Dada Bodies: Between Battlefield and Fairground 1526131145, 9781526131140

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Cover image: Hannah Höch, Die Süsse (The Sweet One). Museum Folkwang, Essen. © DACS, London, 2017.

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Between battlefield and fairground

Elza Adamowicz is Professor Emerita of French Literature and Visual Culture at Queen Mary University of London

Dada bodies

Between battlefield and fairground

Dada bodies

Dada bodies takes an international and interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing the movement’s various centres and diverse media. Richly illustrated with colour images of the works discussed, it will appeal to scholars and students of European cultural history, art and literature, as well as the interested general reader.

Dada bodies

This is the first study to focus critical attention on Dada’s limit-forms of the human image. It confronts them not as organic, integrated unities but as fictional constructs, revealing how they operate as a reflection of the disjunctive, dehumanised society of war-torn Europe while simultaneously promoting the blueprint of a possible future body. Through detailed analyses of works by Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Hannah Höch, Marcel Duchamp and others, the book offers an original and lively survey of the topic, informed by recent theoretical and critical perspectives. The result is a reassessment of Dada, which is shown to occupy an ambivalent space between the battlefield – in the satirical exposure of ideological lies – and the fairground – in the playful manipulation of the body through laughter, dream and dance.

Adamowicz

Representations of the human form are central to Dada, whether iconoclastic or grotesque, assembled from disparate elements or reduced to a fragment. They can be read as a subversion of the classical body or a response to bodies mutilated by war, but they always defy a single, cohesive explanation.

Elza Adamowicz

Dada bodies

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Dada bodies Between battlefield and fairground

Elza Adamowicz

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Elza Adamowicz 2019 The right of Elza Adamowicz to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 3114 0 hardback

First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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Man lost his divine countenance, became matter, chance, an aggregate animal, the lunatic product of thoughts quivering abruptly and ineffectually. Hugo Ball (1996: 223) When we have broken with the old world and are not yet able to form the new world, satire, the grotesque, caricature, the clown and the doll appear; and the profound meaning of these forms of expression, by showing their marionettelike quality and their apparent and real solidification, will make us feel and guess another life. Raoul Hausmann (1921: 285) Le corps humain est un champ de guerre où il serait bon que nous revenions. Antonin Artaud (1946)

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Contents

List of figures page viii Acknowledgementsxv 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Introduction: spare parts Zurich Dada: between gas mask and carnival dance Shooting the classical body Hybrid bodies (I): the impossible machine Hybrid bodies (II): the grotesque Performance spaces: fairground, cabaret, exhibition Death and rebirth: corpse or chrysalis Fluid bodies, shifting identities Dada’s Africa Limit-bodies Conclusion: exquisite corpses

1 22 46 70 92 115 141 164 192 207 230

Bibliography240 Index253

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Figures

All dimensions are given in centimetres. 1.1 Max Ernst, Jeune chimère (Young Chimera, c.1921), collage, gouache and ink on paper, 29 x 9, private collection. © ADAGP, Paris page 2 and DACS, London, 2017. 1.2 Francis Picabia, Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity, 1915), drawing, 3 in 291 5–6, 4. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 2.1 Umberto Boccioni, Carica dei Lancieri (Charge of the Lancers, 1915), tempera and collage, 32 x 50, private collection. Photograph: 24 wikimedia commons. 2.2 Fernand Léger, La Partie de cartes (Soldiers Playing Cards, 1917), oil on canvas, 129 x 193. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017.25 2.3 Marcel Janco, Masque (1919), assemblage of paper, cardboard, string, gouache and pastel, 45 x 22 x 5, MNAM, Centre Pompidou, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 34 2.4 Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire (1916). Courtesy of Kunsthaus Zurich.36 2.5 Sophie Taeuber, Smeraldina, from König Hirsch (1918). 38 2.6 Photograph of Sophie Taeuber dancing with Marcel Janco mask (1916–17). Berlin/Rolandswerth: Stiftung Arp e.V. 40 2.7 Photograph of Mary Wigman, Der Zeltweg (1919). 40 3.1 Francis Picabia, La Nuit espagnole (Spanish Night, 1922), enamel paint on canvas, 162.5 x 131. Courtesy of Museum Ludwig, Cologne. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 47 3.2 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Source (1856), oil on

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3.3 3.4

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figures ix

canvas, 163 x 80, Paris, Musée du Louvre, bequest of Countess Duchâtel. On loan to the Musée d’Orsay from 1986. 47 Francis Picabia, Tableau Dada (Still Life), Cannibale 1 (1920), 11. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 51 Francis Picabia, La Feuille de vigne (The Fig Leaf, 1922), oil on canvas, 200 x 160, Tate London. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017. Photo © Tate, London, 2018. 54 Francis Picabia, cover of Littérature 2:10 (1923). © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 56 Man Ray, Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), photograph, reproduced in Littérature 13 (June 1924), 4. © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 58 Johannes Theodor Baargeld, Typische Vertikalklitterung als Darstellung des Dada Baargeld (Typical Vertical Mess as Depiction of the Dada Baargeld, 1920), photomontage on cardboard, 37 x 27.5, Graphische Sammlung, Kunsthaus Zurich. 60 George Grosz, Der neue Mensch (New Man, 1921), watercolour, ink and pencil on paper, 50.8 x 34.6. © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ/DACS, London, 2017. 62 Cover of Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (1919). National Art Library, London.63 Max Ernst, La Santé par le sport (1920), photograph of photomontage, Kunsthaus Zurich. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 64 Tristan Tzara, ‘Boxe’, SIC 42–3 (March–April 1919), p. 325. 65 Francis Picabia, Fille née sans mère (Girl Born Without a Mother, 1916–17), gouache and metallic paint on printed paper, 50 x 65, National Galleries of Scotland. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 74 Francis Picabia, Américaine, cover of 391 6:1 (1917). © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 76 Marius de Zayas, ‘Femme’, and Francis Picabia, Voilà Elle, 291 9 (1915), 2–3. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 77 Francis Picabia, Parade amoureuse (Amorous Parade, 1917), oil, gesso, metallic paint, ink, oegold leaf, crayon on board, 96 x 73, private collection. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 79 Suzanne Duchamp, Un et une menacés (Male and Female Threatened, 1916), watercolour, metal objects and string on paper, 70 x 54.5, Fonds de dotation Jean-Jacques Lebel. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 80 George Grosz, Daum marries her pedantic automaton ‘George’ in

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May 1920, John Heartfield is very glad of it (Meta-Mech. Constr. nach Prof. R. Hausmann) (1920), watercolour, pencil, ink and collage, 42 x 30.2, Berlinische Galerie. © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ/DACS, London, 2017. 83 John Heartfield, Die Rationalisierung marschiert! (Rationalisation on the March!, 1927), photomontage. Courtesy of HeartfieldExhibition. us. © Heartfield Community of Heirs, 2018. All Rights Reserved. 87 Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau (1933), photograph of installation, various media, destroyed in 1943, bpk/Sprengel Museum Hannover/Wilhelm Redemann. © DACS, London, 2017. 93 George Grosz, illustration from Richard Huelsenbeck, Phantastische Gebete (Berlin: Roland-Verlag, 1920), p. 17. © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ/DACS, London, 2017. 99 George Grosz, illustration from Richard Huelsenbeck, Phantastische Gebete (Berlin: Roland-Verlag, 1920), p. 25. © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ/DACS, London, 2017. 100 Photograph of First International Dada Fair, Dr Otto Burchard Gallery, Berlin. R. Huelsenbeck, Dada Almanach (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1920). 101 Otto Dix, Die Skatspieler (The Skat Players, 1920), oil and collage on canvas, 110 x 87, bpk/Nationalgalerie, SMB, Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie/Jörg P. Anders. © DACS, London, 2017.104 Ernst Friedrich, from Krieg dem Kriege (Berlin: Freie Jugend, 1924). Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 107 Otto Dix, Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor (Shock Troops Advance Under Gas), etching, from Der Krieg (Berlin: Karl Nierendorf, 1924). © DACS, London, 2017. 108 Otto Dix, Tote bei der Stellung bei Tahure (Dead Men near Position at Tahure), etching, from Der Krieg (Berlin: Karl Nierendorf, 1924). © DACS, London, 2017. 109 Portrait of André Breton at the Festival Dada (with placard by Picabia) (1920), in Dadaglobe (Zurich, 2016), p. 130. 117 Photograph of Dada group at Montmartre Fair (1923), in La Subversion des images (Paris, 2009), p. 37. 120 Photograph of Dada group with a copy of Dada 3 (1919). Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris. 120 Man Ray, photograph of Dada group (1922), in L. Le Bon, DADA (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2005), p. 769. © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 120 Photograph of Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Hans Richter in

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figures xi

Zurich (1917), in L. Dickerman, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 17. 121 Photograph of Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, André Breton and Théodore Fraenkel – Dadaists at performance of Vous m’oublierez (1920), in Dadaglobe (Zurich, 2016), p. 5. 121 Five-way photographic portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1917). © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 122 Raoul Hausmann, ‘Kp’erioum lp’erioum’, Schriftkonstruktion aus dem Dadaco (1919–20), print on paper, 43 x 26, Berlinische Galerie. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 131 Photograph of the Dadaists in front of the Sans Pareil bookshop at opening of Max Ernst’s exhibition (1921): René Hilsum, Benjamin Péret, Serge Charchoune, Philippe Soupault, Jacques Rigaut, André Breton. Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet Paris.137 Cover of Bulletin D (1919). Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. 142 Max Ernst, Untitled (l’avionne meurtrière/The Murderous She-Plane, c.1920), collage and pencil on paperboard, 6.1 x 15, Menil Collection, Houston Texas. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 145 Max Ernst, die chinesische nachtigall/le rossignol chinois (The Chinese Nightingale, 1920), collage of photographic prints and ink on paper, 12.5 x 9, musée de Grenoble. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 148 Max Ernst, santa conversazione (1921), photographed collage, 22.5 x 13.5, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 151 Max Ernst, die anatomie als braut (Anatomy as Bride, 1921), collage, gouache and graphite pencil, 10.7 x 7.8, MNAM Centre Pompidou, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 152 Max Ernst, des éventails brisés (Broken Fans), from Les Malheurs des immortels (Paris: Librairie Six, 1922), p. 38. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 155 Heinrich Hoerle, Das Ehepaar (Married Couple), lithograph no. 3, from Die Krüppelmappe (The Cripple Portfolio, Cologne: Schlömilch Verlag, 1920). Art Institute of Chicago 2018. © Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence, 2018. 157 Heinrich Hoerle, Hallucinationen (Hallucinations), lithograph no. 9, from Die Krüppelmappe (The Cripple Portfolio, Cologne: Schlömilch

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xii

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Verlag, 1920). Art Institute of Chicago 2018. © Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence, 2018. 158 Heinrich Hoerle, Der Mann mit dem Holzbein träumt (Dream of the Man with the Wooden Leg), lithograph no. 7, from Die Krüppelmappe (The Cripple Portfolio, Cologne: Schlömilch Verlag, 1920). Art Institute of Chicago 2018. © Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence, 2018. 159 Heinrich Hoerle, Helft dem Krüppel (Help the Disabled), lithograph no. 1, from Die Krüppelmappe (The Cripple Portfolio, Cologne: Schlömilch Verlag, 1920). Art Institute of Chicago 2018. © Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence, 2018. 160 Erwin Blumenfeld, Bloomfield, President – DADA – Chaplinist (1921), collage of photographs, ink and pencil on postcard, 13.4 x 8.8. Courtesy of Kunsthaus Zurich. © The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld, 2018. 168 Max Ernst, The punching ball ou l’immortalite de buonarroti or dadafex maximus (1920), collage and gouache on photograph, 17.6 x 11.5, private collection. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 169 Max Ernst, Rencontre de deux sourires (Meeting of Two Smiles), from Les Malheurs des immortels (Paris: Librairie Six, 1922), p. 14. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 176 Hannah Höch, Bürgerliches Brautpaar (Streit) (Bourgeois Couple (Quarrel), 1919), collage and photomontage, 38 x 30.6, private collection. © DACS, London, 2017. 178 George Grosz, Lustmord in der Ackerstraße (Sex Murder in Acker Street, 1916–17), from Ecce Homo (Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1923), pl. 32. © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ/DACS, London, 2017. 179 Otto Dix, Dirne und Kriegsverletzter (Prostitute and Disabled War Veteran, 1923), pen drawing on paper, 47 x 37, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur (Westfälisches Landesmuseum)/Sabine Ahlbrand-Dornseif. © DACS, London, 2017. 180 Hannah Höch, Bäuerliches Brautpaar (Peasant Wedding Couple, 1931), collage, 21 x 21, private collection. Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York. © DACS 2017. 181 Hannah Höch, Liebe im Busch (Love in the Bush, 1925), collage, 22.8 x 21.6. © DACS, London, 2017. 183 Johannes Baader and Raoul Hausmann, Untitled (Double Portrait, 1919–20), print of photomontage, 25.4 x 15.8. Courtesy of Kunsthaus Zurich. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017.185 Hannah Höch, Liebe (Love, 1931), collage, 21 x 21. Courtesy

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8.11

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National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © DACS, London, 2017.186 Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Belle Haleine, eau de voilette (Beautiful Breath, Veil Water, 1921), photograph, reproduced on the cover of New York Dada (1921). © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017/© Man Ray Trust/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 187 Man Ray, Black and White, cover of 391 18 (July 1924). © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 193 Hannah Höch, Die Süsse (The Sweet One), from Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (1926), collage and watercolour on paper, 30 x 15.5, Museum Folkwang, Essen. © DACS, London, 2017. 195 Hannah Höch, Denkmal I (Monument I, 1924), from Aus einem ethnographischen Museum, collage on cardboard, 20.1 x 8.8, Berlinische Galerie. © DACS 2017. 199 Guro Mask, Ivory Coast (nineteenth century), Museum Rietberg, Zurich, in Dada Afrika (Zurich, 2016), p. 211. 199 Hannah Höch, Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture, 1928), collage, 19.5 x 12.4, National Galleries of Scotland. © DACS, London, 2017. 203 Man Ray, Le Retour à la raison (1923), still, La Révolution surréaliste 1 (1924), 4. © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 209 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain by R. Mutt, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, Blind Man (1917). © Association Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 213 Max Ernst, Fiat modes pereat ars, no. 1 (Cologne: Schlömilch Verlag, 1920). © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 216 Max Ernst, Fiat modes pereat ars, no. 7 (Cologne: Schlömilch Verlag, 1920). © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017 217 Francis Picabia, La Veuve joyeuse (The Merry Widow, 1921), oil and photograph on canvas, 92 x 73, private collection. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 221 Francis Picabia, Portrait de Tristan Tzara, Cannibale 1 (1920), 3. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 222 Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, photograph of Portrait of Duchamp (c.1920), assemblage of various media, reproduced in Little Review 9 (1922), photographer Charles Sheeler. National Art Library, London.224 Raoul Hausmann, Gurk (1918–19), collage on paper, reproduced in Dada 2 (Berlin, 1919), p. 7. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 225

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10.9 Proverbe 4 (1920), p. 1. National Art Library, London. 226 10.10 Francis Picabia, Portrait de l’auteur par lui-même (Portrait of the Artist by Himself), frontispiece, Unique Eunuque (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, Collection Dada, 1920). © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017.227 11. 1 George Grosz, Die Gesundbeter (The Faith Healers), from Gott mit uns (Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1920). © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ/DACS, London, 2017. 231 11.2 Max Ernst, Arrivée des voyageurs (Arrival of the Travellers), from Les Malheurs des immortels (Paris: Librairie Six, 1922), p. 28. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2017. 232 11.3 Cindy Sherman, Untitled #261 (1992), chromogenic colour print, 173 x 114. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York, 2017.235 11.4 Sadie Murdoch, As Given 4 (2013). Courtesy of the artist and Roberto Polo Gallery, Brussels, 2017. 237 11.5 Sadie Murdoch, Rrosebushwheels 1 (2015), photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Roberto Polo Gallery, Brussels, 2017. 239 Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

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Acknowledgements

This book has benefited from discussions with colleagues, friends and students. I am particularly grateful to the following for their support and critical comments at different stages of the project: Henri Béhar, Ina Boesch, Jill Fell, Robert Gillett, Ruth Hemus, Andreas Kramer, Frank Krause, Agathe Mareuge, Eric Robertson, Andrew Rothwell and Michael Sheringham. I would like to thank the team at Manchester University Press for their advice and efficiency throughout the production process, in particular Emma Brennan, Alun Richards, David Appleyard and Joe Haining. Finally, I wish to thank Peter Dunwoodie, who has accompanied this book from initial stages to completion with his continuing intellectual generosity, fiendishly critical input and unfailing sense of humour.

