Tristen and Dadaism from Dada Art and Anti-Art (by Hans Richter)

Using primary resources, I believe, is the only way to do justice to history, art, stories, and people, especially in the field of creative art itself.

1. The definition of DADA

“When I visited my old Dada colleague Tristan Tzara in Paris two years ago, he left me these parting words as food for thought on my journey: Don’t forget that polemics always played a big part in Dada. This may be true, especially where the literacy side of Dada is concerned. But Dada has too often been regarded as a style of literary polemic directed at the overthrow of existing forms. Alongside the noisy literary movement there existed another which was not polemical at all: a total revolution in visual art, more radical than that which took place in literature, although intimately linked with it.“The life we led, our follies and our deeds of heroism, our provocations, however ‘polemical’ and aggressive they may have been, were all part of a tireless quest for an anti-art, a new way of thinking, feeling and knowing. New art in a new-freedom.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3sNiiOlvjU&index=3&list=PLoejz2-IUGIRrX3YdEs5WHzad0W5FHDiahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p1jBWv1xto, 1:52 – 3:01

Here is an interesting twist of thought: The book was written while Tristen Tzara had already been in Paris, which means at least years after the heyday of Dadaism in Zurich when all those founders and promoters of Dada were all quite young. Certainly, they could claim afterwards that it was about anti-art from a new perspective, freedom, new wave of thoughts, etc., instead of pure and mere polemics. Nonetheless, back then when they were as young as us in these days, did they really consider that much? Make no mistake, instead of criticizing their possible recklessness, I’d like simply call

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for attentions to different layers of characters, according to which different acting choices can be made.

2. It’s more than art movement. It’s also about politics stands.

“Dada has reaped the harvest of confusion that it sowed.“However this confusion was only a façade. Our provocation, demonstrations and defiances were only a means of arousing the bourgeoisies to rage, and through rage to a shamefaced self-awareness. Our real motive force was not rowdiness for its own sake, or contradiction or revolt in themselves, but the questions (basic then, as it is now), ‘where next?’”.

Apart from Lenin, here comes another character, the movement led by whom is also related to the classes. However, does it indicate Travesties is only or mainly about politics? Not necessarily. But probably politics in a broader sense.

3. Peculiar Atmosphere: the peaceful dead-center of the War became the birthplace of Dadaism

“But it was only in one of these (Zurich, New York, Berlin, Paris, etc.) that the magic fusion of personalities and ideas took place which is essential to the formation of a movement. The peculiarly claustrophobic and tense atmosphere of neutral Switzerland in the middle of the Great War supplied an appropriate background. The Swiss Dada movement, which carried others after it and with it, began in Zurich, at the Cabaret Voltaire, at the beginning of 1916.”

It’s still not very clearly stated in the book that how and why Zurich could and would serve as the place, where a fusion of minds (like Dada and many others) were given rise to, were tolerated and, moreover, thrived. The nature of this place, as the neutral zone, during the first world war definitely came first among all. But in terms of Dadaism, was it the place nurtured many of the radical ideas, or the many active minds made the city what it was? Behind the obvious answer of mutual influence, the general anxiety and a state of mental tension in Zurich produced by the Great War around it undoubtedly played an important part in almost every aspect.

4. Questionable Freedom

“To understand the climate in which Dada began, it is necessary to recall how much freedom there was in Zurich, even during a world war. The Cabaret Voltaire played and raised hell at No.1, Spiegelgasse. Diagonally opposite, at No.12, Spiegelgasse, the same narrow thoroughfare in which the Cabaret Voltaire mounted its nightly orgies of singing, poetry and dancing, lived Lenin. Radek, Lenin and Zinoviev were allowed complete liberty. I saw Lenin in the library several times and once heard him speak at a meeting in Berne. He spoke good German. It seemed to me that the Swiss authorities were much

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more suspicious of the Dadaists, who were after all capable of perpetrating some new enormity at any moment, than of these quiet, studious Russians… even though the later were planning a world revolution and later astonished the authorities by carrying it out.”

5. Finally, Here Comes Tristen Tzara

“(Hugo) Ball’s qualities of thoughtfulness, profundity and restraint were complemented by the fiery vivacity, the pugnacity and the incredible intellectual mobility of the Rumanian poet Tristan Tzara. He was a small man, but this made him all the more uninhibited. He was a David who knew how to hit every Goliath in exactly the right spot with a bit of stone, earth or manure, with or without the accompaniment of witty bons-mots, back-answers and sharp splinters of linguistic granite. Life and language were his chosen arts, and the wilder the surrounding fracas, the livelier he became. The total antithesis between him and Ball brought out more clearly the qualities of each. In the movement’s early, ‘idealistic’ period, these anti-Dioscuri formed a dynamic, even if serio-comic unity.“What Tzara did not know, could not do, would not dare to do, had not yet been thought of. His crafty grin was full of humor but also full of tricks; there was never a dull moment with him. Always on the move, chattering away in German, French or Rumanian… What would Dada have been without Tzara’s poems, his insatiable ambition, his manifestos, not to speak of the riots he produced in such a masterly fashion? He declaimed, sang and spoke in French, although he could do so just as well in German, and punctuated his performances with screams, sobs and whistles.“Bells, drums, cow-bells, blows on the table or on empty boxes, all enlivened the already wild accents of the new poetic language, and excited, by purely physical means, an audience which had begun by sitting impassively behind its beer-mugs.”

