Dada podcast
Script👇
Introduction
Sound: Raoul Hausman’s Phonème bbbb.
Narration: What you’ve just heard was a sound poem by Raoul Hausman titled Phonème bbbb.
What is a sound poem? A sound poem is an approach to poetry that focuses on the sounds and rhythm of language instead of words and meaning. Sound poetry breaches the function of language as an instrument for communication, and questions the arbitrariness of any given linguistic system. By the same token, it gives free rein to a primitive voice that is often suppressed when we are trying to make sense.
Sound: Erik Satie’s Furniture Music.
Narration: Bonjour tout le monde! My name is Spyridon Simotas. I teach French at UVA and this podcast is all about avant-gardes. I am going to be talking about Dada mainly—the mother of all the avant-garde movements in the 20th century.
Sound: Erik Satie’s Furniture Music.
Narration: Dada emerged in Europe in the early 20th century, and in many ways it is still relevant today. As a matter of fact, the research for this podcast led me to the website takedadaseriously.com which is a current online exhibition of four contemporary female artists who explore Dada techniques in their work.
The Dada spirit is still a beacon of subversion, of pushing boundaries, and stirring up conventions to the point where any other subsequent underground movement pales in comparison.
I started this podcast with a live recitation of a sound poem. Now I am going to read you Tristan Tzara’s instructions on how to make a Dadaist poem.
How to Make a Dadaist Poem
- Take a newspaper.
- Take some scissors.
- Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
- Cut out the article.
- Next, carefully, cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
- Shake gently.
- Next take out each cutting one after the other.
- Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
- The poem will resemble you.
- And there you are–an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
As you’ve noticed, Tristan Tzara’s recipe playfully eschews the problem of writing and the myriad little decisions that go into it. Rules of grammar, clarity, coherence, meaning are all thrown out the window, along with inspiration. So what’s left when all the intellectual labor is disposed of? Tzara’s step-by-step guide implies that the good old lyric muse is replaced by a mechanical process that includes copying the results produced by chance. So there you have it, a type of poetry that is fun, simple and accessible. A type of poetry that eliminates false hierarchies to the point that, nowadays, methods like these are taught from kindergarten to high-brow creative writing programs.
Sound: Live performance of L’amiral cherche une maison à louer.
Narration: Tristan Tzara, whose voice you’ve just heard reciting the poem L’amiral cherche une maison à louer was one of the founders of Dada—a spirit and a movement that turned the art world upside down.
Dada had an enormous influence in all the subsequent avant-gardes of the 20th century with a legacy that includes sound poetry, visual poetry, performance art, appropriation, installation, collage, photo-montage, ready-made, free-writing, free-painting… The gamut of Dada techniques runs large.
Today, these terms are common places in any artistic, or design milieu.
Co-opted by the cultural industry they have become aesthetic categories that are no longer provocative, challenging, or unconventional.
About a century ago, though, when the Dada movement emerged, these artistic practices were scandalous, and met with skepticism, if not outright rejected by the establishment, which, of course, it was a victory for the Dadaists.
Political opposition
Narration: To better understand the anarchist Dada spirit, one has to look at the artistic, scientific, and political effervescence of the early 20th century. New media of the time, photography and cinema, had forced visual art to reinvent itself with cubism and futurism. Einstein’s General Theory of relativity was published in 1915, and, of course there was the war.
Sound: War sounds start…
Narration: Dada was created in Zurich in 1916 in the midst of the first world war, one of the deadliest conflicts in human history.
The butchery of the battlefield cast its gloom over Europe. The atrocities of the war eroded the trust in the good morals and manners of the European citizens.
Sound: War sounds continue…
Narration: By the end of the four-year war the toll of casualties had risen up to 40 million. Forty million people had lost their lives, or had returned home shell shocked, severely wounded, or amputated in the name of nationalistic and imperialistic ideologies.
Understandably, the catastrophic forces unleashed by national pride, capable of tearing the world apart, had to somehow be questioned and critiqued. Federated around this idea and the assumption that European civilization was based on a shaky foundation, Dadaists, expressed their opposition and mockery with all their might. In doing so, they might have defended, or even rescue, some shred of human integrity.
Sound: War sounds continue until birds chirping.
Narration: The cohort of young anarchists that formed the Dada movement met in Zurich, Switzerland, which had remained neutral during the war. Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings had started the famous Cabaret Voltaire, and they were joined by Jean Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara among others. Cabaret Voltaire became the headquarter of their activities that didn’t have a name until the word Dada was randomly found in the Larousse encyclopedia. The word Dada was enthusiastically adopted by the members of the group because it doesn’t have a clear meaning. “A cube, and a mother, in a certain region of Italy, are called: DADA. The word for a hobby horse, a children’s nurse, a double affirmative in Russian and Romanian, is also: DADA” writes Tristan Tzara in his 1918 Dada manifesto. In many cases, also, “Dada” is among the first sounds an infant makes when they are learning how to speak. “Dada” is language at the entry level, before the linguistic system is fully formed and its conventions assimilated.
Conveniently, the word Dada was fuzzy enough to represent the anarchist attitude of the group, whose objective through their uncensored writings, their messy paintings, and their chaotic stage performances was to reaffirm life—the last word in Tristan Tzara’s manifesto, written in all caps.
