Art, in its execution and direction, is dependent upon the time in
which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest
art will be the one that presents in its contents of consciousness the
thousand-fold problems of the time; to which one may note that this
art allows itself to be tossed by the explosions of the last week,
that it pieces together its parts again and again while being shoved
by the day before. The best and most original artists will be those
who hour by hour tear the tatters of their body out of the tumult of
life's cataract, commited to the intellect of the age, bleeding from
hands and hearts.
Did expressionism ever fulfill our expectations of this kind of art
that is a confirmation of our most vital concerns?
No!No!No!
Did the expressionists fulfill our expectations of an art that burns
the essence of life into our flesh?
No!No!No!
Under the pretense of interiorization the expressionists in literature
and painting have made of themselves a generation that is still
waiting today for literary- and art-historical veneration and that
puts itself forward as a candidate for an honorable bourgeois
recognition. Under the pretense of propagating soul, they have found
their way back--using a battle against naturalism--to the
abstract-pathetic gestures that are the presupposition of a vapid,
comfortable, and stolid life. The stages are filled with kings,
poets, and faustian natures of every sort, while the theory of a
melioristic conception of the world, whose childish, psychologically
naive manner is significant only as a critical supplementation of
expressionism, haunts actionless heads. Hatred of the press, hatred
of the advertisement, hatred of sensation--all this speaks for people
for whom a chair is more important than the noise of the street and
who think of it as an advantage to be tricked by every con man. That
sentimental resistance to an age that is no better and no worse, no
more reactionary and no more revolutionary than any other age, that
faded opposition that yearns for prayer and incense whenever it does
not prefer to make its cardboard gun out of attic iambs--these are
characteristics of a youth that never understood how to be young.
Expressionism, discovered abroad, has become in Germany--as always
happens--a fat idyll and the expectation of a good pension; it has
nothing more to do with the struggles of active people. The signers
of this manifesto have gathered under the battlecry
DADA!!!
for the propaganda of an art from which they expect the realization of
new ideals. What exactly is DADAISM?
The word Dada symbolizes the primitive relationship to ambient
reality; with dadaism a new reality achieves its majority. Life
appears as a simultaneous confusion of noises, colors, and mental
rhythms that is absorbed cold-eyed into a dadaistic art with all the
sensational screams and feverishness of its deviant everyday psyche
and in its total, brutal reality. Here is the sharply marked parting
of the ways that separates dada from all previous artistic directions
and above all from FUTURISM, that some addlebrains have recently taken
for a new edition of impressionist achievement. Dadaism, for one
thing, no longer stands aside from life an an aesthetic manner, in
that it shreds into its component parts all the jargon of ethics,
culture, and an interiority that is only a jacket for weak muscles.
The BRUITISTIC poem
shows a streetcar just as it is, the essence of the streetcar with the
yawning of the pensioner Schulze and the scream of the brakes.
The SIMULTANEOUS poem
teaches the meaning of the jumbledness of all things, whil Herr
Schulze reads, the Balkan express crosses a bridge near Nisch, a pig
bawls in the cellar at Nuttke the butcher's.
The STATIC poem
makes individuals of words, the woods with its treetops, foresters'
liverys, and wild boars step out of the three letters "woods," maybe
a small hotel even steps out, with the name Bellevue or Bella Vista.
Dadaism leads to unheard of new possibilities and forms of expression
in all the arts. It has made cubism into a dance on the stage, it has
propagated the BRUITISTIC music of the futurists (whose purely Italian
concerns it however doesn't wish to generalize) in all the countries
of Europe. The word Dada points at the same time to the
internationalism of the movement, which is bound to no borders,
religions or professions. Dada is the international expression of all
these offensives, peace congresses, ruckus at the vegetable market,
suppers on the Esplenade, etc. etc. Dada seeks the use of
new materials in painting.
Dada is a CLUB founded in Berlin that one can enter
without taking on any responsibilities. Here everyone is chairman,
and everyone can express an opinion on artistic matters. Dada is not
a pretense for the ambition of a few belletrists (as our enemies would
like to have you believe), Dada is a type of intellect that can reveal
itself in every conversation so that one has to say: that one is a
dadaist, this one is not; the Dada Club has members in every part of
the world, in Honolulu as much as in New Orleans or Meseritz. To be a
dadaist can mean, under certain circumstances, to be more of a
businessman or politician than an artist--or to be an artist only by
accident; to be a dadaist is to be thrown by all things, to be against
all accretion of sediment, to sit down for a moment on a chair means
that one has brought life in danger (Mr. Wengs has already drawn the
revolver out of his pocket). A fabric is torn when touched, one says
yes to a life that wants to move higher through negation. To say yes
-- to say no; the mighty hocus pocus of existence gives winds to the
nerves of the true dadaist -- he lies like this, he hunts like this,
he cycles like this -- half Pantagruel, half Franziskus and laughs and
laughs. Down with the aesthetic-ethical attitude! Down with the
bloodless abstraction of expressionism! Down with holier than-thou
theories of the literary fools! We are for dadaism in word and image,
for the dadaistic happening in the world. To be against this
manifesto is to be a dadaist!
Tristan Tzara. Franz Jung. George Grosz. Marcel Janco. Richard
Hulsenbeck. Gerhard Preiss. Raoul Hausmann.
Others.
The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology
Surrealist Poetry in English