Why did Tzara rather sing in French than German? What is crafty grin full of humor like? In terms of his screams, sobs and whistles, were they related to the content of what he was singing or meant to be random at all? The same question goes to the bells, drums, cow-bells, blows on the table or on empty boxes. Or rather, did the ‘music’(or noises) he produced have any meaning at all?

Last two questions: One, behind his frenzy and forever lively conduct, what kind of person was Tzara under the cover? (In other words, when would he be excited and when would he be depressed?) Two, when Tom Stoppard wrote Travesties, did he have Hans Richter’s Tzara in mind, or Henry Carr’s?

Think about it.

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(Hugo Ball) (Tristen Tzara)

(Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, Zurich 1917-18)

6. A Proof: What is Dada?

Arp:“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. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men’s minds”

Janco

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“We had lost the hope that art would one day achieve its just place in our society. We all beside ourselves with rage and grief at the suffering and humiliation of mankind.”

The quotes from them implies the effects of war and living in a neutral zone during the wartime on themselves, i.e. the anxiety I mentioned above. However, taking into consideration that there were varieties of different ideas and minds then and there, it’s really hard to say what Dada was and what the Dadaists were after.

7. From The Cabaret Voltaire to Dada

“The Cabaret Voltaire was a six-piece band, each played his instrument, i.e. himself, passionately and with all his soul. Each of them, different as he was from all the others, was his own music, his own words, his own rhythm. Each sang his own song with all his might – and, miraculously, they found in the end that they belonged together and needed each other.……“The Cabaret Voltaire fostered a unity which resulted from no act of will…“To this day it is impossible to be sure who discovered or invented the word Dada, or what it means. When I came to Zurich in the middle of August 1916, the word already existed and no one cared in the least how, or by whom, it had been invented. But I heard the two Rumanians Tzara and Janco punctuating their torrents of Rumanian talk with the affirmative ‘da, da’. I assumed that the name Dada, applied to our movement, had some connection with the joyous Slavonic affirmative, ‘da, da’…“Arp… says: I hearby declare that Tzara invented the word Dada on 6th Feb 1916.”

[Cabaret Voltaire, Spiegelgasse 1, Zurich [photographed in 1935; collection Baugeschichtliches Archiv Zürich]

8. Competition in Neutral Zone

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“It was the always resourceful Tzara who discovered that the government of the belligerent nations were only too anxious to compete with each other in neutral Switzerland, even if only in the field of culture… and even if the insubordinate Dada movement was the means by which this took place.

9. How did Tzara Compose Poems

“He cut newspaper articles up into tiny pieces, none of them longer than a word, put the words in a bag, shook them well, and allowed them to flutter on to a table. The arrangement (or lack of it) in which they fell constituted a ‘poem’, a Tzara poem, and was intended to reveal something of the mind and personality of the author.Arp adhere to (and never abandoned) the idea of ‘balance’ between conscious and unconscious. This was fundamental to me as well; but Tzara attributed importance exclusively to the UNKNOWN. This was the real dividing-line. Dada throve on the resulting tension between premeditation and spontaneity… or art and anti-art, volition and non-volition…”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpNJDBJOkFs, 7:04 – 7:45

Noted, while here it is indicated that Tzara cuts newspaper articles mostly, in Travesties, Tzara first cuts what he writes (pp. 1), then a famous Shakespeare sonnet written down by him (pp.34). Whether it was intended or not, for someone who emphasizes randomness so much as Tzara, it might be very likely that cutting things that are printed and written are completely different.

10. Café Odeon & Café de la Terrasse

“When I arrived in Zurich in August 1916, the artists and intellectuals used to meet in the Café de la Terrasse. Only a few months later, we moved to the Café Odeon. The waiters at the Terrasse had gone on strike. In sympathy with them, because they often let us sit for hours over one cup of coffee, we punished the Terrasse by permanently withdrawing our custom, although we had been much more comfortable in the big room at the Terrasse than we were in the cramped, ill-lit Odeon.”

The text mentioned Terrasse and Odeon twice on page 12 and 71, both iterated by Henry Carr without putting much effort in distinguishing them. Hence, this piece of information may not be very useful in terms of this play; but it definitely serves as a good reference to construct the social background of Zurich in 1917.

11. Zurich Dada’s Climax as well as its End

“the grand soiree in the Saal zur Kaufleuten on 9th April 1919”“Tzara had organized the whole thing with the magnificent precision…”“During the long interval that followed the second part, with the hall still in total uproar, we looked for Tzara, who we thought must have been torn to pieces. Indeed, he was

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nowhere to be found. It turned out that he had never been there in the first place. We found him at last sitting in the restaurant, peacefully and contentedly counting the takings. I think we had taken 1,200 francs, the biggest sum that Dada had ever seen.”

It’s more and more puzzling what kind of person Tristen Tzara is. Is him a bit like James Joyce in this sense, who is also extremely particular when it comes to money. Then the following question would appropriately be what artists are like.

12. Tristan Tzara performs his Chanson Dada Dada Songhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtwOrCuGJag, 4:29 - 5:07

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