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In Our Time
Dadaism
00:50:58
How, in 1916 in Zurich, artists responded to the absurdity of war by creating absurd art.
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- [00:00]
Stephen Forcer
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- [00:06]
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- [00:38]
Dawn Addis
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- [01:40]
Misha Glenny
This is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description of wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In the spring of 1916 in Zurich, young people gathered on a small stage in a bar, sometimes dressed in cardboard, often performing nonsense poems, and people are still talking about it today. This was the start of Dada, a cultural phenomenon that spread to other cities in war torn Europe by part protest against the inevitability of constant wars on the continent, part artistic experiment. And if the poem, songs, costumes and art made no sense, well, that was deliberate since what, after all, could make sense to people of conscription age horrified by the killing. With me to discuss Dadaism are Dawn Addis, Emeritus professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex Ruth Heemas, professor of French and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway University of London. And Stephen Forcer, professor of French at the University of Glasgow. Stephen, let me come to you first. Zurich, 1916. Why there and why then?
- [03:05]
Stephen Forcer
Thank you very much. So, 1915-16, we are, of course, in the middle of World War I, the Mechanised Mass murder of the Western Front. The war, of course, extends across Central Europe into the Balkans. Rampant nationalism is on the rise. The Ottoman Empire is collapsing. Russia is about to go through a revolutionary moment. So if you're an aspiring student or an aspiring writer or artist, and you don't want to be brutally murdered in an insane war or in social unrest, then Zurich is a pretty good bet. Switzerland, of course, is neutral. It's German speaking, but ferociously multilingual, multicultural. It's a site where people are seeking refuge. It has a university where a lot of our Dadaists and proto Dadaists are enrolled. It is a place to meet people and that is important not only culturally, but also because friendship is really important for our young Dadas. They're looking for a sense of community. And of course, Zurich is home at that time to a lot of cultural and political heavyweights. Joyce spent a lot of World War I in Zurich and wrote a chunk of Ulysses in the. In the City. Lenin is there with Nadesha Krupskaya as well. So it's in some ways a sort of an unlikely place, looking, I guess, back at it from a kind of, you know, a kind of Anglocentric perspective. But if you think about the immediate context, it makes a lot of sense as a place where people can go, be safe, but also be energized and come together around this feeling, as you say, Misha, of profound disgust, really, at what's going on in the world.
- [04:45]
Misha Glenny
We'll talk about this as we go on, but can you give us a first taste of the link between Dada and the absurd?
- [04:55]
Stephen Forcer
Yeah. So this takes us, among other things, to Hugo Baul, who, with Emmy Hennings, has already been on the scene as a cabaret sort of impresario. And Bal was very interested in Nietzsche's work on the absurd. The absurd in Dada is. Is an index. So their absurdity is a kind of marker of the absurd, collapse of civilization as we know it. There's also a degree of self satire in the absurd. The Dadaist are laughing not only at the world around them, but they're laughing about themselves. And absurdity, well, it looks like absurdity and we are meant to be provoked by it. But it's also the opportunity for a lot of very interesting aesthetic innovation. And we might get into later some of the fine details, some of the semantics about what kind of comes out of this absurdity. So they are provoking, but they're also experimenting. And this follows on from Fauvism, from Cubism, from a whole host of other currents that are in train and of course, extend for a long while after Dada.
- [05:59]
Misha Glenny
And both Hugo Bal and Emmy Hennings were actually quite experienced performers, Emmy Hemings in particular, is that right?
- [06:06]
Stephen Forcer
Yes, exactly. So between the two of them, they've got the kind of professionalised bases covered. Hennings particularly as a performer and as a writer in her own right as well, Bal as an organiser. They're a bit older, they're around 30 by the time they get to Zurich and found the Cabaret Voltaire. It's situated on Spiegel Gasse, which translates roughly into Mirror Alley, which I think is lovely. And Voltaire, Yes. I mean, it's a rejection of an Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, but. But there are also some affinities, I think, with Voltaire. And going back further, perhaps, to Moliere, who talks about the duty of satire to correct audiences as well as to entertain them. And in that absurdity, you can certainly see a desire to entertain, to shock, but also to be a corrective for society in the direction it's headed in.
- [06:55]
Misha Glenny
Well, right now I'd like you to give us a first example of how shocking they could be. Could you read a couple of lines from one of Hugo Bal's poems? This one goes under the title Gadjiberi
- [07:06]
Stephen Forcer
Bimba with great pleasure. Self idiocy is a key theme of Dada. So here goes. Gaji Beri, Bimba Glandridi, Lola Loni Kadori, Gajama Gramma Berida Bimbala Glandri, Galasasa, Lolita Lomini.
- [07:24]
Misha Glenny
Wow. Yeah, we can discuss that. Discuss that later. But, Ruth, when these first performances take place, with poems like that in the Cabaret Voltaire, as it's called, as Stephen has mention, can you take us there and give us a sense of the atmosphere of what was going on in Cabaret Voltaire?
- [07:45]
Ruth Heemas
Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the questions that drives anyone who's interested in Dada. Trying to grasp what this moment must have been like, that feels ungraspable. But there's lots of memoirs and accounts and pamphlets, and there's even a painting by Marcel Janco that's gone missing. But there's a reproduction of It. That gives a sense of the kind of noisiness and the fact that it was so crowded and people were intervening. I think it must have been pretty chaotic and confusing. Baud talks about it as a centre for artistic entertainment. So what Stephen says about the professional side as well, of Emmy Hennings would have been a draw. You know, that there's parts of it that would have been, I suspect, almost, oh, yeah, this is what we're expecting. And then other elements that would have been completely a surprise. So we've. I think we've all seen sort of recreations over the years of these to try and understand what it's like. And sometimes I found them quite uncomfortable, but then I think that's probably right, because I'm not sure that I would have thought at the time we wouldn't have known that this was going to turn out as it did.
