Dada Historiography; or, How to End One’s Work?

Abstract

No other early twentieth-century avant-garde project and aesthetic movement occupied itself with its history and legacy to such a large extent as Dada. This urge to write their history is one of Dada’s complexities. It attests to their critical engagement with the discourses forming and informing the artistic work in the early twentieth century. Dada’s revolt against the art establishment and bourgeoise society is found not only in their compositions and “artworks” but also in how they conceived of the idea of their legacy and history and, thus, of the canonical formation as a venue for their nonsense. Working within the parameters of historiography, the histories discussed in this article by Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, and Raoul Hausmann transgress the set boundaries between historical fact and artistic expression by performatively undermining the conventions of writing and making history.

Keywords:

• Dada
• avant-garde
• historiography
• nonsense
• intermediality
• canonicity

Notes

1 Tristan Tzara, “Manifeste Dada 1918,” Dada 3 (1918): 1–3, retrieved from: https://dada.lib.uiowa.edu/files/show/1479 (accessed August 16, 2022).

2 In “Tristan Tzaras Manifeste Dada 1918: Anti-Manifest oder Manifestierte Indifferenz? Salomo Friedlaenders ‘Schöpferische Indifferenz’ und das Dadaistische Selbstverständnis,” Neophilologus 79 (1995): 353–76 Hubert van den Berg examines the differences between Hugo Ball’s nothing (nichts), Tristan Tzara’s negation of meaning, and Salomo Friedlaender’s indifferential point of nothingness. For a detailed analysis of Dada’s rien, néant, and nichts see Iris Foster, Die Fülle des Nichts: Wie Dada die Kontingenz zur Weltanschauung macht (Munich: m Press, 2005).

3 Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Luzern: Josef Stocker, 1927), here 91.

4 Francis Picabia, “Dada Cannibal Manifesto,” in I am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation of Francis Picabia, translated by Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012), 204. The French original of Picabia’s “Manifeste Cannibale Dada,” Dada 7 (1920): 2, reads: “DADA lui ne sent rien, il n’est rien, rien, rien. Il est comme vos espoirs: rien. / comme vos paradis: rien / comme vos idoles: rien / comme vos hommes politiques: rien / comme vos héros: rien / comme vos artistes: rien / comme vos religions: rien.”

5 Richard W. Sheppard, “Dada and Expressionism,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 49, no. 1 (2016): 45–83, describes Dada’s refusal to participate in art historical lineages with reference to Expressionism’s father figure.

6 Too much presence, however, seems to stand in opposition to Dada. Présentism was Raoul Hausmann’s conceptual successor to Dada. He published his “PRÉsentismus: Gegen den Puffkeismus der teutschen Seele” in 1921 in De Stijl. In the same year he started working on his manifesto of Dada’s death “Immer an der Wand lang, immer an der Wand lang. Manifest von Dadas Tod in Berlin” in Scharfrichter der deutschen Seele: Raoul Hausmann in Berlin 1900-1930, ed. by Eva Züchner (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 1998), 117–25. In his manifesto Hausmann states: “In meiner unbändigen Wut, in Deutschland eine Bewegung gegen den alten und neuen schöngeistigen Schwindel loszulassen und in meiner Ungeduld, die in meinem Experimentieren mit Menschen lag, habe ich meine eigene Arbeit verdorben, habe ich den deutschen Dadaismus, dessen besondere, nihilistische Richtung ich herausgebracht hatte, das frühe Grab gegraben,” because Hausmann was “Präsentist und Dämlack […].” Later in the same year, Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters started their Merz-Antidada-Präsentismus-Tournee.

7 Andreas Schmid, “Nachhut der Avantgarde. Raoul Hausmann und Richard Huelsenbeck als Historiographen des Dadaismus,” in Heteronomieästhetik der Moderne, ed. by Irene Albers, Marcus Hahn, Frederic Ponten (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2022), 189–216 underlines a program of revision in Richard Huelsenbeck’s and Raoul Hausmann’s late testimonial accounts. For analyses of Dada’s legacy see also Hubert van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus: Dada in Zürich und Berlin (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999), particularly 42–43, Tobias Wilke, “The Making of a Manifesto: Historiography, Transcription, and the Beginnings of Dada,” Germanic Review 91 (2016): 370–91, Patrizia C. McBride, “Berlin Dada and the Time of Revolution,” PMLA 133 (2018): 491–507, and Hans Platschek, “Dada und die Unsterblichkeit,” in Von Dada zur Smart Art: Aufsätze zum Kunstgeschehen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), 9–28.

8 As outlined in van den Berg, Avantgarde, 42.

9 Raoul Hausmann, “Dada ist mehr als Dada,” in Bilanz der Feierlichkeit: Texte bis 1933. Band 1, ed. Michael Erlhoff (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1982), 166–71.

