DADA.

"Let us rewrite life every day. What we are celebrating is both buffoonery and a requiem mass" (Ball, p. 56). When the German poet Hugo Ball set down those lines in his diary on 12 March 1916, he invoked both Christian liturgical prayers for the salvation of the souls of the dead ("requiem mass") and the comic performances of clowns and acrobats ("buffoonery") as points of reference for what he and a group of fellow poets and artists had been doing of late in the newly established Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland.

DADA IN ZURICH

Named in honor of the eighteenth-century French philosopher Voltaire, author of the satirical novel Candide, or Optimism (1759), and founded by Ball, along with the German poet and cabaret singer Emmy Hennings, the Alsatian artist Jean Arp, the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, and the Romanian artist Marcel Janco, the Cabaret Voltaire opened on 5 February 1916 and lasted only until late June of that year. The naming of the Cabaret Voltaire was a gesture that acknowledged the political and philosophical despair as well as the artistic ambitions of Ball and his collaborators, including, in addition to those named above, the Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber, the German poet and medical student Richard Huelsenbeck, and the German artist, writer, and filmmaker Hans Richter. "The ideals of culture and of art as a program for a variety show—that is our kind of Candide against the times," wrote Ball (p. 67). As a group, Ball and the others sought to invent new ways of composing both art and life in neutral Switzerland, a location in which they were at once insulated from and haunted by the perils and terrors of World War I. Speaking of the effects of their performances and exhibitions, Ball wrote: "The horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible" (p. 65).

As announced in a press notice in the Zurich papers of 2 February 1916 that Ball cites in his diary, the Cabaret Voltaire was founded as an experiment intended "to create a center for artistic entertainment" that would be open to "suggestions and contributions of all kinds" from the "young artists of Zurich" (p. 50). Arp, Ball, Hennings, Huelsenbeck, Janco, Richter, Taeuber, and Tzara variously contributed paintings, masks, and other objects that were exhibited on the walls of the nightclub's cramped rooms; so-called sound-poems or verses without words, including Ball's "Gadji beri bimba" (1916), that were recited on the nightclub's makeshift stage by authors in outlandish masks and costumes, often accompanied by drumming that was meant to evoke African musical traditions; simultaneous poems that were declaimed by several performers at once ("L'amiral cherche une maison à louer" [1916] by Huelsenbeck, Janco, and Tzara being the most famous of those); and experimental dance performances that drew on new theories of expressive movement promulgated by the choreographer Rudolf von Laban, with whom Taeuber and the German dancer Mary Wigman, herself a pioneer of modern dance and occasional Cabaret Voltaire performer, studied.

A journal called Cabaret Voltaire that was published on 4 June 1916 contained the first appearance in print of the word Dada in connection with the Zurich group's avant-garde art, poetry, and performances. The title Dada was soon attached to a periodical, collections of poetry by Huelsenbeck, and exhibitions of art by Arp, Richter, Janco, and others. Precisely how or when the word Dada was discovered or invented as a name for the performances, poems, and works of art produced by the Zurich group in spring 1916 has not been established, but it is clear that part of the word's appeal was its multi-lingual evocativeness: "Dada," wrote Ball on 18 April 1916, "is 'yes, yes' in Rumanian, 'rocking horse' and 'hobbyhorse' in French. For Germans it is a sign of foolish naïveté, joy in procreation, and preoccupation with the baby carriage" (p. 63). March 1917 saw the opening of an art gallery, the Galerie Dada, that succeeded the Cabaret Voltaire as the center of Zurich Dada activities. At around that same time, Huelsenbeck returned to Berlin and quickly sought to establish the German capital as a center of Dada activity.