- [08:54]
Misha Glenny
Presumably discomfort was one of the sentiments they wanted to nurture.
- [08:59]
Ruth Heemas
Yeah, absolutely. I think just to question everything, all the established systems, what your expectations of art and literature are, the different languages going on at the same time. And we just heard this, or even something that's not language, that's not recognizable as language, so that the semantics become less important than the. The materiality, the emotive side of the. Of the words that are. That are coming out of the sounds and the noises. And I think that must have been confusing. But as Stephen said in Zurich, where you're hearing different languages overlaid or fragments of them, I think that's a perfect place for it to arise.
- [09:37]
Misha Glenny
But what were the key ideas behind Dadaism? Was there a political aspect to it rather than this sort of anarchic sense of chaos?
- [09:49]
Ruth Heemas
Yeah, absolutely. They were anti war, anti nationalism. There were people there avoiding the war draft or who had perhaps gone to war and then been discharged. So they quite definitely had political ideals, but they weren't dogmatic. I would say they're more investigative than dogmatic. And I think that's, again, something that is appealing about Dada. They didn't align themselves quickly with any kind of current. I think they were looking for what that might be and in some senses it's quite, you know, quite spiritual experiences as well. So it's, you know, it's known as being anti art, anti religion, but I think anything. They were open to many different currents and trains of thought and were drawing on those different elements to find something. But, you know, definitely anti establishment. Very unhappy about the way that language was being misused for propaganda and for nationalist aims.
- [10:44]
Misha Glenny
Dawn Addis. It starts in Zurich in 1916, 1917. But it then spreads to other places. How does it spread? And is it the same movement that you see in other cities around Europe?
- [10:59]
Dawn Addis
It spread incredibly fast, I think, partly because of that wonderful name, which is completely nonsense in a way, though it has meanings in various languages. The person who really started spreading it was Tristan Zara, who came from Romania, exile, to Zurich, and he started sending the little magazines that they produced to everyone he knew all over Europe and in the United States, New York, Paris and Berlin and everywhere. So the name sort of spread like that. People also moved from Zurich to Berlin to Cologne and so on, and ignited something else there, where they were, which is not always the same. I mean, in a way, Dada is extremely different in the different places where it took brief root.
- [11:45]
Misha Glenny
Yes. It struck me that in Berlin, for example, it was a much more political movement than, say, in Zurich.
- [11:51]
Dawn Addis
It was a much more political movement. And the works that were produced were very famous photo montages by Hartfield, who anglicised his name deliberately in the middle of the war. And George Gross, rather than gay old Gross, also anglicised his name in the middle of the war, produced these very violent photomontages which juxtapose things to, as it were, to sort of undermine the surface, the kind of apparent. You know, the apparent reason that governed things, even the war.
- [12:19]
Misha Glenny
So was there any sense of coherence at the time as to what Dadaism actually was, or was it forever shifting?
- [12:27]
Dawn Addis
Oh, no, no. I mean, I think, no, they didn't want to define it. They rather preferred producing sort of little manifestos of things like, what is Dada? Is it a state religion? Is it a philosoph? Or is it nothing at all? They were challenging people all the time. But of course, in a sense, it did have importance. We're still talking about it, in a way. And one of the things that Zara said when he was interviewed here in the BBC in 1959 was that it was a kind of dialectical negativity. Oui, egal, non, yes equals no. So you can start trying to unpick that.
- [13:04]
Misha Glenny
Well, please do unpick it, Stephen.
- [13:06]
Stephen Forcer
Yeah. I mean, amazingly, this is a job working on this kind of stuff, and I've thought about this in. In some detail. So as dawn was just saying there, that idea of something which is simultaneously a cancellation on the one hand and a renewal on the other is very Hegelian. That's a key notion of Hegel's dialectics. And there's this fascinating parallel and it comes into view around 1922, where Zara is calling time on Dada. Dada has run its course. It must not prolong itself needlessly. He's going around Europe giving this talk, and he goes to Jena, and at that same year, down the road in Gottingen, I think a young Werner Heisenberg is starting his studies in physics and will go on over the late 20s to produce the uncertainty principle and of course, quantum physics. Uncertainty principles, entanglements which are still live questions for scientists now. Recently, I think, recognized in the Nobel this idea that there are these bizarre yet real contradictions going on at a subatomic level, at a philosophical level, at an artistic level. Dada really encourages us to think beyond simple binaries of yes or no, of this or that. Dada wants to synthesize this. And it comes together actually, in what Ruth was saying earlier about Dada is a profoundly ethical thing. Yes, it's a violent rejection, but it's also a profoundly sort of. Yeah, kind of ethical drive towards a world that can be better. We haven't used the word nihilism yet, and I don't like using the word nihilism about Dada, but it's not pure nihilism. It is a rejection and an endorsement of ways in which we can live better together.
- [14:48]
Misha Glenny
So dawn, just going back to the movement. It goes to Berlin, it goes to Paris. It also goes to Cologne, which is a. A strange place for it to be. Why would it go to Cologne?
