During World War I, a small group of artists, writers and dramatists performed unheard of in neutral Zurich. "Dadaism" was born and swept the world from Zurich, invading from theatrical creation and plastic arts to painting, sculpture and other artistic fields, and even becoming a way of life. To this day, the influence of Dadaism continues.
Original author 丨 [de] Martin Mitremeier
Excerpt from Xiao Shuyan
A Centennial History of Dadaism, by Martin Mitremeier, translated by Shi Jingzhou, Edition: Social Sciences Academic Press, August 2021
01
Personality of the royal robe: "Dada" in the styling design
In July 1916, when Hugo Bauer wanted to show the "tyranny of individuality" on the stage of the Wager Guildhall, he had already accomplished such a move with a carefully constructed strangeness, and it reached an almost comical level. He put a costume on his body:
"My legs were wrapped in a shiny cylinder rolled up in blue cardboard, up to my hips, which made me look like an obelisk; the cylinder was covered with a false collar cut from cardboard, scarlet on the inside, golden on the outside, and the inside and outside parts were connected to each other at the neck, and I could make it fan up and down like wings by raising my elbows; in addition, I wore a blue-and-white striped magician's hat on my head."
Hugo Ball in a three-dimensional costume. Photographed in Zurich in 1916 by unknown authors, it was used as a promotional postcard to attract audiences for its performance in Voltercabale.
Because his whole body was stuck in a cylinder made of cardboard and could not move, he could only be carried up and down the stage. Not only is this at odds with the image of a self-made tyrant, but it also looks more like a full-speed sprint to pull the handbrake. Once at the first threshold to the stage, there was already a chaotic appearance. Did Hugo Bauer make the mistake that newly enthroned tyrants often make, choosing a so eye-catching and magical robe that it took over the tyrant's control of his body in a noisy way?
Hugo Bauer, however, was neither a tyrant nor a trumpeter of individuality. His low-key and restrained disposition, his hesitation due to his empathy and prudence out of a sense of justice often attracted praise from friends. Taking the stage with great fanfare and publicly reading out the program was not Hugo Ball's style. Because of his shy nature, before each performance, he had to find a no-one corner to hold his breath so that his tense nerves could relax. All his performances on the floor confirm the difficulty: no one is more confident and energetic than him. Perhaps this is precisely the message of Hugo Bauer's declaration?
The tyrant's flaunting might is nothing more than a bluff, and a single toe can expose his weakness, because he himself is not sure where to use this power? "This is me!" —The individualist shouts in Styner's pen. All right. So what now? Hugo Ball, dressed in costume, is the idol of the young generation who is eager to try but is at a loss. Self-liberation, dionysus, or the will to power were not the lessons that this generation took for granted. Moreover, the distribution of talents is often uneven, and a person's ambition for the tyranny of individuality is likely to be far from the means of expression at his disposal.
When a person stands on the commanding heights of freedom, he is likely to face a fragmented self: "Today is a socialist, tomorrow is an individualist, today is a Catholic, tomorrow is an anarchist." Oh my God, countless voices gasped, groaned, roared in my mind...... My ears were about to explode, ears that had only been used to listen to nature, the auditory vessel that captured the soul and poetry. (Hulson Baker)
Hugo Ball used his three-dimensional costume to set a standard for the strange costumes that had no practicality to speak of, a standard that the future Dada movement spared no effort to surpass. When Dada was brought to Berlin, the personality tyrant had another shiny robe in his wardrobe: at that time, the November Revolution was brutally suppressed, and the individual's mobility and individual self-determination became an urgent political issue.
02
Collect the world: "Dada" in collage art
"Strange world, beware!" Grotz was collecting everything at hand at all times, and his room was plastered with all sorts of pictures—if a beer or whiskey advertisement, a circus poster with clowns, acrobats, and tattooed women, or photographs and illustrations in the press could be called "pictures." A young artist, Max Ernst, also described this fascination caused by excessive visual abundance: "The vast pictorial elements come together, and such a grotesque pile of them in me triggers a sudden visual reinforcement that evokes a dizzying array of contradictory images and transforms them into double, triple, or even infinite..." The jumble of elements becomes an everyday experience, challenging all existing artistic techniques. Strange visual symphonies echo in the depths of people's hearts for a long time.
One possible response is a direct imitation of the "excess" as a product of society itself. This kind of imitation is not provocative or critical, but only out of the need to conform to the trend of the times. How much Grotz loved this overly rich world of infinite possibilities, he hated the ugliness of wartime Berlin. Even before the outbreak of the Great War, Groz had abhorred the noise of businessmen, proprietors and bourgeois mediocres.
The war confirmed that his world-weariness was not unfounded. He enlisted for the second time in 1917, and after suffering severe psychological trauma, his enthusiasm for the complexity of the world turned into a pungent taunt, and he began to show the world its unfathomable darkness. But how can this be presented appropriately? How can we depict in the most direct way the picture of "pieces of bright red fat wrapped in ugly gray cloth bags sitting in the Hichen Beer Hall eating hays"?