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1 Introduction: spare parts

Un pied un oeil le tout mélangé aux objets. Fernand Léger 1

Limit-bodies: an elusive corpus An assemblage of prosthetic limbs (figure 1.1); a spark plug with the words ‘FOREVER’ stamped on it (figure 1.2); a hybrid of African statue and European woman; a readymade object, tube or piston, eggbeater or hat; a blot, blob or blur. The Dadaists rejected mimetic representations of the human form: the body in Dada is displaced, deformed or dissolved, a mutating organic limb or an elusive limit-form of the human anatomy. In their paintings, collages and assemblages, their readymades, manifestos, poems and films, the Dadaists exposed, expelled or exploded the human figure, loudly proclaiming its demise or tentatively announcing its renewal. Can a common denominator be found among such seemingly disparate and contradictory bodily images? In the principle of subversion of the once-whole classical body, for instance? Such an approach would risk branding Dada as a mere anti-art strategy. In the image of the fragmented body of the wounded soldiers, the shattered identities of the shell-shocked of the First World War, or the image of the machine-body of the post-war assembly lines? This would risk reducing Dada to a mirror of the reality of wartime and post-war Europe, a mere form of (second-degree) mimeticism. In the idea of a therapeutic strategy, in which collective or individual vital energies that had been constricted in the coffin-corset of the wartime years, are liberated anew in a carnivalesque space? This would be to bypass Dada’s political import or its satirical dimension. In the elaboration of a monstrous rhetoric of the body, the dissection of its parts and links? This would be to forget that Dada cannot be subjected to an overarching

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dada bodies

1.1  Max Ernst, Jeune chimère (Young Chimera, c.1921)

system; indeed, that it is an aleatory, mutable entity, often displaced, abstract or near-invisible. Inadequate though they are as grounds for a meaningful common denominator when taken individually, each of these aspects of Dada, along with their caveats, will be shown to be relevant to the analysis of our corpus. Dada was primarily the voice of revolt and vitality, its urgency encapsulated in a woodcut by German artist Otto Dix titled Der Schrei (The Shout, 1919), and echoed in a text written by Romanian poet Tzara in 1930, which repeats the word ‘hurle’ (‘howl’) 275 times (Tzara 1975: 387).2 It was a cry of protest against a civilisation that was reducing much of Europe to rubble. In Tzara’s ‘Manifeste dada 1918’, war is seen as the manifestation of the bankruptcy of Europe’s political, social and moral values, ‘the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned in the hands of bandits, who rend and destroy the centuries’ (1918: 3; 1975: 366).3 Why choose to turn the spotlight on the body in Dada?4 Primarily, in response to the centrality of images of the human form in Dada, not only as

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introduction : spare parts 3

1.2  Francis Picabia, Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity, 1915)

a physical reality but more specifically as a social and political reality. Dada’s corporeal figurations, when considered as constructs, appear as the site of cultural mediations between the individual and the collective, as the locus of conflicts and reconfigurations, or the theatre of contradictions. Embodying Dada’s rebellion, they are a site for the philosophical, political and aesthetic questioning, erosion or subversion of social conventions, undermining dominant power relations, challenging enshrined gender differences and defying notions of fixed identities. Such images can therefore be read as tropes, essentially critical statements on the dominant ideology, exposing the dislocated body and body politic which the post-war ‘return to order’ was actively seeking to suppress or deny. Dada’s bodily images are overt fictions and fabrications which act both as a reflection of the disjunctive body of the early twentieth century, and a reflection on the dehumanised body of wartime and post-war Europe. Moreover, Dada’s strategies of perversion or subversion of the normative body transcend the simple act of resistance against social norms and initiate an exploration of new modes of individual or collective experience, offering a blueprint of the possible body. This study explores the fabrications of the human figure across Dada art, texts, film, manifestos and performances in the context of the tensions and

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dada bodies

contradictions of the ideological, socio-political and artistic situation across Europe during and after the First World War. Born in Zurich in 1916, at the heart of a war-torn Europe, Dada emerged at a time of social, economic and moral crisis, and of major developments in technology and media culture. It is this period of widespread upheaval that Walter Benjamin evokes in ‘The Storyteller’: With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? … For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of forces of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (Benjamin 1999: 84)5

Through their literary, artistic and programmatic activities, the Dadaists both reflected and reflected on these radical changes and the ensuing turmoil. Their fabrications of the human figure have both a critical and a utopian dimension. In critical guise, they exposed the lies of an ideology that sought to clothe the corpse, to shore up the ‘tiny, fragile human body’ of war-torn Europe and to deny the disturbing presence in society of shattered bodies and minds. In this confrontation, the Dadaists staged in their texts and images the demise of the integral body of pre-war Europe, both the body politic, founded on the principle of the authoritarian state, and the aesthetic body, epitomised by the classical Greek statue. These they replaced by the dismembered, dehumanised, reconstructed or mechanised beings of a post-war Europe mired in its inability to heal physical and psychic wounds. In utopian guise, on the other hand, Dadaists disavowed traumatic memories, denying the demise of the whole body and reaffirming, on the contrary, its continuing vitality in images of the body transformed and reconfigured. It is this paradoxical aspect of Dada, as dystopian body (dysfunctional, disjunctive, dismembered) and utopian body (extended, exploded, ex-static), that this study will explore, arguing that Dada’s bodily images occupy an ambivalent space, between death and rebirth, between the battlefield (in the satirical exposure of the physical and psychic violence of the times) and the fairground (in the regression to the infantile and the celebration of the life-force). The exploration of Dada’s bodily imagery will be taken further by considering Dada itself as corporeal, in the sense developed by Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘To write, not about the body, but the body itself. Not corporeality, but the body.

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Not the signs, images and figures of the body, but again the body. This was, and probably is no longer, one of modernity’s objectives’ (1992: 12).6 The notion is central to Tristan Tzara’s claim that whereas Western man has lost his sense of the tactility in favour of the head in what constitutes a form of disembodiment, Dada poetry and art are literally embedded in the body: ‘Thought is produced in the mouth’ (‘La pensée se fait dans la bouche’), he writes about Dada poetry in 1920 ([1924] 1963: 57; 1975: 379); and in 1947: ‘Thought is produced through the hand’ (‘La pensée se fait sous la main’, 1992: 368). Georges RibemontDessaignes champions the same direct language–body connection when he writes in his 1920 ‘Manifeste selon Saint-Jean Clysopompe’: ‘Words come swirling out of your navel. Like a troop of archangels with candlewhite buttocks. You talk out of your navel, your eyes turned to heaven’ (1920a: 3).7 The aim of the present study is thus neither to retrieve Dada by reducing it to a homogeneous movement – anti-war, anti-logic, anti-modernity – nor to uncover a unifying principle beyond the proliferation of its spare parts. If Dada was a bomb, as Max Ernst claimed in an interview with Patrick Waldberg in 1958, why should one now wish to put the pieces back together: ‘Dada was a bomb. Can you imagine someone, almost half a century after the explosion of a bomb, intent on collecting the shards, pasting them together and displaying them?’ (1970: 411).8 Endorsing Ernst’s statement, this study investigates the make-up and impact of some of the splinters, in particular those shards which succeeded in dislocating the unified body of pre-war Europe and fabricating the anti-body, the new body or the possible body of the immediate post-war years. Hence, sidestepping any urge to recuperate Dada, it is the heterogeneity of the movement that will occupy centre stage. To this end, this study acknowledges Dada’s geographical multi-centredness and the distinctive social and political contexts which shaped the activities of its various groups. If Dada was indeed a chameleon, as Tzara proclaimed in ‘Dada est un microbe vierge’ (1920a), it changed its colours in response to its targets: ‘Dada has 391 different attitudes and colours according to the sex of the president … Dada is the chameleon of rapid and self-seeking change’ (1975: 385).9 In a similar spirit, Francis Picabia playfully assembles Dada as a multi-limbed and multinational figure in his text ‘Dada philosophique’: DADA has blue eyes, a pale face, curly hair; he has the English look of young sportsmen. DADA has melancholic fingers, the Spanish look. DADA has a small nose, the Russian look. DADA has a porcelain arse, the French look. (Picabia 1920a: 5; 1975: 225)10

The Dada movement had its origins in Zurich in neutral Switzerland, ‘a birdcage, surrounded by roaring lions’, according to Hugo Ball (1996: 34), in

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the revolt of a cosmopolitan group of displaced writers, artists and performers against the traditional values which had led to the catastrophe of the First World War.11 It was in Zurich on 5 February 1916 that German writer and theatre director Hugo Ball (1886–1927) opened a literary cabaret, the Cabaret Voltaire, where the first Dada activities took place. It was here that an international group of writers and artists first gathered around Ball, including Richard Huelsenbeck from Germany, Hans Arp from Alsace, Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara from Romania.12 The movement soon spread to other European cities, including Cologne, Barcelona and Hanover. In 1917 Huelsenbeck returned to Berlin, where he founded the Club Dada with Franz Jung and Raoul Hausmann. On 12 April 1918 Huelsenbeck declaimed the ‘Dadaistisches Manifest’, signed by Hausmann, Jung, Grosz and others. Berlin Dada culminated in the international Dada-Messe in 1920, held at Dr Otto Burchardt’s gallery (see chapter 4). The Zurich Dadaists were also in touch with a group of young French poets – André Breton, Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon – around the publication Littérature, which took on a resolutely Dada tone in 1920 when Tzara accepted Breton’s invitation to join them in Paris. Over the next two years he acted as impresario of a series of Dada soirées, but these activities were brought to an end in 1922 following a quarrel between Tzara and Breton. Dada was also active in Cologne (see chapter 7) and in New York, from 1916, where the key figures were Duchamp, Picabia and Man Ray (chapter 4). Dada as an international movement was thus embodied in exchanges and collaborations across Europe and New York, while each Dada centre had its own distinctive character and preoccupations. Zurich, for instance, was invaded by the carnival masks of a grotesque Totentanz, while in Hanover Kurt Schwitters’s collages played nostalgically with fragments of nineteenth-century iconography. Berlin Dada proved to be a much more violently political animal, exploiting photomontage’s prosthetic bodies as a critique of Weimar Republic policies and the new media, while Cologne’s Dadaists exploited black humour and the grotesque to mock the post-war situation. And in Paris we encounter dadaist ‘exquisite corpses’, which are, arguably, more playful, more exquisite than corpse. As for New York, the human figure provided both a playful embrace and a critique of machine and commodity culture. It is in pursuing the tendency towards significant diversification that Höch’s fragmented figures, for example, will be shown to contrast with George Grosz’s bestial beings or Max Ernst’s erotic hybrids. And these, in turn, will be viewed in relation to the ironic manipulations of machine images by Francis Picabia or Marcel Duchamp. Dada’s proliferation and paradoxes, its ludic and morbid dimensions, its regressive or projective impulses thus constitute the focal points of the investigation. It will be argued that it is this very proliferation and these paradoxes which

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constitute the specificity – and not the (impossible) essence – of Dada as a mobile and fluctuating body.

Historical context Dada developed in the midst of the First World War, ‘in a field of forces of destructive torrents and explosions’, yet the upheaval described by Benjamin did not originate with the war itself, as Philip Blom (2008) has rightly argued. At the end of the nineteenth century and in the first years of the twentieth century, with the critique of Enlightenment thought and the development of urban modernity, the traditional concept of the humanist subject defined as an autonomous and rational individual was undermined, accompanied by a crisis in the notion of bodily integrity and body–mind continuum. The very idea of a fixed human essence was called into question by new models of identity developed by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and others. Alternative forms of subjectivity considered identity as constructed and fluid, as process rather than essence. In the arts, pre-1914 modernist figures such as artists Egon Schiele and Ludwig Meidner, composer Igor Stravinsky or novelist Robert Musil subverted traditional aesthetic conventions and explored new forms of artistic expression. So, while Dada emerged in the disruption of the First World War, the movement resists reduction to a simple reaction – however far-reaching – to the war in Europe. As Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck would later express it, Dada rebellion was a broader form of protest: ‘Dada was a moral protest not only against the war but also against the malaise of the time’ (1969: xviii). The First World War can thus be read both as event – the mechanical and inescapable collapse of humanism – and as a process of creative destruction. There were a total of seventeen million military and civilian deaths, and twenty million wounded, in the course of the war. Germany lost 2 million soldiers and 4.2 million were wounded or crippled (Kriegsbeschädigte); while in France 1.7 million were killed, and of the 4.3 million wounded 1 million suffered lasting injuries (grands mutilés). Modern technology on the battlefield stripped Western consciousness of the myth of the heroic soldier; a collapse exposed in Henri Barbusse’s novel Le Feu (1916), or satirised in Charlie Chaplin’s film Shoulder Arms (1918). Besides the millions expeditiously accounted for as ‘casualties’, those soldiers who made it through no man’s land were, for the most part, relegated, dehumanised: ‘The gloomily bruised modernist antiheroes [became] not just No Men, nobodies, but not men, unmen. That twentieth-century Everyman, the faceless cipher … is not just publicly powerless, he is privately impotent’ (Gilbert 1987: 198). While Germany underwent the humiliation of defeat, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1918) and the failed Spartakist uprising (1919), in France the

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orchestrated euphoria of victory gave way all too soon to disillusionment. By the early 1920s a writer like Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, close to the Dadaists, could present the widely shared vision of a decadent France, writing in his essay Mesure de la France: ‘We are here, knee-deep in corpses, among our sterile womenfolk’ (‘Nous sommes ici, les pieds dans nos cadavres, parmi nos femmes stériles’, 1922: 14). Looking back on this period, the French surrealist André Breton would recall the generalised feeling of waste, disillusionment and mediocrity: ‘a feeling of the uselessness of the sacrifice of so many lives, … the break-up of innumerable families, utterly mediocre prospects for the future. The initial euphoria of military victory did not last’ (1999: 456).13 Pre-war values of social stability and wholeness were destroyed, established concepts of the inviolability and integrity of the human being, at one with an ordered environment, were negated. In a cutting article published in 1919, ‘Menschliche Fragmente’ (‘Human Fragments’), the Austrian journalist Joseph Roth wrote of this essential shift, materialised in the body as the site of degradation. The opening lines adopt a mock biblical tone: ‘There was once man. Claimed to be in the image of God, crown of creation, he walked upright on his feet through the dust of which he was made. He walked freer than the lion, he looked more bravely than the tiger and raised his eyes towards the flight of the eagle and the stars of the cosmos’ (1919: 21).14 But far from corresponding to the humanist ideal of a godlike being, contemporary man has lost even his human identity, become a godless creature, degraded to the level of an animal: ‘What is that? Fabulous beast, insect, reptile of legendary times? His upper body horizontal, his arms bent outwards on either side, a club in each hand, his face parallel to the road surface: a quadruped’ (1919: 21).15 Insect or reptile, man has become a trembling, staggering, crawling, disorientated being, Lazarus-like, a mere ‘fragment, a remnant of humanity’ (‘Fragment, Uberbleibsel eines Menschentums’). It is this image of the degeneracy of the human being, reduced to an animal state as a consequence of the war, that haunts the writings of Dadaist Hugo Ball, for instance (see chapter 2). Faced with the traumatic experiences of the 1914–18 war, with its mass destruction, its mutilated and disfigured bodies, its wounded psyches and hysterical disorders, its violence – not only the violence of the front (the massacres and squalor of trench warfare) but also of the home front – the Dadaists resorted to the absurd to express their violent reaction to the absurdity of the war, privileging art forms based on spontaneity, chance and the irrational. As André Breton acknowledged: ‘For a time, we simply responded in kind to a world that scandalised us’ (1999: 485).16 The human figure in Dada, wounded, divided, wrenched from nature and society, was both symptom and product of a double dehumanisation: by the destructive military machine of the First World War and by the industrial machine of the post-war period. In his ‘Dadaistisches Manifest’, recited at the

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first Dada soirée in Berlin on 12 April 1918, Richard Huelsenbeck claimed that in comparison with Expressionism, which failed to burn ‘the essence of life into the flesh’ (‘die Essenz des Lebens ins Fleisch’), Dada’s violence was much more radical: ‘The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time’ (trans. in Motherwell 1951: 40).17 The post-war tabula rasa left no get-out for European thought and the movements it spawned, whether harking backwards (refusing to bury, make disappear) or forwards (promoting perspectives either positive, utopian or negative, dehumanised). In the immediate post-war period, faced with the breakdown of the fundamental concepts and assumptions on which European humanism had long been grounded, both France and Germany attempted to resuscitate pre-war values and patch up the shattered social body. Government-driven reconstruction programmes sought to suppress the traumatic presence of the disfigured bodies and dislocated minds of soldiers blasted by mechanical warfare, or the squalid conditions and physical collapse of the munitions factory workers. Seeking to clothe the corpse and veil the injured, official discourse endeavoured to deny their pervasive and unsettling presence via a return to the illusory wholeness of the integral body. Major advances were made in reconstructive surgery and prosthetic medicine, reconfiguring the veteran to slot him into post-war society and industry as unobtrusively and productively as possible. In the art world, journals and exhibitions celebrated the smooth or fulsome bodies painted by artists such as Ingres and Renoir (see chapter 3). Appalled by this systematic whitewash, the Dadaists and other avant-garde movements undertook, on the contrary, to expose the effects of the war. They produced bodies made up of disparate limbs, assemblages of parts that do not quite mesh together: images of the body as dysfunctional machine (Picabia, Grosz), grotesque (Dix) or hybrid (Höch), as fragment (Ernst) or fantasy (Hoerle), ghostly limbs lurking in the readymade (Duchamp). In short, images that display rather than suppress the violence exerted on the body. They attacked the military machine by satirising, vandalising and recycling wartime images, and highlighted the psychic wounds of the period by mimicking the language of the insane. They critiqued the dehumanisation of the individual by depicting him or her as an object, a thing, an inkblot, a mere trace. The early 1920s were marked by further upheavals throughout Europe: rapid industrial rationalisation and the acceleration of the rhythms of metropolitan life; the expansion of mass culture and consumerism; developments in printing technologies and mechanical reproduction as evidenced in the proliferation of illustrated newspapers; shifts in gender-specific identities in fashion and art, with the fashioning of the androgynous figure of the New Woman, whether

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flapper, neue Frau or garçonne; and increasing demands by women in France and Germany for social and political emancipation. Modernity itself, in its post-war guise, was questioned in the Dadaists’ critical appropriation of advertisements, newspapers and mass-produced objects; their détournement of the machine; and their manipulation of shifting identities. As we shall see, the human figure in Dada is actualised as trauma and potential liberation, whether in the tragic-ludic replay of Oedipal scenarios (regression to pre-war intertexts, the nostalgic images of the magic theatre or early cinema), or in the fragmented or exploded body as source of anxious separation from, or joyful transgression of, the containment and constraints of the contained, classical body. In the exploratory shifting and disruptive reconfigurations of the body and the self, distinctions – body/non-body, self/other, ­masculine/feminine, in/animate – merge or collapse in the dissolves and clashes of contradictory elements.

