What is Dada? A lecture by Leah Dickerman at the University of Delaware-10/7-5:30pm-Willard Hall



"DADA speaks with you, it is everything, it envelops everything, it belongs to every religion, can be neither victory or defeat, it lives in space and not in time." - Francis Picabia

Excerpt from the first page of Leah Dickerman's essay, "Dada Gambits" published in the arts journal OCTOBER by the MIT press in 2003. Ms. Dickerman will give a lecture tonight at the University of Delaware, sponsored by the Art History department. Dickerman is a curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.


Dada has been paradoxically underwritten and overwritten. There is no dearth of words on the subject, but especially in comparison with the type of critical attention given to the two other most important movements of the historical avantgarde, Surrealism and Russian Constructivism, there have been—with a handful of important exceptions—relatively few sustained efforts to examine the premises of Dada practice in broad view, to understand its structural workings.

Yet, if Surrealism has appeared as the critical problem par excellence for a revisionist art history in the past decades, then perhaps, just perhaps, in this moment when a globalized media culture and war once again seem to be intersecting, Dada is the problem to come. The question is: How do we begin? This issue of October is intended to offer openings for reconsidering Dada now.

Art history’s general hesitancy around Dada as a movement is in large part a legacy of its historiography, and particularly that presented within a museum context. In the Anglophone world, the work of artists allied with Dada has been viewed largely within monographic presentations. (In the last two decades, we have seen important retrospective exhibitions of the work of Max Ernst, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, and Kurt Schwitters, among others, and one, opening up a regional view, that looked at New York Dada.) Or Dada has been tied to Surrealism, as is the case with three exhibitions, seminal in their own right, that have defined our approach to an alternate modernist tradition (an alternative, that is, to a Cubism-focused narrative of geometric abstraction): at the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr’s 1936 Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism and his successor William Rubin’s 1968 reprise of the subject Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, and at the Hayward Gallery, the team-curated 1978 show, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed



Dada Manifesto
Hugo Ball-1916
Translated from German



Dada is a new direction in art. You can tell this because up to now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It's terribly simple. In French it means "hobbyhorse." In German: "addio," "get off my back," "see you later!" In Romanian: "Absolutely, you're right, that's it. Yeah, really, let's do it." And so forth.

An international word. Only a word, and the word as movement. It's just awful. If you make it into a direction in art, that must mean you want to get rid of complications. Dada psychology, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and you, most honored poets, who have always composed with words but never composed the word itself. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada you friends and alsopoets, posterior evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m'dada, dada mhm' dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.

How do you achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How do you become famous? By saying dada. With noble attitude and fine deportment. Until you go crazy, until you pass out. How can you get rid of everything infernalish and journalish, everything nice and neat, everything priggish and brutish and foppish? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the point, dada is the world's best lily-milk soap. Dada Herr Rubiner, dada Herr Korrodi, dada Herr Anastasius Lilienstein.

Which is to say: the hospitality of the Swiss is to be valued above all things, and in aesthetics what matters is the norm.

I'm reading poems that intend nothing less than to do without language. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe, Dada Stendhal. Dada Buddha, Dalai Lama, Dada m'dada, Dada m'dada, Dada mhm' dada. What matters is connection, and first interrupting it a little. I don't want words that other people have invented. All the words have been invented by other people. I want my own nonsense, and the corresponding vowels and consonants along with it. If the vibration is seven cubits long, I want words that fit it, seven cubits long. Herr Schulze's words are only two and a half centimeters long.

So now you can clearly see how articulated language develops. I just let the sounds fall where they may. Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Ow, oy, oo. You shouldn't let too many words show up. A verse is an opportunity to get by without words and without language as far as possible. This accursed language, it sticks to dirt like stockbrokers' hands that have worn down coins. I want the word where it stops and where it starts.

When each thing has its word, the word itself has become a thing. Why can't a tree be called pluplusch, and pluplubasch when it's been raining? And why does it have to be called anything at all? The word, the word, the woe's the worst you ever heard, the word, gentlemen, is a first-class public concern.

Posted: Thu - October 7, 2004 at 12:34 PM        

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