"Using the Dada Knife to Cut Open the Last Weimar Beer Belly Culture Era in Germany", Hannah Horch.
In order to find the ideal way of expression, Groz even copied the "genre paintings" unique to children's graffiti and the walls of public men's toilets. "Gradually, I found a style as sharp as a knife, which was essential for documenting my observations at the time under the domination of a world-weary mood." Groz recalled. Although for a long time he had been living and enjoying drawing comics, he did not want to stop at simple stylization, but gradually used the study of nature as a correction and supplement.
In 1917, Groz and the Herzfeld brothers began a fruitful collaboration. Together, they worked to discover artistic means that would appropriately represent contemporaneity, and published the lavish and beautifully opened weekly magazine New Youth. It's clear how John Hertfield combined his typography experiments with Groz's interest in refuting the phenomenon. The advertisement in Issue 5 takes the form of a print, in which the names of the featured series that appear repeatedly and staggered have revealed several different and ingenious meanings, and the overall layout of Issue 6 is more stylistic. Hutfield uses a four-column layout that deliberately blurs boundaries, in which contrasting fonts, photography, advertising columns, graphic elements and colors appear frequently. Opening the magazine, you will be greeted by a huge picture of the Flatiron Building: a symbol of strength and conquest, a passionate confession of American culture, an advertising carnival - the top of the Iron Building diagonally runs through the line: Advertising Consulting.
In order to show its strong strength in advertising and marketing, the magazine also deliberately adopted a cover title such as "Groz Album Catalog". The advertisement on the tail page looks like Hetfield shook a box full of locomotives, sailboats, ballet dancers, phonographs, trumpets, skulls, and other flower patterns, and then sprinkled it on the blank part of the tail page, and then with the indispensable "Freshly baked!" The words are listed in one place along with the titles of twenty lithographs. In the center is the only small enlarged icon on the entire page, the skull, and the top hat diagonally above makes it look like a announcer who is previewing a great show. I believe that any Dadaist publication will understand such an unconventional typography design.
In the interior of an exhibition hall of the 1920 Dada Exposition, German officers with pig heads hung from the ceiling.
The Count of Kessler provided the opportunity for the second phase of the cooperation between Hertfield and Groz. Under his arrangement, Hertfield and Groz joined UFA Pictures (UFA) and began to consider the production of national promotional films. Later, under their impetus, the film art that led the technological trend was moving in the direction of composing the origin myth with collage.
03
"Spring": "Dada" is on the cusp of the storm
In 1917, Duchamp forced the "exclusion of heretics" to be re-enacted in an outrageous and provocative way: he submitted a urinal signed "R. Mutt" to the first American Independent Artists Association as an exhibited work, Fountain, and he himself was one of the founders of the association. Although Duchamp anonymously paid the stipulated $6 processing fee, the jury ignored the work. "Although I was one of the judges myself, they never asked for my opinion because the jury didn't know I was the author. I signed it 'Mute' to avoid leaving any personal mark on the work. "Spring" was hastily thrown behind a partition by them, and I didn't know where it was during the whole exhibition. I can't say I submitted that thing. ”
One of the reasons for the act of submitting urinals was known for pioneering art was that Duchamp revealed the absurdity of both selection and non-selection. And simultaneity ultimately means showing the whole world as it is in the here and now, and that any mediocre detail that is not included in it renders the so-called exhibition meaningless.
The Fountain, Marcel Duchamp.
Duchamp's urinals pushed the antagonism between tradition and anti-tradition, repression and independence to the extreme, but the use of the word "opposition" does not properly describe the various artistic trends of the 1910s and 1920s; at best, it opens up a space for it. Such dualism can easily degenerate into rigid clichés, because shocking things are always easy to spread and often impressive. The initial protests against the Paris Salon selection process came from within the much-maligned system. As soon as the results of the 1863 salon were announced, they aroused strong dissatisfaction among the unsuccessful painters, who simply founded a "salon for the losers". The highlight of the Loser Salon comes precisely from a paradox: it is a "heretic" on official display.
Thus, under the appearance of tradition and anti-tradition, a rich and unpredictable relationship between exclusion and influence has also been formed. In vacant positions in authorities such as the academies, which have been boycotted, new networks must be constructed. Modernist art has won its own public space through the pursuit of independence.
But the urinal was far more than a provocation for Duchamp, and like other "Readymade" bike wheels mounted on stools, bottle racks, or a snow shovel named "Expectant Broken Arm," etc., it followed the idea of "removing the artist's personal imprint." Duchamp, who parted ways from traditional oil painting, has also been thinking about how to find an impersonal form of painting: "Completely forget your own hands, this is my concept ... When you draw, no matter how you do it, your personal preferences will always be mixed in. ...... I want to find something that breaks away from tradition... It's impossible to get rid of it completely, but I consciously try to do it. I deliberately wasted what I had learned... I must forget my own hands. ”
At that time, on the arts and crafts roads of the European continent, Touber and Arp wanted to achieve the clear form and ideal proportions they aspired to, and to minimize the interference from the outside, mainly from the artist himself, the so-called "reason" who constantly intervened in the creation of art with his self-proclaimed cleverness but in fact the smallness of the so-called "reason". This ideal can only be realized when the artist's "hand" is helpless, only when he can use ready-made materials to complete the "work".