Aesthetics of the body Depictions of the body in Dada can be broadly linked to two important trends in Western art: the classical body of the Italian Renaissance derived from Greek and Roman models, and the Northern European tradition of the grotesque. Dadaists both continue and defy this dual heritage: the classical aesthetics, against which they rebelled, and the grotesque, which they adopted and took to its limits. The Renaissance ideal in art was derived from the Greek model of the perfect human form based on the harmony of proportions. Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of Vitruvian Man was considered by Renaissance artists not only as an ideal of human proportions but also as a model of the mathematical perfection of the macrocosm. This model, which portrayed the body in conformity with classical aesthetic norms (egola, disegno, maniera, ordine) and as the embodiment of social stability, was dominant in European culture until the mid-nineteenth century. The paradigmatic shift in science and philosophy that followed mirrors and informs a parallel shift in the artistic field, marked by the abandonment of the divine origin of the corpus. With the crisis of humanism and the development of materialism, the seamlessness, balance and integrity of the harmoniously composed human form, which had been central to Western culture, were challenged in early twentieth-century modernism in disturbing portrayals of the body, and by extension of social reality, as fragmented (Cubism), mechanised (Futurism) or monstrous (Surrealism). The dadaist rebellion is exemplary of this shift, exploding classical aesthetic norms by parodying the (neo-)classical body as contained or framed, producing instead the anti-classical body, a reconfiguration of the human figure grounded

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on fragmentation rather than the integral body; on the disjunctive rather than the harmonious; on the body as fabrication rather than representation; on the conceptual rather than the perceptual; as the site of allegory or myth rather than mimesis; as a network of signs rather than fixed meanings. The ideal body in harmony with the universe is violently dislodged by a two-dimensional mannequin figure in a disjunctive space, producing a hybrid figure (see chapter 4), the body assembled from spare parts, as in Grosz’s Daum marries her pedantic automaton ‘George’ (1920; see figure 4.6), or Max Ernst’s collage Jeune Chimère (1920; see figure 1.1). The hybrid is also a key characteristic of the second aesthetic tradition inherited by the Dadaists: the grotesque. Although the term ‘grotteschi’ was coined in Italy (referring to the discovery around 1500 of Nero’s Villa Aurea), the grotesque developed mainly in Northern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with artists such as Bosch, Bruegel or Grünewald, in whose works the idealised forms of classical art are replaced by the materiality of the grotesque. While the Italian Renaissance valued the beauty of the human body in its harmonious proportions, the grotesque tradition depicts the body as monstrosity. Artistic practices of the grotesque were greatly extended from the late nineteenth century with the work on the unconscious in psychoanalysis, in ‘primitivism’ in art, collage in modernist aesthetics, the formless in Bataillean aesthetics, the abject in feminist criticism and virtual reality in contemporary culture. Dada pushed the grotesque genre to its limits. Dada bodies are material entities spilling out of their contours, based on a cavalier disregard for consummate style. Rejecting the establishment denial operative in the suppression of the wounded body of wartime Europe and the commodified or prosthetic body of post-war capitalism, the Dadaists exposed the violence done to the body in scenes of distorted realism, transgressing normative contours, the skin no longer treated as marking the body’s limits as in Albertian aesthetics. In opposition to the closure and restraint of the classical or naturalistic body, ‘the closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface’ (Bakhtin 1984: 317), Dada’s grotesque bodies display excess and ambivalence, open bodies in process rather than a finished body (perfectio). The grotesque body is defined by Bakhtin as that which is ‘unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits … interrogates and subverts the prevailing culture’ (1984: 26). This subversive force is at the heart of Dada’s revolutionary politics: reviling the classical body, they celebrate the grotesque as an act of resistance to official hierarchies and norms, a critique of so-called high culture, and a utopian vision of renewal. Pushed to extremes, Dada bodies, whether born of iconoclastic (anti-­ classical) gestures or grotesque tactics, are on the one hand limit-forms of anthropomorphic figuration, what Paul Ardenne refers to as the ‘impossible

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body’: ‘doesn’t the body in art, finally, refer first and foremost to the impossibility of the body?’ (2000: 10).18 In such limit-bodies anatomical boundaries are exceeded or obscured; they become hybridised with the animal or the machine; they replace academic, controlled delineation of form with deliberately messy execution; they become blob or blur, organic proliferation, exaggerating the ornamental, the tangential, the arbitrary. Moreover, because Dada’s corporeal images are largely mediated, whether quoted, processed or displaced, this study will consider human forms as fabrications, overt fictions, rather than representations. The plural form ‘bodies’, considered in terms of process and performativity, will replace the singular ‘body’ and its burden of fixity and essentialism. Consequently, the principle and practice of montage – and its cognates (photo)collage or assemblage – are central to any discussion of Dada’s experimentation with depictions of the human figure. Assembled out of disparate elements, the body is highlighted as a hybrid, a construct rather than an organic integrated unity. This is not to deny that Leonardo’s body itself is not also a form of montage, but, unlike Dada assemblage, it is based on principles of harmony and proportion. Dada montage, on the contrary, is grounded on radical disruption, the process of construction made visible in the seams and cracks between the assembled parts. According to Theodor Adorno, ‘the principle of montage was conceived as an act against a surreptitiously achieved organic unity; it was meant to shock’ (1984: 204). And as we shall argue, radical montage – embodied in collage or photomontage, as well as in caricature or disruptive text/image conflations – has a dual function: while formal disruptions mirror the ideological and social disintegration of post-war Europe, they are also part of a transformative process, fabricating the new body from the very fragments of the past. The anatomy of disparate limbs and recycled fragments of the dadaist body was to be systematised in 1925 in the surrealist collective game of the ‘cadavre exquis’ or exquisite corpse, named after the first sentence produced using this method: ‘The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine’ (‘Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau’). Based on the principle of assemblage, each participant draws or pastes (the equivalent of) a head, shoulders, arms and so on, or writes a word or phrase, without seeing the contributions of the other participants, thus assembling disjunctive elements to form either (the other of) the body, limitforms of anatomical structure, the body fabricated from spare parts, or poetic or absurd sentences, whose effect is based on the encounter of disjunctive elements. These are hybrid productions: on the one hand, the allusion to death is foregrounded in the name (death of the normative anatomy, of the order of syntax); on the other hand, death is denied and transcended in the ‘exquisite’ manipulation of body-parts. Such figures are open to multiple readings, and in particular

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as an ironic comment on the dismembered soldier of the trenches or the taylorised body of industrial production. As Hal Foster has argued, the exquisite corpse is ‘a perverse assembly-line’ (1994: 160): in opposition to the taylorised body, where rational management of work sought to eliminate all random, that is, non-productive, movement, Dadaists and Surrealists i­rrationalise the body, reintroducing the incoherent and the gratuitous. Faced with the range of Dada’s bodily images, as outlined above – ­iconoclastic, grotesque, ludic or limit-bodies, fiction and fabrication – the ­following chapters will be grounded on a critical framework based on several broadly overlapping categories. Walter Benjamin’s theory of montage is central to an analysis of the hybrid body, whether human-machine (chapter 4) or human-animal (chapter 5). Mikhael Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque underlies the discussion of Dada’s activities in Zurich (chapter 2) and the analysis of fairground figures (chapter 6), while his related concept of ‘grotesque realism’, focusing on the notion of the disjunctive body as a concatenation of incompatible and irreconcilable parts (Dix’s dismembered bodies) or bodily functions (Grosz’s spewing, pissing bodies) is developed in both the study of the grotesque body (chapter 5) and Hannah Höch’s photomontages (chapter 9). Since the notion of performance is central to dadaist practice, in dance (chapter 2), cabaret or exhibition (chapter 6), the analyses will draw on both performance theory and notions of play, pastiche and parody. As Susan Rubin Suleiman has shown, the modernist image is subversive, in the sense of ‘playing as fantasy, or playing as free invention, as mastery, as mockery, as parody … as self mutilation … as transgression, as perversion, as jouissance’ (1990: 4). The analyses that follow are thus informed not only by the notion of play as a subversive strategy but also by Linda Hutcheon’s (1985) analysis of parody and pastiche. And finally, when uncovering how Dadaists undermined essentialised concepts of race, gender and class, the analyses are critically informed by Donna Haraway’s (1991) ­perceptive work on the cyborg. The importance of laughter encountered in Dada practice implies that the body is not only significant as an object of representation but also is engaged in the artwork as subject, both as producer and spectator. Dada artworks thus fit uneasily within the parameters of the Greenbergian theory of opticality and autonomy of the art object. Duchamp’s ‘visual indifference’ points to an alternative form of production and reception of the work of art, marking a major shift from the distance of sight to the physicality of touch, inviting an embodied encounter and interaction with the art object, as Martin Jay (1994) and Janine Mileaf and Matthew Witovsky (2005) have argued. It is this radical aspect of Dada artworks that Benjamin stresses when he writes: ‘the Dadaists turned the artwork into a missile. It jolted the viewer, taking on a tactile (taktisch) quality’ ([1936] 2002: 119).

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Finally, the psychoanalytical model of desire based on lack or loss, theorised by Freud and Lacan, and developed by Hal Foster (1991) in the context of Dada and Surrealism, confronts the Deleuzian model of desire grounded on flow and surplus. The analysis will be based on an opposition: on the one hand, the disjunctive body as a narrative of loss and trauma; on the other, the celebration of Dada’s bodies as fabrication and fiction. By focusing on limit-forms of the body – hybrid machine- or animal-bodies, part-bodies or displaced bodies – it will be argued that, far from being immobilised in the fixed traces of a trauma, or reducible to the nostalgic fragment of an impossible unity – such fragmented, grotesque, disjunctive or limit-forms can also be pregnant with possible bodies, new liberated realities.

Critical context While critical literature on Dada in Germany has considered Dada essentially within the lineage of Expressionism (Sheppard 2000), Dada in France, notably among French scholars, has traditionally been treated as a noisy nursery for future Surrealists, as a negative phase, ‘as a comical transition – or as a psychic slash-and-burn ploy – for its more successful cousin Surrealism’ (Gordon 1987: 7), which is deemed to represent a coming-of-age of the group. In positioning it in this way, Marguerite Bonnet even referred to the years 1920–22 as the ‘Dada interlude’ (‘l’intermède Dada’, see Breton 1990: 1280). Exhibitions have often underscored the claimed filiation by presenting the two movements within a chronological framework tainted by the post hoc fallacy: for example, Alfred Barr’s Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism (MoMA, New York, 1936), William Rubin’s Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage (MoMA, New York, 1968), or Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (Hayward Gallery, London, 1978), curated by David Sylvester. However, as Laurent Le Bon, curator of the 2005 Dada exhibition (MNAM Centre Pompidou, Paris), has claimed: ‘Dada is neither prologue, prelude nor prehistory’ (‘Dada n’est pas un prologue, ni un prélude, ni une préhistoire’, 2005: 519). Indeed, on the contrary, for Francis Picabia writing in 1924, the Surrealism of Breton and Philippe ‘Coppeaux’ (Soupault) was considered ‘a poor imitation of Dada’ (‘une pauvre imitation de Dada’), and Breton’s brand of Surrealism derided as ‘simply Dada dressed up as an advertising float for the firm Breton & Co.’ (‘tout simplement Dada travesti en ballon réclame pour la maison Breton et Cie’, 1924: 2; 1978: 152). The dependent relationship was in fact revised in the 1940s, after the Second World War especially, when art historians and museum curators reassessed Dada as a movement distinct from Surrealism, particularly in the United States. As Mel Gordon concluded: ‘By the forties … there was a total reevaluation among the new generation of museum curators and art historians: Dada had finally received its separate

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and revolutionary status in twentieth-century art. In some ways, it became the bedrock of all late modern and postmodern art’ (1987: 7). Robert Motherwell’s anthology The Dada Painters and Poets (1951) played a key role in shaping this direction, corroborated by the 1953 exhibition Dada 1916–1923, curated by Marcel Duchamp for Sidney Janis’s New York gallery. Recent critical and curatorial interest in Europe and North America is evidence of a resurgence of interest in Dada, generating reprints and anthologies of Dada texts (Ades 2006), and above all a host of publications focusing on gender (Sawelson-Gorse 1999; Hopkins 2007; Hemus 2009); literature (Béhar and Dufour 2005); Dada and (post)modernism (Pegrum 2000; Sheppard 2000); Dada as an interdisciplinary object of study (Adamowicz and Robertson 2011, 2012; Hopkins and White 2014); Dada in Germany (Doherty 1999; Bergius 2000); in New York (Naumann and Venn 1996; Jones 2004); and in Eastern Europe (Sandqvist 2006). Exhibitions include the huge Dada exhibit (Paris, New York and Washington) with its linked publications (Le Bon 2005; Dickerman and Witkovsky 2005). The centenary of the founding of Dada in Zurich in 2016 was the occasion for a number of exhibitions, including: Dadaglobe Reconstructed (Kunsthaus, Zurich, and MoMA, New York, 2016), and Dada Africa (Rietberg Museum, Zurich, 2016, and Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, 2017–18). While earlier studies tended to focus on individuals, as attested by the large number of monographs on Dadaists such as Ball, Hausmann, Duchamp and Ernst, or the tirelessly replayed accounts of the disputes between Tzara and Breton, recent scholarship has treated Dada as a collective activity, analysing the movement within its historical context rather than rehearsing its anecdotes. Moreover, an important consequence of considering Dada as a distinct movement was recognition of its importance in informing post-1945 neo-avant-gardes (Bürger 1984; the October journal); the postmodern favouring of discursive and pictorial strategies such as montage, collage, heteroglossia, the aleatory, the grotesque, parody or pastiche; and contemporary developments in ­performance art. In these reassessments, Dada has been considered less as an ex nihilo anarchist gesture (albeit shorn of effect) than as a movement forming an integral part of the broader European avant-garde, with its ambivalent relationship with Expressionism (Sheppard 2000: 236), Futurism (Sheppard 2000: 207–35) and Constructivism (Dachy [1994] 2011: 11). It is true that Dadaists collaborated with other avant-garde artists, for example at the Cabaret Voltaire (1916) or the Soirée du Coeur à barbe (1923), while the Congrès de Paris in 1922 was an attempt to bring together, albeit unsuccessfully, international avantgarde groups under the common front of ‘l’esprit moderne’. The Dadaists (including Hans Richter, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and Franz Seiwert) also participated in the International Congress of Progressive Artists held in

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Düsseldorf in May 1922; while Tzara, Arp, Richter and Schwitters took part in the International Congress of Constructivists in Weimar in September 1922 alongside Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and others. Dadaists also contributed to avant-garde journals, such as Kurt Schwitters’s Merz (1923–36), Theo van Doesberg’s De Stijl, as well as his Mecano (edited in Leyden in 1922–23 under the pseudonym I. K. Bonset) and Émile Malespine’s Manomètre (Lyon 1922–28). However, among critical studies there has been no overarching analysis to date of the body in Dada. Valerie Preston-Dunlop (1996) has sketched the outlines of a possible study of Dada bodies, making useful distinctions between, for example, Leib (body as experienced or lived) and Körper (the body as a physical object), and related notions of Erlebnis (experience of lived body) and Erkenntnis (knowledge of the body as object). However, these distinctions are left undeveloped and the critic is content to list a number of works. Most critical literature focuses instead on specific aspects of the human figure in Dada. The most developed area of analysis focuses on Berlin photomontage (Doherty 1999; Bergius 2000; Schaschke 2004); while research on Dada’s hybrid bodies – Hal Foster’s prosthetic bodies (2004), Matthew Biro’s cyborg (2009) – treats hybridity primarily as a response to the destruction of the First World War. The effects of the war on concepts of masculinity in 1920s Europe are the subject of works by critics such as Hal Foster (2004) and Amy Lyford (2007), and more specifically in the Weimar Republic by Heynen (2015), while David Hopkins (2007) analyses Dada homosociability in the work of Duchamp and its legacy in contemporary art. The Dadaists’ assault on the neo-classical figure in the post-war ‘return to order’ has been studied by Arnaud Pierre (2001, 2002), and a final group of studies focuses on the grotesque figure (Lavin 1993; Connelly 2003). While most critical studies have situated Dada’s fragmented bodies in the context of wartime destruction or post-war capitalism, the originality of the present study lies in the fact that, recognising the paradoxical nature of Dada’s bodily images, it considers the affabulations of the human figure not only as a radical critique of dominant discourses and iconography but also as an exploration of utopian possibilities, within the historical, social, aesthetic and political context of the time.

