Lipstick Traces (32 page)

It was a moment of panic: Ball suddenly realized he didn’t understand what the costume was demanding of him, didn’t recognize the audience, didn’t know what his empty words (“blago bung / blago bung / bosso fataka”) didn’t mean. In his terror, he felt himself drawn back to the cadences of a priest celebrating the mass as he, little Hugo, knelt with his mother and father two decades before; the years rose up, then died. It was a moment of hubris and fear that took Ball straight out of dada, opened the road back to the church, and, eventually, got him on TV.

By the time Huelsenbeck gave his Danzig lecture (it was no lecture, none of the events described ever happened, but the words in roman type are from his 1920 pamphlet
En avant dado),
thanks to the holes punched in his eyes in the Cabaret Voltaire he had seen it all, far more than he ever wanted to see. As time went on he saw it again and again. “The dadaist is a man of reality who loves wine, women and advertising,” he said in 1920; soon enough advertising would be dada, dada would be everywhere he looked, dogging his footsteps, and so like the rest he would run from it. The great goal of dissolving all boundaries between art and life would be realized, which meant there was nothing left to do but contemplate the strange way in which the realization of the great goal had not granted everyday life the transformative power of art, but only dissolved art’s power and produced nothing to replace it, contemplate that, or talk about the legend, for a fee, those days in Zurich,
I was there
—or remember that before there was dada, there was an ad for Dada Shampoo.

In 1980 Bob Acraman advertised a vacation package at a New Belsen theme park, and a wire service picked up the story. By then the word dada was in the dictionaries, artists from all countries claimed it, there were quarterlies and conferences, archives and revivals, but if dada lived it was in such novelty items buried in the daily papers, weird tales that blew up the frank-exchange-of-views prose of front-page propaganda, or never touched it—Bob Acraman, not Andy Warhol, was the real neo-dadaist, even if on this level too dada was a replica of itself: old news. After all—it was only 1921 when the Basel
News
offered its readers a package tour to the battlefields of Verdun, promising “the quintessence of the horrors of modern warfare,” real life as modern art, “unforgettable impressions” of destroyed villages, “enormous cemeteries containing hundreds of thousands of fallen
men,” and every body was doing it, doing it, doing it, first come first served:

Not only to the French mind is [Verdun] the battlefield
par excellence
on which the enormous struggle between France and Germany was finally decided . . . If the entire war cost France 1,400,000 dead, almost one third of that number fell in the sector of Verdun, which comprises but a few square kilometers. The Germans suffered more than twice the number of casualties there. In this small area, where more than a million men—perhaps a million and a half—bled to death, there is not a square centimeter of soil that was not exploded by grenades. Afterwards the traveler should cover the battlefields of the Argonne Forest, the river Somme, wander through the ruins of Reims, returning via St. Mihiel and the Priest Forest: but everything merely repeats

umbah, umbah—

details which at Verdun combine into an unprecedentedly phenomenal panorama of horror and dread . . . wine and coffee and gratuities included.

The great Vienna critic Karl Kraus was appalled. “I am holding in my hand a document which transcends and seals all the shame of this age and would in itself suffice to assign the currency stew that calls itself mankind a place of honor in a cosmic carrion pit,” he wrote. “After the monstrous collapse of the fiction of culture . . . [the age] has nothing left but the naked truth of its condition, so that it has almost reached the point where it is no longer capable of lying.” Kraus’s first sentence was Huelsenbeck’s kind of language, his second, Ball’s, but Kraus was not a dadaist; he was simply saying what he meant. Fifty-six years after he wrote, the Sex Pistols would offer him an answer record, “Holidays in the Sun” (Bomb sites! Hitler’s Bunker! The Berlin Wall! Wine and coffee and gratuities not included!)—and by what means was it that a line from the Basel
News
to Karl Kraus to excursion rates for Auschwitz cattle cars to the Sex Pistols to Bob Acraman pieced itself together? This is the history the dadaists were fighting and the history they were acting out, all of it appearing on the stage at the same time; to reduce the age and its language to the point where it was no longer capable of lying, even if that meant it would no longer be capable of speaking,
had been precisely their goal. Had they been there at the end of the line they would have been in ecstasy, convulsed by the thrill of having been proved right. Then they would have thrown up—but dada would still be laughing. To be a dadaist was to be a man of reality who loved wine, women, and advertising; to have a smile on your lips, a song in your heart, and a skull in your pocket.

By January 1917 Huelsenbeck was in Berlin, a dada courier. There he would join with new comrades who were almost as mean as he was: Raoul Hausmann, Walter Mehring, Franz Jung, George Grosz, Johannes Baader, Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde. After the “health resort” of Zurich, Huelsenbeck exulted, Berlin was real life: “Fear was in everybody’s bones.” All authority was collapsing, which meant that anything was possible, that anyone could be shot down in any street.

