February 8, 1916, birth of Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire, in Zurich.
February 21, 1916, the Germans launch their offensive on Verdun.

Coincidence such that one could seriously wonder if Dada was born from the war, or the war from Dada. It is certain that the first protagonists, and not the least, wanted to overcome the international conflict in favor of their own freedom of creation. Thus Hugo Ball, writing in Cabaret Voltaire, first issue of a review that announced the advent of Dada and a review of the same name that was to: "specify the activity of this Cabaret whose goal is to remind that there are, beyond war and homelands, independent men who live by other ideals."

Why "Dada"? What did this childish-looking term mean? Who "invented" it? Let's abandon any search for paternity, which no longer makes any sense today, but observe that, beyond words, in this historical context, it is the act, the gesture that counts, expressing the fed-upness of youth from all countries.

A hundred years later, the commemoration of the Battle of Verdun comes at the right time to remind us of what hell on earth was. That in France, the right, faithful to itself, took advantage of it to gesticulate, is not surprising. On the other hand, one remains stunned by the welcome given to the various events devoted to Dada today, if only by the city of Zurich, the banking center of Europe, which had not accustomed us to so much consideration.

We know, roughly, the different phases of this movement that lived in several countries, more precisely in several cities (Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, etc.) between 1916 and 1923. Strangely, it responds exactly to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, according to which, the more the position of a particle is determined, the less its speed will be measured with precision, and vice versa. In other words, the more details we have on one of the groups claiming Dada, the less we perceive its relations with the central nucleus, and the more we lose sight of its objectives. It has often been said that Dada proved the movement by walking.

Let's enumerate, briefly, some of its major characteristics. The Movement, by definition, is a collective of artists and poets. It groups together, originally, stateless persons, refugees, deserters fleeing the war towards a neutral and peaceful country. They all have one thing in common: they advance in life with rage in their hearts. Whatever their political opinions and their position with respect to the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, they define themselves as rebels, anarchists, autistic tendency. Their political education is rarely thorough, with the possible exception of the Berliners, of whom it is said that some fired shots alongside the Spartacists.

Opposed to the war, they are nevertheless not pacifists, not measuring their sarcasms against Romain Rolland ("Above the fray") and his thurifers such as Ivan Goll, who complains about it publicly.

One thing is certain: they were all internationalists, which explains, subsequently, their little taste for the Stalinist thesis of socialism in one country. Anticipating a little, one could say that Dada puts into practice the opposite thesis, since it spreads over several continents, up to Japan!

Unlike all other literary or artistic groupings, there is no command center. No leader, no "President", or rather, "everyone is president", as Tzara indicates to Man Ray when the latter asks him for permission to entitle New York Dada the review he wishes to found in the United States in the company of Marcel Duchamp.

No Central Bureau, I was saying, no structured organization, but source-men, and passers-by. Tzara, who makes it a point to organize exhibitions in Zurich for artists belonging to belligerent countries (and he succeeds!), who can enter into contact with Germans, French, Italians and even Americans... Huelsenbeck, returned to Berlin at the end of 1916, communicates the good news to the avant-garde youth and ends up organizing the Dada Club... Picabia, who jumps over meridians and puts some in contact with others.

Despite his enthusiasm for allogenous cultures and for the most curious implantations, Dada defines itself, after all, as European. I would even say more European than were, at the time, the organizations militating for a Europe transcending the nations that compose it. This was easy for him, insofar as he wanted to ignore any border, virtual or real.

In any case, wherever it rages, Dada is part of the avant-garde. It is itself the avant-garde, since it subscribes to the constitutive political principle of any avant-garde since Baudelaire. Not by rallying to an existing or future political party, but by taking on its own account (and by twisting it to its advantage) the Baudelairian formula according to which "to be just, that is to say to have its raison d'être, criticism must be partial, passionate, political, that is to say made from an exclusive point of view, but from the point of view that opens the most horizons." (Salon of 1846)

This begins with the radical contestation of institutions and all academicisms. Let's think of Marcel Duchamp's famous Fountain (1917), this ready-made exhibited at the Society of Independent Artists of New York in the name of the very principles of this organization, as he had done in Paris in 1912 for the Nude Descending a Staircase, refused by the Society of Independent Artists.

