature, music or sound, and play/theatre. In 1918 Tzara also published a “Dada Manifesto”, which was sometimes regarded as the establishment file for Dada officially. The “Dada Manifesto 1918” was written in an anti-manifesto style, full of self-mockery about the search for meaning for life and art.

In the same year of the Dada Manifesto, Hugo Ball wrote the sound poem “Karawane”, with the ambition to create a new kind of poetry where words could not be recognized. This kind of poetry attempted to express the “innermost alchemy of the word” or sentence [3]. Speaking in tongues, as it were, during the performance, he uttered a pattern of syllables in an irregular rhythm. Could this have anticipated Chomsky’s deep structure analysis of linguistics that came decades later? While performing, he wore strange costumes made from daily objects, which anticipated ballet costumes created by Oscar Schlemmer (1888-1943), the Bauhaus designer, about a decade later. The performance itself added another layer of absurdity to the text of non-sense, creating a Dadaist experience as a whole.

(Left) Hugo Ball, a poet and Dadaist, wearing a Cubist costume at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916.

(Right) Proof sheet for the projected anthology Dadaco, edited by George Grosz, John Heartfield, et al., 1919, with Ball’s 1917 text “Karawane” [4]

Bauhaus theatre, Triadisches Ballett, Oskar Schlemmer, 1923 [5]

Dada artists have drawn much inspiration from Futurism, another artistic and social movement originated in Italy a few years earlier than Dada. Futurism is famous for its appreciation of the speed and technology of machines. The Futurist manifesto entitled “The Art of Noises” written by Italian Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) in 1913 urged the re-evaluation of noise in daily lives, especially those generated by machines after entering the industrial era. His manifesto went along with the invention of a family of instruments named “intonarumori” (meaning “noise-intoners“). The instruments, collaboratively invented by Russolo and his assistant Ugo Piatti, created music pieces containing imitative effects of noise so as to reflect the real life that has been inundated with machinery noises at that time.

One of the works was entitled “Bruitism”, a word that was later borrowed by Dada to define one kind of sound poem, the Bruitist poem. The word “Bruitism”, meaning “noise music”, was first introduced to the art field by another Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) in his “Manifesto of Futurism” (1909), recorded by Richard Huelsenbeck (1892-1974), the initiator of the Berlin Dada group in in his 1920 essay “En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism” [6][7]. Similar to Futurist poetry’s advocacy of the “words in freedom”, the Bruitist poem is also characterized by a visual presentation of the unexpected combination between simple and irrelevant text and images, a prototype of graphic design [8]. The literal reference clearly shows the influence of Futurist poetic and sonic conception on Dada. Although Hugo Ball was always tagged as the inventor of sound poetry, it was relatively limited within Dada’s context because over the longer time frame of sound poetry, the relevant exploration of the phonetic attribute of language had already been started by the end of the 19th century. The thorough survey of “Sound Poetry” by Canadian poet and scholar Steve McCaffery has revealed that because of the “historical prominence” of Dada, the sonic experiments of Futurists have been unfairly underestimated by art history [9].

Russolo, his assistant Ugo Piatti and the “intonarumori” (the name of the instrument)

Futuristic Poetry advocates “words in freedom”, utilizing onomatopoeia and visual design to destroy the solidified semantics

The other two kinds of sound poems are the Simultaneous poem and Movement poem [10]. They either emphasize the synchronous nature of the poem recital by different people in different languages, rhythms and tonalities or the necessary accompaniment of primitive movements, both reconfirming the performative-orientation embedded in sound poems. And the concept of “Simultaneity” is also taken over from Marinetti and serves as a “direct reminder of life” [11]. A group of Dadaists mainly consisting of Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann (1861-1971), Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco (1895-1984) have explored the possibility of sound poems through write-up and more importantly, performances that highlight improvisation. The bizarre performance conjuring primitive and religious rituals was also the incarnation of the broken society.

Collage, a method of introducing non-art objects such as pieces of newspapers into the art realm, is one of the most prominent techniques promoted by Dada artworks. The technique originated from Cubism with Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) being the leading exponent after totally giving up perspective in painting. His experiment was not limited to two-dimensions thus encompassing collage and assemblage using “found objects” from life. But it was Dada’s employment of the cut-up and collage method in various pieces that further freed the syntax of the technique. Dadaists are not bothered with creating “original” works such as paintings or sculptures but are more inclined to utilize daily objects, which later would be coined into terms such as “readymade”. Specifically, the “readymades” used by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) are those manufactured and mass-produced objects that result from the industrial era. Duchamp is more proactive in defining “readymade”. He would simply present a manufactured object without any treatment before they were collaged.