- [15:00]
Dawn Addis
It went to Cologne largely because of Max Ernst. He'd been fighting, and on the front he had actually fought opposite Eluir, one of the early surrealists. They discovered later when they became great friends. But Ernst was there. Arp. Hans Arp, who had been in Zurich, he moved to Cologne as well. And they joined one other person. It was a tiny little group. There's really three of them who put on an exhibition which challenged people. It's one of those exhibitions that must have been quite extraordinary. And one finds echoes of it today. It included an aquarium with a woman's sort of false wig floating on the surface of it, and various other objects. And there was a pile of chairs in the corner, and one of the visitors thought the chairs were a chair, but they were actually chairs. They were chairs. So I think that confusion between what is sort of art and what is not art was already there in Cologne. The two worked very happily together, with Bargelt as well, produced a magazine as all Dadaist did, in every site where it took root.
- [16:03]
Misha Glenny
But they weren't sort of in Constant contact with each other. They were emerging as separate.
- [16:09]
Dawn Addis
Well, I think they were in contact. I mean, Zahra made sure that everybody sort of knew what he was doing in Zurich, and he called it Mouvement Danda, I think partly ironically, but that was the name that was attached to it. They were in contact, not so much necessarily individually, but Arp, he'd moved from Zurich and he. He kept his connections there. So there were connections.
- [16:28]
Misha Glenny
So sort of loose network, as it were. Ruth Hamus, the use of language is absolutely critical in Dadaism, even with the name Dada. Can you enlighten us about language? And also, what does Dada mean?
- [16:45]
Ruth Heemas
So I've got a few quotes from what Dada means, which I don't think will enlighten, but maybe further confused, because it's always like a fascinating question, which I think is part of its enduring charm and appeal somehow. It's like sort of trailing a brand when you don't know yet what it is. And it's kind of clever marketing, isn't it? So there's various examples. Yes, yes. In Romanian. And of course, there were a lot of Romanian participants. Hobby horse in French. Sign of foolish naivety. The beginning at zero. I mean, they did say Arp says the Larousse Dictionary was consulted for an international word free from any political or partisan color and even from any exact meaning. So they were trying to get beyond meanings and get beyond fixed semantic ideas. But that's very difficult still, because, of course, you do. Whatever language you're using, it rings bells in your head. So I'm also intrigued by the fact that for many participants in the Cabaret Voltaire and other areas, in other centers in Dada, they had different languages. You know, the language that they were using in that place was not their first language. And I think part of the. What you see is this real revelry in the texture of language. So we heard Stephen reading that sound poem. There's another example, which is a simultaneous poem called l' Amerelle cherche une maison a louer. The admiral is looking for a house to rent. And here you have three overlapping voices, largely in French, German and English, but also bells and whistles and drums, all sorts of percussion and, you know, speaking these at the same time. It's like a musical score. It was also printed in the magazine. And it's at once sort of, you know, you can't guess the meaning, but it's generating new meanings, new words. So I love this texture of language when even if you don't understand what's Being said, you get a feel for something, you get emotion, and it can have an impact on you.
- [18:45]
Misha Glenny
Is that almost axiomatic for works of Dadaism, that they defy interpretation? I read that article, that sound poem of the admiral looking for a house, and I mean, I found it quite entertaining, but I didn't really know why.
- [19:04]
Ruth Heemas
Yeah, it's a bit like being moved, I think, by a piece of abstract art or music that hasn't got a very clear narrative, I suppose, that sense of anti narrative, but still feeling something from it. And you're not always sure why, but you're getting something from tone and. Yeah, this texture breaking apart the elements of language. And I think of someone like Tristan Zara or Celine Arnaud, who is another Romanian who was working in Paris a bit later. Sometimes I see these, like these lists or these words, and I think of learning vocabulary or coming across a strange word or an expression that's really fun or different in another language. So I think the multilingual element is really important to how Dada was propagated elsewhere.
- [19:50]
Stephen Forcer
Stephen Ruth, you mentioned the simultaneous poem. Again, not to sort of flog the horse, but it's a rejection of the. The reader and our attempts to interpret it, or just a kind of, you know, an absence of that possibility. And yet, at the same time, these are the three languages primarily involved in the Western Front. French, German, English. It's as if you're kind of tuning in to a radio that's broadcasting simultaneously. Quantum physics, simultaneity, you know, very different sphere, but that idea of simultaneity, of a whole profusion of things going on at the same time, as you find in the Georges Gross paintings, actually the kind of the undigestible rush of modernity that is something that's captured in this.
- [20:32]
Ruth Heemas
I kind of describe paintings or photomontages as noisy, you know, because they do feel multi sensory. I think they were trying to capture that sense in some of these works of the huge rush of the sensations and modern life.
- [20:49]
Misha Glenny
Dawn, you wanted to come in there.
- [20:51]
Dawn Addis
Well, I was just thinking that it's interesting to consider the kind of artistic and cultural bedrock which existed just before the First World War, and which, of course, the Dadaists in Zurich were very aware of. And Zara had sent his little magazine to Marinetti, that leader of the Futurists in Italy, as well as to a polinaire in Paris. And I think there's a kind of. It's interesting to think about that simultaneous poem in terms of futurist simultaneity, because it's like a deviation of what was intended to be a genuinely sort of modern experience. And Dada, it is not an expression of modernity at all. It's something quite different. And they were very anti modern.
