from Hugo Ball “Dada Fragments” originally published in 1927. trans. Jolas reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 250-251
“June 12, 1916 – What we call Dada is an harlequinade made of nothingness in which all higher questions are involved, a gladiator’s gesture, a play with shabby debris, an execution of postured morality and plenitude…
The Dadaist loves the extraordinary, the absurd, even. He knows that life asserts itself in contradictions, and that his age, more than any preceding it, aims to the destruction of all generous impulses. Every kind of mask is therefore welcome to him, every plat at hide and seek in which there is an inherent power of deception. the direct and the primative appear to him in the midst of this huge anti-nature, as being the supernatural itself…” [ellipsis in original] p. 250
“March 30, 1917 – The new art is sympathetic because in an age of total disruption it has conserved the will-to-the-image; because it is inclined to force the image, even though the means and parts be antagonistic. Convention triumphs in the moralistic evaluation of the parts and details; art cannot be concerned with this. It drives towards the in-dwelling, the all-connecting life nerve; it is indifferent to external resistance. One might also say: morals are withdrawn from convention, and utilized for the sole purpose of sharpening the senses of measure and weight…” p. 251
I posted these fragments because I think they address (and undermine) several key elements of how we understand artistic/political expression.
Dada understands success as the dissolution of meaning, rather than its creation. Dada writings engage in extensive, contradictory, and evasive discussion about the character of the Dada ‘movement’, essentially an attempt to efface the explicit political meanings of their art. Liberation is a product of end of the ability to assign easy meaning to people or their actions, and Dada begins that process of creating freedom by refusing the designations placed upon it. Even the name ‘Dada’ was chosen through a process somewhere between random chance and babbling.
The second fragment I think shows how Dada would reject measuring of ‘success’ in art – the comment on ‘measures and weight’ shows how analytic approaches to art are anathema to the Dadaist method.
Tristan Tzara “Dada Manifesto 1918″ trans R. Mannheim, reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 252-253
“How can one expect to put order into the chaos that constitutes that infinite and shapeless variation: man? The principle: ‘love thy neighbor’ is a hypocrisy. ‘Know thyself’ is utopian but more acceptable, for it embraces wickedness. No pity. After the carnace we still retain the hope of a purified mankind. I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way, if he knows the joy that rises like arrows to the astral layers, or that other joy that goes down into the mines of corpse-flowers and fertile spasms. Stalactites: seek them everywhere, in managers magnified by pain, eyes white as the hares of the angels.” p. 253
This section continues the theme about dissolution of meaning and the embrace of total expression as a reaction to the violence of World War One. The basis of Dada seems to be in this unwillingness to impress meaning, and the embrace of deep individual expression.