Dada and Beyond: Volume 2: Dada and its legacies

260 Pages·2012·8.688 MB·English

by  Elza Adamowicz, Eric Robertson

DADA AND BEYOND
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AVANT-GARDE
CRITICAL STUDIES
27
Editor
Klaus Beekman
Associate Editors
Sophie Berrebi, Ben Rebel,
Jan de Vries, Willem G. Weststeijn
International Advisory Board
Henri Béhar, Hubert van den Berg,
Peter Bürger, Ralf Grüttemeier,
Hilde Heinen, Leigh Landy
Founding Editor
Fernand Drijkoningen†
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DADA AND BEYOND
VOLUME 2:
DADA AND ITS LEGACIES
Edited by
Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2012
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Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
All titles in the Avant-Garde Critical Studies series (from 1999 onwards)
are available to download from the Ingenta website http://www.ingenta.com
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3589-8
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0864-2
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2012
Printed in The Netherlands
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Contents
List of Illustrations 7
Preface Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson 9
Dada Performance
Chapter 1 Jill Fell
Zurich Dada Dance Performance
and the Role of Sophie Taeuber 17
Chapter 2 Catherine Dufour
L’Acte Dada 33
Chapter 3 Kerstin Sommer
‘Dada is Dead – Long Live Dada’:
The Influence of Dadaism on Contemporary
Performance Art 43
Dada and Cinema
Chapter 4 Jennifer Wild
Francis Picabia, Stacia Napierkowska,
and the Cinema: The Circuits of Perception 57
Chapter 5 Kim Knowles
Patterns of Duality –
Between/Beyond Dada and Surrealism:
Man Ray’s Emak Bakia(1926) 77
Chapter 6 Ramona Fotiade
Spectres of Dada:
From Man Ray to Marker and Godard 89
Dada Cultures
Chapter 7 Dafydd Jones
The Location of Dada Culture:
Revising the Cultural Coordinates 109
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Chapter 8 Nadia Ghanem
LeCabaret Voltaire en perspective 123
Chapter 9 Patrick Suter
Dada et la fonction écologique de l’art (à partir
de Fountain de Duchamp) 135
Dada Legacies
Chapter 10 Nathalie Roelens
Dans le sillage de Dada: Dubuffet,
Michaux,Alechinsky et autres ‘périphériques’ 149
Chapter 11 Paul Cooke
The Critical Reception of René Crevel:
The 1920s and Beyond 167
Chapter 12 Andrea Oberhuber
Enfants naturels ou filles spirituelles?
À propos de quelques réflexions sur l’esprit de
filiation Dada dans les pratiques ‘autographiques’
des auteures-artistes surréalistes 181
Chapter 13 John Goodby
‘The Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’:
Dylan Thomas as Surrealist 199
Beyond Dada
Chapter 14 Olivier Salazar-Ferrer
Tararirade Benjamin Fondane et
l’héritage subversif du Dadaïsme 227
Chapter 15 Alfred Thomas
Dada and its Afterlife in Czechoslovakia:
Jan (cid:2)vankmajer’s The Flatand Vera
Chytilová’s Daisies 245
Chapter 16 Stephen Forcer
The Importance of Talking Nonsense:
Tzara, Ideology, and Dada in the 21st Century 263
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List of Illustrations
Figure 1. Sophie Taeuber dancing at the Cabaret Voltaire,
Zurich (1916). Stiftung Hans Arp und Sophie
Taeuber–Arp e.V., Rolandseck. 21
Figure 2. Sophie Taeuber and Erika Schlegel
in Hopi costumes (1918–1920). 27
Figure 3. Mary Wigman performing a “Witch Dance” (1916). 29
Figure 4. Francis Picabia, Mechanical Expression Seen
Through Our Own Mechanical Expression
(Npierkowska)(1913).
Artist Rights Association. 58
Figure 5. The Moving Picture News (March 29, 1913).
Fair Use/Public Domain. 68
Figure 6. Thomas A. Edison, Electric Lamp patent
drawing (1880). Fair Use/ Public domain. 70
Figure 7. “Woes of the One Night Stands,” The New York
Times (30 March, 1913). Fair Use/Public Domain. 72
Figure 8. Photographie du tournage de Tararira
avec Fondane au premier plan. 233
Figure 9.Concert final de Tararira joué sur l’air du
Boléro de Ravel. 235
Figure 10. Scène de Tararira- personnage masculin
habillé en danseuse. 238
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Preface
Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson
As the chapters in the first volume of the book demonstrated,
performance was one of the most fundamental aspects of Dada’s
originality. This idea is developed further in the opening essay of the
present volume. In her detailed study of Sophie Taeuber’s contribution
to Zurich Dada, Jill Fell explores one of the defining yet still under-
researched areas of Dada performance, namely dance. Through a
detailed examination of Taeuber’s training with the Laban school and
her interaction with her fellow Dadaists, Fell corrects a lingering
misconception of Dada dance as an unstructured improvisation,
revealing it to be a much more consciously created entity. Fell
suggests possible areas of interaction and cross-fertilisation between
dance and other creative forms of expression, and reveals the extent to
which Dada dance anticipates later forms of twentieth-century
experimentation.
As Catherine Dufour argues in her essay, “L’Acte Dada”, the
performative dimension of Dada plays a key role in the alternative
history of twentieth-century art. Studying the relationship of Dada’s
actions with the pre-war avant-gardes in Italy, Russia and
Czechoslovakia, Dufour argues that Dada action stemmed from the
need to transcend the traditional parameters of artistic expression. As
Dufour explains, Dada action differs according to the context in which
it is produced, but two essential characteristics emerge from it: while
on the one hand it enacts a cathartic, physical celebration of our
