Lipstick Traces (27 page)

Dada was a legend of freedom only after the fact; in the act it was a gnostic myth of the twentieth century.

It was a secret history not only of the Great War but of all the I-have-a-rendezvous-with-death poetry written to extract meaning from the war—on dada terms, to justify it. François Truffaut’s
Jules and Jim
is a version—with Jules and Jim, conventional bohemians, rational and passionate in their ways, both real people on the screen, and Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine, her face first glimpsed in a field of abandoned statues, dada: junk, unreal but irresistible, the fatal spell.

Much has been written about the Cabaret Voltaire as a protest against the war; the dadaists wrote a lot of it. Arp in 1948:

. . . disgusted by the butchery of World War I, we devoted ourselves to the Fine Arts. Despite the remote booming of artillery we sang, painted, pasted, and wrote poetry with all our might and main. We were seeking an elementary art to cure man of the frenzy of the times and a new order to restore the balance between heaven and hell. This art rapidly became a subject of general disapproval. It was not surprising to us that the “bandits” were unable to understand us. In their puerile megalomania and power-madness, they demanded that art itself must serve to brutalize mankind.

In other words, instead of war for war’s sake, or art for war’s sake, or even war for art’s sake, art for art’s sake, or anyway art for the good of humanity. Such notions might have made the papers in 1916, but they were
hardly the stuff of legend, let alone myth: rather, old-fashioned romanticism or knee-jerk bohemianism. Writing in 1920, Huelsenbeck had a different idea—or a different voice:

We had all left our countries as a result of the war . . . We were agreed that the war had been contrived by the various governments for the most autocratic, sordid and materialistic reasons; we Germans were familiar with the book
J’accuse,
and even without it we would have had little confidence in the decency of the German Kaiser and his generals. Ball was a conscientious objector, and I had escaped by the skin of my teeth from the pursuit of the police myrmidons who, for their so-called patriotic reasons, were massing men in the trenches of Northern France and giving them shells to eat. None of us had much appreciation for the kind of courage it takes to get shot for the idea of a nation which is at best a cartel of pelt merchants and profiteers in leather, at worst a cultural association of psychopaths who, like the Germans, marched off with a volume of Goethe in their knapsacks, to skewer Frenchmen and Russians on their bayonets.

That last sentence is pure dada, or at least the sort of dada this book pursues: a voice of teeth ground down to points, more suited to manifestos and hit singles than to poems, a near-absolute loathing of one’s time and place, the note held until disgust turns into glee. But as dada, that voice surfaced only in Berlin, in 1918 and for a year or two after. It was not the kind of dada one could have found in the Cabaret Voltaire, which this book also pursues. There, in 1916, an experiment was performed in which the language by which the war was justified was destroyed. In the story dada told, this destruction was a necessary preliminary to the discovery of a language so plain the very act of speaking it would grind one’s teeth down to points.

A disciple of Kandinsky—and a follower of Thomas Müntzer, Bakunin, and Kropotkin—Hugo Ball was always torn between defilement of authority and abasement before it. Experimenting with narcotics in 1915, he wrote in his diary: “I can imagine a time when I will seek obedience as much as I have tasted disobedience: to the full.” He reached for a private megalomania to set against the public megalomania of the epoch: “I could not live without the conviction that my own personal fate is an abbreviated version of the fate of the whole nation”—by which, as a good German philosopher, he meant the fate of the whole world.

Well before Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire, he wrote a dirty poem about the Virgin Mary, “Der Henker” (The Hangman). He wanted to fuck her, he said. But that was also before he began his diary, in which he testified that this was nothing.

I once used to carry a skull with me from city to city; I had found it in an old chapel. They had been digging up graves and had exposed hundred-year-old skeletons. They wrote the dead person’s name and birthplace on the top of the skull. They painted the cheekbones with roses and forget-me-nots. The
caput mortuum
that I carried with me for years was the head of a girl who had died in 1811 at the age of twenty-two. I was in fact madly in love with the hundred-and-thirty-three-year old girl and could hardly bear to part from her . . . This living head here

(Emmy Hennings, from 1913 Ball’s mistress, after 1920 his wife, after 1927 his widow)

reminds me of that dead one. When I look at the girl, I want to take some paint and paint flowers on her hollow cheeks.

Certain passages from Ball’s diary appear in almost every history of dada; this one never does.

Ball defined the terms of the Cabaret Voltaire in advance. On 25 November 1915 he wrote:

People who live rashly and precipitately easily lose control over their impressions and are prey to unconscious emotions and motives. The activity of any art (painting, writing, composing) will do them good, provided that they do not pursue any purpose in their subjects, but follow the course of a free, unfettered imagination. The independent process of fantasy never fails to bring to light again those things that have crossed the threshold of consciousness without analysis. In an age like ours, when people are assaulted daily by the most monstrous things without being able to keep account of their impressions, aesthetic production becomes a prescribed course. But all living art will be irrational, primitive, and complex; it will speak a secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox.

Seven decades on, this translates easily—but as with Arp and Huelsenbeck on dada as protest, one has to pare away the conventional to find the element around which the story turns. First off there is borrowed Freudianism—art as psychoanalysis, art as cure, plus enlightened solipsism versus brainwashed mass society. The embrace of the irrational and primitive is just 1915 cafe talk: a blurb for expressionism and cubism, a leap on the band-wagon of Filippo Marinetti’s then-hot futurism, a ride leading straight to Breton’s surrealism. But Ball’s last words—“it will speak a secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox”—remain strange. This was what Lefebvre would respond to. It was the heart of the vaudeville show, a reach for the gnostic myth; everyone who made it felt it.