Girl With Mandolin

Pablo Picasso

1910

Guitar

Pablo Picasso
1913

Cut-and-pasted newspaper, wallpaper, paper,ink, chalk, charcoal, and pencil on colored paper

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Still Life

Pablo Picasso

1914

© Succession Picasso/DACS 2020

Bicycle Wheel
Marcel Duchamp
1951Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool

In essence, each character, word or phrase the objects already available so that they could mix them around and create new works. The photomontage, a photo collage in its nature, as well as sound poems share the same logic that the random chaos and disorder need to be applied upon the existing norms for them to be returned back to the original status. The inherent validity of collage by drawing disparate juxtaposition lies upon the intention to reveal the innermost psychic automatism, which also foreshadows the rise of Surrealism when Dada was on the wane. And even though the Dada movement has been lost in history, the method of collage continues to dominate in the art world until nowadays. Recent research shows that collage was actually invented long before Cubism. The 2019 survey exhibition entitled Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage, held by the National Galleries of Scotland, traces back to the origin of collage-esque technique that could be found in many pre modernist handiworks [12]. In Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant’s research on the history of “Dada Collage” also reveals that the work Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany by Hannah Höch (1889-1978), one of the most representative Dada Collage works, brought the technique back into the original context where collage was “a traditionally female domestic art form” simply by the suggestion of the tool “kitchen knife” in the name [13]. Each era or movement takes its own impetus from this technique and creates its own modification.

The exhibition catalogue for “Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage”

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919-20, photomontage and collage with watercolor

To Make A Dadaist Poem

Take a newspaper.

Take some scissors.

Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.

Cut out the article.

Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and

put them all in a bag.

Shake gently.

Next take out each cutting one after the other.

Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.

The poem will resemble you.

And there you are — an infinitely original author of charming sensibility

even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

Tristan Tzara

In 1920 Tzara wrote “To Make A Dadaist Poem” [14]

Tzara has written down an instruction as above for manufacturing a dadaist poem, a method that is still popular today. David Bowie (1947-2016), the rock star of our era, has claimed that he has used this method a lot in lyric writing and idea inspiring. His usage of the cut-up method and further application of it on computers also revalidates the contemporaneity of Dada with the digital era. When technique and technology run parallel with each other in analog and digital context, collage straddles over the physical world and virtual world and reactivates it’s life.

Screenshots from “Cut up technique- David Bowie”, the lyrics for the song “Moonage Daydream” [15]

There has existed a synonym of Dada called Merz, invented by Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who, despite being rejected by the Dada Club officially, is no doubt a Dadaist by examining his art practices. He proposed his own version of Dada, Merz, with the same level of concision and randomness. Schwitters derived different series of works encompassing mixed material, photomontage, sculpture and architectures and he provided different but connected names to the series. The collages and assemblages are entitled as “merzbild” and the methodology employed on these works involves a high degree of spontaneity. Another work called Merzbau (1933) is more radical, in which Schwitters transformed the interior of his house using found objects. Schwitters has launched the Merz brand and further derived many subsidiary brands, constituting his own art landscape [16].

Merz 1. – Holland Dada, 1923, printed cover of his first Merz-publication

Merzbild 29a

Kurt Schwitters

The Merzbau, Sprengel Museum, Hanover, 1933

There is an influential noise project launched by Masami Akita (Japanese) in 1979 called Merbow, paying homage to Merz. When the noise, sound, Dada and Merz have been observed under the same apparatus, it would not be surprising to find that this is a project about noise art. People continuously dig up new content from the sound poems and derive a new treatment from each of the pieces. The pieces are continuously re-imagined by visualized animation, video, music album, and performance.

It was Schwitters who created one of the most famous and quintessential sound poems named “Ursonate”, which he first presented in 1925 and then kept refining for years. In 2017, commissioned by the Performa 17 Biennial, South African artist William Kentridge staged two performances of Schwitters’ “Ursonate”, an homage to a Dada artist at the centenary of the DADA movement. There are other versions of “Ursonate” such as the performance by Michael Schmid at the Music Biennale of Venice 2011. The vitality of Dada seems to be long reaching with these new performances of the traditional pieces.

As an important figure for not only Dada but also modernism and postmodernism in general, Marcel Duchamp indeed brought the art movement to another level. Besides his famous works defining “readymade”, he also has developed some assemblage/musical instructions expressing a strong inclination of sonic experiments, which was considered a half-century ahead of John Cage’s exploration in sound art. Duchamp’s musical experiment could be traced back to as early as 1912 which is earlier than the practices of Dadaism itself [17]. Taking the unfinished work “Erratum Musical” as an example, the lightspot is the playful and conceptual method of composition for three voices in this song. By randomly drawing a card bearing a note from a hat, a chance mechanism anticipates the series of indeterminacy for John Cage (1912-1992), which at some stage is affected by Zen thought and embraces whatever comes along. The “chance” in fact can be regarded as some transformation of the randomness held by Dadaists. This work by Duchamp was “first performed publicly by the Dada artist Marguerite Buffet at the Manifestation of Dada on March 27, 1920”, according to the research by Ya-Ling Chen [18].