10 The gesture is repeatedly chosen by Ball as a description of the artistic projects that have been produced and performed by the circle of artists associated with the Cabaret Voltaire.

11 Among the many insightful studies that tie Dada primarily to a rendition and image of the early twentieth century, the following stand out: Hal Foster’s “A Bashed Ego: Max Ernst in Cologne,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 127–49, the articles published by Brigid Doherty on Berlin Dada, “«See: ‘We Are All Neurasthenics’!» or, the Trauma of Dada Montage,” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (1997): 82–132; “The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada,” October 105.2 (2003): 73–92, and Matthew Biro’s influential study The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis/London: Minnesota UP, 2009). Another line of inquiry concerns forms of constructivism in Dada. Scholars such as Hanne Bergius, Montage und Metamechanik: Dada Berlin – Artistik von Polaritäten (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2000); “Der Da-Dandy – Das ‘Narrenspiel aus dem nichts’,” in Tendenzen der zwanziger Jahre: 15. Europäische Kunstausstellung Berlin 1977, ed. Stephan Waetzoldt (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1977), 12–29 and Eberhard Roters, “Collage und Montage,” in Tendenzen der zwanziger Jahre: 15. Europäische Kunstausstellung Berlin 1977, ed. Stephan Waetzoldt (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1977), 30–41; “Mechanomorphosen, Mechanomannequins, Metamaschinen,” in Tendenzen der zwanziger Jahre: 15. Europäische Kunstausstellung Berlin 1977, ed. Stephan Waetzoldt (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1977), 42–48 conceive of a dialectic of destruction and construction in the tradition of a Nietzschean cycle of Dionysian and Apollonian drives in Dadaist works.

12 Raoul Hausmann, “Pamphlet gegen die Weimarische Lebensauffassung,” Der Einzige 1.14 (1919): 163–64. Another illustrative example is John Heartfield and George Grosz’s “Der Kunstlump,” Der Gegner 1.10–12 (1919): 48–56 including their denunciation of Oskar Kokoschka’s plea for the protection of artworks during the revolutionary upsurge of the working class in Dresden.

13 I am describing here the aesthetic rupture caused by new art and opposing stances toward traditional formative procedures and receptions of art in the early twentieth century. The new economic and social formations beginning in the nineteenth century led to a critical move in the arts that denounced and pronounced the naïve mimetic position in order to highlight the discursive contextualization of artistic production. This development is best described in Thierry de Duve’s seminal Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), particularly 149f.

14 Dada’s take on avant-garde movements and modernist aesthetics has been voiced critically by Leah Dickerman in her introduction to The Dada Seminars (Washington: National Art Gallery, 2005), 1–5. A similar position is taken by Richard W. Sheppard, “What is Dada?,” Orbis Litterarum 34 (1979): 175–207.

15 Theo van Doesburg, “A Short Review of the Proceedings, followed by Statements made by the Artist’ Groups,” in The Tradition of Constructivism, edited by Stephen Bann, translated by Nicholas Bullock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 1990), 60–61.

16 Peter Bürger calls Dada the most radical manifestation of self-criticism. Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), here 28.

17 Hausmann, “Dada ist mehr als Dada,” 166. Reinhard Döhl, “Narrenspiel und Maulwürfe oder vom Unsinn der Kunst gegen den Wahnsinn der Zeit,” retrieved from: https://www.stuttgarter-schule.de/unsinn.htm (accessed August 17, 2022) lists several appearances of the term Unsinn in texts of Zurich Dadaists. Particularly Hans Arp utilized Unsinn as a notion to introduce his reader to a discrepancy between art and nature. In his retrospections on Dada from the 1960s, Huelsenbeck defines Dada’s negation of sense as a precursor to later existentialist theories.

18 Hausmann, “Dada ist mehr als Dada,” 166.

19 Hausmann, “Dada ist mehr als Dada,” 167.

20 Hausmann, “Dada ist mehr als Dada,” 167.

21 Hausmann, “Dada ist mehr als Dada,” 168.

22 Raoul Hausmann, “Der deutsche Spiesser ärgert sich,” in Bilanz der Feierlichkeit: Texte bis 1933. Band 1, ed. Michael Erlhoff (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1982), 82–84, 84.

23 Hausmann’s engagement with processes of objectification needs to be contextualized in the psychoanalytic and political thought of the time. The psychoanalytical theory of Otto Gross and the political writings of Franz Jung influenced Hausmann to a great extent. Together they collaborated on issues of the magazine Die Freie Strasse and Club Dada.