Plan ‘Centrifugal Dada, centripetal Dada!’ (‘Dada centrifuge, dada centripète!’), exclaims Laurent Le Bon (2005: 516), curator of the 2005–6 Dada exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The layout of the exhibition was based on French artist Daniel Burren’s grid system of forty interconnecting rooms or cells, originally designed for the 2002 exhibition Le Musée qui n’existait pas. Each section of the Dada exhibition focused on a geographical centre, an artist, a historical event or a theme. At the centre of the exhibition

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space was a partial reconstitution of the 1920 Berlin Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair). Far from presenting a rigid chronological development or distinct thematic categories, the display encouraged multiple and varied trajectories, confrontations and dialogues within and between rooms. According to Le Bon, ‘the obligatory linear path is abolished in favour of crossings, dialogues between works, visitors and cells, between the most concealed and the most open’ (2005: 515).19 Thus, avoiding a linear history of Dada – a task precluded, practically, by the very diversity of the movement and, conceptually, by the rejection of a conventional historiographical perspective – the exhibition enabled a network of paths and intersections, convergences and divergences. Like the exhibition, the present study proposes an itinerary of parallel developments, crossings, contradictions, echoes and affinities. Like its object of analysis, it has been conceived as a disjunctive body, an assemblage. It rejects the possibility of cohesion and closure of traditional discursive narratives to propose alternative micro-narratives which respect Dada’s refusal to be contained, and to focus on tensions and confusions, heterogeneity and, above all, continued vitality. Chapter 2 situates Dada historically in the context of pre-1914 avant-garde art and thought, and traces the shift from the glorification of war’s destructive forces to Dada’s exposure of the war as absurd. It argues that if the Dadaists adopted a rhetoric of war and violence, it was to pervert it in the promotion of their own global revolt in the face of the machinery of destruction. An analysis of Zurich Dada’s grotesque Totentanz is developed, focusing on George Grosz’s poems, Marcel Janco’s masks, and Sophie Taeuber’s dances and puppets. The Dadaists’ radical critique of the neo-classical revival promoted by the ‘return to order’ of post-war France and Germany is the subject of chapter 3, which examines how the cult of neo-Ingrism in art as a model for the reconstituted body of France is satirised in Francis Picabia’s parodies of the nineteenth-century artist, and in Man Ray’s photograph Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), thus exposing the official myth-making policies of post-war France. This is followed by a discussion of the cult of the healthy body forged through sport in the promotion of body-building in Germany in the post-war years, and the subsequent parodic remake in images of sportsmen by Ernst, Baargeld and Grosz. Yet the Dadaists were not solely iconoclasts or Luddites. They proved to be, on occasion, engineers. It is in this light that the reconfigurations of the human form are explored in chapters 4 and 5 through the concept of the hybrid body, firstly as human-machine, and secondly as human-animal. Chapter 4 begins by exploring the machine-as-body in Picabia’s mecanomorphic drawings, read as a satire of a technological utopia. In his games of perversion, the ‘becoming-machine’ of the body is explored as a ‘becoming-erotic’ of the machine. The second part of the chapter focuses on an analysis of the body-as-machine

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in Berlin Dadaists’ violent exposure – through photomontage – of dismembered, prosthetic, mechanised bodies in the early 1920s. Chapter 5, meanwhile, extends the study of the theme of the composite body via an exploration of the grotesque, informed by the work of Mikhael Bakhtin. An analysis of Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (1919–37) in terms of the corporeal dimension of architecture, structured on the principle of the grotto, is followed by a discussion of Grosz and Dix’s Phantastische Gebete (Fantastic Prayers, 1920) and Otto Dix’s savage depiction of wounded war-veterans in Die Skatspieler (The Skat Players, 1920). The grotesque is, finally, linked to the abject body, as exposed in Tristan Tzara’s play Le Coeur à gaz (The Gas Heart, 1921). In the chapter 6, Dada is treated as process rather than product, art as event rather than as object. It focuses, consequently, on carnivalesque spaces where the phantasmagoric body is seen as both nostalgia and parody of end-of-century entertainment. The first section deals with fairground spaces: the photographs of the Dada group; optical machines; and René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924). The allegory of the male magician controlling his female victim is shown to be central to the theme of the dismemberment and reconstitution of the body. Both transgression (of body limits) and regression (a return to infantile fantasies) are thus revealed as modes of resistance to dominant ideologies. The following section extends the notion of performance to Dada texts, via an analysis of body, voice and gesture in Raoul Hausmann’s phonetic poetry. Finally, the performative dimension of Dada exhibitions is addressed via a discussion of the 1920 Dada-Vorfrühling exhibition in Cologne, in order to highlight the ways in which it implicated the body of the spectator Chapter 7, an analysis of Max Ernst’s early collages and the fatagaga photocollages produced with Hans Arp, confronts the recycling of war images, arguing that they constitute not only a satire of the militaro-industrial machine of the First World War (the body as site of loss or trauma) but also a narrative of rebirth, informed by alchemical thought. The motif of the chrysalis or the man in flight in Ernst’s works is contrasted with fellow Cologne artist Heinrich Hoerle’s images of the wounded veteran in his series of lithographs, the Cripple Portfolio or Die Krüppelmappe (1919), which were shaped by a cynical view of the motif of renewal. Hoerle’s ‘unman’ thus confronts Ernst’s New Man. Chapter 8 turns to the rejection of essentialist notions of identity in favour of the self as construct or process, constantly remodelled by chance or the irrational, and as multiple and open. It investigates, consequently, the Dadaists’ subversion of patriarchal law, based on the work of German psychoanalysts such as Otto Grosz, through the figure of the jester in Hans Richter’s film Vormittagsspuk (1928). The fluidity they championed is approached through Dada self-portraits and Hausmann’s Klebebild portraits; and the accompanying

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breakdown of traditional gender categories surfaces in the analysis of Dada’s dysfunctional couples. Chapter 9 opens with a discussion of Man Ray’s Black and White (1921), the photograph of an African female statuette juxtaposed with a classical European statue. The chapter investigates the relations between Dada’s ‘primitivism’ and Expressionism and, particularly, the influence of Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik ([1915] 2004). Hannah Höch’s cycle of photomontages, Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (1924–34), composed of fragments from fashion magazines and ethnographic illustrations, is then discussed as her response to contemporary racist and colonial discourses in 1920s Weimar Germany, to tribal and commodity fetishism and as a challenge to contemporary aesthetics of the body. The radical critique embodied therein takes the shape of limit-forms of the human figure in chapter 10, which examines the displacements, objectification or disembodiment of the human figure. This is exemplified firstly in Man Ray’s film Le Retour à la raison (1923), where the human figure, montaged with moving objects and abstract forms, itself becomes abstract. The body as indexical trace is explored in the recurrent image of the handprint. In Max Ernst’s lithographs Fiat modes pereat ars (1920) the theatrical spaces are occupied by surrogate human figures (a tailor’s dummy, featureless automatons, round or cone-shaped forms) which seem to merge with the geometrical spaces in which they are placed. This is followed by a discussion of the performative function of Duchamp’s readymades, which call for the viewer’s bodily response in a tactile engagement. Lastly, on the path to a final vanishing point, the body as abstraction will be considered, as found in a number of Dada portraits by Picabia and others. In the final chapter the notion of the ambivalence of Dada’s bodies, as both ‘corpse’ and ‘exquisite’, is reasserted, in images of the body degraded and dissolved, or reconfigured and regenerated. Finally, Dada’s heritage is considered in developments in contemporary art, focusing in particular on critical or playful reappropriations of corporeal images which the Dadaists themselves had already transformed, in the work of Damien Hirst, Anna Artaker or Sadie Murdoch. The analyses undertaken in this study do not claim to coalesce into a coherent ensemble or, indeed, an exhaustive overview, not least because any such pretention would merely be seeking to reimpose the straitjacket that Dada dismantled. Like the object of study, they are offered as part-bodies, components of a monstrous body, grafted onto the (part-)body of work by other Dada scholars, and forming a body-in-progress to be cut up, mutilated and expanded by future scholars.

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Notes 1. ‘A foot an eye mixed with objects.’ Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2. The text was published in Littérature 18 (December 1920), 20. 3. ‘l’état de folie, de folie agressive, complète, d’un monde laissé entre les mains des bandits qui déchirent et détruisent les siècles’. 4. While recent interest in theorising the body in art informs this reading, it is not to claim that Dada can be reduced to a postmodern phenomenon. Nor does this study seek to join the cohort of what art critic Waldemar Januszczak has scathingly referred to as ‘modern body-maniacs’: ‘It is certainly true that “the body” is one of the most reliable obsessions of contemporary art, and that countless, tediously sensational explorations of it have been mounted in recent years by puerile and sex-obsessed modern imaginations. Blood, gore, penises, breasts and orifices are the bread and butter of the contemporary cultural feast’ (Januszczak 2005). 5. ‘Mit dem Weltkrieg begann ein Vorgang offenkundig zu werden, der seither nicht zum Stillstand gekommen ist. Hatte man nicht bei Kriegsende bemerkt, daß die Leute verstummt aus dem Felde kamen? nicht reicher – ärmer an mitteilbarer Erfahrung. … Denn nie sind Erfahrungen gründlicher Lügen gestraft worden als die strategischen durch den Stellungskrieg, die wirtschaftlichen durch die Inflation, die körperlichen durch die Materialschlacht, die sittlichen durch die Machthaber. Eine Generation, die noch mit der Pferdebahn zur Schule gefahren war, stand unter freiem Himmel in einer Landschaft, in der nichts unverändert geblieben war als die Wolken und unter ihnen, in einem Kraftfeld zerstörender Ströme und Explosionen, der winzige, gebrechliche Menschenkörper.’ (Benjamin [1936] 2007: 104) 6. ‘Soit à écrire, non pas du corps, mais le corps même. Non pas la corporéité, mais le corps. Non pas les signes, les images, les chiffres du corps, mais encore le corps. Cela fut, et sans doute n’est déjàplus, un programme de la modernité.’ 7. ‘Les mots vous sortent en tourbillonnant hors du nombril. On dirait une troupe d’archanges à fesses blanches comme la chandelle. C’est avec le nombril que vous parlez, les yeux tournés vers le ciel.’ 8. ‘Dada était une bombe. Peut-on imaginer quelqu’un, près d’un demi-siècle après l’explosion d’une bombe, qui s’emploierait à en recueillir les éclats, à les coller ensemble et à les montrer?’ 9. ‘Dada a 391 attitudes et couleurs différentes suivant le sexe du président … Dada est le caméléon du changement rapide et intéressé.’ Published in Dadaphone, Dada 7 (1920), [4]. 10. ‘DADA a le regard bleu, sa figure est pale, ses cheveux sont bouclés; il a l’aspect anglais des jeunes hommes qui font du sport. / DADA a les doigts mélancoliques, à l’aspect espagnol. / DADA a le nez petit, à l’aspect russe. / DADA a le cul en porcelaine, à l’aspect français.’ 11. On Dada in the context of the First World War, see Kuenzli (1982); Buelens (2006). 12. See chapter 2 for details of the specific social and political contexts.

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13. ‘sentiment de l’inutilité du sacrifice de tant de vies, … brisement d’innombrables foyers, extrême médiocrité du lendemain. L’enivrement de la victoire militaire avait fait long feu.’ 14. ‘Das war einmal Mensch. Nannte sich Ebenbild Gottes, Krone der Schöpfung, und wandelte aufrecht und mit den Füßen durch den Staub, aus dem er gemacht war. Er ging freier als der Löwe, blickte mutiger als der Tiger und erhob seine Augen zu dem Fluge des Adlers und zu den Gestirnen des Kosmos.’ 15. ‘Was ist das? Fabeltier, Insekt, Reptil sagenhafter Vorzeit? Der Oberkörper waagrecht, die Arme seitlich nach auswärts gebogen, in jeder Hand einen Stab, das Gesicht parallel zum Straßenpflaster: ein Vierfüßler.’ 16. ‘Durant une certaine période, nous allions en quelque sorte user de réciprocité à l’égard d’un monde qui nous scandalisait.’ 17. ‘Die besten und unerhörtesten Künstler werden diejenigen sein, die stündlich die Fetzen ihrer Leibes aus dem Wirrsal der Lebenskatarakte zusammenreißen, verbissen in den Intellekt der Zeit, blutend an Händen und Herzen’ (Huelsenbeck 1920a: 45). 18. ‘l’art corporel, pour finir, ne parlerait-il pas d’abord de l’impossible du corps?’ 19. ‘le parcours obligé et linéaire est aboli au profit des croisements, des dialogues entre les oeuvres, les visiteurs, les cellules, entre le plus caché et le plus ouvert.’

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2 Zurich Dada: between gas mask and carnival dance

Was wir zelebrieren ist eine Buffonade und eine Totenmesse zugleich. Hugo Ball (1996: 56)1

The European avant-garde and the First World War: from utopia to dystopia ‘We intend to glorify war – the only hygiene of the world’, declared the Italian poet Philippo Tommasso Marinetti in his ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, published in Paris on 20 February 1909 in Le Figaro (Rainey et al. 2009: 51). His statement epitomises the position of many of the avant-garde writers and artists of pre-1914 Europe, who called for the destruction of a decadent and materialist Europe, invoking war as a catalyst. Their position was informed by the Nietzschean principle of chaos: the need for destruction in order to bring about change and renewal. That utopian vision of war is depicted in a number of semi-abstract paintings of the immediate pre-war period. Futurist artist Luigi Russolo’s painting Revolt (La Rivolta, 1911),2 for example, with its bold diagonals and contrasting primary colours, stages the clash between the forces of revolution and tradition as an opposition between light and dark, reds and yellows against blues and blacks, the revolutionary advance of massed red figures on the right overwhelming the static forms of tradition on the left of the painting. The work can also be read as an allegory of the artistic avant-garde itself, a military term applied to a radical movement in the vanguard of revolt against the past, the abstract style signalling a rejection of traditional aesthetics. In a similar spirit, Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky’s 1913 painting Improvisation no. 30 (Cannons)3 evokes, in the artist’s own words, both disaster and ‘a hymn about the new birth that arises from it’, not in a representational mode but through colour and form:

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‘These contents are indeed what the spectator lives, or feels while under the effect of the form and colour combinations of the picture’ (quoted in Cork 1994: 18). While the painting’s violent colours and aggressive abstract forms can be read as an expression of Kandinsky’s philosophy of cosmic destruction and spiritual reawakening, it also evokes – in the image of the cannon in the right foreground of the canvas – the political situation of Europe on the brink of war. The actual 1914–18 war, and not simply the idea(l) of war, was supported, at least in its initial stages, by a number of Expressionist and Futurist writers and artists, including Austrian artist, poet and playwright Oskar Kokoschka, and Italian artist Gino Severini. It was greeted less as a patriotic war than as the possibility for social and spiritual revolution, freed from the corruption and decadence of pre-war Europe. It was in this spirit that Thomas Mann, in his essay ‘Gedanken im Kriege’ (‘Thoughts on the War’), written shortly after the outbreak of the war, greeted it with enthusiasm: ‘How should the artist, the soldier in the artist, not have praised God for the collapse of a world of peace, which he was so sick of, so very sick of? War! We felt purified and liberated, and felt enormous hope’ ([1914] 1986: 9).4 Among Futurist artists, Severini’s dynamic Armoured Train in Action (1915)5 evokes military advance as dynamic vitality, troops merging with their metallic surroundings. Similarly, Bursting Shell (1915)6 by the English Vorticist artist C. R. W. Nevinson depicts the aerial view of a shell exploding, in a jubilatory image where aggressive black triangular forms collide with bright spiralling shapes. In the same year Nevinson wrote: ‘The war will be a violent incentive to Futurism, for we believe that there is no beauty except in strike, and no ­masterpiece ­without aggressiveness’ (Daily Express, 25 February 1915). ‘Oh! What a beautiful war!’ (‘Ah Dieu! que la guerre est jolie!’), exclaimed the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1965: 253), who joined the French army as a volunteer in 1914. His wartime poetry, written in the trenches and sent to his fiancée Madeleine Pagès, later published in Calligrammes (1918), expresses the erotic excitement of war. In ‘Fusées’, he imagines the battlefield in terms of celebration and resistance, a vast firework display caught up in an erotic vision where he compares his lover’s breasts to bombshells – ‘Your breasts are the only shells I love’ (‘Tes seins sont les seuls obus que j’aime’) – eroticising destructive weapons and thus defusing their threat (1965: 261). The glorification of war was often accompanied in avant-garde art by a celebration of technology, particularly in the early days of the conflict, and notably in Futurist imagery of the body perfected as machine. In Umberto Boccioni’s Carica dei Lancieri (Charge of the Lancers, 1914; figure 2.1), for example, the cavalry is presented as forming a single unit with horse and lance, creating a dynamic, forward-surging mechanical body. Elsewhere, in the works of the French Cubist artist Fernand Léger, for instance, such as the 1917 painting La

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2.1  Umberto Boccioni, Carica dei Lancieri (Charge of the Lancers, 1915)

Partie de cartes (Soldiers Playing Cards; figure 2.2), the soldiers’ limbs appear to be made of tubular metal, producing a fusion between man and machine in the vision of a technological utopia. Léger, who served in the First World War as a stretcher-bearer, writes about the fragmentation of the human body in battle in a letter sent from the front in 1915: ‘Nothing is more cubist than a war like this one that cuts up a chap more or less cleanly in several pieces and scatters him in all directions … at last I understand the division of form’ (quoted in Dagen [1996] 2012: 174).7 The initial optimism, unsurprisingly, faded quickly, as one sees in the autobiography of German Dada artist George Grosz, who records his shift from patriot to pacifist. While the declaration of war was greeted enthusiastically by ‘mass intoxication’, he writes, the reality of the soldiers’ trench life soon replaced it with more sober feelings: ‘The initial frenzy and enthusiasm … were quickly dissipated, leaving nothing behind for most of us but a vast emptiness. … [War] came to mean filth, lice, idiocy, disease and deformity’ (1946: 145). A similar shift can be traced in the work of British artist Jacob Epstein. In his sculpture Rock Drill (1913–15), a large mechanised figure with an elongated mask-like head and armoured torso is mounted on a real drill. A powerful image of the optimistic fusion of man and machine, à la Severini, or a threatening figure of destruction? Epstein provides an answer in his 1940 autobiography: ‘I made and mounted a machine-like robot, visored, menacing, and carrying

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2.2  Fernand Léger, La Partie de cartes (Soldiers Playing Cards, 1917)

within itself its progeny, protectively ensconced. Here is the armed, sinister figure of today and tomorrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have made ourselves into’ (1955: 56). In 1916 Epstein went on to discard the drill and the lower part of the figure, and cast the torso, slightly modified, in gunmetal and later in bronze, turning the earlier heroic figure into a victim, emasculated and vulnerable.8 The image of the worker-soldier as superman from the pre-war period and the early days of the war was now replaced by a sculpture which can be read as a shift into dystopian violence, a critique of machine utopias. German artist Otto Dix’s self-portraits chart a similar shift from the depiction of the self as godlike Mars to shooting-target (Cork 1994: 94–5).