Destruction beckoned. “In 1917 the Germans were beginning to give a great deal of thought to their souls,” Huelsenbeck wrote of the last days of the war. “This was only a natural defense on the part of a society that had been harassed, milked dry, and driven to the breaking point . . . A phenomenon familiar in German history was again manifested: Germany will always become a land of poets and thinkers when it begins to understand that it has mismanaged itself as a land of judges and hangmen.” Thus came the Omphaloskepsist-Himmelists: the expressionists, who “pulled people gently by the sleeve and led them into the half-light of the Gothic cathedrals, where the street noises die down to a distant murmur and, in accord with the old principle that all cats are gray in the dark, men without exception are fine fellows.” Expressionism performed the magic trick of taking Germany inward and heavenward at the same time, so the new Berlin Dada Club countered with magic of its own: the word.

That was all they had: “dada,” a thousand times and a thousand different ways,
mene mene tekel upharsin
dropped down into a two-step (“Dadatrott,” they named the dance, thoughtfully publishing photos demonstrating exactly how to do it). They trumpeted the word as the great mystery, secreting it in the corners of paintings where people turned into monsters
and machines; they left it dripping on walls. Launching the word like a rocket out of their cut-ups and collages, printing it up on handbills, wearing it on sandwich boards and on their clothes, shouting it in the streets or on stage, they claimed it as the most obvious fact. The word became the Modifier, no other word capable of meaning without “dada” attached to it, no other word able to hold its meaning with “dada” riding on its back. Crowds came to hear it happen, to watch the void be conjured up: “Now,” Huelsenbeck said, “they were suddenly confronted with people who deliberately severed the process of communication, the causal nexus between payment and ware, between expectation and fulfillment.” Hausmann broke the sound poems Huelsenbeck brought from Zurich into letter poems; the dictatorship of the phoneme was overthrown. Even names split and reformed: “groszfield,” “hearthaus,” “georgemann.” The dadaists ruled an invisible empire, so they took titles: “Marschalldada” (Grosz, who cultivated his resemblance to a Prussian Junker), “Monteurdada” (Heartfield, the photo-montagist), “Progress-dada” (Herzfelde, a Communist), “Dadasoph” (Hausmann, “the philosopher,” the word perhaps taken to mask his Neandertal brow), “Oberdada” (Baader, who thought he ruled the world), “Meisterdada” (Huelsenbeck).

Dada became a game; powered by a loathing so strong at times it was all but undifferentiated, dada became fun. Throwing off all vestiges of aesthetics, philosophy, ethics, dada became what perhaps it had always wanted to be: merely a voice, a sound. The voice battered itself against the walls of honor and decency, looking for limits, finding none. When Huelsenbeck, speaking the dada language of backward and forward so fast not even he knew what he was saying, announced that “We were for the war and Dadaism today is still for war. Life must hurt,” there were mutilated veterans in the audience. But on the stage behind him there were no aesthetes like Arp, no careerists like Tzara, no Catholics like Ball to stop the show to ask what it all meant: the momentum was all toward spleen. The most arresting images the group left behind are mouths, Hausmann’s or Heartfield’s, open, teeth bared, words or letters spewing forth like giant microbes: We
will drown you out.

Like the extraterrestrial slime in
The Creeping Unknown,
the 1954 film that preceded
Five Million Years to Earth
in the Quatermass series, dada
in Berlin began as a speck, and expanded until it swallowed the city; so it went, in the invisible empire. When in 1918 the time came for Huelsenbeck and Hausmann to ask “What is Dadaism and what does it want in Germany?,” the answer was self-evident:

Dadaism demands . . .

The introduction of progressive unemployment through comprehensive mechanization of every field of activity. Only by unemployment does it become possible for the individual to achieve certainty as to the truth of life and finally become accustomed to experience . . .

The Central Council demands . . .

Compulsory adherence of all clergymen and teachers to the Dadaist articles of faith . . .

The immediate erection of a state art center, elimination of concepts of property in the new art (expressionism); the concept of property is entirely excluded from the super-individual movement of Dadaism which liberates all mankind;

Introduction of the simultaneist poem as a Communist state prayer;

Establishment of a Dadaist advisory council for the remodeling of life in every city of over 50,000 inhabitants;

Immediate organization of a large scale Dadaist propaganda campaign with 150 circuses for the enlightenment of the proletariat;

Submission of all laws and decrees to the Dadaist central council for approval;

Immediate regulation of all sexual relations according to the views of international Dadaism through establishment of a Dadaist sexual center.

It sounds familiar because two decades later all Germany would be living it out. Hausmann always thought it was a joke, he said after the Nazis had come and gone; he was never sure about Huelsenbeck. “The significance of this program,” Huelsenbeck wrote in 1920, was dada as “no more than an expression of the times,” taking “into itself all their knowledge, their breathless tempo, their skepticism, but also their weariness, their despair of a meaning or a ‘truth.’ ” But that wasn’t it at all, he said as an old man, speaking to his friend Hans J. Kleinschmidt: he had wanted to change society. “There was a moment in Berlin when I would have accepted the help of the Devil to accomplish it,” he remembered, but the devil was otherwise occupied; all Huelsenbeck left behind was a legend, which he carried with him the rest of his life. “
NO
!
NO
!
NO
!,” he said in one of his milder Berlin moments. “The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.” Dada was to be the art, and also the explosion, and then another, called up by the art of yesterday’s crash. There was to be no end to dada.