24 Hugo Ball, “Tenderenda der Phantast,” in: Hugo Ball: Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit. Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. by Hans Burkhard Schlichting (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), 377–417, here 393.

25 Tristan Tzara, Dada souléve tout, retrieved from: https://www.duchamparchives.org/pma/archive/component/WLA_B038_F036_001/ (accessed August 17, 2022), 2.

26 In his Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, Peter Sloterdijk identifies Dada as anti-semantic: “Dada ist Antisemantik.” Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. Band 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), 722.

27 Peter Bürger, Theorie.

28 Hans Richter, dada – art and anti-art. transl. by David Britt (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997).

29 Reinhard Döhl, “Dadaismus,” in Metzler Lexikon Literatur: Begriffe und Definitionen, ed. Dieter Burdorf, Christoph Fasbender, and Burkhard Moennighoff, 3^rd ed. (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2007), 138.

30 This is not to say the term Dadaismus was never used by members of Dada projects to label their work. Both Edgar Firn (under his pseudonym Daimonides) and Richard Huelsenbeck adopted the term in their texts published in the Dada Almanach. Further, in the aftermath of Berlin Dada Hans Arp and El Lissitzky used the label in their publication Kunst-ismen, Die Kunstismen. ed. by El Lissitzky and Hans Arp (Erlenbach-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925), 10. Another instance of the use of Dadaismus is Huelsenbeck’s Dada siegt! Eine Bilanz des Dadaismus published in the Malik Verlag.

31 Tzara, Dada, 2.

32 Raoul Hausmann, “Aussichten oder Ende des Neodadaismus,” in Ich bin immerhin der größte Experimentator Österreichs. Raoul Hausmann und Neodada & ein Essay: Raoul Hausmann Aussichten oder Ende des Neodadaismus, ed. by Adelheid Koch (Vienna: Haymon, 1994), 227–316, here 244.

33 Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

34 Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Dritte Fassung,” in Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften VIII.1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), 471–508, 501.

35 El Lissitzky, “Die Blockade Russlands geht ihrem Ende entgegen, – das Erscheinen des ‘Gegenstandes’,” Veshch–Objet–Gegenstand 1.1-2 (1922): 1–4, 2.

36 The dispute between Bürger and Buchloh centers on the notion of a critical hermeneutics, as introduced by Bürger, and Buchloh’s aim to rectify the view on the neo avant-garde not as a melancholic stasis that enacts the failure of the historical avant-garde, but one that engages critically with forms of the institutionalization of art. According to Buchloh, “the inability of current art history and criticism to recognize the necessity and reference of this new generation of artists working within the parameters of allegorical appropriation results partially from art history’s almost total failure to develop an adequate reading of Dada and Productivist theory and practices […].” (“Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” in Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Cambridge/Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015), 173–226, 199). The aim of Buchloh’s claim about historicity is thus that “an increasingly acute analysis of history (or structure) will eventually make specific motivations, actual differences, and latent continuity or compulsive repetitions sufficiently transparent […].” (introduction to Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Cambridge/Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015), xv–xli, xviii). A response to Buchloh’s review by Bürger appeared in “Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’,” New Literary History 41.4 (2010): 695–715, particularly 702–703.

37 An answer to the question of how to reconcile critical hermeneutics as method of literary history and formal inquiries as a premise of historiography is largely missing in Bürger’s Theorie der Avantgarde. Although Bürger is aware of this methodological chasm while introducing the concept of “Werkintention,” he postpones an answer to this problem and thus any inquiry into performativity as a critical tool to dismantle the historiographic objectification: “Ich schlage hierfür den Begriff der Werkintention vor. Bezeichnen soll er nicht die bewußte Wirkungsabsicht des Autors, sondern den Fluchtpunkt der im Werk auszumachenden Wirkungsmittel (Stimuli). Hier liegt das Problem der Einbeziehung formaler Verfahren der Textanalyse in eine kritische Literaturwissenschaft. Diese Einbeziehung ist notwendig; allerdings macht sie auf theoretischer Ebene noch Überlegungen erforderlich, die den wissenschafts-logischen Status formaler Verfahren und die Legitimität der Einbeziehung in eine kritisch hermeneutische Wissenschaft klären.” Bürger, Theorie, 12f.

38 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Theorizing the Avant-Garde,” Art in America 72 (1984): 19–20.

39 This is most apparent in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’: The Anomic Archive,” October 88.1 (1999): 117–45, 131: “The very avant-garde artists who initiated photomontage (e.g., Heartfield, Höch, Klucis, Lissitzky, and Rodchenko) now diagnosed avant-gardism, mounting a critique that called, paradoxically, for a reintroduction of the dimensions of narrative, communicative action, and instrumentalized logic within the structural organization of montage aesthetics.”