Mirroring the chaos of war What had happened between the visionary exuberance of pre-war Europe and Epstein’s destruction of the heroic worker-soldier? How can the shift from a utopian to a critical man–machine hybrid be explained? It was popularly believed that the actual war would be ‘over by Christmas’, but by 1916 the war

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machine appeared to have run out of control. Destruction and massacre had been brought about on an unprecedented scale and, despite the propaganda, initial enthusiasm had gradually been replaced by disillusionment. The German writer Hugo Ball wrote in his diary on 26 June 1915: ‘The war is based on a crass error. Men have been mistaken for machines. Machines, not men, should be decimated. At some future date, when only the machines march, things will be better. Then everyone will be right to rejoice when they all demolish each other’ (1996: 22). Like Apollinaire, Ball had volunteered for military service in 1914 but he had been rejected on health grounds. His initial patriotic fervour soon turned to shock and revolt after a visit to the Belgian front in September 1914. Horrified by what he had witnessed, he became a pacifist. He lived in Berlin between October 1914 and May 1915, and in February 1915, together with his friend Richard Huelsenbeck and his companion Emmy Hennings, a cabaret performer, he organised the ‘Gedächtnisfeier für gefallene Dichter’ (‘Memorial service for fallen poets’). This included a recital of his text ‘Totenrede’, a funeral oration for his friend Hans Leybold, who had been wounded on the Western Front in the first days of the war and had committed suicide, and a manifesto written in a dadaistic tone by Ball and Huelsenbeck, ‘Ein literarisiches Manifest’ (reproduced on the programme): ‘We wish to ­randomly provoke, overthrow, bluff, tease, tickle to death’.9 In May 1915, after leaving Berlin for Zurich in neutral Switzerland, Ball was initially invited to join the editorial staff of Walter Serner’s journal Der Mistral, but when it collapsed for lack of funds, he worked briefly in a factory before joining a vaudeville company, the Maxim Ensemble, as a pianist and sketch writer. On 5 February 1916 he opened a literary cabaret in Zurich, Künstlerkneipe Voltaire. It was here that several Dadaists first gathered: writers and artists from Germany (Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Richter, Christian Schad), Alsace (Hans Arp), Switzerland (Sophie Taeuber), Romania (Marcel Janco, Arthur Segal, Tristan Tzara) and the Netherlands (Otto and Adya van Rees).10 The international character of this group was replicated across other European cities – Berlin, Cologne, Paris and Barcelona – as well as in New York, but the movement had its origins in Zurich, at the heart of the First World War, in the revolt of a generation of displaced, disaffected poets, artists and intellectuals against the war raging around them.11 For Tzara, the war was seen as the outcome of the collapse of Europe’s traditional values. In the same spirit, Huelsenbeck stated bluntly in En avant Dada (1920) the Dadaists’ opposition to war: We were agreed that the war had been contrived by the various governments for the most autocratic, sordid and materialistic reasons … None of us had

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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. (trans. in Motherwell 1951: 23)12

Yet in his ‘Dadaistisches Manifest’ in 1918, Huelsenbeck had defended the Dadaists’ bellicose intentions: ‘We were for the war and Dadaism is still for the war today. Things must clash: things are not yet nearly cruel enough’ (1920a: 106).13 This apparent contradiction is elucidated in a lecture given by Tzara at the Sorbonne on 11 April 1947, Le Surréalisme et l’après-guerre: Dada was born of a moral need, an implacable will to achieve a moral absolute … Honour, Homeland, Morality, Family, Art, Religion, Liberty, Fraternity, etc., all these notions had once answered to human needs, now nothing remained of them but a skeleton of conventions, for they were emptied of their original content. (Tzara 1992: 65)14

The Dadaists’ war was thus seen as remote from the patriotic-capitalist war raging across Europe. And if they took up the rhetoric of war and violence, it was to promote their own global revolt in the face of the machinery of destruction. This position was corroborated by Max Ernst, who claimed in his autobiographical notes ‘Some data on the youth of M. E. as told by himself’, published in View in 1942, that: ‘Dada was a rebellious upsurge of vital energy and rage: it resulted from the absurdity, the whole immense Schweinerei of that imbecilic war’ (1942: 28). ‘God is dead. A world disintegrated. I am dynamite … A thousand-year old culture disintegrates’ (Ball 1996: 222–34): in this apocalyptic vision evoked in his lecture on ‘Kandinsky’, given at the Galerie Dada on 7 April 1917, Hugo Ball proposed a lucid diagnosis of both the situation of the pre-war period and of wartime Europe. He singled out three principal causes for the collapse of the world and the disintegration of the traditional foundations of European society. Firstly, the disappearance of the belief in a higher being in religion and philosophy (‘God is dead’ [‘Gott ist tot’]), with its associated loss of a coherent and rational order of the world (‘The meaning of the world disappeared’), has resulted in the breakdown and subsequent chaos of society. This – in a way perhaps hard to comprehend for today’s reader – was compounded by the discovery of the atom in science, with the consequent disappearance of the notion of a fixed immutable reality (‘Objects changed shape, weight, relations of juxtaposition and superimposition’), and the destruction of the traditional values long grounded therein. Finally, with the rapid development of mass culture and the modern city, it was felt that individual life, as incorporated in the organic community, was being destroyed and that machines were replacing

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individuals (‘A world of abstract demons swallowed the individual utterance, invested individual faces into masks tall as towers, swallowed private expression … [and] destroyed the ego’). Seen as having lost their privileged position at the centre of a stable universe, human beings were no longer godlike creatures: having lost their integrity, their bodies were becoming increasingly fragmented and debased. The Nietzschean overtones are unmistakable in Ball’s evocation of the disintegration of the godlike body: Man has lost his divine countenance, became matter, chance, an aggregate animal, the lunatic product of thoughts quivering abruptly and ineffectually. Man lost the special position that reason had guaranteed him. He became a particle of nature, seen (without prejudice) as a froglike or stork-like creature with disproportionate limbs, a wedge jutting out of his face (called ‘nose’), and flaps protruding from his head (which people used to call ‘ears’). Man, stripped of the illusion of godliness, became ordinary, no more interesting than a stone, and constructed and ruled by the same laws as a stone; he vanished in nature; one had every reason to avoid giving him too close a look, unless one wanted to lose, in terror and disgust, the last remnant of respect for this desolate reflection of the dead Creator. (Ball 1996: 223–4)

Positioned in stark contrast to the Renaissance idealisation of the human body, or even to Expressionism’s anthropocentric frame of reference, for Dada ‘man’ had been dislodged, pushed to the periphery, in a state of flux, reduced to the animal, mineral, matter – a debasement and alienation at work in the pre-war years and efficiently consummated on Europe’s battlefields. The Dadaists both reflected and resisted this crisis in the human form fragmented, bestialised, debased. And in Zurich, in particular, that resistance took the form of the carnival mask and dance.

Zurich’s carnival masks: between buffoonery and death dance In his 1948 text ‘Dadaland’, Hans Arp recalls the Dadaists’ activities in Zurich: ‘While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the furious folly of the times’ (1948: 39; 1966: 306).15 To this end, Zurich Dada’s rowdy performances, held first at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, then at the Galerie Dada, were organised like early happenings, expressions of vociferous protest against the times and an affirmation of youthful anarchic vitality. Ball evokes this vividly in his diary entry for 14 April 1916: Our cabaret is a gesture. Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.

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What could be respectable and impressive about it? Its cannons? Our big drum drowns them. Its idealism? That has long been a laughingstock, in its popular and its academic edition. The grandiose slaughters and cannibalistic exploits? Our spontaneous foolishness and our enthusiasm for illusion will destroy them. (Ball 1996: 61)

A similar note is struck in Tristan Tzara’s ‘Chronique zurichoise 1915–19’, where he records the chaotic vitality of their activities: ‘Dadadada we took an oath of friendship on the new transmutation that signifies nothing, and was the most formidable protest, the most intense armed affirmation of salvation liberty blasphemy mass combat speed prayer tranquillity private guerrilla negation and chocolate of the desperate’ (trans. in Motherwell 1951: 236).16 In some respects, Dada evenings can be seen as a continuation of the German turn-of-the-century cabaret tradition, represented, for example, by Munich’s Die Elf Scharfrichter, or The Eleven Executioners, a touring group following a tradition of mime, political satire, sketches and songs, grotesque dances and inciting the direct engagement of the audience. These cabaret performances took place in Munich cafes such as Simplicissimus, where Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings met, which had a small stage where they improvised their satirical sketches. Ball and Hennings went to Zurich in May 1915, where Ball joined the cabaret group Flamenco in their tour of Swiss cities. The Cabaret Voltaire was opened in 1916 and the Dadaists organised their events there until it was closed down after five months. Marcel Janco’s painting Cabaret Voltaire (1916), now lost, was a precious document of their evenings; it depicted the Dadaists performing on stage and spectators standing or sitting at tables. In its dynamism and abstraction, the human figure fuses with the masks hanging round the stage. On a typical evening, as Arp has described, Ball would be at the piano while Emmy Hennings danced and Huelsenbeck, Arp and Janco recited simultaneous poems: On a platform in an overcrowded room, splotched with color, are seated several fantastical characters … The people around us are shouting, laughing, gesticulating. We reply with sighs of love, salvos of hiccups, poems, and the bow-wows and meows of mediaeval bruitists. Tzara makes his bottom jump like the belly of an oriental dancer. Janco plays an invisible violin and bows down to the ground. Madame Hennings with a face like a madonna attempts a split. Huelsenbeck keeps pounding on a big drum, while Ball, pale as a plaster dummy, accompanies him on the piano. The honorary title of nihilists was bestowed on us. (Arp 1948: 45; 1966: 308)17

Among the many texts and dances performed at the Cabaret Voltaire was Ball’s ‘Totentanz 1916’ (‘Dance of Death’) from his Zeitgedichte series, an anti-war poem first published on the title page of the socialist journal Der Revoluzzer.18 According to Ludger Derenthal (2004: 3) it was a fierce pastiche of a marching

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song of Prussian origin, ‘Der Dessauer’ (1706). The text was first performed by Emmy Hennings in January 1916. It was closer to a medieval Dance of Death than to a triumphant military song, danced by skeletons rather than marching soldiers. Instead of the rousing opening lines of the original song (‘And so we live, so we live, / So we live every day’ [‘So leben wir, so leben wir, / So leben wir alle Tage’]), Ball’s text marches to the beat of death: And so we die, we die, We die every day, Because one can let oneself die so comfortably. (So sterben wir, so sterben wir, / Wir sterben alle Tage, / Weil es so gemütlich sich sterben lässt.)

Instead of the goose-stepping soldiers in perfect formation marching indefatigably to victory, they advance towards disintegration: ‘Until the hipbone twists off the joint’ (‘Bis sich vom Gelenke das Hüftbein dreht’). Instead of the body triumphant and sublimation in the heroic death of the soldier, the body disintegrating, vulnerable and buried: ‘Our poor flesh, covered by grass’ (‘Unser armer Leib, den der Rasen deckt’). And, finally, the death of God: ‘Bloodied and soiled the good Lord’ (‘Blutig und besudelt der liebe Gott’). A contemporary review in De Nieuwe Amsterdamme left no illusion: ‘[Hennings] sings not with a beautiful voice but with an expressive one. And the narrow face, deformed by morphine, twitches as she evokes her fierce images. She sings a soldier’s song to this war by Hugo Ball. Sings it to a simple, almost happy melody. And the sarcasm and hatred, the despair of the men who were driven into war resounds in every phrase’ (quoted in White 2013: 54). Dadaist performances like these were not only a violent denunciation of the values which had brought about this destruction but also a mirror of the times and a defence against and form of liberation from the chaos. As Ball commented: ‘Our present stylistic endeavours – what are they trying to do? To free themselves from these times, even in the subconscious, and thus to give the times their innermost form’ (1996: 105). The artistic gestures of Zurich Dada thus represented for Ball ‘an opportunity for true perception and criticism of the times we live in’ (1996: 58), a moral reaction, as Tzara claimed, and a form of harsh parodic mimicry. For Huelsenbeck too, the Dadaists’ stance was primarily moral: Dada, mainly at the outset at the Cabaret Voltaire and then later in Berlin, was a violently moral reaction. When Emmy Hennings sang ‘They kill one another with steam and with knives’ in Switzerland, which was encircled by fighting armies, she was voicing our collective hatred of the inhumanity of war. This beginning of dada was really a humanitarian reaction against mass murder in Europe, the political abuse of technology, and especially against the

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kaiser, on whom we, particularly the Germans, blamed the war. I would like to say that dada developed into an artistic reaction after starting as a moral revolution and remaining one – even when the artistic question seemed to dominate. (1969: 137)

As Hal Foster puts it, the Dadaists reacted to the absurdity and chaos of war and its aftermath via a ‘traumatic mime … whereby the Dadaist assumes the dire conditions of his time – the armoring of the military body, the fragmenting of the industrial worker, the commodifying of the capitalist subject – and inflates them through hyperbole’ (2003: 169). In so doing they enact what, in his ‘Thoughts for the times on war and death’, Freud recognised: that war ‘strips us of the later accretions of civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each of us’ ([1915] 1957: 299), exposing the individual as irrational, governed by destructive instincts. In the whirlwind of their masked dances and absurd texts, their improvisations and chaotic performances, the Dadaists unleashed a savage mimicry of the human instincts released on the battlefield. In the words of Hugo Ball, in his diary entry dated 7 November 1915: ‘The war has at least liberated the devil and given him free expression, and the devil belongs no longer to the rationalistic sphere but to the mythological’ (1996: 43). Yet Zurich Dada was also a form of carnivalesque celebration. According to Bakhtin: ‘As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and complete’ (1984: 10). Bakhtin’s theory of laughter emphasises both laughter’s dimensions (‘laughter degrades and materialises’) and its ambivalence: ‘it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival’ (1984: 11–12). For Hans Richter it was, precisely, laughter that was at the heart of Cabaret Voltaire’s carnivalesque performances and their key objectives: ‘We destroyed, we insulted, we despised – and we laughed. We laughed at everything. We laughed at ourselves just as we laughed at Emperor, King and Country, fat bellies and baby-pacifiers. We took our laughter seriously; laughter was the only guarantee of the seriousness with which, on our voyage of self-discovery, we practised anti-art’ (1965: 65). In their raucous re-enactments, the Zurich Dadaists simulated the insanity of the shell-shocked soldiers, mimicked the violence of the battlefield, and in so doing mediated the horrors of war. Dadaist laughter was both joyful and mocking, from the grimace of the corpse as an expression of terror and means of defence against that terror, to the tricks of the trickster. It was low laughter, that of the cabaret and the music hall, of