Erratum Musical, 1934

By far, the most inventive and radical musical constructions were those of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), who had taken up residence in the United States. Often working under the alias A. Klang (Klang: “sound” in German), his assemblages cunningly obscure the boundaries of text, music, representation, and notation a half-century before John Cage’s experiments in indeterminacy.

——From Revolutionary to Normative: A Secret History of Dada and Surrealism in American Music

The realm of sound is a paradise for Dada to dwell as sound itself is too abstract to articulate and too ephemeral to consolidate, not to mention that sound is an interdisciplinary medium in nature with its flexibility in blending with other senses. Sometimes the ideas of the artists are so far ahead of their time that the realization is limited by technology. Due to the restriction of the recording and reproduction technology, it was after the invention of tape recorders that more sound experiments became possible. Sound, be it noise or music or abstract vibration, is transformed from some abstract notes into objects with a plastic body of itself, which then allows it to be “found” and further “processed”. The panel of “found objects” is expanded, so are the possibilities of art. The embodiment of sound anticipated the concept of musique concrète (concrete music), a music composition method that recorded sound is inputted as raw material for various kinds of process, proposed by the French composer Pierre Schaeffer(1910-1995) in early 1940s.

And it was another story after entering the electronic era. Contemporary sound art is equipped technologically to play within the sound scape much more wildly.

There has been some research on the influence of Dada on sound art. The French-American experimental, modernist, avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (1883-1965), claimed as the father of electronic music, has been “involved with the New York Dadaist circle upon moving to America as a young artist in 1915” [19]. And some of his works emphasize purely on the percussive sound. These sounds serve as the instructions and a reminder of the “machine language” of Dada. In the article From Revolutionary to Normative: A Secret History of Dada and Surrealism in American Music, many covert connections between sound art and the Dada movement are identified, leading to the conclusion that Dada has done the cognitive preparation work for the future’s sonic experiments that correlate with contemporary art and its normative incarnation. After all, we all live in a time when machines seem to intrude on life and society. With the advancement of technology, although the transmission speed of information is much faster than originally imagined by Dadaists, what we are faced with is an intensively fragmented reality. The essential difference of our reality with Dada’s reality might be the transition of the machine language from analog to digital.

A large number of dazzling art concepts were waiting in line after the fall of the Dada movement but the rebellious spirit of Dada never dies. It could be symbolized as a capital “NO”, according to one Dada scholar, who said the most popular words in Punk songs are “no” [20]. Is the ghost of Dada still lingering in the contemporary world? No wonder the albums with records of Dadaist‘s works and the reenactment of the original artworks are being produced continuously – they are in demand. Throughout a period of more than a century, Dada’s voice is still reverberating today. Dada, with its name being some kind of gibberish, was trying to agitate the prevailing order, a resistive force that is in urgent need of the contemporary world where the problem of industrialization, bourgeois values and consumerism are getting even worse as new issues such as digitalization and globalization keep popping up.

However short-lived, Dada constitutes something like the Big Bang of Modernism [21].

——Dada Was Born 100 Years Ago. So What?

Our Echo via Curation

Here is the process of producing the sound installation：

A Brainstorm session of drawing keywords from the works of Zheng Hong Xiang, whatever words come into mind will be written down and put into the pool
Remix the pool of words a little bit
Translate the words into several languages and pick up a reader for each language
Instead of reciting the text in different languages at the same time, each reader reads the text individually and make a record
Cut and paste the sound samples in different languages
Search for songs entitled “Ship of Fools” or “Das Narrenschiff” or the Chinese operas with lyrics containing the “Floating Raft” (The Chinese Title of the show)
Insert the sample of the songs into the sound installation as the intermission between the reading
Search for some background music that is loosely relevant with the semantic reference of the text

The video installation shown at the very beginning of this article is a further development based on the sound installation. Put all the footage we shot for the show, the paintings by the artist Zheng Hong Xiang and the video works produced by himself into the editor and do a cut-up and assemblage work again. Because of the inherent editing relevance, the sound installation was transformed into a video installation, which is presented at the show as a curatorial echo of Zheng’s works.

As stated at the very beginning of this article, it is the collage paintings by Zheng that inspired us to research this concept, trace through art history, and find many valuable connections linking to our present. Zheng employs the most efficient cut-up method in a straightforward style without creating any visual chaos. The provocation lies more in the combination of the method and the concept. Zheng introduces Furs, an object appearing in the text of one Chinese ancient fable in which the “fur” serves as a metaphor of the benefit that the authority would like to draw from the people. Furs becomes a device to interweave the allegory into the narrative of the painting. Methodologically related but ideologically opposite to Dada’s improvisatory collage and normally conducted on a subconscious level, Zheng’s work is a result not of deconstruction but instead of deliberate re-construction.

The inclusivity and particularity, the spatial diffusibility of sound inspires us to transform the gallery into a new space by broadcasting the collage works of heterogeneous source materials, which might be linked further to another aspect of the curation for this show, that is the “heterotopia”; a type of social space.