appendix 3: dada influences

a p p e n d i x 3: d a d a i nfl u e n c e s

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 anticultural 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 influence 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 imparted 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 perspective 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 phenomenon comparable (in his words) " to the teachings of Socrates, the invention of printing, Halley's comet, or Dadaism. " Though later admitting that he may have been bombastic, nevertheless he continued to assert that at least the comparison with Dadaism was historically 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-

ly, he dedicates the 5th chapter in his book Het witte gevaar ( The White Danger) to a history of Dadaism, including generous quotes from Hulsenbeck, Hugo B all, Tristan Tzara, Hans (Jean) Arp, Raoul Haussmann, and Theo Van Doesburg. By far the most obvious Provo sympathizer of Dadaism is Robert Jasper Grootveld. Grootveld's performance activities vividly recall performance strategies exploited by the B erlin Dadaist Johannes B aader, the s elf-proclaimed " Ober-Dada" ( Supreme Dada) of the early 1 920s. According to Van Duyn, Baader was a prophetic monomaniac who proclaimed himself Jesus Christ returned to Earth. He wrote letters to the Kaiser and to the French government, and was arrested at the outbreak of World War I as a danger to the State. In 1 9 1 7 he was an unsucces sful candidate for parliament, and in 1 9 1 9 he broke up a meeting of the p arliament in Weimar when he threw copies of one of his pamphlets over the heads of the astonished legislators, an incident that made headlines in the German press . In the pamphlet, which was entitled Das Grune Leiche ( The Green Corpse) , he asked the German people if they were willing to give the Ober-Dada a free hand. He promised to bring them Order, Peace, Freedom, and B read - in November 1 9 1 8 he had caused an uproar in the Lutheran C athedral in Berlin when he yelled out in the midst of the s ervice that Jesus C hrist was a sausage. ( Pandemonium broke out and charges of blasphemy were brought against him . )

There is also a correlation between t h e language o f Grootveld's manifestos and the language used by the Dutch Dadaist Theo Van Doesburg. Van Doesburg is best remembered as the founder of " De Stijl" group. De Stijl was a Dutch version of Bauhau s . Its bestknown figure is Piet Mondriaan, noted for his beautiful primary-color paintings of black-edged rectangles in red , blue, yellow, and white. Van Doesburg painted, designed interiors, and did architectural work. At the s ame time, with the assistance of the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (who was not considered " Dada" by many of the German Dadaists) , he tirelessly attempted to introduce Dadaism into the Netherlands. He and Schwitters toured the country giving a series of riotous performances during which Schwitters barked like a dog to substitute for his lack of knowledge of the Dutch language . ( S e e Robert Motherwell's Dada Painters a n d Poets for a delightful account of two of these evenings. ) Van Doesburg also smuggled Dadaist poetry into the pages of De Stijl, the movement' s magazine under the pseudonyms of I. K. Bonset and Aldo Camini. With regard to Provo and Grootveld, Van Doesburg's most important text seems to be the fourteen-page manifesto " Wat is Dada?" Van Doesburg's language there seems to prefigure that of

..,. the manifestos that Grootveld delivered at the K. Temple and the .� "Cl Lieverdje , and the manifestos Simon Vinkenoog produced for some c QI of the happenings. Van Duyn devotes a page of Het witte gevaar to c. � quotes from " Wat is Dada?" In his manifesto, Van Doesburg put forth a version of Dada that did not believe in the spiritual content of life, art, religion, philosophy, or politic s , but insisted that they instead relied solely on publicity and the power of suggestion. People let themselves be manipulated by symbols that were repeated so often that they left an indelible impression: religion was represented by the Cross,

Nietzsche by his thick mustache, O scar Wilde by his homosexuality, and so on. Dada realize s , Van Doesburg declared, that through experience anyone can win over the masses as long as one appeals to their atavistic instincts through powerful well-publicized suggestions. According to Van Doesburg, Dada views every dogma or formula as a stopgap measure designed to keep afloat the sinking ship of Western civilization. Noting the fraud that sustains every aspect of civilization, Dada declares the world bankrupt. As presented by

Van Doesburg, Dada was the international expression of collective experience over the ten years preceding his manifesto, a reaction to the wanton destructiveness of World War I. Dada is " the most immediate expression of our formless times . . . . Dada does not have any aspirations for immortality . . . . Dada has always existed but was only discovered in our times. " Based on these stylistic similarities and person connections, it is clear that Dadaism was one model for action that influenced

Robert Jasper Grootveld; it was a model masterfully transmuted by this " Smoke Magician" and his Provo associates to affect the spirit of Amsterdam in the Sixties.

works referenced

Baljeu (1974); Van Duyn (1967); Motherwell (1951); Richter (1965); Schippers (1974)