No programs, but key texts, proclamation-manifestos, which drain a whole public, such as the famous "Dada Manifesto 1918" by Tzara. He affirms there that he wants nothing, but says it so well that he leads to Breton's adherence and with him the whole Littérature group. Same for the Dada Manifesto in German, proclaimed by Raoul Hausmann, parody of President Wilson's thirteen points, where Louis Janover nevertheless perceives some positive options: "Under the creed with Ubu-esque accents, the measures and 'abolitions' proposed, sprinkled with frankly comical demands, can be heard as a limit exaggeration of demands by no means delirious in themselves: 'international and revolutionary association of creators and intellectuals of the whole world on the basis of radical communism', 'progressive introduction of unemployment by the generalized mechanization of all activities', 'immediate abolition of all property', struggle against 'the hidden bourgeois spirit' but still active in cultural circles, of expressionism notably, 'abolition of the concept of property in the new art', etc. (1)".

Dada gives back its primacy to the individual, which does not exclude collective action. By refusing the institution in favor of direct action (still mediated by the press), it runs the double risk:

1- of exhaustion in the constant renewal to reconstitute a network with indefinite contours;

2- of freezing in repetition, which would have led it to become an institution by itself.

Dada has known both dangers. It quickly understood that it was running to its loss, hence its brevity and voluntary death.

Beforehand, it had reached its primary objective, which was to establish, in its own way, the Tabula rasa as a methodological principle: to make the void to give free rein to novelty; to suppress the past in order to think freely. In this sense, we understand the appearance of Descartes on the first page of Dada 3. Descartes over Kant, by means of an integral and assumed confusionism. In short, Dada is never happier than when it has deceived everyone, as the reaction of the exacerbated public proves to it, furious at having been fooled.

Most often, the public is deceived by the fact that the artist it knows to be part of a given aesthetic grouping finds himself under the Dada banner. Thus, in Berlin, one can affirm that there were Dada-Marxists as well as Dada-expressionists; and the same Van Doesburg, holder of constructivism, will sign I.K. Bonset his contributions to Dada!

Unlike what we usually do when we talk about literature or art, in this case, we must take into account individual dissimilarities rather than similarities: this is what makes the originality of the Movement, its richness. In his journal, The Flight Out of Time, Hugo Ball observes with interest, to mark the productivity of such a process, that, according to the days, rapprochements are made sometimes with some, sometimes with others, the essential being that all maintain a minimum of understanding between them, a common will to identify with Dada, which, in return, identifies with them: "We are five and the remarkable fact is that we are never really in perfect agreement, even if we agree on the main objectives. The constellations change. Sometimes Arp and Huelsenbeck agree and seem inseparable, sometimes Arp and Janco unite their forces against H., then H. and Tzara against Arp, etc. There is a perpetual movement of attraction and repulsion. An idea, a gesture, a certain nervousness is enough to modify the constellation without however upsetting the small group. (2)" The same back and forth reproduces itself at the international level, constituting a set of nodes of relations over the borders, in other words a network, with loose and mobile meshes.

Certain groups will recognize themselves in Dada, a posteriori: the Russian "nitchevoki", Iliazd and his 41°, Clément Pansaers with the review Ça ira, the Spaniards Guillermo de Torre, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Jacques Edwards... Better still, the presence of late centers in Antwerp, Amsterdam, in Hungary with the review Ma, in Poland, etc. is reported.

Historians wonder if it is legitimate to apply, today, a label that was not claimed at the time. But, I think, we must take into account the great confusion maintained and wanted by Dada, which makes it very difficult for us to catalog, to designate the invariants of such or such movement. To the point that this confusion, each time we encounter it, associated with other constants, legitimizes the Dada appellation.