Just as Arp was pondering how to exclude the artist's subjective will, a fortuitous discovery came unexpectedly. Once, unable to achieve the desired effect, he scattered the shredded paper in his hand on the ground in one fell swoop, and he was surprised to find that the scattered confetti had inadvertently spelled out the pattern he wanted—at least as Described by Hans Richter. The confetti scattered on the ground is Arp's miniature "Voltay Cabaret" – Bauer used the same strategy when creating the Cabaret. Contingency becomes a key element of artistic creation, perfecting the artist's balancing skills by eliminating the artist.
04
Mountain of Truth: "Dada" is in paradise
In 1900, several well-off young people gave up the lives that their families had planned for them, and decided to break away from society and form an alliance of their own. They bought a piece of land on the hill of Ascona and began a self-sufficient farming life—the "Mountain of Truth" tribe was born. As a result of the war, more and more alternative movement groups chose to camp in Ascona. These settlements and settlements were intended to create a new morality and religion, a new form of society based on collective labour, the sharing of land and goods, and freedom, which was also accepted by the people.
At this time, Hugo Bauer, a journalist for the Bernese Newspaper of Wisdom, took a very kind attitude towards his program and ideas in his reports on them. In his diary, he also described a grand and breathtaking large-scale dance. The three-part "Sun Festival" ceremony kicks off in the glorious mountain scenery of the Mountain of Truth. The figure of a reciter appears on the distant horizon, behind him is the falling sun, and he walks toward the audience while reciting the sunset message. At this time, the campfire set up on the stage is lit, and in the smoke that rises, the group performances rise and fall like waves. Near midnight, the audience is taken to the top of the mountain, where the second part of the show, "Night Devil", will unfold. Elves and witches danced and ghostly on a circular meadow surrounded by strange rocks. In the morning dance dedicated to the sunrise, a group of actresses dressed in wide silk robes flocked to the hillside. The sun rises slowly from the horizon, and the light reflects the dancers' gorgeous clothes. The evil spirits of the night were dispelled by the light, and the crowds symbolizing the eternal return of the star of day began to rejoice. The third part, titled "The Triumph of the Sun", leads the group performance of Sophie Touber, who is the embodiment of fire, spirit and lightning, leading the group performance of joyful and dancing...
Birth, Hannah Horsch.
People should break away from society in droves, work on the unpolluted earth, and return to true humanity. "With love for the lost human beings, with love for our descendants and for ourselves, we are to be completely free from the crowds, to establish our own lives and socialities, to meet the needs of life with the creation of labor. Stay as far away from the country as possible, away from commodities and consumer society, away from all vulgar life! Gustav Randall so appealed to the lonely minority and isolated volunteers. Industrialization and rationalism have spawned various social practices that seek to take a different path outside capitalism or communism. Can humanity construct a truly rational way of coexistence, rather than being satisfied with rapid industrialization and narrow civic ethics, with the scientificization of Marxism or the praise of crude labor?
Reflections on social hygiene, food supply, and land redistribution have also given rise to a variety of social reform theories and alternative life movements. In 1901, the poets and publishers Julius Hart and Heinrich Hart founded the "New Community Community" on the shores of Berlin's Schlachten Lake. These social movements are driven not by class struggle but more by a desire to reunite the fragmented modern world: "The new community of communities aims to realize the human ideal of the perfection of the individual and society through the fusion of religion, art, knowledge and life. The "City Garden Movement" in Herrenau, Dresden, is another example of social practice in the form of cooperatives to resist the ills of urban life and unbridled real estate development.
Broken Thoughts, Hannah Horsh.
Randall's advocacy of the "League of the Recluses" sought to steer a sense of social disillusionment toward mysticism. As a thorough socialist, Randall's goal was the equal distribution of social wealth: "In reality, it is not uncommon for many people to remain destitute despite their participation in the creation of economic value, while those who do not participate in social labor or do nothing can enjoy their success and even become rich; there are many who are not allowed to work despite their willingness to work. ”
But all these efforts to transform society are set against the backdrop of a deep humanistic tradition and are therefore incompatible with the materialist values espoused by most socialist currents. It is a superfluous desire to try to maintain the integrity of the world so that it will not fall apart under the impact of modernity. For in Randall's view, both the world and humanity itself remain an interconnected unity: a human community obscured by the secularized appearance of modern society. All modern man, who pretends to be an individual, is merely a grand whole "appearance, node, and spark, a sudden flash of what can be called a human, species, or cosmic flow (Seelenstrom)," while the individualism flaunted by modern society hinders humanity from moving towards this grand whole. In his time, Randall could not see any path to connect with the "flow", and people were lost and indulged in insignificant "small selves". It will be a bumpy journey full of hardships, because only the abolition of the "small self" can achieve a "big me" that embraces the world, and only then will people see a beautiful new world. "Let's wait and see how we become Gods, how we discover the existence of the whole world in ourselves."