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Dada Changed My Life
review by Gregory
Avery, 5 September 2003
In his biography of Luis Buñuel,
John Baxter quotes another biographer, Lachlan Mackinnon, who said,
"Those who survived it [the Surrealist movement] were either
heroic individualists like André Breton or psychotics like Salvador
Dalí." This makes it sound as if it were something like a war,
which it was and wasn't -- it was certainly a concerted and
organized effort in response to something. The French author and
poet Breton served as the
grand poobah of the
Surrealists in the 1920s, deciding on who would, or would not, be
admitted as a Surrealist member and be allowed to call themselves as
such in public. The Catalonian-born Dalí, who cultivated his
nuttiness for the sake of Art, knew, like Picasso and Andy Warhol,
exactly how to market himself. With the Spanish Civil War and the
ascension of the Franco regime in Spain, Dalí went to the U.S.,
designed department store window displays, and did paintings such as
one which rendered the Golden Gate Bridge as if it were made from
human bones. He also achieved the singular accomplishment of
grossing-out no less a personage than Cecil B. De Mille with a
screening of Un Chien Andalou, the film which would define
Surrealism in the minds of many people for years to come.
But the Surrealists themselves were
begat from the Dadaists, whose manifesto was written by poet and
writer Tristan Tzara in 1918. Like the Surrealists -- who would
create public disturbances and even wreck establishments they felt
disinclined towards -- the Dadaists didn't confine themselves
entirely to the world of the arts. Dadaism was in part a response to
the conditions which were engendered in Europe by the catastrophic
First World War -- among which was the effective sweeping-away of
the old Europe, including two of its "central powers," the
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires; the use of armored tanks and
mustard gas and trench warfare in battlefields; and the disastrous
tactical errors made by military commanders, sometimes resulting in
the loss of several thousand soldiers per day and, in one instance,
troops breaking-rank and refusing to go back into the trenches
because they had lost all faith in their upper command.
Dada -- an "anti-art
movement" born of "misunderstanding and confusion" --
was a means by which to challenge conventions and confront the very
questions of existence. "Every page must explode," Tzara
wrote in his 1918 "Dada Manifesto," continuing, "On
the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the
glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men.... We will put an
end to mourning and replace tears by sirens screeching from one
continent to another...." The Dadaists created publications,
photomontages, held poetry readings where two or more people read
on-stage simultaneously or while accompanied by tomtoms. Exhibitions
were held where patrons had to enter through a urinal. In Berlin,
members of the Weimar parliament were showered with incendiary
leaflets declaring that Dadaists were "rulers of the
Globe."
Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists --
who included poet and impresario Hugo Ball, artist Hans Arp, and
writer Richard Hulsenbeck -- regularly convened at the Cabaret
Voltaire, a cafe in Zurich, Switzerland, and the new documentary Dada
Changed My Life is essentially about how a group that could be
called the New Dadaists reopened the Cabaret Voltaire in early 2002
as a meeting and performance space, and how they subsequently fought
to keep it from being turned into a pharmacy and apartment block by
developers. The documentary -- made by Olga Mazurkiewicz (who's
Polish-American), Daniel Martinez (who's Spanish), and Lou Lou
(who's Swiss, making this a respectably international undertaking)
-- takes its title from a story related to the filmmakers by a woman
-- Ursula Sterling, "Council President" for the
"Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches" -- who was
arrested at the Cabaret one night by a policewoman who, instead of
taking her to the station, took her back to her apartment, where
they had a drink and an evening that is described simply as being
"wun-der-schön." The film is playful, loose, and
scrappy in a way that Tzara and his group probably would've approved
of. It includes portions of slam-poetry readings, a marriage
ceremony at a "Ministry of Silly Weddings" in Britain
(interrupted on account of a phone call for the bride), and an
attempt to interview the "sole surviving Dadaist," who
only manages to get out how the new kids are "mierda"
before keeling over for good. The Dadaist "Foundation
Kroesus" decides to liquidate their assets by throwing them out
the window to people on the street below, while a hiccuping
recording of John Philip Sousa's "Liberty Bell March"
plays in the background.
That last, of course, also served
as the theme to Monty Python's Flying Circus. So much of what
comprised the original Dada movement has long since been absorbed
and made commonplace by mainstream culture, from record album covers
to advertising and music videos. It is often difficult, in the age
of electronic communications, to discern when people are trying to
do something "meaningful," nowadays, from people who are
just acting-out in front of the cameras to get what immediate
attention they will. (The wedding sequence mentioned above is
interrupted by a beautiful young woman in pearls and a fur coat who
seizes the attention of the documentary-makers and then says,
"I absolutely have nothing to tell. I just would like to be
filmed." After directing the cameraman to look at her legs, she
tells us that her "profession" is, "I live to be
rich.") Films and the moving visual arts were just getting
started when the Dadaists came into being; they would be further
explored by Man Ray , with his experimental black-and-white montage
films, and Buñuel, who was able to make L'Age d'Or,
one of the great anarchist documents in film history, because he had
private financial backers who gave him complete freedom. The New
Dadaists seek to exercise their God-given right to express
themselves, however and in whatever way they see fit, and they
certainly don't appear to be spoiling for a fight (something of a
relief during this time of "preemptive" wrist-smacking).
The New Dadaists may have to find some way to do so in the video or
film medium that conveys the same shock of the old -- maybe some way
that says, we don't care whether you gaup at us like some freaks on
a "reality" show or not, but we've got something to say.
A return to the stage, with its sense of immediacy and power,
may also be the thing, which is why fighting to keep places like the
Cabaret Voltaire up and going as an open forum is something of
genuinely vital concern. To everybody.
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