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improvisation and pleasure born of chaos, of graffiti, caricature and children’s scribbles, which sought to voice rather than repress the violence. Laughter, which for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is at the heart of revolt, was for the Dadaists a major subversive force bellowing in the face of the dominant irrationality of the times. As George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde claimed in ‘Die Kunst ist in Gefahr’ (‘Art is in Danger’): ‘In those days we saw the mad end-product of the dominant social order and burst out laughing’ (1925: 24).19 Through laughter – a harsh mix of derision, scepticism and v­ itality – the Dadaists freed themselves from the despair of war, and their collective actions were acts of defiance, forms of self-defensive regression against the insanity of war. But they were also a means of symbolic crisis management, as Cornelius Partsch has argued convincingly: ‘The ritualised performance space becomes the dynamic and liminal site of cultural contestation where the audience retains the freedom to make or transform meaning and where, potentially, the assumptions and embodiments of a culture can be undermined and resisted’ (2006: 41). For Hanne Bergius too, the Dadaist’s laughter, while a manifestation of a lucid, ironic or sceptical view of reality, was also a survival strategy, ‘a means of defence against powerlessness, terror and fear’ (1987: 76).20 Yet beyond the defensive, laughter was also liberating, an affirmation of life and a mode of regeneration. Julia Kristeva refers to such laughter as ‘what lifts inhibitions by breaking through prohibition … to introduce the aggressive, violent, liberating drive’ ([1974] 1984: 224). Laughter shatters the constraints of the symbolic order, liberating the corporeal. The dualism – savage indictment and carnivalesque Totentanz – is neatly encapsulated by Hugo Ball: ‘What we are celebrating is both buffoonery and a requiem mass’ (1996: 56).21 Inevitably, therefore, ‘the Gorgon’s head of a boundless terror smiles out of the fantastic destruction’, as Ball put it (1996: 56) – the grin of the death mask worn by Ball in Berlin, and donned by the Dadaists in war-torn Europe’s grotesque dance of death. A great deal separates this Zurich Dada laughter from the more cynical humour of a Francis Picabia or Marcel Duchamp, just as the carnivalesque vitality of Dada’s Zurich events shares little with the theatricalisation of Paris Dada events. The repetition, codification and early institutionalisation of the Paris Dadaists’ activities, in which formal play became an end in itself, were signs of disengagement and a mark of the fossilisation of Dada activities. The ambivalence of Zurich Dada activities, on the other hand, is perhaps best exemplified by their fabrication and use of masks. Hugo Ball writes of their fascination: The Dadaist loves the extraordinary and the absurd. He knows that life asserts itself in contradiction, and that his age aims at the destruction of generosity as

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no other age has ever done before. He therefore welcomes any kind of mask. Any game of hide-and-seek, with its inherent power to deceive. In the midst of the enormous unnaturalness, the direct and the primitive seem incredible to him. (1996: 65)

The explanation lies partly in their interest in primordial mental states, Jungian rather than Freudian, in their fascination for the creative potential of insanity, infantile or prerational states, and the encounter thereof with an interest in non-European tribal cultures. The mélange is emphasised by Ball in his text ‘Kandinsky’: ‘The strongest affinity shown in works of art today is with the dread masks of primitive peoples, and with the plague and terror masks of the Peruvians, Australian aborigenes, and Negroes’ (1996: 225). Their exhibitions provide concrete evidence, since tribal art objects were displayed alongside Dada art works, and non-European rhythms and resonances informed Huelsenbeck’s ‘chants nègres’ or Ball’s sound poems.22 But their usage openly overturned the prevailing symbolism of the mask in contemporary European culture, as articulated by Freud when he writes of the mask of social convention, of ‘civilised’ morality, in opposition to the depths of the psyche that it covers. For the Dadaists, on the contrary, the mask effaces the individual, the social or ethical, exposing instead the reality and madness of the times, like a parodic, hapless double of the gas mask of the trenches: ‘The horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible’, writes Ball (1996: 64–5) The Dadaists’ performances at the Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada often included gruesome masks fabricated by Marcel Janco and Hans Arp from cardboard and string, wire and cloth (figure 2.3). Arp would later recall: ‘I haven’t forgotten the masks you used to make for our Dada demonstrations. They were terrifying, most of them daubed with bloody red. Out of cardboard, paper, horsehair, wire and cloth you made your languorous fetuses, your Lesbian sardines, your ecstatic mice’ (1948: 46; 1966: 310).23 The masks were either hung around the walls of the Cabaret or incorporated by the Dadaists into their improvised dances. They clearly had a strong visual impact in the cramped space of the Cabaret, and the troubling effect experienced the first time Janco’s masks were used at the Dada soirée on 24 May 1916 is recounted by Ball: We were all there when Janco arrived with his masks, and everyone immediately put one on. Then something strange happened. Not only did the mask immediately call for a costume; it also demanded a quite definite, passionate gesture, bordering on madness. Although we could not have imagined it five minutes earlier, we were walking around with the most bizarre movements, festooned and draped with impossible objects, each one of us trying to outdo the other in inventiveness. The motive power of these masks was irresistibly

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2.3  Marcel Janco, Masque (1919) conveyed to us. … The masks simply demanded that their wearers start to move in a tragic-absurd dance. (1996: 64)

No longer simple props for the dancers, the masks dictated the movements of the dance and transformed their wearers. Performative agency effectively shifted from dancer to mask, as the latter led the dance. A detailed example of the active role played by the masks in determining the

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evolution of their movements was the dance titled ‘Negermimus Mime Negre’, performed on 31 May 1916. The performance, with music by Ball and masks by Janco, was in three parts: Their varied individuality inspired us to invent dances, and for each I composed a short piece of music on the spot. We called one dance ‘Fliegenfangen’ [‘Flycatching’]. The only things suitable for this mask were clumsy, fumbling steps and some quick snatches and wide swings of the arms, accompanied by nervous, shrill music. We called the second dance ‘Cauchemar’ [‘Nightmare’]. The dancing figure starts from a crouching position, gets straight up, and moves forward. The mouth of the mask is wide open, the nose is broad and in the wrong place. The performer’s arms, menacingly raised, are elongated by special tubes. The third dance we called ‘Festliche Verzweiflung’ [‘Festive Despair’]. Long, cutout, golden hands on the curved arms. The figure turns a few times to the left and to the right, then slowly turns on its axis, and finally collapses abruptly to return slowly to the first movement. (Ball 1996: 64)

Not only were the masks active agents in the creation of each dance, they incarnated, in Ball’s words, collective forces beyond the individual: ‘What fascinates us all about the masks is that they represent not human characters and passions, but characters and passions that are larger than life’ (1996: 64–5). The performers were thus de-individualised, their bodies absorbed into rhythmic units of movement outside their control. Sometimes the masks actually obliterated the performer’s body, which was sheathed in long tubes for arms, cutout hands, and masked face, as occurred for the first performance of Ball’s sound poems on 23 June 1916 when he wore a costume that encased his whole body (figure 2.4): My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which came up to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk. Over it I wore a huge coat collar cut out of cardboard, scarlet inside and gold outside. It was fastened at the neck in such a way that I could give the impression of wing-like movement by raising and lowering my elbows. I also wore a high, blue-and-white-striped witch doctor’s hat. (Ball 1996: 70)

He had to be carried out onto the stage, where he began to recite three of his Lautgedichte or sound poems: ‘Gadji beri bimba’, ‘Labadas Gesang an die Wolken’, and ‘Elefanten Karawane’ – a ‘priestly lamentation’ in the solemn tones used in liturgical singing. Natural bodily movements were impeded and the experience was recorded as one of both disembodiment and depersonalisation. His body resembled a piece of architecture (‘I looked like an obelisk’), his gloves a lobster sculpture, his arms a bird’s wings. The Sturm soirée of 14 April 1917 provides a further telling example of masks completely concealing the performers, giving the performance a non-corporeal, abstract quality. The event included a performance of Oskar Kokoschka’s

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2.4  Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire (1916)

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one-act play Sphinx und Strohmann (Sphinx and Strawman), in which the actors wore body masks created by Janco, who also produced the play. According to Ball, who played the role of Herr Firdusi: ‘The play was performed in two adjoining rooms, the actors wore body masks. Mine was so big that I could read my script inside it quite comfortably’ (1996: 106). It is clear from such descriptions that the mask was an invaluable contributor to the Dadaists’ concept of dance as resolutely anti-realistic and anti-expressionistic. As early as 1913, in fact, Ball had imagined a form of performance in which the individual actor’s face was covered and his voice mediated: ‘The new theater will use masks and stilts again. It will recall archetypes and use megaphones’ (1996: 9). Ball’s concept of performance has been linked to various experiments in the contemporary avant-garde theatre such as the pre-war anti-realist experiments of Edward Gordon Craig’s The Actor and the Über-Marionnette (1908), where the actor was effectively replaced by a puppet or appeared in a mask covering his body (Cheung 2014: 291); or Vsevolod Meyerhold’s theatrical performances, where the actor’s movements were also deliberately puppet-like. Clearly, the subjectivity of the Expressionist theatre of the time was rejected in favour of the depersonalisation of the performer. For contemporary practitioners this was linked to tribal societies in which, according to Carl Einstein, ‘the mask has meaning only when it is inhuman, impersonal, which is to say constructive, freed from the lived experience of the individual’ (2004: 137).

Puppets and dancers: Sophie Taeuber24 The Zurich Dadaists made use of bodily imagery on the frontier between the animate and the inanimate. The Dada soirée at the Saal Zur Kaufleuten on 9 April 1919 included various substitutes for the human figure, including a mask by Janco worn by Suzanne Perrottet in her dances to music by Satie and Schönberg, and a headless dressmaker’s dummy carried onto the stage by Walter Serner, who then placed a bunch of flowers at its feet (Richter 1965: 77–8). Not only did Taeuber create masks, she also fabricated puppets, and produced herself in the puppet-like performances of her dances at the Cabaret Voltaire. Among her many fabricated figures were the marionettes for König Hirsch (King Stag) performed at the Stadttheater in Zurich in September 1918 (figure 2.5). Based on Il Re Cervo (1762) by Carlo Gozzi, it combines the world of commedia dell’arte with that of a parodic mise-en-scene of psychoanalysis. Gozzi’s traditional characters of Pantalon, Leandro or Smeraldina, mingle with Dr Complex (Jung), Freud Analyticus or the fairy Urlibido. The marionettes consist of assemblages of brightly coloured wooden cones, cylinders, spheres or disks: the elongated form of Freud Analyticus contrasts with the condensed

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2.5  Sophie Taeuber, Smeraldina, from König Hirsch (1918)

figure of Dr Complex, made up of three superimposed cones. Their simplified shapes contrast with the more ornate traditional characters, decked with feathers and capes. They appear to have been operated by wires attached to their heads and strings attached to their arms (Fell 1999: 281). In ‘Dada XYZ’ (1948) Hans Richter underlines the importance of Arp and Taeuber’s puppets, which ‘were the first abstract puppets ever used at puppet shows. They consisted mainly of thread spools joined together, to which were added pearls, feathers or cloth. They moved with a grace not of this earth and would have out-circused even Calder’s circus in their purity’ (trans. in

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Motherwell 1951: 288). Ludic in the assemblage of colourful geometric shapes, which give them a toy-like appearance, the puppets are simultaneously critical in the mise-en-scene of the human figure reduced here to a mechanical form manipulated by an unseen puppeteer. A member of the Zurich Dada group, Taeuber was not only a puppetmaker and a dancer who resembled a marionette, she was also an accomplished textile artist, sculptor and lecturer at the Zurich Kunstgewerbe Schule (School of Applied Arts). She choreographed dances to Hugo Ball’s Lautgedichte: ‘Gesang der Seepferdchen und Flugfische’ (‘Song of the Seahorses and Flying Fish’), ‘Elefanten Karawane’ and ‘Katze und Pfau’ (‘Cat and Peacock’). Along with Suzanne Perrottet, Claire Walter and others, she was a student of Rudolf von Laban at his summer school at Ascona. Laban was an avant-garde choreographer and dance teacher who invented a notation system for modern dance form, the ‘Labanotation’, in which movement was analysed in relation to expressivity, space and rhythm. Taeuber provided the contact between the Laban and Dada groups. Although the Laban dancers performed alongside the Dadaists at the Galerie Dada, there is a sharp contrast between Laban’s expressionist dances or Ausdruckstänze and Dada’s disjunctive performances, as Didier Plassard has argued (1992: 148–51). While the Laban dancers developed free movement, often dancing in the nude, thereby liberating the body, the Dadaists on the contrary, as was shown above, masked the body, constraining physical freedom and denying the body any individual expressive capacity: ‘The body is rid of its individuality, the dancer of her authorship and the body is no longer an uncomplicated representation of the self’, writes Ruth Hemus in relation to Suzanne Perrottet’s dance movements (2009: 68). The contrast between Dada and Laban dancers is evident if we compare a photograph of Sophie Taeuber posing for an ‘abstract dance’ in a costume designed by Hans Arp (probably for a performance at the Cabaret Voltaire on 24 May 1916), with a photograph of the Laban dancer Mary Wigman (reproduced in the only issue of Der Zeltweg, 1919) performing the Hexentanz (figures 2.6 and 2.7). Taeuber wears a large, rectangular Janco mask painted red, and a cardboard costume designed by Arp, with tubular cardboard arms ending in claws. The costume was designed to conceal the contours of the dancer’s body, rejecting any erotic and emotional elements traditionally associated with the female dancer. She adopts an angular geometric pose, which transforms her into an angular figure, recalling for Ball the fragmented bodies of cubist works (‘The lines of her body broke up, each gesture decomposed into a hundred precise, angular, and sharp movements’, 1996: xxxi) or a mechanical puppet-like figure (‘the hundred-jointed body of the dancer’, 1996: 102). Movement thus constrained, expressive possibilities are impeded and subjectivity eliminated.

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2.6  Photograph of Sophie Taeuber dancing with Marcel Janco mask (1916–17)

2.7  Photograph of Mary Wigman, Der Zeltweg (1919)

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Taeuber’s pose, her more grotesque improvised dance, ‘virtuoso buffoonery with the hallmarks of a circus heritage’ (Fell 1999: 278), contrasts starkly with the fluid movements of Wigman. As in a chronophotograph or Futurist painting, the multiple-exposure photograph superimposes the movements of Wigman’s body, which appears to dissolve in space, presented as pure dynamism and light, ‘ecstatic and demonic’. The Laban dancers took part in Dada activities in Zurich. Sometimes the Dadaists themselves acted as choreographers, subjecting the dancers to a deliberate depersonalisation, their faces masked, the curves of their bodies hidden. For example, the Galerie Dada’s second Sturm soirée on 14 April 1917 (which also featured a performance of Kokoschka’s Sphinx und Strohmann, as related above), included ‘Musique et danse nègres’, with music by Ball, who also choreographed performances by the Laban dancers, among them Jeanne Rigaud and Maya Chrusecz, wearing masks designed by Janco. A few days before the event Ball wrote: ‘I am rehearsing a new dance with five Laban-ladies as Negresses in long black caftans and face masks. The movements are symmetrical, the rhythm is strongly emphasized, the mimicry is of a studied, deformed ugliness’ (1996: 104). In this dance, the female body was concealed beneath long robes, feminine beauty was rejected in favour of ugliness, individuality was denied through the use of face masks. Similarly, on the occasion of the performance of the ballet Noir Kakadu, choreographed by Taeuber and performed at the Saal zur Kaufleuten (9 April 1919), Richter’s attention was drawn to the disappearance of the bodies of the Laban dancers beneath their costumes: ‘the ballet Noir Kakadu, with Janco’s savage Negro masks to hide the pretty faces of our Labanese girls, and abstract costumes to cover their slender bodies, was something quite new, unexpected and anti-conventional’ (1965: 79–80). The dancer’s body was thus not merely depersonalised but, no less importantly, de-gendered (Hemus 2007: 100). While Dada shared with Expressionism a concept of primitivism as a means of liberation, a revolt against prevailing aesthetic norms and a search for the expression of the instinctual powers, they parted company where Expressionist artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or Emil Nolde posited a link between the primitive and the feminine. Zurich dadaist masks, on the contrary, evoked an ecstatic reality not only beyond the individual but also beyond the gendered individual. Nolde’s Dance around the Golden Calf (1910),25 where dancers display uninhibited female sexuality, stands in stark contrast to the photographs of Sophie Taeuber’s dances, where the disappearance of the body beneath the costume combined with the unnatural movements of the dance mark a denial of both the gendered body and its very materiality. Dada’s abstraction of the human body can, no doubt, be linked to Wilhelm Worringer’s argument, developed in Abstraction and Empathy ([1908] 1963), that abstraction, manifesting itself at times of unrest, is a