They were never masters of the paradox, but simply messengers—or, as the years went on, victims. For the rest of their lives (save for Ball, the members of the Cabaret Voltaire sextet lived a long time) they returned again and again to their few days in the Zurich bar. They tried to understand what happened to them. They never got over it.

This is the best evidence—the only real evidence—that something actually happened in Zurich in the spring of 1916, something the art-history version of dada can only cover up.

From the beginning it was commonplace to hear punk described as dada.
Here are the lines that got me interested, written by Isabelle Anscombe in 1978: “Punk must be willing to reject itself as it becomes established, to be open to change and to forgo the profits. It is a mode of anarchy as much as the Dadaist ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ at the end of the First World War, and how many people are particularly familiar with that?” A lot of people, it turned out: Andrew Czezowski, who ran the Roxy, told reporters it was “a sort of new Cabaret Voltaire.” Plenty of punks had done time in that traditional spawning ground of U.K. rock bands, the state-run art school. Punk made the dailies as “dole-queue rock”; it made the monthlies as “another art-school demo.”

Still, Anscombe was working on an idea, and opposed to literary references ideas about punk and dada were almost nonexistent as she wrote. In London or New York in the late 1970s dada meant what it meant in Paris and New York at the end of the First World War: a not-quite-naked prank, a jape clothed in the barest g-string of aesthetic authority, a Bronx cheer in three-part harmony, Tzara’s affirmation of the right “to piss and shit in different colors.” It meant Arthur Cravan getting up to deliver a lecture and dropping his pants, a young John Lennon urinating from a Hamburg balcony onto a passing line of nuns (“Let’s baptize ’em”), the Sex Pistols saying “fuck” on TV. Dada meant a charming gratuitous act amenable to some future art-historical homage—as opposed to the uncharming simplest-surrealist-act, Breton’s man shooting blindly into a crowd, which, since no surrealist ever did anything of the kind, devolves into this sort of dada, into a literary reference, where it meets Zed, a punk gang leader played by Bob Goldthwait in the 1985 film
Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment.

In his mid-twenties, but seemingly superannuated—fat, balding, sweating, drooling—Zed heads thugs signed as punks by their multicolored hair and studded leather, by 1985 the diffused and floating signs of London 1976. They terrorize a neighborhood for lack of anything else to do with it. Zed is so full of rage he can barely talk: you can feel his vocal cords breaking up every time he opens his mouth.

He’s a cuddly anarchist, blithering but lovable. When he tells the mayor “
I-VOTED-FOR-YOU
!” while his gang trashes her community-outreach street fair, when he says “
THANK-YOU-VERY-MUCH-YOU
’
VE-GOTTA-LOTTA-NICE-BARGAINS-HERE
!” after they’ve unloaded a supermarket, there’s not a hint
of sarcasm—on some level, he’s completely sincere. He wants the mayor to drop dead of shock; he also wants her to like him. “Be reasonable,” a cop begs him. “
I-HATE-REASONABLE
!” he screams; you feel for him. He’s just a boy who can’t say yes; any art critic could pin him as dada, just as in 1965 every art critic pinned Andy Warhol as “neo-dada.” “Dada is a tomato,” said one Paris dada manifesto. “To wear a tomato in your lapel is to be a dadaist,” said another. Textbook dada in a phrase: absurd negation that wants no consequences. Unless it’s the kind Zed’s antics produced: in
Police Academy 3
he became a cop himself.

In the late 1970s punk-as-dada did not even mean this much. It meant the history-in-nutshell parallels always needed to explain something new, or explain it away: wasn’t there a British band that called itself “Cabaret Voltaire”? Didn’t Talking Heads set a Hugo Ball sound poem to music on their third lp? Every book on dada told the story of Kurt Schwitters combing his Hanover streets for cigarette butts and discarded concert tickets to stick into his collages; the formal dada theory that art could be made out of anything matched the formal punk theory that anyone could make art (“Here are three chords,” read the famous notes to a diagram in
Sniffin’ Glue,
the first U.K. punk fanzine—“now form a band”). “The Dadaist logic of sucking in all the trivia, the rubbish and the cast-offs of the world and then stamping a new meaning on the assemblage,” ran a typical gloss on Tzara’s recipe for dada poetry (cut words out of a newspaper, shake in a bag, paste at random on a page), “was there both in punk’s music and sartorial regime.” It was true: there were punk songs about cigarette butts, and a ’77 London punk jacket could look like a 1918 Berlin dada collage. Why, though? And so what? Why form a band?

Historical validation turns every no into a yes if the no can be footnoted, just as those who are always happier to announce the death of something than be present at its birth have mastered the knack of turning a casual aside into an embrace of the whole social order. Yes, the safety pin Jamie Reid put through H.R.H.’s lips in his “God Save the Queen” graphic harked back even more loudly to Duchamp’s defaced
Mona Lisa
than to
the May ’68 Atelier populaire poster—but Johnny Rotten had not said the word “dada” since he was two.

No one tried to use dada to find the limits of punk, or vice versa: to start a conversation between the past and the present, to wonder just how it is that an idea jumps a sixty-year gap, or burrows under it. Instead there was a setup. The dada aesthetic went into the books as “anti-art”; punk was “anti-rock.” The basic dada act was understood to be the performer’s attack on the audience; punks swore and spit from the stage. Like punk, except for a few favored saints dada refused all ancestors: “I’m not even interested in knowing if anyone existed before me,” Tzara announced, quoting Descartes. You could find the footnotes in the songs: “Anti-art was the start,” as Poly Styrene sang.