existence, its tendency to provoke a strong response from the public
endows it with a political character. If the former trait is evident in
later forms of performance such as body art, action art and even punk
music, Dada’s political dimension re-emerges in the work of the
Situationists and the Russian ultra avant-garde. While an empty
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10 Adamowicz/Robertson
ritualistic form of Dada reappeared in some neo-Dada work of the
1960s, Dufour argues that the world crises of the new millennium
have given rise to a “third age” of Dada in the work of artists such as
Wem Delvoye and Jose Castro.
Starting with Tzara’s famous declaration that “Dada is a state of
mind”, Kerstin Sommer considers the ongoing relevance of Dada to
artistic practices in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
She explores its legacy in the work of three diverse artists: the action
painting of Jackson Pollock, the Atta-art of German performance artist
Christoph Schlingensief and the work of contemporary British artist
Richard Layzell. As Sommer observes, Pollock’s action-paintings are
considered as a form of Dada performance, sharing the Dadaists’
preoccupation with chance, whereas Schilingensief’s art is indebted to
the politically-charged activities of Berlin Dada, and Layzell’s
installations and events show the unmistakable influence of Schwitters
in their subversion of audience expectations while undermining
notions of social order. In their various ways, these successors of the
original Dada revolution keep its flame alive.
In “Dada and Cinema”, Jennifer Wild turns her attention to the role of
cinema as a decisive influence on Francis Picabia’s paintings of the
period 1913–15, a full decade before he ventured into filmmaking. As
the essay reveals, the visits Picabia made to New York not only
familiarised him with popular American cinema, but may have offered
the impetus for his famous mechanomorphic style. In particular, Wild
argues, Picabia’s encounter with the famous dancer-turned-film star
Stacia Napierkowska in January 1913 would prove to be decisive for
the development of his mechanomorphic paintings, many of which
conflate the theme of woman with a cinematographically inflected
evocation of the US experience.
Man Ray’s films are widely acknowledged as vital contributions
to both Dada and Surrealist cinema, yet most studies omit to separate
and evaluate the respective roles of the two movements, or the degree
to which they interact in his cinematographic œuvre. In her essay,
Kim Knowles examines Man Ray’s Emak Bakia (1926) in detail, and
argues that it occupies a unique space on the borderline between Dada
and Surrealism. The use of automatic techniques, and the co-existence
of subjective and objective vision and abstract and figurative forms,
are all revealed to be of key importance to the film’s particular status
within his repertoire.
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Preface 11
Ramona Fotiade examines Man Ray’s experimental films in an
essay where parallels are drawn between early twentieth-century
avant-garde film and the post-modernist aesthetic of New Wave
cinema. Man Ray’s innovative techniques – his radical montage
techniques, the creation of optical illusion, and the self-referentiality
of his films – impact on film-makers Chris Marker and Jean-Luc
Godard, whose disruptive strategies – concerning the role of montage
and photography, or the relationship between montage and soundtrack
– subvert conventions of cinematic realism.
In the section “Dada Cultures”, attempting to locate Dada culture,
Dafydd Jones highlights the very difficulty of establishing any
singular definition of Dada, given that its very basis lies in the
rejection of categories and straightforward definitions. As Jones points
out, it is as difficult to impose a chronological starting point or a
moment of closure on the movement as it is to attempt to ascribe it
any single, coherent ideological stance. Reconsidering Dada’s position
from the perspective of poststructuralist theory, Jones argues
compellingly that we must remove Dada from the implicitly
oppositional – and ultimately redundant – conceptual framework of an
“avant-garde” in order to think of it instead as a phenomenon in flux,
constantly reconstituting and redefining itself.
Given the etymology of “culture” as something that has grown, it
is appropriate that Nadia Ghanem should focus on the birthplace of
Dada, the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich’s Spiegelgasse. Highlighting its
status as a haven amidst the devastation of the First World War,
Ghanem considers the Cabaret as a necessary abstraction from the real
world in which the Dada group could create their own universe. In
some key respects, the Cabaret’s closed micro-utopian space
foreshadows recent works such as Maurizio Cattelan’s 6th Caribbean
Biennial (2001) which, echoing Zurich Dada, appropriates the
practices of the official art world only in order to subvert them.
Extending the etymological definition of culture as a product of
the earth, Patrick Suter examines Dada from an environmental point
of view. Taking as his first exemplary instance Duchamp’s Fountain,
Suter contends that amongst its most radical achievements are the
emphasis it places on the act of naming, and its exposure of the cleft
that traditionally separates the art work from the real world in the
mind of the spectator. The “recycled” collages of Kurt Schwitters, too,
pose questions of an environmental nature, while his Merzbau
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