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reaction against mental states – anguish, destabilisation, alienation – provoked by the modern world. This de-individualised, de-gendered human figure, reconfigured as geometric form and movement, is paramount in the Dadaists’ accounts of performances at Dada soirées, where the dancer’s body is abstracted, or depicted in terms of movement and light, for example. Ball’s evocation of Sophie Taeuber’s dance for the opening of the Galerie Dada on 29 March 1917 provides an example: [A] poetic sequence of sounds was enough to make each of the individual word particles produce the strangest visible effect on the hundred-jointed body of the dancer. She is bathed in the brightness of the sun and the miracle that replaces tradition. She is full of inventiveness, whimsy, and caprice. She danced to the ‘Song of the Flying Fish and the Sea Horses’, an onomatopoeic lament. It was a dance full of flashes and edges, full of dazzling light and penetrating intensity. The lines of her body broke up, each gesture decomposed into a hundred precise, angular, and sharp movements. (Ball 1996: 102)

The body dissolves into light. The sounds of the musical instruments, including a gong or African drums, or the human voice itself, act on the body of the dancer: ‘a gong beat is enough to stimulate the dancer’s body to make the most fantastic movements’ (Ball 1996: 102). In his review of a Laban School performance in June of the same year, Tzara too evokes Taeuber’s dancing body in terms of abstract movement: ‘Miss S. Taeuber: delirious bizarreness in the spider of the hand vibrates rhythm rapidly ascending to the paroxysm of a beautiful capricious mocking madness’ (1917: 16; 1975: 558).26 Metaphors associating the dancer with the natural world frequently represent a further depersonalisation. For instance, in Richter’s description of the Laban students’ dance at the Saal zur Kaufleuten, referred to above, the dancers are transformed into butterflies: ‘In front of abstract backdrops (“cucumber plantations”) by Arp and myself, dancers wearing Janco’s abstract masks fluttered like butterflies of Ensor’ (1965: 70). Similarly, in Emmy Hennings’s account of Taeuber dancing (‘Zur Erinnerung an Sophie Taeuber’), she is again transformed, this time into a skylark rising up into the sky, or a flower bowing before the light of the sun (Kessler 1989: 53).27 Taeuber’s movements are in constant flux, embodying a mobile and shifting identity, as exemplified in the analogies with the natural world drawn by Hennings to evoke the dancer’s movements. Hans Arp’s poetic evocation of Taeuber dancing corroborates this link to the natural world: You danced daybreak overflowing the earth. You danced the garden quivering at dawn. You danced in the cushioned landscape of the moon with the mischievous gnomes of darkness. (Arp 1966: 186)28

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The accounts of Zurich Dadaists’ performances, like their dances, underscore the function of the mask – face or body mask – as a form of physical constraint or denial, of expression beyond the individual, beyond sexual identity and gender differentiation and, ultimately, beyond the human. Conventional binary categories are joyfully overturned – human/mechanical, human/animal, male/female – distinctions between body and non-body effectively blurred. Masks promoted anonymity, the vitality of primordial sensation, ecstasy in its original sense of standing outside the self or body. And it is at this extreme that we begin to understand their quest for the links to the experience of the wearer of the mask in African cultures, as Carl Einstein expounded it in his 1915 text Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture): ‘He [the mask-wearer] prays to the god, he dances ecstatically for the tribe, and he transforms himself through the mask into the tribe and the god. This transformation offers him the most powerful comprehension of objectivity; he incarnates it within himself, and he himself is this objectivity, in which all individuality is annihilated’ ([1915] 2004: 137).

Notes 1. ‘What we are celebrating is both buffoonery and a requiem mass.’ 2. Luigi Russolo, La Rivolta (The Revolt, 1911), oil on canvas, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. 3. Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation no. 30 (Cannons) (1913), oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago. 4. ‘Wie hatte der Künstler, der Soldat im Künstler nicht Gott loben sollen für den Zusammenbruch einer Friedenswelt, die er so satt, so überaus satt hatte? Krieg! Es war Reinigung, Befreiung, was wir empfanden, und eine ungeheuere Hoffnung.’ 5. Gino Severini, Armoured Train in Action (1915), oil on canvas, MoMA, New York. 6. C. R. W. Nevinson, Bursting Shell (1915), oil on canvas, Tate Liverpool. 7. ‘Il n’y a pas plus cubiste qu’une guerre comme celle-là qui te divise plus ou moins proprement un bonhomme en plusieurs morceaux et qui te l’envoie aux quatre points cardinaux … la division de la forme, je la tiens.’ 8. Jacob Epstein, Torso in Metal from The Rock Drill (1916), Tate Britain, London. 9. ‘Wir wollen: Aufreizen, umwerfen, bluffen, triezen, zu Tode kitzeln, wirr, ohne Zusammenhang’. 10. For a discussion of Zurich Dada see Pichon and Riha (1996). 11. On Dada in the context of the First World War, see Kuenzli (1982); Buelens (2006). 12. ‘Wir waren uns darüber einig, daß der Krieg von den einzelnen Regierungen aus den plattesten materialistischen Kabinettsgründen angezettelt worden war … Wir hatten alle keinen Sinn für den Mut, der dazu gehört, sich für die Idee einer Nation totschießen zu lassen, die im besten Fall eine Interessengemeinschaft von Felthändlern une Lederschiebern, im schlechtesten eine kulturelle Vereinigung von Psychopathen ist, die, wie im deutschen “Vaterlande”, mit dem Goetheband

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im Tornister auszogen, um Franzosen und Russen auf Baionette zu spießen’ (Huelsenbeck 1920d: 3). 13. ‘Wir waren für den Krieg und der Dadaismus ist heute noch für den Krieg. Die Dinge müssen sich stoßen: es geht noch lange nicht grausam genug zu.’ 14. ‘Dada naquit d’une exigence morale, d’une volonté implacable d’atteindre à un absolu moral … Honneur, Patrie, Morale, Famille, Art, Religion, Liberté, Fraternité, que sais-je, autant de notions répondant à des nécessités humaines, dont il ne subsistait que de squelettiques conventions, car elles étaient vides de leur contenu initial.’ 15. ‘Tandis que grondait dans le lointain le tonnerre des batteries, nous collions, nous récitions, nous versifiions, nous chantions de toute notre âme. Nous cherchions un art élémentaire qui devait, pensions-nous, sauver les hommes de la folie furieuse de ces temps.’ 16. ‘Dadadada on jura amitié sur la nouvelle transmutation, qui ne signifie rien, et fut la plus formidable protestation, la plus intense affirmation armée du salut liberté juron masse combat vitesse prière tranquillité guérilla privée négation et chocolat du désespéré’ (Tzara 1920b: 13; 1975: 562). 17. ‘Dans un local surpeuplé et bariolé de couleurs se tiennent sur une estrade quelques personnages fantastiques … Les gens autour de nous crient, rient et gesticulent. Nous répondons par des soupirs d’amour, des salves de hoquets, des poésies, des “Oua, Oua” et des “Miaou” de bruitistes moyenâgeux. Tzara fait sauter son cul comme le ventre d’une danseuse orientale. Janco joue un violon invisible et salue jusqu’à terre. Madame Hennings avec une figure de madone essaie le grand écart. Huelsenbeck n’arrête pas de frapper sur sa grosse caisse, pendant que Ball l’accompagne au piano pâle comme un mannequin de craie. On nous attribua le titre honorifique de nihilistes.’ 18. The text was reproduced in Der Blutige Ernst 1:4 (1919), 12–13, a satirical weekly published in Berlin by Trianon Verlag. 19. ‘Wir sahen damals die irrsinnigen Endprodukte der herrschenden Gesellschaftsordnung und brachen in Gelächter aus.’ 20. ‘un moyen de défense contre l’impuissance, l’épouvante et la peur.’ 21. ‘Was wir zelebrieren ist eine Buffonade und eine Totenmesse zugleich.’ 22. The Dadaists’ interest in non-European art will be discussed in chapter 9. 23. ‘Je n’ai pas oublié les masques que tu fabriquais pour nos manifestations dada. Ils étaient terrifiants et ordinairement badigeonnés d’un rouge sang. Avec du carton, du papier, du crin, du fil de fer, et des étoffes tu confectionnais tes foetus langoureux, tes sardines lesbiennes, tes souris en extase.’ 24. See analysis by Kessler (1989: 43–57); Fell (1999; 2012); Cheung (2014). 25. Emil Nolde, Dance around the Golden Calf (1910), oil on canvas, Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich. 26. ‘Mlle S. Taeuber: bizarrerie délirante dans l’araigné [sic] de la main vibre rythme rapidement ascendant vers le paroxysme d’une démence goguenarde capricieuse belle.’ 27. ‘Je voyais Sophie Taeuber comme un oiseau en vol, peut-être une jeune alouette, qui emporte avec elle le ciel quand elle y monte … Dans une autre danse, je la voyais fleur qui se courbait et s’inclinait devant la lumière du soleil.’

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28. ‘Tu dansais l’aurore qui déborde la terre. / Tu dansais le jardin frémissant à l’aube. / Tu dansais dans le paysage capitonné de la lune / avec les gnomes espiègles de l’ombre.’ From ‘Sophie rêvait Sophie peignait Sophie dansait’ (1944), a poem first published in Derrière le miroir 33 (1950).

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3 Shooting the classical body

Francis Picabia est un imbécile, un idiot, un pickpocket !!! Francis Picabia (1978: 41)

Francis Picabia’s painting La Nuit espagnole (Spanish Night, 1922; figure 3.1) depicts the black silhouetted figure of a male flamenco dancer against a white ground, alongside a white female nude against a black ground. Two targets are superimposed on the female figure over breast and sex, recalling the cardboard cutout figures of a fairground shooting gallery. The painting was first exhibited at the Paris Salon d’Automne in 1922. A handbill by Pierre de Massot distributed at the entrance to the exhibition warned its visitors: ‘Spanish Love is a revolver trap!’ (Camfield 1979: 189), and indeed the painting is riddled with painted bullet marks, recalling Marcel Duchamp’s La Mariée mise à nu pas ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1917–23). The body in this painting is depicted as the object not only of sexual or military violence but also of aesthetic violation. Agnès de Baumelle refers to ‘these human figures [becoming] in turn the targets of a derisory firing range: painting itself’ (1996: 18).1 Picabia has appropriated here images from the neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: the female figure recalls the figure in Ingres’s painting La Source (1820; figure 3.2) as well as Roger délivrant Angélique (1818) (Pierre 2001: 137). Picabia’s painting, with its shift from high art to fairground target, can be read as an acerbic parody of the neo-classical revival promoted by the ‘return to order’ which dominated art and politics in post-war France. Rejecting the denial inherent in the State’s promotion of the integral body, and dismissive of the return to classical norms, the Dadaists reacted by aggressively attacking images of the normative body through their parodic remake of neo-classical artists (Picabia, Man Ray) or outlandish pastiches of images used

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3.1  Francis Picabia, La Nuit espagnole (Spanish Night, 1922)

3.2   Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Source (1856)

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to promote sport or body-building (Max Ernst, Grosz). These processes will be discussed in the present chapter.

The ‘return to order’: Ingres versus Picabia2 After losing the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, France developed a collective consciousness of mutilation and loss, and a deep-seated desire for recovery. The subsequent revanchism that dominated much of post-war French politics was widely seen as vindicated when in 1918, with the reintegration of the two provinces into the Republic, France could now proclaim itself whole again. Yet in the aftermath of the 1914–18 war, such symbolic wholeness was actually confronted by the presence across Europe of innumerable shell-shocked and wounded veterans, giving the lie to the humanist ideal of the integrity of the body, whether individual or collective, and of the self in harmony with an ordered environment. In response to this contradiction, in both France and Germany – and despite the reality of four hundred thousand ‘gueules cassées’ or facially wounded, literally shattered faces, and ‘grands mutilés’ veterans in France, of some three million crippled or amputated (Kriegskrüppel) soldiers in Germany – the trauma of war and its visible aftermath was countered by repression in a state-sponsored strategy of ‘collective amnesia’ (Dagen [1996] 2012: 15). The myth of the whole body was firmly reasserted and systematically disseminated by official discourses, discreetly bolstered by exhibitions displaying the fulsome body, for example in works by Auguste Renoir shown at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1920. When applying the policy in the field of popular imagery, France-Marianne, in her allegorical (dis)guises, was depicted in posters either as a young peasant woman, a figure of healthy fertility or as a robust female warrior (Golan 1995: 18), thus linking, in the image of energy and renewal, soil, birth-rate and national defence. The policy of suppression was widespread across Europe, promoting, for instance, the installation of war memorials on which the traditional fallen or wounded soldier gives way to the striding hero or Greek god, figures in the heroic national narratives of valour, noble sacrifice and victory.3 It is on a postcard of a Leipzig war memorial (postmarked 25 February 1920) that we see most explicitly the Dadaists’ scathing attitude towards the deceit behind patriotic monuments and the grand narratives of nation-building: sent to Tzara in Paris, signed by Huelsenbeck, Hausmann and Baader, it has the words ‘Long live France! Down with the Kaiser / down with dada order / SHIT from Leipsik’ (‘Vive la France! à bas le Kaiser / à bas l’obre dada / MERDE de Leipsik’) scrawled across the image.4 In a similar spirit, Breton referred contemptuously to ‘the endless unveiling ceremonies of those war

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memorials which survive today as witnesses of an age of vandalism’ (1999: 457).5 Even the much-praised heroism of the soldiers was not beyond ridicule: ‘You die like a hero, or an idiot, which comes to the same thing’ (‘On meurt en héros, ou en idiot, ce qui est la même chose’), proclaimed Picabia in his ‘Manifeste cannibale dada’ (1920b: 3; 1978: 213). As for the (decorated) survivors, they were often subjected to equally bitter mockery: ‘The men covered in crosses remind me of a cemetery’,6 commented Picabia contemptuously in a Dada tract distributed at the 1921 Salon d’Automne, attacking the institution of which these men were gullible victims, dressed up as ‘having earned the nation’s gratitude’ (‘ayant mérité de la patrie’, 1978: 41). National reconstruction programmes and official discourse in France and Germany were premised on a process of ‘normalisation’ or ‘return to order’ in a drive not to repair but to erase the material and human cost of the war. Governments actively promoted the return to conservative values via their social and economic regeneration programmes, favouring pro-natalist policies (to repopulate) and industrial growth (to defend). Bomb sites were cleared and rebuilt; scientific advances replaced shattered limbs by prosthetic body-parts; taylorisation was introduced in industry to rationalise (i.e. mechanise) the workers’ movements, leading to increased efficiency and productivity; traditional aesthetic values and a rhetoric of measure, balance, order and clarity permeated cultural politics. Official policies, revanchist in motivation but forward-looking in presentation, thus suppressed, then built over, the rubble and the mangled limbs. The tensions and contradictions of the socio-political and ideological situation of post-war Europe were laid bare in the manifestos and tracts of the Dadaists; they exposed the lies of an ideology that sought to clothe the corpse through its promotion of the unscathed heroic soldier and its reinstatement of pre-war values. Prominent among the Dadaists in this undertaking was Francis Picabia, of French-Cuban origin, who enlisted in the French army in 1914, deserted in 1915, moved to New York in 1916 and returned to Paris in 1917. His satirical attacks against wartime and post-war patriotic rhetoric took both a verbal and a pictorial form. In a text from Unique eunuque (1920), for example, he inverts standard word-order to evoke the chaos of the times, recalling Max Ernst’s ‘violent attacks against … language, syntax, logic, literature, painting’ (1942: 30): I love war epidemics accidents That climb after passions’ joyful tears Germans the detest I War the during why is that Possible as away far as stayed I

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Now I will try to see them from closer Before like Before the labyrinth of salt tuna. (Picabia 1920c: 40; 1975: 205)7

In his text ‘Dactylocoque’, the satire of post-war nationalistic attitudes is articulated through an attack, in the pornographic mode, on the cult of the heroic soldier and on France’s military leaders: The woman who is now beside me strokes her breasts, the nipples are red, on each breast there is a portrait, Foch to the left, the Unknown Soldier to the right. Her stomach is painted white, her legs yellow, alas! She dances the tango! Her bottom is caught in a candle-box, the top of the box has a slit like a piggy bank, blue pearls escape from the slit, I thread them. This woman has outspread plaster arms, without joints. Suddenly she stops dancing and I am overcome by vertigo in the impressive silence. (Picabia 1922: 10; 1978: 98–9)8

In this text the establishment-approved integrity and decency of the body are derided through the evocation of the grotesque female body, disfigured and obscene, her breasts ludicrously adorned with the images of General Foch and the Unknown Soldier, perpetrator and victim, cause and consequence of the slaughter of the First World War. In the push for post-war normalisation in the artistic field, avant-garde experimentation and the so-called excesses of Expressionism were rejected in favour of traditional figurative art in the form of neo-classicism. The ideal here was the body as a closed, harmonious entity, screening the memory of the open body of the wounded or the obscene formlessness of the corpse. Consequently, as mentioned above, a painter such as Renoir figured prominently among the artists promoted in the immediate post-war period, his female figures providing a wholesome antidote to the realities of post-war society. Sculpture in particular was a favoured medium, when firmly grounded in references to Greek and Roman antiquity, as evidenced in the output of popular sculptors Aristide Maillol and Antoine Bourdelle – also called upon for a number of war memorials. Such was the groundswell in favour of this invasive neo-classicism that it permeated even the work of avant-garde artists themselves: Picasso’s Ingresque nudes, such as his La Source (1921), are executed in a robustly classical style; Georges Braque’s Canéphore (The Basket Carrier, 1922)9 embodies the ancient Greek motif of the caryatid; and paintings such as Fernand Léger’s Le Mécanicien (The Mechanic, 1920)10 depict the strong, healthy, pneumatic body of the working man. In response, dadaist attacks on the traditional icons of classical art forms were widespread and often virulent. Duchamp subjected the Mona Lisa to his irreverent graffiti in his L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), while Hans Arp extolled the desecration