Proclaiming the dictatorship of the spirit, this movement embodies the uprising of life, of youth, desirous of living after having rid itself of the deathly forces. I have already signaled the individualism of these artists that friendship alone can unite, for the time of a brilliant action. We are therefore not surprised to see them quarrel for petty reasons, reconcile immediately for what, most of the time, exceeds them.

It is humor (with or without H, if one is a friend of Jacques Vaché) that transcends their remarks and actions. Tzara will moreover declare that, without humor, poetry, which is life, is not worth living.

The end of Dada is relatively indeterminate, according to the chronotopes considered. Some literally exploded, each of their members adopting the solution of his choice: faith, grocery or suicide. Others took refuge in silence, when they did not get lost there forever. Others reappeared under the surrealist hypostasis. Besides offering an honorable way out to these rebels tired of repeating themselves, we must recognize that surrealism truly engaged in a takeover bid on what remained of its predecessor!

Elsewhere, let's not forget the political context, the Italians turned towards fascism or anti-fascism, the Germans had to enter seriously organized organisms to avoid generalized auto-da-fé, etc.

What remained then of this explosion of youth? If there were only laughter and humor, it would already be a positive balance, especially when compared to that of politicians, or even to the "return to order" advocated by the well-thinking! But there is much more: the systematic and reasoned practice of incoherence opened the doors of the unconscious to them. I mean that they knew how to foil the all-powerful censorship of the superego to better dive into the black river. It is indeed the scientists who have explored, with appropriate techniques, the meanders of this watercourse, which they have considered individually or collectively. But, as Gaston Bachelard proved a decade later, it was necessary for poets and plastic artists to engage in the adventure for scientists to draw their lessons from it.

Finally, we should not minimize the omnipotence of chance, which is at the origin of so many new works and practices, systematized, such as Man Ray's rayographs, or Christian Schad's schadographs, and so many collages or innumerable montages, more disorienting than others.

It is on such a background that we must appreciate the raison d'être and quality of the centenary manifestations of Dada.

While the commemorative mania tends to fade collectively, one is not a little surprised to see associations forming devoted to celebrating the infernal machine that was Dada. What's more, in the very places where it arose, while the Zurich officials had not distinguished themselves, previously, by their zeal in favor of Dada!

Without enumerating all the presentations of the Movement since its more or less noted death, it is appropriate to mention the fiftieth anniversary exhibition, in Zurich and Paris, in 1966-67, which, the first, demonstrated, against the old Dadaists, that it was worth collecting the scattered pieces of their initial explosion. Closer to us, the Centre Pompidou exhibition, in 2005, did not pretend any historical justification, which allowed it to show, through a labyrinthine route, the largest set of textual, plastic or sound works ever assembled.

The year 2016 did not start with a bang for Dada. But the press attachés had taken care to inform their interlocutors of a whole program of activities that were to begin in February, and take place in Zurich, its birthplace, in Berlin or in Paris. In parallel, military and political people focused on the centenary of Verdun, battlefield where 700,000 soldiers from both camps perished. The contrast remains striking between this morbid atmosphere of the commemoration of Verdun, despite the youthful staging of the old filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff, and that of Zurich, vigorous, full of vitality, a true hymn to joy.

In the impossibility of commenting on each of these events, I will distinguish three, among the most representative and most significant.

First, I will detach this reading, at dawn, and for 165 days, of Dada works by the director of the Cabaret Voltaire. It happens that an anonymous listener, taken to the guts by the morning ceremony in the forest, was so upset by it that he decided to transform his life, henceforth entirely devoted to Dada. He confided to me, speaking to me, this upheaval in his way of living and acting with his fellows. Apart from this personal investment, it should be specified that the Cabaret Voltaire premises, recently rehabilitated by the city, has become both a place of memory and the most lively cultural bistro in the neighborhood, with its conferences and shows that revolve around Dada, because it is frequented by school youth.

