Abstract
The editors of this ambitious collection of 13 well-illustrated essays define their aims as follows: we foreground thematic issues rather than the biographies of individual Dadaists or the characterization of particular locations; we are also advancing recent theoretical agendas, such as the study of identity construction and the relationship between avant-gardism and mass culture … [and] we have placed a strong emphasis on the religious, metaphysical, and philosophical concerns of Dada. (pp. 5–6)
Within this framework, the book, which is for the specialist not the tyro and would have been helped by a greater leavening of humour, falls into five parts: a very impressive ‘Introduction’ (pp. 3–11) which provides a comprehensive overview of the huge amount of secondary literature on Dada that now exists; ‘Part 1: Dada’s Dissemination’ (pp. 13–87); ‘Part 2: Dada Metaphysics’ (pp. 89–177); ‘Part 3: Dada’s Identities’ (pp. 179–309); and ‘Part 4: Dada and Mass Culture’ (pp. 225–309). These sections are, however, not watertight, and overlap in their common concern to close with Dada’s radicalism and enduring importance and do interpretative justice to its many-layered artefacts. In Part 1, Timothy O. Benson provides an encyclopaedic assessment of ‘Dada Geographies’ – i.e. the similarities and differences between the Dada’s geographical variants. Adrian Sudhalter then discusses in fascinating and unprecedented detail the history and make-up of Tzara’s huge, never-to-be-published anthology Dadaglobe (1920–1921) and in the process leaves the reader with an excellent interpretation of Max Ernst’s 3ème tableau gasométrique (1920) and Man Ray’s La Plus Belle Statue d’Amérique (1920) (pp. 54–7). Finally, Hubert van den Berg discusses a range of reasons why Dada, particularly in Holland, was ‘picked up’ by relatively few Dutch avant-garde artists and writers and did ‘not find fertile ground in the Dutch literary and artistic fields’; why the Dutch Dadaists kept their ‘affiliation as low profile as possible’; and why Dada discovered ‘its margins in the Netherlands’ (p. 79). Consequently, his intriguing analysis makes one ask why, despite the UK’s long tradition of zany, disrespectful and anarchic humour, Dada has had even less of an impact on British galleries, writers and visual artists.
Debbie Lever opens Part 2 by explaining how Hugo Ball’s ‘own, sometimes idiosyncratic aesthetics and politics of Askese (asceticism) might be relevant for our understanding of Dada’ (p.106), and her essay is followed by David Hopkins’s searching discussion of Marcel Duchamp’s cryptic metaphysics, concern with ‘dust’ as a no-man’s-land between an atomic and an energetic understanding of reality, and the resultant links between his visual work and the Great War in such tantalizing pieces as Dust Breeding (1920) (pp. 124–8). Part 2 concludes with Rainer Rumold’s magisterial account of Kurt Schwitters’ first – ‘unfinished and unfinishable’ Merzbau (1923–37) (pp. 139 and 148). In a spiralling sentence that replicates the dynamics of a construct that began as a tabernacle for Schwitters’ cryptic ‘Cathedral of Erotic Misery’, Rumold describes the Bau as a ‘monumental entropic structure of wood and plaster, constructed in layers and fluid patterns of crystalline forms, interspersed with caves or niches, reaching eventually to the water level of the cistern below and up to the roof of his family home in the provincial city of Hannover’ – where it occupied at least six rooms before being destroyed in October 1943, allegedly on the express orders of ‘Bomber’ Harris, who preferred the work of Lady Feodora Gleichen. Quite apart from its wealth of fascinating detail, this essay is particularly important because its author is concerned, first and foremost, to identify and discuss those complex generative aspects of the Bau which provoke difficult questions: its crystalline ‘forms that oscillate between extreme wisdom and extreme dementia’, its ‘dialectic between the pointed formal and the rounded organic’, its ‘creative and ironic and parodic undercutting of German memory, [with] its monumental memorials, cultural icons and institutions’ – en bref, its ‘transformation of conceptual constructs into a fluid arche-texture’ (pp. 149–50; see also pp. 157–8). Part 3 consists of two contributions: Elizabeth Legge’s helpful discussion of the ambivalent work of Tristan Tzara and Eric Robertson’s perceptive analysis of how the signification of Hans Arp’s poems is changed when they are translated, either by the first or second person, into his second – or do I mean first? – language. Either way, the result is said to subvert ‘the normally hierarchical relationship of the original to its translation’ (pp. 210–11). In Part 4, Sherwin Simmons’s wide-ranging essay on Dada and Kitsch, whose title could well be expanded to include ‘Banalities, Commodities, and the Modes of the Mass Modern’, offers stimulating close readings of such lesser-known works as George Grosz’s Entwicklung (1920, now lost) (pp. 231–3), Sophie Taeuber’s and Hannah Höch’s embroideries (pp. 235–8), Max Ernst’s Trophée hypertrophique (1919–20) (pp. 242–3), and Otto Dix’s puzzling Die Barikade (1920, now lost) (pp. 230–1), in which the street-fighters on the barricade include a revolutionary sailor and a porcine Groszian Puffke, both of whom are, for no apparent reason, emptying their weapons in the same general direction. This discussion then leads Simmons to two important conclusions: first, that Dada ‘thrived on the abolition of … canons, on the jarring of the field of cultural distinctions’ (p. 244) and, second, that ‘by taking up means that lay across the borders of the discursive field structured by terms such as art and kitsch’, its practitioners raised provocative questions ‘about the purposes – social, political, economic, sexual – [that are] served by such categories’ (p. 243).