Aesthetic opposition
Dada was predicated upon the idea that making art was not enough. It was not enough to just produce objects that would end up decorating the interiors of bourgeois apartments, or that would eventually be collected by museums and presented as relics from the past. It was not enough to just make objects to be looked at with the zeal of a religious cult. The idolatry of the art world profited only the happy few connoisseurs and the art market. To reach and affect everyday people, art had to become more democratized. It had to descend from its pedestal and be conceived differently.
All these disruptive ideas about non-conformist and non-representational art were already floating in the artistic milieu and had been set in motion by Marcel Duchamp. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp presented in the show of independent artists a piece called Fountain. Fountain was a ready-made, which means that Marcel Duchamp was not involved in the process of the creation of the object. His intervention consisted in reframing it, namely choosing it among other everyday objects, renaming, and signing it with the pseudonym “R. Mutt”. Fountain, which was nothing else but a typical urinal turned 90 degrees on its flat back, was immediately rejected by the committee in which Duchamp himself was a member. Fountain’s rejection had Duchamp resign from the committee, but his disruptive gesture hasn’t stopped causing heated debates in the art world ever since.
In 2004, 500 art experts elected Duchamp’s urinal as the most influential artwork of the 20th century, leaving behind masterpieces by Matisse, Picasso, and Warhol.1 In 2016 Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan echoing Duchamp’s controversial gesture from a century ago, created a solid gold toilet called America. America was stolen in 2019, and it is to this day lost, the same way Fountain was immediately lost after its rejection. That didn’t stop it from being exhibited, in various shows, as a replica, just like many others of Duchamp’s works. Duchamp didn’t really believe in permanence and conservation of works of art and the irony of all this would have amused him along with his Dadaist friends.
Here is a short excerpt of him talking about the ephemerality of the works of art taken from a 1959 interview:
Sound: Excerpt from Duchamp’s 1959 interview.
Narration: Duchamp was a lone wolf. He was operating independently from art movements. He didn’t pledge allegiance to any of the art movements of his time but he was considered a cult figure among Dadaists and Surrealists circles. Dadaists, who also had strong feelings about a number of aesthetic values carried over from past centuries, found Duchamp’s iconoclastic approach liberating. Their radical, irrational, irreverent, and experimental approaches clashed directly with the tyrannical grip of representation, and the arbitrariness of beauty both in classicism and in modernism.
Here is how Tristan Tzara in his 1918 manifesto describes the new approach to art:
Narration:
DADA was born, out of a need for independence, out of mistrust for the community. People who join us keep their freedom. We don’t accept any theories. We’ve had enough of the cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas. Do we make art in order to earn money and keep the dear bourgeoisie happy? […] Cubism was born out of a simple manner of looking at objects […] The futurist sees the same [object] in movement, a succession of objects side by side, mischievously embellished by a few guide-lines. This doesn’t stop the canvas being either a good or a bad painting destined to form an investment for intellectual capital. […] The new painter creates a world whose elements are also its means, a sober, definitive, irrefutable work. The new artist protests: he no longer paints […]
For Tzara and the Dadaists the distorted perspectives of Cubism and Futurism were not cutting it. They were looking for something deeper that wouldn’t only change the grammar rules of painting but it would contribute to sustain life. Any collage activity that consists of taking elements of the world around you and reassembling them in new arrangements is a way to embrace spontaneity, chance, and, playfully, act upon reality itself.
Sound: Erik Satie’s Furniture Music.
The Dada movement was short-lived. It only lasted for about 7 years, from 1916 to 1923, but it spread rapidly across the world through numerous magazines to the point where it became an international phenomenon and the breeding ground for all the later avant-garde movements of the 20th century.2 Surrealism, born in Paris in 1924, right after the dissolution of the Dada movement, was its closest grown-up relative.
Surrealism
Surrealism was defined by André Breton as a
Psychic automation […] by which one proposes to express verbally the actual functionning of the thought.
André Breton, who was the brain behind the Surrealist movement, had a formal training in medicine and he was particularly drawn to the discovery of the unconsciousness by Freud. Breton’s approach to Surrealism was significantly more literary than visual, but nonetheless, the end goal was to transform the lived experience of the individuals who practiced Surrealism.
In his first manifesto of surrealism in 1924, Breton gives specific instructions on how one can get to the meditative state which is a pre-requisite for the surrealist practice of automatic writing. In order for the psychic automation to occur the subject has to let the conscious and the unconscious mind to converge. André Breton rejected a certain facility of Dada techniques such as glossolalia^[Sound poetry.] and collage poetry. Breton believed in the neglected associations of one’s own mind, and the omnipotence of dreams to change language and, consequently, to find answers to important questions of life.
Surrealism went through several iterations until Breton’s death in 1966, but its main claim remained the same. When the whole mind is at work, and not only the conscious mind, the fantastic or marvelous can erupt at any given moment.
Acknowledgments
All the recordings used in this podcast are available online at UBU Web an online repository of avant-garde and underground cultures. Check it out at ubu.com. Thanks for listening.
Outro
Sound: Excerpt from the 1953 movie The Wild One.
Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?
What you got?