appe n d ix 3 : dada i nfl u e nces
In 1 9 1 6 , at the height of World War l's brutality, Dada emerged from a nightclub called Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, when a group of expatriate artists organized a series of outrageous and provocative anti cultural manifestations that served as a desperate total protest. The Dadaists were protesting both the senseless war that had engulfed them and the obsolete art forms of European civilization. The history of Dadaism is well known ( see Hans Richter's Dada, Art, and Anti-Art, for one version ) . It had a tremendous in fluence on almost every form of modern art. It might even be said that Dada supplied the alphabet for much of the innovative artistic language of the Western world at mid-century. En route it gave rise to the Surrealist movement and it still appeared as fresh as the day it was conceived when it resurfaced amidst receptive artists and intellectuals in the 1 950s. Among the art forms it influenced were theater of the absurd, sound poetry, concrete poetry, performance art , collage, Happenings , and mixed media in general. Dadaism im parted a strong sense of playful irony to every movement it touched. The Dada manifestos from 1 9 1 6 through the 1 920s find their echo in the social sentiments of many 1 960s Anarchist movements , Provo among them. Dada was totally, even ruthlessly, anti-authoritarian. The freedom of the individual was highly prized. From this perspec tive it can be seen as the artistic corollary of political Anarchism. A campaign leaflet that Roel Van Duyn wrote for the City Council elections insisted that Provo was a rare historical phenom enon comparable ( in his words ) " to the teachings of Socrates , the invention of printing, Halley's comet, or Dadaism. " Though later ad mitting that he may have been bombastic , nevertheless he contin ued to assert that at least the comparison with Dadaism was histor ically defensible. The Dadaists had used terms such as provocation and to provoke so frequently that Van Duyn voiced surprise that they had not come up with the term Provo themselves . Significant-
122 • richard ke mpton •••••••
