By: James Aitchison

On 5 February 1916, at Number 1 Spiegelgasse in Zurich, the Cabaret Voltaire opened its doors. Performances of poetry and music were promised, and young artists were invited to bring along their own ideas and contributions.  On stage was the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, who fished out poems from the various pockets of his coat.  The cabaret was an overnight sensation.  Singing, dancing and revolutionary poetry recitals raised hell in the narrow street; diagonally opposite, at Number 12, lived a group of quiet, studious Russians.  One of them, Vladimir Lenin, was allowed free access to the Dadaists’ library; no one at the time suspected he was plotting a revolution of his own.

The Dada movement was helmed by Hugo Ball, a German sceptic writer, philosopher, poet and producer, along with his mistress Emmy Hennings, a singer and poetry reader.  Ball conceived a literary cabaret that would challenge war, art, and the bourgeois sentiments of the time.  Zurich had attracted many young kindred spirits who opposed the meaningless slaughter of World War I, which raged beyond neutral Switzerland’s borders.  The Cabaret Voltaire was a riotous, explosive phenomenon; bells, drums, cow-bells and fists on tables greeted a new poetic language.  Provactive art covered its walls; frenzied screams and whistles greeted work by Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Hans Richter and Man Ray.

Emmy Hennings sang folk songs and brothel songs, accompanied by Ball at the piano.  Tzara’s rapid wit lacked inhibition; he was described as “a David who knew how to hit every Goliath”.  Poet and physician Richard Huelsenbeck sang lyrics such as “The garbage cans are pregnant” and “The vicar closes his pants … how the hairs grow from his ears”.  Small wonder the local Zurich press wrote, “They are men possessed, outcasts, maniacs, and all for love of their work.”

Ironically, Dada’s main proponents, Ball and Tzara, were contradictory yet complementary personalities. Ball avowed that he could never welcome chaos, while Tzara welcomed chaos with open arms.

Perhaps Dadaism was best described by Alsatian poet and painter Hans Arp, who experimented with collages and used scrap wood to create works of art.  “Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts.  While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.  We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.”

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Who coined the word “dada”?  And what did it mean?

Hans Arp declared that Tristan Tzara first uttered the word at 6 pm on the 6 February 1916.  Huelsenbeck claims he and Hugo Ball discovered the word in a German-French dictionary; “dada”, he said, is a French word for hobby-horse.  Another version states that the name derived from the Romanian word “da” meaning yes; thus, “da, da” signified “yes, yes” to life and freedom.  

Hugo Ball defined Dada as “foolery extracted from the emptiness in which all the higher problems are wrapped … a game played with the shabby remnants … a public execution of false morality”.

Artist Hans Richter argued, “Dada’s propaganda for a total repudiation of art was in itself a factor in the advance of art.  Our feeling of freedom from rules, precepts, money and critical praise … brought us all the closer to the source of all art, the voice within ourselves.”

And there were many voices within what Richter labelled “a jungle of contradictions”.  

Marcel Duchamp (“the nihilist of art”) was engaged in new “ready-made”, three-dimensional productions, where commonplace “found” objects became the art itself.  He fastened a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watched it turn.  He bought a snow shovel on which he wrote, “In advance of a broken arm”.

Meanwhile, “chance and anti-chance” provided a major avenue of Dadaist expression.  Hans Arp ripped an unsatisfactory artwork into pieces and watched them flutter to the floor.  Struck by the pattern they formed, he pasted them down in the pattern that chance had determined.  Arp would wonder whether chance was the artist’s subconscious mind at work, or the work of a “mysterious collaborator”.

In a similar way, Tristan Tzara cut words at random from newspapers and shuffled them in a hat.  Withdrawing the words, one by one, determined the sequence they would appear in a poem.  Tzara stated that by following this process conscientiously, the poem would resemble the poet.

Tzara also composed a book of seven manifestos.  The first manifesto begins, “Dada is our intensity: it erects inconsequential bayonets and the Sumatral head of German babies; Dada is life with neither bedroom slippers nor parallels; it is against and for unity and definitely against the future … cleaving the air like a seraph landing in a public bath to piss …”  In another manifesto he demanded “the right to piss in different colours” — no doubt outraging the middle class Swiss.

Another manifesto explains, “Everything is the same as everything that is not the same …”

Looking back at Dada’s origins and the havoc created at the Cabaret Voltaire, Hans Richter summarises, “The realisation that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole — this was the central message of Dada.”

The end of the Great War saw Dada expand to New York, Berlin, Barcelona, Cologne, Hanover and Paris.  Historically, Dadaism inspired much revolutionary creativity.  Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac acknowledged their debt to Dadaism.

In 1922, in Weimar, with the rise of Hitler and Nazism only a handful of years away, Tristan Tzara delivered Dada’s funeral ovation to a few colleagues.  “Dada marches on, destroying more and more, not in extension but in itself … it draws no conclusion, no pride and no profit … Dada is a state of mind … Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing.”  He concluded, “Dada is useless, like everything else in life.  Dada has no pretensions, just as life should have none.”

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Dadism and Surrealism shared many parallels, outlandish behaviour being one.  

One Dadaist, Oscar Wilde’s nephew Arthur Cravan, published a vitriolic anti-avant garde literary magazine; his list of “credentials” included hotel thief, muleteer, snake charmer and chauffeur.  In 1916, he challenged the world heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, to a fight in Barcelona.  He lost.  By 1917 he was in New York, arriving drunk at a lecture and stripping off his clothes.  In 1918, he set off from Mexico in a rowing boat, heading for Buenos Aires, and was never seen again!

Arguably, though, Surrealism was more concerned with commercial success.  And no Dadaist ever rivalled the great Surrealist Salvador Dali’s flamboyance.  At the 1936 London International Exhibition of Surrealism, Dali wore a deep-sea diving suit.  Dali also espoused Fascist and right-wing sympathies, anathema to true Dadaists.

When we look back on a plethora of -isms — Absurdism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism, Nihilism — Dadaism remains the perfect model for literary and artistic revolution.  In the words of one critic, “The beginning of Dada … was the invention of a new universe”.

Which brings us to the madness of our own age.  

In today’s world, with the rise of extremism, threats to democracy, Middle East wars, social unrest and division, do we need a fresh Dada movement to reinvent our universe …?