- [21:29]
Misha Glenny
You mentioned that Saurabh referred to it as an art movement. Does that help us to understand it? Is it a movement?
- [21:38]
Dawn Addis
I suspect that he used it partly in the spirit of irony. As I said, movement Dada, you know, we have the futurist movement, which has its manifestos. Dada had its manifestos, lots of manifestos. But they aren't necessarily saying this is what we should be doing as artists, this is what we should be doing as poets. They're something else. They're disruptive, they're aggressive. He's not trying to propagate a particular thing. So calling it mouvement Dada is both a challenge to the existing movements and a sort of genuine feeling that something is going on here. It's an adventure we're all involved in.
- [22:11]
Misha Glenny
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- [22:19]
Stephen Forcer
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- [22:20]
Misha Glenny
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- [22:27]
Stephen Forcer
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- [22:30]
Misha Glenny
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- [22:33]
Stephen Forcer
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- [22:36]
Misha Glenny
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Stephen Forcer
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Misha Glenny
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- [23:12]
Stephen Forcer
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- [23:15]
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- [23:49]
Misha Glenny
one of the problems that I think some people have with Dadaism is that there are no iconic works from the movement itself. It's not like Surrealism with Magritte and Salvador Dali. So when somebody says, tell me about a work of art that Dada produced, what do you say?
- [24:09]
Dawn Addis
Well, there are several things you can say, because actually, everywhere Dada sprung up, something appeared that was visually very arresting. Arp is particularly interesting in Zurich because he begins with a kind of attempt to make things as non expressionist as possible. He cut paper for collages using a knife rather than using his hand. Then he discovered chance, and he thought that chance was a very, very productive possible process to use. And he started tearing up paper and dropping it down and making collages.
- [24:39]
Ruth Heemas
Ruth, I would mention photomontage as a technique. That was a popular technique. It wasn't owned by the Dadaists, but they used this technique to artistic effect. Somebody like Hannah Hoch, who I really find resonates with students, she's one of the Berlin Dadaists. Yes, that's right. And she worked with Raoul Haussmann. And there's a photo montage called Das schne Madchin from 1920, or the beautiful girl, the new woman. She's a jaunty in a swimsuit with her legs crossed, and then this huge spoofon, modern haircut, a light bulb instead of a face. And then in the background, there's the BMW insignia repeated over and over again. Machinery, a watch to think about time. And that's a comment on modernity, I think, and on beauty and on the mass media. So this cutting up of newspapers and popular magazines to create these surprising new images. And that's something that I think, you know, is used now, but in a more digital rather than handmade way. Usually people see that and find really intriguing because it's both of its time. You know, all the photo matter is from its time, but it's something that one can do as well, and that we've got lots of questions about now, about what's real and what's not real when you first come across one of these images.
- [25:56]
Misha Glenny
So it strikes me that what Dadaism was, was about various techniques emerging, various, which became traditions later on, but were not necessarily themselves set in stone, as it were. Stephen, can you tell us about the poetry and how it was performed?
- [26:19]
Stephen Forcer
Well, your listeners might well be thinking, in what way can this possibly be poetry? It's just a load of sloblock to pick up a word used by Frian Laurie in a sort of, you know, Post Duda moment, if you think about the Greek etymology of poetry, it means to create, to imagine, to make something. That is exactly what these people are up to. Hugo Baul, back to him, talks about the urgent need to reinvent language. And no less a luminary than Andre Gide at the end of World War I, says, We cannot just sit down at the table and start writing and speaking and using language in the way that we did in 1914. Discourse has got to change. So it's poetic. To the extent that it's messing around with and experimenting with language, you don't necessarily know what that is going to produce, the outcome. And if you look at, well, some of the iconic as well as the ephemera that's buried away in the magazines that you can consult at the International Dada Archive, which fittingly, is based in Iowa, if you look at some of this material, it is profoundly.
- [27:28]
Misha Glenny
Because Iowa's is unlikely a place.
- [27:30]
Ruth Heemas
Exactly.
- [27:32]
Stephen Forcer
I've yet to go.
- [27:33]
Ruth Heemas
I must.
- [27:34]
Stephen Forcer
If you look at some of this stuff, it has the features of poetry, it has anaphora, it has meter, it has rhyme of different sorts, it has occasionally the. In French, the Alexandrine, you know, the kind of gold standard of 12 syllable lines. And people like Zara messing around with the place of the caesura. So it does respond actually to poetic analysis, understood in a kind of a serious sense. The other thing about the manuscripts is that the Dadaists corrected their work. So I've looked at Zara's manuscripts where you get this nonsense verse. He corrects the nonsense words, so he'll write off, you know, starting off booz Duke, that will be a double O, but then you correct it to an ou to make that more distinctive U sound. And then it's very amusing and interesting looking at what translators try to do with this stuff, because let's say you're translating Booze Duke into English. Well, do you translate that into oo?
- [28:28]
Misha Glenny
And another thing that you've mentioned, Ruth, is photo montage, because this really is one of the great legacies, surely. I mean, we see it emerge in Russia, in Germany, in France, in Britain. Everywhere photomontage becomes one of the great innovations.