Another remarkable event: the attempt to reconstitute the Dada anthology that was to be Dadaglobe. It had been entrusted to Tzara by the Siren editions, on the model of the Negro Anthology made by Blaise Cendrars in 1921. Due to the too many illustrations entrusted by the Dadaists, the project failed for lack of means. But the documents had not disappeared: a good number of texts or poems found themselves at the Jacques Doucet Literary Library, which we had previously published in the Dada-Surrealism review, n° 1. American, the art historian Adrian Sudhalter set out to gather the maximum of complementary documents for an exhibition in Zurich then in New York. Once again, the thesis expressed by Max Ernst, according to which it was useless to collect Dada debris, was put in check.

Thirdly, I will retain the "DADA Africa" exhibition addressing, for the first time in such an official context, a subject little studied until now: the discovery of cultures and "primitive arts" by the Dadaists. Materials, forms, texts and music from Africa, Oceania, Asia and America served as a source of inspiration and reference for the two coexisting tendencies of the movement, abstraction on the one hand, "primitivism" on the other. Fruit of the cooperation of the Rietberg Museum of Zurich and the Berlin museum Berlinische Galerie, we perceive there especially the touch of the Berlin curators, well informed of North-South civilization contacts.

I could not leave these acts of memory without mentioning the considerable efforts of the Romanians to bring back the prodigal child, both Tzara and Dada, to the bosom of Bucharest. We know what to expect regarding Tristan Tzara, who did not compose more than a quintet of poems in Romanian, entrusted before his departure to his friend Ion Vinea, charged with valuing them as best as possible among the avant-garde reviews. The exhibition, under the title Tzara, Dada, etc., of his plastic and poetic works held by the collector Emilian Radu remains no less moving. For Romania having become a democracy again, it is indeed a question of reappropriating what, in its sense, should never have escaped it. Hence the multiplication of colloquiums, exhibitions, editions, having for objective to show the Romanian roots of the works that flourished outside.

I have kept for the end the most important event, the exhibition devoted to Tristan Tzara alone. It took place at the Museum of Modern Art in Strasbourg, from September 24 of last year to January 17, 2016. Its exact title was: Tristan Tzara, the approximate man, poet, art writer, collector. Starting from the wink to his major epic, emphasis was placed on the three lines of force of his activity. The fact is all the more notable as it was the first large-scale national exhibition devoted to the poet.

The use of monographic exhibitions for painters is perfectly established for more than a century: it suffices to hang their pictorial production on a wall, in the way most appropriate to the work in question. But what about poets? We can, at most, present the different states of a work, from manuscript to final realization, to the book to say everything. A bit limited in visual matter, isn't it? Except to divert the problem by pointing to biography, with the help of photographs and period documents, or by relying on perfectly visible sets, paintings elaborated by painter friends. Fortunately, Tzara, who was a painter in his time (we didn't know it since nothing of this plastic activity had appeared to date), published about fifty booklets adorned with a work engraved by a friend, chosen among the most known of the time. Besides the presentation of these books, opened to the ad hoc page, it was justified to show the paintings relating to them, in one way or another.

The curators opted for a route following the chronological order, undoubtedly the most acceptable in the eyes of a public, it must be admitted, generally ignorant of Tzara's work, when he does not reduce it to his Dada period (1916-1923)! Other choices were possible, thematic for example, but let's not spoil our pleasure! Finally Tzara spoke alone, at the forefront of all and for all. According to the press, the public very favorably welcomed this exhibition, accompanied by various animations. Belatedly, but surely, the poet returns to the forefront of the scene, as formerly in the time of Dada.

Henri BÉHAR

1. Louis Janover, La Révolution surréaliste, op. cit. p. 43.

2. Hugo Ball: La Fuite hors du temps, 24-V-1917.