DADA IN GERMANY

In the midst of the acute material deprivation and increasing social and political tension brought on by World War I, Huelsenbeck began to collaborate in Berlin with the artists George Grosz and John Heartfield and the writers Wieland Herzfelde and Franz Jung, and in early 1918 they joined him in founding the "Club Dada," which also counted the architect and writer Johannes Baader, the artists Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and Otto Schmalhausen, and the writer Walter Mehring among its members. In Germany Dada took on a more aggressively political character, with the Berlin dadaists and their counterparts in Cologne, prominent among the latter the artists Max Ernst and Johannes Theodor Baargeld, advocating radical political change in the wake of the abdication of Kaiser William II and the November Revolution of 1918. Grosz, Heartfield, Herzfelde, and Jung were all founding members of the German Communist Party, and German Dada journals (including Der Ventilator [The fan], published in Cologne, and Jedermann sein eigner Fussball [Every man his own football], published in Berlin) as well as several major Dada exhibitions held in Cologne and Berlin in 1919–1920, addressed contemporary political events and attempted to establish connections between the German dadaists' experimental artistic techniques, most prominent among them collage and photomontage, and their critiques of contemporary politics and culture. A spring 1920 exhibition in Cologne was temporarily shut down by the police in connection with charges of obscenity, and the largest of the German Dada exhibitions, the so-called Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair), which was held in Berlin in summer 1920, resulted in the trial of several of its organizers on charges of having "insulted the military" with the inclusion of works such as Grosz's portfolio of lithographs, Gott mit uns(God with us; 1920), which satirized the practices of military authorities during and after World War I, and a sculptural assemblage consisting of a stuffed German officer's uniform with a plaster pig's head that hung from the ceiling in the exhibition and bore the name Prussian Archangel (1920).

DADA IN PARIS AND THE
SHIFT TO SURREALISM

Just as Huelsenbeck bore the word Dada to Berlin, Tzara carried it to Paris, arriving there from Zurich in January 1920. Through personal correspondences, the collaborative production and international dissemination of Dada publications, and word of mouth, key players in what would become the Paris Dada movement were already aware of much of what had gone on at the Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada in Zurich, and they were even more familiar with the events and inventions of the New York Dada movement, in which the Parisian artists Marcel Duchamp, Jean Crotti, and Francis Picabia had participated, along with the American artist Man Ray and others, while living in the United States during World War I. Early in 1919, Picabia collaborated with Tzara in Zurich on the publication of issues of the journals Dada and 391. Around the same time, the Parisian poet AndréBreton made contact with Tzara to praise his 1918 "Dada Manifesto." Several months later, Breton and fellow poets Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault published the first issue of Littérature, which would become a key organ of Paris Dada and, eventually, one of the major journals of the surrealist movement that would succeed Dada in Paris as the French capital's primary avant-garde movement in literature and the arts. Dada in Paris was more oriented to literature and the making of art-world scandals than to politics and the visual arts, and one of its centers of activity was the bookstore Au Sans Pareil, site of several key Dada exhibitions, including an important show of Ernst's Dada works in late spring 1921.

By 1923 the various European Dada movements—which had spread from Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, and Paris to Hanover and elsewhere in Germany, and to Holland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Russia—had more or less come to an end. Ball had retreated from Dada and from public life in general in 1920, turning his attention instead to the study of early Christian saints and pursuing his own devotion to Catholicism; the Berlin dadaists variously oriented their work toward politics and the so-called new objectivity in painting; Baargeld studied for a doctorate in philosophy and economics; and Ernst moved to Paris, where he became a key participant in the surrealist movement.

See alsoAragon, Louis; Arp, Jean; Ball, Hugo; Breton, André;Cabaret; Duchamp, Marcel; Grosz, George; Surrealism; Tzara, Tristan.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ball, Hugo. Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary. Edited and with an introduction by John Elderfield. Translated by Ann Raimes. Berkeley, Calif., Los Angeles, and London, 1996.

Dickerman, Leah, ed. Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris. New York, 2005.

Huelsenbeck, Richard. Memoirs of a Dada Drummer. Edited by Hans J. Kleinschmidt. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Berkeley, Calif., Los Angeles, and London, 1991.

Motherwell, Robert, ed. The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.

Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. Translated by David Britt. London and New York, 1997.

Tzara, Tristan. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. Translated by Barbara Wright. London, 1981.

Brigid Doherty