Part 4 then continues with what seems to me to be the most innovative and accessible essay of the collection: Andreas Kramer’s piece on ‘Dada Berlin, Sport, and Weimar Culture’. He begins by accepting the idea that in modern culture the popularity of sport is connected with the transformation of ‘sport spectatorship into some form of aesthetic experience’ (p. 253) – though one might ask how this trend can be reconciled with the serious physical damage that was done to so many aesthetically pleasing young gymnasts from the old Eastern bloc. Kramer then shows how Dada’s understanding of sport differs from its place in the late 1920s/1930s, when sport was assimilated with remarkable ease into the cult of the classical body that was common to totalitarian regimes of both the right and the left (p. 255). From here, it is a short step to fascinating multi-level readings of Dada artefacts involving sports – particularly football, boxing and cycling (pp. 255–61), though given Dada’s anti-authoritarian social consciousness and penchant for wordplay, there is more to say about the vernacular meaning of the verb ‘radfahren’ and the noun ‘Radfahrer’ (‘nach oben gucken, nach unten treten’ [‘look upwards, kick downwards’]). And then there is the way in which sport – but not rugby – appears in Dada artefacts as a means of generating ‘gender instability’, an aim that had exercised several of the Berlin Dadaists for a good decade because of their familiarity with the theoretical work of the anti-Freudian Freudian Otto Gross (pp. 263–6). But Kramer also understands that although several members of Berlin Dada were ‘keen spectators of sport, extending their interest in sport from the artist’s studio to the public arena’ (p. 264), they were also well aware that the ‘objectification and commercialization’ of the human body, female as well as male (p. 266), were connected with ‘the maximizing of efficiency in modern technology’ (p. 265). Hence the way in which some Dada artefacts involve strategies ‘that seem to acknowledge a performative bind inherent in its productive play’ (pp. 270–1), and so debunk sport even as they appear to celebrate it. The final essay of the collection is Joyce Suechun Cheng’s sensitive essay on the Zurich Dadaists’ ‘inter-medial’ (p. 275) deployment of ‘Cardboard Toys and Dancing Marionettes’. Professor Cheng, who understands that Dada objects, particularly masks, had a close affinity with ‘carnival and ritual artefacts’ (p. 281), argues for the centrality of ‘play’ to Dada, particularly in Zurich, and discusses that allegedly positive idea in relation to the work of such theoreticians of play as Benjamin (pp. 276–303), Baudelaire (pp. 276–95), Huizinga (pp. 294–5), and Schiller (pp. 280 and 294). But when she discusses the one-off performance of Kokoschka’s ‘curiosum’ Sphinx und Strohmann that took place in Zurich in April 1917, she overlooks one sad, but vital aspect of the performance. Tzara, who was chosen to play the Parrot and look after the sound effects, completely wrecked a major point of Ball’s dialectical production by deploying his thunder and lightning at the wrong times. He thereby gave the impression that the noise and confusion, so suggestive of the Western Front, were all part of the show, and so subverted the idea that Schiller’s Spieltrieb (ludic drive) was inherently capable of reconciling the dialectical binarisms (cf. p. 288) that so troubled Hugo Ball. Or, to put it another way, Tzara sensed that ‘the idealist philosophy of play’, according to which play is ‘a free, unhampered, extra-utilitarian activity that manifests [itself] above all in immaterial ideas and spontaneous actions’ (p. 294), can very easily turn into its opposite – destructive violence. Which is partly why Schiller, shocked and disillusioned by the rapid degeneration of the French Revolution into the Reign of Terror (September 1793 –July 1794), wrote Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1794) at all.