- [28:47]
Ruth Heemas
It really appeals to people because it can be. It's very rooted in its particular moment. It's, you know, political, social context. It tells us a lot about what's going on, but it also seems to, you know, you can still respond to it now. So Hannah Hough, for example, started using colour, which has a whole different aesthetic, later in her life. And you can really relate it to that moment. And then it was used for very political reasons. I mean, I would say that she was political. They would poke fun at politicians of the time. There was lots of celebrities from that moment, the fashions, the sport. It was like a real kaleidoscopic version of what was going. But it became especially political in the 1930s with John Hartfield's work above all else. Absolutely. So very, you know, there was an urgency in the late 20s and early 30s, and some of the photo montages that Hartfield produced, you know, very particularly against fascism. And this combination of text and image as well is something. Because we've talked about the visual and the verbal, but the interaction between them. So you have the slogans remade, you have the images remade, something that looks familiar, that is not quite familiar, so it asks you to look again. And I think that technique is very useful still.
- [30:00]
Misha Glenny
So, dawn, it's time to talk about the fountain. Can you tell us about Marshal Duchamp's fountain? The porcelain urinal, signed, Ah, Matt. Is this a Dada's work? And if so, what is its importance?
- [30:13]
Dawn Addis
Well, it's kind of been annexed to Dada, but it certainly was not linked to Dada in Europe at the time. It's not quite clear whether Duchamp at the time is, in 1917 in New York, had even heard or seen the name his friend Picabia might have done, but that would be, I think, irrelevant to the incident which has actually had such reverberations throughout the 20th century. There was an exhibition being planned for the Society of Independent Artists, and Duchamp was one of the people on the kind of board that was organizing it. And shortly before it opened, a porcelain urinal arrived, just before it was open to the public. It then was never shown. And there is a considerable confusion about what actually happened. There are lots of different accounts of what happened and why it wasn't exhibited, but it wasn't exhibited. And as a result, Duchamp, of course, his name was not officially linked to it, immediately resigned from the board of the Independent Artists. And he and his friends Beatrice Wood and Henri Pierre Rocher, produced another little magazine called the Blind Man, Asking the question, why was Mr. Mutt. The fountain had been signed, the Paulston fountain had been signed with the words are Mutt. Why was Mr. Mutt's sculpture refused? So it turned into a publicity event. He had already been experimenting, if you like, with giving ordinary objects a title. The question, of course, is, are they to be called art? And he was always, I think, quite Clear that they were asking a question about what is art? They're not saying this is art, but his point was actually that he was questioning it. I mean, what is art? Can you define art?
- [31:56]
Misha Glenny
And this is a question, of course, which we've heard repeatedly, ever, ever since then, from the pile of bricks in the Tate onto some of the young British artists work and so on. This is a question which hasn't yet been answered, but it was posed by Dadaissm.
- [32:12]
Dawn Addis
It was posed by Dadaissm. And it was also posed in the text that was published, together with the photograph of the fountain that appeared in the little magazine the Blind Man, a text saying that what happened was the object was given a new thought, very carefully sidestepping the question whether it is art or not.
- [32:31]
Misha Glenny
Stephen, some of Dada was intended to prompt laughter, but what sort of a laughter was it intending to prompt?
- [32:41]
Stephen Forcer
Yeah, that's an excellent question. And Dada is a case study really, in the multifaceted directions and functions and consequences of humour. Dada is a joke. It's a joke about the sick joke of a civilization flushing itself into the fountain, as it were, or kind of down the toilet of history. It is a joke about themselves. And part of that is not only to satirize themselves, but also, again, back to contradiction. It's a joke against the viewer or the audience, but also with them. And it's really clear that the audiences were in on the joke. Andre Breton, who was a Dada, as they called themselves before he was a surrealist, writes about 1921, a visit to Saint Julien Le Pauvre in Paris, attended by crowds and crowds of people in the rain. There was this public interest and affection for Dada. And in the Bibliotheque literature, Jacques Doucet in Paris, there's this wonderful series of scrapbooks that Francis Picabia kept, and they are press cuttings of Dada being mentioned by journalists. The journalists are also sort of interested and skeptical. There's something going on here. They're not convinced, but that they're sort of interested. So the humour is pushing you away, but also kind of drawing you in. And there is this ethical dimension to humor as well. You know, the Dadaists are laughing at themselves. They're making a joke about language. And I think they're promoting, going back to what we were saying earlier about satire, you know, absurdist culture as not a political party, it's not a political program, but as something that society needs a radical injection of in order to progress.
- [34:21]
Misha Glenny
Now, Dadaism didn't really make it over to London. And yet that humour that you're talking about appears to be shot through all of British satire ever since. What is that linkage between British humour and Dadda's?
- [34:38]
Stephen Forcer
This is fascinating in a way. It's as if British cultural at least figures in an organized sense, don't need Dada. There are these interesting individual cases. So Hope merely, for example, wrote a very long and quite lauded poem in 1920, Paris. It looks very much like a sort of mix of Dadda and a Pollina. There's Helen Bigger, who wrote an experimental quasi Dadais film about the commercialization of armaments. There was this prank that was on the BBC recently, the centenary of the 1926 hoax by Father Knox about ministers of transport being hanged from lampposts. And.
- [35:18]
Misha Glenny
And that was on the BBC in 1920.
- [35:20]
Stephen Forcer
So we understand. I don't think there's a recording of it, but it was commemorated recently and, you know, it's a joke. So there's something about British cultural elites and artists that says, we're not interested in this in an organized form. But as you say, Misha, if you look at British culture, since he shot through with examples of this Dada spirit, and Dara refers to Dada as a spirit, you're absolutely right, Dawn. He's messing around with the idea of a movement. But he also says Dada is a state of mind. So whether it's the Bonzo Dog Dudar Band, whether it's Philomena Kunk, whether it's Fry and Laurie, Python, of course, it's kind of nowhere formally and everywhere in comedic and cultural discourse.