40 Cf. van den Berg, Avantgarde, 41 and Michel Sanouillet, “Dada: A Definition,” in Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, ed. by Stephen C. foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Madison: Coda Press, 1979), 15–27, here 19. Similar to Sanouillet, Malcom Turvey in “Dada Between Heaven and Hell: Abstraction and Universal Language in the Rhythm of Hans Richter,” October 105 (2003): 13–36, here 19, argued that Dada cannot be defined by intrinsic properties their works share. Turvey argues for an approach to Dada that focuses on the function the single work performs.

41 Cf. Raoul Hausman, “Synthetisches Cino der Malerei,” in Bilanz der Feierlichkeit: Texte bis 1933. Band 1, ed. Michael Erlhoff (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1982), 14–16: “Der Maler malt wie der Ochs brüllt–diese feierliche Unverfrorenheit festgefahrener Markeure mit Tiefsinn vermengt, ergab wichtige Jagdreviere besonders deutscher Kunsthistoriker” (14). Hausmann’s image of art succumbing to the hunt of art history becomes clearer in a later passage on Expressionism: “Der Expressionismus, Symbolik dieser Triebumkehrung–innere Notwendigkeit–immer mehr in ästhetischer Weltüberwindung versinkend, ist heute ein reinrubrizierter Begriff, Lebensnotwendigkeit gleich Kohlenkarte oder Schleichhandel für Leute weit vom Schuß, dem Zwang zum Sein” (15).

42 Hausmann, “Synthetisches Cino,” 16.

43 Hausmann, “Synthetisches Cino,” 16.

44 My translation. Tristan Tzara, “Chronique Zurichoise 1915-1919,” in Dada Almanach, ed. Richard Huelsenbeck (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1920), 10–29, 10: “1916 – février. Dans la plus obscure rue sous l’ombre des côtes architecturales, où l’on trouve des detectifs discrets parmi les lanternes rouges – NAISSANCE – naissance du CABARET VOLTRAIRE […].”

45 In her text “Scenes of Birth and Founding of Myths,” Nicola Behrmann emphasizes that the notion of birth in Dada is a highly performative category. Nicola Behrmann, “Scenes of Birth and Founding Myths: Dada 1916/1917,” The Germanic Review 91.4 (2016): 335–49.

46 Richard Huelsenbeck, Dada siegt! Eine Bilanz des Dadaismus (Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1920), 5.

47 Huelsenbeck, Dada siegt!, 5.

48 Ball, Flucht, 88.

49 Hans Arp, “Dada-au-grand-air,” cited in Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, “History of Dada (1931),” in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge/London: Belknap Press, 1981), 99–123, 101f.

50 Arp, “Dada,” 102.

51 Richard Huelsenbeck, “The Dada Drummer,” in Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, transl. Joachim Neugroschel, ed. Hans J. Kleinschmidt (New York: Viking Press, 1969), 1–95, 51.

52 Huelsenbeck, “Dada Drummer,” 51.

53 Huelsenbeck, “Dada oder der Sinn im Chaos,” in Dada: Eine literarische Dokumentation, ed. Richard Huelsenbeck (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964), 7–23, 17.

54 Huelsenbeck, “Sinn im Chaos,” 17.

55 My translation. Raoul Hausmann, Courrier Dada (Paris: Éditions Allia, 1992), 11: “Sept, oui, sept villes, sept villes grecques se disputaient l’honneur, s’honoraient de la dispute d’être le lieu de naissance d’Homère… qui probablement n’était né dans aucune ville grecque. Pour DADA ce sont plusieurs pays et deux continents! Et encore, personne ne saurait définir exactement ce qu’est dada, ni s’il a vécu! Au Diable! Je veux savoir ce qu’est dada, où est né dada, et qui était dada! Tout ce qu’on peut lire sur dada est écrit comme une histoire du monde à l’âge de pierre, embrouillé, inexact et arbitraire!”

56 Huelsenbeck, “Durch Dada erledigt: ein Trialog zwischen menschlichen Wesen,” in En Avant Dada: Eine Geschichte des Dadaismus (Hannover: Paul Steegemann Verlag, 1920), 40–44, here 41: “Dr. Smartny: Mr. Peupilos wird uns aufklären. Ich gehe nicht eher von hier fort, als bis ich weiß, was Dada ist, wie alt Dada ist und von wem es gemacht wurde.”

57 Hausmann, Courrier Dada, 13.

58 On “Dada” as an infantile word cf. Tobias Wilke, Sound Writing: Experimental Modernism and the Poetics of Articulation (Chicago: UP Chicago, 2022), 130ff.

59 Sloterdijk, Kritik, 708.

60 Ball, Flucht, 62.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

André Flicker

André Flicker is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto.