Dada: From Disgust to Spontaneity
“If all of a sudden your head begins to crackle with laughter, if you find all your ideas useless and ridiculous, know that it is Dada beginning to speak to you” (Hentea 161). We may define this passage to be rather symptomatic: it conveys a state of mind of people (mainly, related to art in a broad sense, and that means someone who reflects) before and during World War I. How could the massacre run up to such an extent? This acute feeling of absurd constituted the dadaist agenda. Switzerland was a neutral country at that time and many art groups left their native countries involved in the war for Zurich. Among them was a young Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, an inspirator and guru of a movement, lately become known as Dada.
According to Tzara's manifesto and related works, Dada is a movement rather than a school or organisation (dadaists clamor against cubist and futurist academies), something liquid rather than something solid and concrete, something that you cannot actually catch, you cannot appeal to, something rhizomatic that resists hierarchy, resists and hates any kind of authorities, resists folk psychology, resists everything that established. Resists? Possibly, it simply spits on it with a disastrous laughter.
“I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle, I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles. () I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; () I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense” (Tzara). Thus, Tzara, probably the most prolific and enthusiastic propagandist of Dada, with this somewhat hate speech (is it a hatred or just indifferent disgust?) conveys the dadaist agenda that is full of that double-bind schizo utterances ("I am here -- no, I am there -- where I am, actually? -- I am where you are not", and so on and so forth endlessly). Dada seeks to escape the everlasting dualism and neverending oppositions -- in other words, Dada wants to undermine and abolish logic, morality, law, good manners, common sense. Everything that is blindly accepted by society and goes without saying finds the dadaists' disgust and rebuff. The dadaists always ask why, and the answer is known: because of Dada. You are talking about good and bad -- Dada doesn't like it, you are talking about light and dark -- Dada detests it. Whenever you are trying to judge, to formalise, to interpret, to plan, to edify, Dada will resist you because Dada is liquid and chaotic as life itself.
"A work of art should not be beauty in itself, for beauty is dead; it should be neither gay nor sad, neither light nor dark to rejoice or torture the individual () A work of art is never beautiful by decree, objectively and for all" (Tzara). According to Tzara, art is merely a beautiful cake to "cajole nice nice bourgeois". Instead, an artist must produce works beyond understanding, beyond binary dichotomies, beyond cliches of schools and academies. What considers methodology, Tzara also attacks unities and universalities: there is no commons, no formal ideas, no general rules for everybody -- a singularity that is important, every thing, man, event is unique ("Dada was born of a need for independence of a distrust toward unity").
“I assure you: there is no beginning, and we are not afraid; we aren't sentimental. () We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits, who rend one another and destroy the centuries. Without aim or design, without organization: indomitable madness, decomposition”. Dada systematically ridicules logic, dialectics, psychoanalysis, science in general, and terrorizes its adepts. What is the Progress (with its logic, morality, law etc) if it ends up with World War? "Supposing a life to be a pure farce," Dada produces its own "I-don't-give-a-damn attitude of life". Tsara offers a weapon to fight this unbearable disgust: it is a spontaneity. Apparently, the dadaists' attitude towards the war was not invariable -- the war is an inherent part of human nature, of life. What if we allow us more chaos, madness, and spontaneity in daily routine? Would there be fewer wars? But after all, "everyone dances to his own personal boomboom" (Tzara), and life which is Dada will remain the same.
Works Cited
Tzara, Tristan. Dada Manifesto. 23rd March 1918. 391: archive. Web. 2 Feb. 2016.
Hentea, Marius. TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara. Google
Books. Web. 1 Feb. 2016.