- [36:03]
Misha Glenny
I'm very pleased that Philomena Kunk has been name checked on in our time. Ruth, you mentioned Hannah Ho in Berlin, but can you tell us about some of the other women who are engaged in Dada? We've heard of Emmy Jennings as well.
- [36:18]
Ruth Heemas
Yeah. So we often come to them through talking about one of the men in the movement, but that wasn't unusual in that there was quite a network. So Emmy Hennings was the star of the cabaret and as Stephen said, a writer herself. We think of her as a performer, but she used to sell her poems in the cabaret and go around with her photographs and so on, and was involved in Expressionism before as well. And then Sophie Touba Arp, who has got a lot of recognition, actually, because she's such a talented artist, designer, maker, you know, she was doing textiles and jewellery and furniture and architecture and was a dancer in the cabaret as well. What's striking, I think, about A lot of the women that we come across is how many different activities they were involved in as well, you know, as were many of the men. But I think there's no area in which they weren't participating. And then she became very important in terms of. Of geometric abstraction later on. Another person to mention is Suzanne Duchamp, sister of Marcel, very briefly, but nonetheless quite interesting and small body of work in the mechanomorphic style from around, like 1916. So there's a work called Ernet un Menese, or Male and Female Threatened, which is this kind of strange crane like machine imagery of two people, of two figures that would also have been. Was very unusual and quite early on in the sort of style of Francis Picabia. Marcel Duchamp. And then finally I would mention a poet called Celine Arnault, I think I spoke about her earlier, who was like Tristan Tsar, was Romanian, Jewish, born Carolina Goldstein, and moved to Paris around 1914-15. And then she produced a huge amount of poetry and manifestos and dramatic texts and so on, largely for these magazines that we've been talking about, these pamphlets. She started her own again, just a one off called projecteur in 1920, which included all of the kinds of Dada and proto Surrealist writers of the time, and 11 of her own volumes. And she was forgotten until relatively recently and didn't much take to Surrealism or Breton precisely, perhaps for some of the reasons we've been talking about. Keeping a free spirit.
- [38:38]
Misha Glenny
So, dawn, tell us how Dada comes to an end. What happens to it?
- [38:44]
Dawn Addis
It does come to an end. Exactly. Who wanted it to end is another question. Zahra had moved to Paris in, I think, 1920 and interrupted what was already a kind of budding movement which became Surrealism. A little magazine called Litterature, which was very experimental and very interested in automatic writing. But Czarrot arrived, Picabia was also there and Duchamp was there. And so a kind of Dada in Paris moment. Yes, yes, a lot of activity. I think it was about 1922 when Breton began to tire of Dada. Andre Breton, who became of course the leader of the surrealist movement, being very involved with Dada, he tried to organize what he wanted to call a congress to determine the direction of the modern spirit. Now this was far too organized, far too deliberate for Zara, who immediately sabotaged it. That was one of the reasons it just broke up, it split up. Zara went on talking about Dada, went on visiting and giving lectures about it. But basically that was the end. And after a gap, Surrealism was launched.
- [39:51]
Misha Glenny
We've heard a lot, Stephen, about how it spawned all sorts of other things in large parts of Europe. What was its fate?
- [40:01]
Stephen Forcer
It was actually really dangerous to be associated with this kind of activity, especially in someone like Berlin, you know, German revolution right after the end Of World War I, nascent Weimar Republic alongside National Socialism. And as a modern embodiment of Dada. We thought about, where is Dada to be found today? I often think of Pussy Riots as an iconoclastic, brave, anti orthodox, anti authoritarian phenomenon who have got that data spirit. I don't know if they have any conscious connection to Dada. They may, they may not. But there's that sense of political protest through culture Grail. Marcus has produced a really nice book on this called Lipstick Traces. It tracks Dada and other forms of cultural revolution through hippie culture, punk, post punk, Elvis Costello, Pete Townsend, you know, they're all there. So in a way, it's. It's almost impossible to point to the neatly defined political relevance of Dada, but its irrelevance is profoundly relevant.
- [41:03]
Misha Glenny
Dawn, you mentioned Andre Breton just there. Is there a direct link between Dadaism and Surrealism? Surrealism is much more easy to define, as it were.
- [41:15]
Dawn Addis
One of the obvious links is through the artists, because surrealism inherited a lot of the Dada artists. And this is where it becomes more difficult to disentangle them, which I think is important to do. But it is difficult because someone like Max Ernst, who was so central to Dada and Cologne, they moved to Paris. And what he had been doing with photomontage, what he called collage, was so unlike what the Berlin Dadais were doing and was far more in the line of a spark that is produced from unlikely juxtapositions that seem to have been brought together by chance. So artists are a link, but I think it's a mistake to put them together too much. I've done so myself frequently in the past. Dada and surrealism, they seem to go together, but actually they are very distinct, and I think that's quite, quite significant.
- [42:02]
Misha Glenny
Ruth, a final question to you, and it's a big one. What's the legacy of Dada? I mean, we've heard some of the sort of disparate things that it appeared to spawn. But why do you think that it has so much persistence, so much energy?
- [42:19]
Ruth Heemas
Culturally, it's a bit of a paradox because it resists definition. People can identify it in so many different ways. I like the slogan, Yeda kan Dada. Anybody can do Dada, really. Anybody can make art. I Think that's often, I don't know, if you're working with school groups or students, then it feels like an accessible way to use techniques. And the spirit, as Stephen said, it's a spirit, it's an attitude, and to redeploy them for things that matter to you. And because it's not dogmatic, precisely because it's not dogmatic, it sort of persists in that way, I think, like a protest, a rebellion, anti authority feels like a sort of democratic way of approaching art. So that sense, I think, continues. And then the absurdity. I mean, we talked about laughing, but I often think we take, you know, we take ourselves very seriously about this. And you can forget to laugh sometimes. You. You're, like, looking at something and thinking, that discomfort, actually, that we mentioned before, that actually it's quite funny, you know, And I've seen lots of good examples where. How to make museum exhibits about Dada, for example, is a really trying question, but where humor is brought into there, where, like cabaret elements that remind you what it must have been like to have this multisensory experience. I think that's another thing. You know, it's musical, it's verbal, it's visual, it has all those different elements, it has different languages. And it's not just tied to one person, which kind of confuses us, but it's not aligned with, do I like this artist or not? Because it's so multifarious.
- [43:53]
Misha Glenny
Yes, I think that it's quite extraordinary. You've mentioned Philomena Kunk and Pussy Riot. I also watched in preparation for this, the Franz Ferdinand video, Take Me out and. And it almost transported me back to the beginning of the 20th century. It was extraordinary. Dawn, a final word from you on the Legacy.
- [44:14]
Dawn Addis
I was just thinking about the tremendous presence that Dada managed to have, disparate as it was, all these different places. And I was thinking about a photomontage with the phrase Dada Siegt, Dada conquers. And I think, actually, yes, that was a terrific slogan.
- [44:31]
Misha Glenny
My thanks to Dawn Addis, Ruth Hemis and Stephen Forcer. Next week, silicon. Not just chips, but a fundamental building block of life on this planet and perhaps elsewhere. Thank you for listening.
- [44:46]
Ruth Heemas
And the In Our Time podcast gets
- [44:48]
Dawn Addis
some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.
- [44:54]
Misha Glenny
And now we can go on to the podcast bit where we discuss what was missing. There's one thing that intrigued me. I mean, we mentioned that it never reached London, really, as a. As a movement. The other place, it strikes me that it didn't reach is Vienna. Even though, you know, Vienna was this cauldron of activity. And I wonder if the. Was it just through the persons that it. I mean, Cologne was a. I highlighted Cologne because it struck me as odd that it would go to Cologne. Not that Cologne isn't an interesting place, but it's not usually associated with innovative movements.
- [45:36]
Stephen Forcer
That's a fascinating question. I don't really feel qualified to answer it. But in Dundasdale, I'll have a go. I mean, maybe it's got something to do with the imperial context that it's perhaps got too kind of close or too closed to take off there.
- [45:51]
Dawn Addis
I mean, it must be something to do with the collapse. Collapse of the old order, Right, in Europe and the complete collapse of the Austro Hungarian Empire. And Vienna obviously changes identity. So we may think of it now as a wonderful artistic and musical center. I don't know what it was like, you know, 1916, 17, 18.
- [46:10]
Misha Glenny
Very traumatized.
- [46:11]
Dawn Addis
Yes, right.
- [46:12]
Misha Glenny
Is the answer to that. I mean, very traumatized in a way that I don't think Berlin was at the same time. The other interesting thing I wanted to ask you about was the contrast between futurism, Italian Futurism, which of course was so aligned with fascism and Dadaism, which was so not aligned with fascism. And yet there seems to be some sort of connectivity there.
- [46:38]
Ruth Heemas
I mean, that's one of the deeply fascinating aspects of the avant garde. Then, if we use that term, how could we can talk about it as these multiple groups? But they were so different in different places. Which kind of reminds us that they were generated from very specific political, social, cultural circumstances. To have such different approaches. Because, as you say, there's techniques that you can sort of assimilate, both poetic techniques of fragmentation and sound and so on. And what you mentioned earlier about simultaneity, these paintings of speed and so on. But they were, yeah, very into modernity, I think. Dawn, you said, you know, Dada wasn't. But the futurists loved the idea of speed and machinery and modernity. So I like the fact that the big umbrella term embraces so many different elements of what the avant garde was doing in different places, just on the spread.
- [47:34]
Stephen Forcer
Dawn, you alluded to this. They're writing each other loads of letters. They're sending the magazine. I got into French through Pen Pals, and there's this beautiful sense of them writing each other letters. In the Doucet holdings, there's this gorgeous set of letters between Zara and Breton. Breton writes with this immaculate, pretty blue Ink. And there's so much excitement and love between them and they're desperate for something to do and for an outlet. So when Sauer arrives in Paris in 1920, he's waited, as Breton says, or he's awaited as a sort of messiah. When he arrives, he's a bit of a disappointment to them. He's not a physically imposing person. But back to politics. One of the things that he would do, Dara, at these Dada soirees in Paris would be to read a political tract, but simultaneously undercut himself by having a siren going or an alarm bell going. And again, it's that kind of political, anti political. There's a synthesis of opposites here.
- [48:36]
Misha Glenny
Yeah, dawn, doesn't it?
- [48:38]
Dawn Addis
He later, in this interview with the BBC in 1959, he denied that there was any real politics in Zurich. Of course, in Berlin there was futurism. Futurism. I mean, of course it wasn't aligned with what became fascism at this time. Marinetti was certainly in contact with Zara and. And they would reproduce works by futurist artists as well as, you know, expressionists and so on in the magazine. So there's a considerable eclecticism also at
- [49:07]
Ruth Heemas
the beginning, this idea of a network, I mean, it's. It's fascinating because you said, you know, it relied on people moving, you know, actual movement of people, or letter writing and contact making in that way. That's how it proliferates
- [49:21]
Misha Glenny
the letter. I mean, presumably a lot of the letters are extant and you can read them.
- [49:26]
Dawn Addis
Yes, a lot of them have been published.
- [49:28]
Stephen Forcer
Yeah, there's a chunky correspondence at the end of Michel Sanui.
- [49:31]
Dawn Addis
Yes, exactly.
- [49:32]
Misha Glenny
Volume as. I'm always intrigued by the number of Romanians who. Who pop up in the absurdist movement. I mean, there's UNESCO as well, of course, later on. Is there anything special about the Romanians? Of course, most of them were Jewish as well, which is very important because they lived in very difficult circumstances in Romania.
- [49:57]
Stephen Forcer
So I'm not an expert on Romanian. I spent time in the country for research and I actually feel very affectionate about the Dada scholars that I've met there. There was a Romanian avant garde and Zara plugs into that and works with others associated with symbolism and post symbolist journals. So there's that going on. The education system in Romania provides French and German. Bucharest is one of these places described as the Paris of the East. So, you know, France and Paris has, I think, significant cultural capital in Romania over the 19th century. So in a way it's a natural thing for Zara to gravitate towards French and towards.
- [50:36]
Misha Glenny
And of course, Romanian is a Latin language.
- [50:38]
Stephen Forcer
Exactly.
- [50:39]
Misha Glenny
It's quite easy for to certainly to learn French if you're a religious speaker.
- [50:45]
Dawn Addis
One of them was the artist Marcel Janko in, In Zurich, and he was responsible for some of the tremendous masks that they would wear in the performances, which very, very, very strange, you know, transforming people's appearance in Cabaret Voltaire. In Cabaret Voltaire, we've not mentioned Sophie
- [51:03]
Stephen Forcer
Teuber, who worked with Janko on these masks. And between the two of them, them, they provide these masks and they write afterwards about just how liberating it was to put on a mask, to be someone different for a bit. So they're trying on new ideas, new senses of self. And Hugo Bal says in his diaries, it's hard to say just how constricting society at the time was. So this chance to experiment, to mess around is so empowering for them.
- [51:33]
Misha Glenny
Ruth and then Dawn.
- [51:34]
Ruth Heemas
No, I just think. I think it's a good question about the Romanian presence, because although we're saying, oh, it's multilingual, it's wonderful, and you use all these different languages, we can erase it a little bit. It would have been a very different experience to be. Sometimes there is a feeling of being an outsider or of coming from elsewhere when you're in that environment. And I know, for example, Celine Arnaud, where she writes a lot of her, where you can pull out thematic threads. It's about that kind of sense of. Of being away from home and being somewhere else and the way one is treated even in an avant garde group. So I think, yeah, I think sometimes we, although we say we don't think of it as a Swiss group or a French group or a German, it's important to remember that these were a mix of people who. With very different cultural, linguistic backgrounds, and that's what makes it so thrilling. But also, I think I always hoped that they'd also be very, very close to each other as to. Not always the case.
- [52:26]
Stephen Forcer
No, there's plenty of falling out.
- [52:27]
Ruth Heemas
Yeah.
- [52:30]
Misha Glenny
You wanted to say something, and then we can have a couple.
- [52:33]
Dawn Addis
I was just thinking about, you know, the fact that it was so liberating as an experience, these performances, and how that might shed little light on why it never. Aydal really never came to this country. I was thinking about the origins of the Cabaret Voltaire in the literary cabarets in Germany, which is a very different kind of cultural event from anything we have, I think, and the idea that you could produce serious avant garde things in a. In a sort of cabaret context is interesting and I think that's one of. One of the ways perhaps that they were able to have this liberating experience.
- [53:06]
Misha Glenny
Yeah, it's true. The tradition here was music hall, which is. Which is a rather different. Different experience. There's Simon hanging up, which means our tea is on its way.
- [53:17]
Stephen Forcer
Who'd like tea or coffee?
- [53:18]
Misha Glenny
Tea, coffee, tea.
- [53:21]
Ruth Heemas
Three teas and a coffee.
- [53:22]
Stephen Forcer
I should ask for eggnog or cabbage or something.
- [53:25]
Ruth Heemas
In Our Time with Misha Glenny is
- [53:27]
Dawn Addis
produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production.
- [53:32]
Stephen Forcer
I'm Jamie Bartlett and for BBC Radio 4, I'll be looking at how fakery took over the world. No, no, hang on, hang on. Sorry, you're not Jamie Bartlett. I'm Jamie Bartlett. Oh, really? Well, who am I, then? I'm afraid you're not real, pal. You're just an imitation chatbot I created to help me make this series on modern fakery and why it's everywhere. Sounds good. What's going to be in it? Well, There's a lot. 1980s professional wrestling, dodgy academics, AI psychosis, COVID vaccine, skeptics. What's it called? Everything Is Fake and Nobody Cares. With me, Jack, Amy Bartlett and me, Jimmy Bartlett. Listen. First on BBC Sounds.