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COPYRIGHT 2006 Smithsonian Institution
IN THE YEARS before World War I, Europe appeared to be losing its hold on reality. Einstein's universe seemed like science fiction, Freud's theories put reason in the grip of the unconscious and Marx's Communism aimed to turn society upside down, with the proletariat on top. The arts were also coming unglued. Schoenberg's music was atonal, Mallarme's poems scrambled syntax and scattered words across the page and Picasso's Cubism made a hash of human anatomy.
And even more radical ideas were afoot. Anarchists and nihilists inhabited the political fringe, and a new breed of artist was starting to attack the very concept of art itself. In Paris, after trying his hand at Impressionism and Cubism, Marcel Duchamp rejected all painting because it was made for the eye, not the mind. "In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn," he later wrote, describing the construction he called Bicycle Wheel, a precursor of both kinetic and conceptual art. In 1916, German writer Hugo Ball, who had taken refuge from the war in neutral Switzerland, reflected on the state of contemporary art: "The image of the human form is gradually disappearing from the painting of these times and all objects appear only in fragments.... The next step is for poetry to decide to do away with language."
That same year, Ball recited just such a poem on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, a nightspot (named for the 18th-century French philosopher and satirist) that he, Emmy Hennings (a singer and poet he would later marry) and a few expatriate pals had opened as a gathering place for artists and writers. The poem began: "gadji beri bimba / glandridi lauli lonni cadori...." It was utter nonsense, of course, aimed at a public that seemed all too complacent about a senseless war. Politicians of all stripes had proclaimed the war a noble cause--whether it was to defend Germany's high culture, France's Enlightenment or Britain's empire. Ball wanted to shock anyone, he wrote, who regarded "all this civilized carnage as a triumph of European intelligence." One Cabaret Voltaire performer, Romanian artist Tristan Tzara, described its nightly shows as "explosions of elective imbecility."
This new, irrational art movement would be named Dada. It got its name, according to Richard Huelsenbeck, a German artist living in Zurich, when he...
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