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3.3  Francis Picabia, Tableau Dada (Still Life), Cannibale 1 (1920)

of classical sculpture: ‘Dada gave the Venus de Milo an enema and permitted Laocoön and his sons to relieve themselves after thousands of years of struggle with the good sausage Python’ (1948: 48; 1966: 312).11 Picabia, for his part, chose the art institution as his target in the satirical Tableau Dada (Natures mortes) (Dada Painting (Still Lives), 1920; figure 3.3), in which the handwritten words ‘Portrait de Cézanne portrait de Rembrandt portrait de Renoir’ form a frame around a stuffed toy monkey attached to the centre of the canvas. First displayed on stage at the Manifestation Dada in Paris on 27 March 1920 and reproduced in the first issue of Cannibale (1920), it ridicules the traditional genres of both still-life

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and portrait, and attacks art as a mimetic, moribund activity (‘natures mortes’), through the use of the readymade and the pun on the artist who ‘apes nature’. In post-1918 France the neo-classical painter Ingres was, without doubt, the dominant artistic figure, his smooth classical forms finding favour with a public all too willing to settle for amnesia and extol the virtues of French classicism, perceived as an antidote to the widely promoted cliché of German barbarism. According to Kenneth Silver, Ingres represented ‘the most public, confident, conservative, and quintessentially French of artists’ (1989: 71).12 In ‘Notes sur Ingres, la doctrine d’Ingres’, Roger Bissière commented on his status as a model for artists in patriotic post-war France: ‘The master of Montauban has been considered by our youth as a guide and precursor, his work has become a rallying-point and acquired a meaning for our time it did not have for his contemporaries’ (1921: 387).13 An exhibition of the artist’s work was organised in 1921 by the Association Franco-Américaine d’Expositions de Peinture et de Sculpture – with proceeds going, ironically perhaps, to disfigured war veterans. Ingres was promoted in particular by Henry Lapauze, who curated exhibitions of his work and edited a special issue of La Renaissance de l’art français et des industries de luxe (May 1921) devoted to the artist. Contemporary art historians and critics postulated a continuity between Ingres and modern art, as evidenced in exhibitions such as D’Ingres à Cézanne (Galerie Rosenberg, 1925); while in an article titled ‘De J. A. D. Ingres au cubisme’, written in 1922 on the occasion of the exhibition Cent Ans de peinture française, the painter André Lhote also traced a filiation in French painting between Ingres and Cézanne, grounded on the ‘architectures mentales’ of their paintings (1933: 69). In the 1921 article quoted above, Bissière went on to claim that Cubism itself, albeit in its classicised form, was a legacy of Ingres: ‘the Cubists were to take up and develop further Ingres’s techniques, and nothing resembles more a painting by Ingres than certain cubist works by Picasso’ (1921: 387).14 Such claims were well suited to a time when Cubism was being reappropriated as a French movement, after being denigrated and vilified during the war as German – ‘Kubisme’ – and identified with the German ‘Bouillon KUB’ (Silver 1989: 11). Calling for a return to ‘the purest traditions of our race’ (‘la tradition la plus pure de notre race’), Bissière ends by openly conflating the defence of traditional artistic values with those of nationalism. It is true to say that the Dadaists themselves exhibited an ambivalent attitude towards the revival of interest in Ingres in post-war France. In the survey ‘Liquidation’, published in 1921 in Littérature (1921: 4), in which Dadaists were asked to assess writers and artists on a scale of -25 to +25, Tzara gave Ingres -25, while Breton assessed him at +17. As for Picabia, who did not take part in the exercise, his own attitude seems at first glance to be unproblematically hostile. The contrast between his iconoclastic production and the profoundly

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anti-modernist dimension of the return to order is suggested in a montage over a double page, published under the title Deux Ecoles in Les Hommes du jour (9 April 1920), of a reproduction of Ingres’s painting Vierge à l’hostie (Virgin with Host, 1841) alongside Picabia’s 1920 Sainte-Vierge, an inkblot.15 Yet while such an opposition seems unequivocally direct, Picabia’s position vis-à-vis Ingres was actually more complex. In Mouvement Dada (1919), he had proclaimed Ingres to be among the spiritual founders of Dada.16 The work combines a mechanical drawing with a chart printed on pink paper tracing Dada’s lineage, beginning with Ingres and Corot and culminating with the Dada group, including Janco, Stieglitz, Tzara and Picabia himself.17 It would seem, on analysis, that the object of his iconoclastic gesture was, in fact, less Ingres than Ingrism, the instrumentalisation of Ingres’s aesthetics in the establishment’s post-1918 revival of neo-classical art. This ambivalent position towards Ingres, a mix of admiration and rejection, has been underlined by several critics. Stéphane Guéguan, for example, refers to Picabia’s quasi-obsessional fascination for Ingres, a combination of admiration and irreverence, a form of ‘deviant Ingrism’ (‘ingrisme déviant’, 2004: 74). Picabia’s agonistic relation to his illustrious predecessor, mixing admiration and dismissal, points to a Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’. Consequently, his use of parody and pastiche would be both an admission of complicity with the earlier artist, who provides a point of departure for Picabia’s own work, and an act of distancing by reworking the hypotext. The notion of duplicity inherent in parody is developed by Linda Hutcheon, who defines parody as ‘a form of imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion … repetition with critical distance, which marks distance rather than similarity’ (1985: 6). Parody, as complicity and distancing, can thus both acknowledge and subvert the doxa, and Picabia can be seen as paying homage to the older artist in his citational practice while desacralising the classical heritage enacted in Ingres’s works and valued by the establishment. It is this dual process, already characteristic of his series of Espagnoles from the pre-war period, that appears in particular in his paintings of the early 1920s, situating his work within an art-historical lineage, but poised between respect and caricature. Attacking the official cultural discourse, Picabia – signing Francis Ingres! – parodied academic drawing in general, and pastiched Ingres in particular, in a series of paintings and drawings from the early 1920s. This appropriative gesture is humorously enacted on the cover of issue 14 of 391 (1920), where he added his first name to a copy of Ingres’s signature: ‘Copie d’un autographe d’Ingres / par / Francis Picabia’. In La Feuille de vigne (The Fig Leaf, 1920; figure 3.4), exhibited alongside La Nuit espagnole at the 1922 Salon d’Automne, the silhouetted male figure depicted in profile, one foot raised on a circular form, is quoted from Ingres’s figure of Oedipus in Oedipe et le sphinx (1827).18 Arnauld Pierre interprets the gigantic vine leaf (the French equivalent of the biblical fig

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3.4  Francis Picabia, La Feuille de vigne (The Fig Leaf, 1922)

leaf) covering the male figure’s penis in La Feuille de vigne – like the targets covering parts of the female figure in La Nuit espagnole – as a parody of the prudishness of French academic painting of the time (2001: 136). Openly ironic, too, are the words ‘dessin français’ inscribed on the painting as a reference to the revival of drawing, central to traditional French painting techniques. It echoes Ingres’s own statement, ‘drawing is the integrity of art’ (‘le dessin est la probité de l’art’), a position savaged by Picabia in one of his vitriolic texts, ‘Académisme’: When Ingres wrote: ‘Drawing is the integrity of art’, he believed that drawing and painting were purely imitative arts. Carpenter-builders raise a scaffold around a cathedral built by Ingres. They look at this cathedral, neon signs and machines the way a frog looks at a cow… What they consider building is in fact fabricating, their art is a cancer feeding on the gullibility of credulous amateurs. (Picabia 1923a: 5; 1978: 107)19

Painted in Ripolin, a commercial enamel paint – which Picabia had used in earlier paintings such as Parade amoureuse (Amorous Parade, 1917; see figure 4.4) or L’Enfant carburateur (The Child Carburettor, 1919) – La Feuille de vigne depicts a simplified cutout figure as in poster graphics, marking the debasement of the

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figure from high art to low, thereby rejecting the aura conferred on the classical work of art and pointing to the work’s status as overt simulacrum. This painting, like La Nuit espagnole, combines elements of the neo-classical (linear construction, iconographic references to Oedipus) and the modernist (flat picture plane, colour blocks), leading Didier Ottinger to argue that ‘classical through their linear construction and iconographic references, modern through their schematic colouring and scrupulous respect of the flat picture plane, Spanish Night and The Fig-Leaf cock a snook both at the adulators of the Ancients and the fanatics of the Moderns’ (2000: 85).20 A similar conflation confronts the viewer In Dresseur d’animaux (Animal Trainer),21 exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1923 (misleadingly dated 5 July 1937 on the canvas). Its simplified forms, strong flat colours on an empty ground, its deformed or masked features recall a circus poster. Naturalism is eschewed in the two-dimensionality and opacity of the cutout figures, whose artifice is made overt. The mix of art-historical reference – the source of the male figure has been identified as one of the figures from the classical Greek sculptural group, the Farnese Bull, dated 100 bce (Camfield 1979: 190) – and popular culture style destabilises the homogeneous discourse of high culture. The half-masks evoke the masks worn by actors in commedia dell’arte theatre, which witnessed a revival on the post-war stage to counter naturalist theatre, as depicted, for example, in Gino Severini’s Pierrot with Guitar (1923).22 A similar mix is present in La Nuit espagnole, in which Ingres is reinterpreted not only via early shadow theatre but also via the contemporary fashion for kitsch Spanish exoticism or ‘l’hispanisme de pacotille’ (Pierre 2002: 171).23 Ingres is referenced again in a later drawing by Picabia, albeit in what is perhaps a more complicit mode. It is one of twenty-six original ink drawings, nine of which were reproduced for the covers of the second series of Littérature (1922–24), edited by Breton.24 One of the drawings depicts a flowing mass of intertwined female bodies, reduced to simple contours, headless and armless, with the title of the review inscribed on their bodies, against a roughly filled black background (figure 3.5). This is yet another ironic reference to ‘le dessin français’, here reduced to a summary sketch. The group of figures recalls the naked female figures portrayed in Ingres’s Le Bain turc (1862),25 while the larger central figure echoes La Source. Unlike the earlier pastiches, however, this drawing also points to a specific characteristic of the neo-classical artist, his distorted anatomies. In a review of the 1855 Exposition Universelle, Baudelaire had already evoked the mix of classical harmony and disfigurement of the female body, underlining, in humorous mode, the distortions introduced by Ingres in the representation of the female anatomy: ‘Here we find a navel straying towards the ribs, there a breast pointing too much in the direction of the armpit’ ([1868] 1956:

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3.5  Francis Picabia, cover of Littérature 2:10 (1923)

211).26 A similar observation is recorded by André Lhote, who comments on Ingres’s depiction of the female figure: ‘two vertebrae too many, and a breast unreasonably placed under the arm!’ (1933: 64–5).27 His observations focus in particular on Ingres’s depiction of the unnaturally elongated backs of the female figures, arguably less informed by anatomical accuracy than infused by desire: ‘The adorable curve of the back, so flowing, supple and long, is lengthened even further, to make even clearer to others the sexual arousal it inspires in him’ (1933: 66).28 Arguing that the deformations are the workings of desire, Lhote sees in Ingres’s distortion of the female body an erotic and hallucinatory quality, in which anatomical precision is relegated in favour of the truth of

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sensation: ‘Anatomy, that sacred science, that keystone of the temple of decadent Academic art, has been desecrated here.’29 A similar comment is made in relation to Jupiter and Thetis (1811),30 when Lhote considers Thetis’s elongated arm not as a real limb, but as ‘an invented form, a hot and sinuous thing made to sensually caress and envelop’ (1933: 67).31 Arguably, the elongated backs of the nude figures in Picabia’s drawing and their sinuous outlines produce a similar erotic charge.

Man Ray’s shots of the female body Picabia’s complex attitude towards Ingres echoes an equally ambivalent position of the nineteenth-century artist himself, epigone of neo-classical forms yet artist subverting classical aesthetic principles in his depiction of the eroticised female body through processes of deformation. Such a mix of restraint and overt eroticism – masked in conventional Ingrism – might well explain the attraction exerted on contemporary artists and writers. Among these was Man Ray, who in his autobiography confesses a fascination far more erotic than aesthetic for classical Greek statues and Ingres’s drawings of nudes (1998: 20). It is consequently this other (erotic) Ingres that Man Ray, on his arrival in Paris in 1921, referenced in his photographs of nude models, recalling Ingres’s Le Bain turc, for example. In 1923 he photographed his lover Kiki de Montparnasse in a pose recalling Ingres’s La Source; a variation of this photograph was reproduced in 1925 in the second issue of La Révolution surréaliste, in which Man Ray has obscured the face of the model and softened the outlines of the body, turning the figure into a ghostlike presence. The neo-classical artist is cited again in Man Ray’s photograph Le Violon d’Ingres (1924; figure 3.6).32 A seated female nude, Kiki once again, is shot from the back. She wears a turban and earring, echoing the Oriental motif of Ingres’s odalisque figures and playing with popular Oriental fashion of the 1920s.33 A robe is draped around the thighs of the figure and her head is shot in profile, while her arms, held in front of the body, are invisible. A sensual motif (female nude) is thus filtered through an academic tradition (neo-classical painting). The photograph actually appropriates both Ingres’s Baigneuse Valpinçon (1808)34 and the central figure in Le Bain turc. Like Ingres, Man Ray has minimised the modelling of the figure by using bright, homogeneous lighting, which has the effect of flattening the figure. He has manipulated the figure of his model even further by accentuating the contours of the body with pencil and Indian ink, adding two f-holes on the back and photographing the print, transforming the body into a violin. The combination of female body and musical instrument reworks the female figure in Le Bain turc playing the oud, as well as echoing Braque and Picasso’s analogies between violin and female forms in their cubist works, for

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3.6  Man Ray, Le Violon d’Ingres (1924)

example in the two drawings reproduced on the front and back covers of the publication 291 in November 1915. The title is also a pun, since ‘violon d’Ingres’, which has come to mean a hobby, refers literally to music as Ingres’s secondary interest. Man Ray, like Picabia, reveals in such reworkings an ambivalent attitude to the older artist, encompassing homage and disrespect. As Kirsten Hoving

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Powell remarks: ‘Through metaphoric mutilation, Man Ray enacts le viol d’Ingres, challenging the inviolability of tradition by violating the sanctity of Ingres’s form’ (2000: 783). Read in this way, the work can be seen as a Dada joke along the lines of Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. While the armless and legless body of Man Ray’s figure can also evoke, beyond ‘metaphoric mutilation’, the mutilated bodies of the First World War, it can also be seen as a metaphoric transformation through desire, echoing Ingres’s own eroticisation of the body as observed by Lhote, for example. Man Ray’s recycling of Ingres, in any case, remains less aggressive than Picabia’s 1920 paintings; less engaged with or, perhaps, more dismissive of Ingres’s neo-classicism. Working at the crossroads between Dadaist parody and surrealist sublimation, he is more complicit with the eroticisation of the female figure, as indeed was Picabia in the 1924 drawing discussed earlier. It would thus resonate with Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer’s reconfiguration and sublimation of the female body through metaphor, made explicit when he writes: ‘a detail, for example a leg, is perceived and available to memory, in short, is REAL, only if desire does not take it automatically for a leg … An object identical to itself lacks reality’ (1957: 38).35 For Bellmer, as for Man Ray (or Ingres), the image of woman is shaped primarily through the dynamics of desire, embodied in terms of anatomical reconfigurations. These examples of the human figure transformed through the mix of desire, homage and playful parody of classical forms contrast with the more derisory quotations of classical art among the Berlin Dadaists, such as Johannes Baargeld’s photocollage Typische Vertikalklitterung als Darstellung des Dada Baargeld (Typical Vertical Mess as Depiction of the Dada Baargeld, 1920), which was exhibited in 1920 at the Berlin Dada-Messe and the Salon Dada in Paris (figure 3.7). It combines a photographic portrait of Baargeld wearing a cap, pasted onto a reproduction of the bust of the Venus de Milo. The deliberately clumsy juxtaposition of classical torso and contemporary head and cap, formally underscored by the combination of black-and-white and sepia photographic fragments, debases the classical reference, subverts the integrity of the body and confuses gender identity, thereby ridiculing traditional binary oppositions of high/low art, male/female, classical/contemporary. Moreover, read in the context of immediate post-war Germany, as Sabina Kriebel observes, ‘it also conjures the bodies of mutilated veterans, transforming the oft-romanticised esthetics of classical ruins, which themselves are dismembered, into a condemnation of war. Baargeld simultaneously imagines himself as amputee, eroticised female, and emasculated male’ (2005: 229). Kriebel’s interpretation is confirmed by the title, since Klitterung means ‘to patch up or piece together something from smaller parts, a messy process, not unlike the provisionally mended bodies of veterans’ (2005: 229).36 No less harshly derisory is Rudolf Schlichter’s series of Verbesserte Bildwerke

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3.7   Johannes Theodor Baargeld, Typische Vertikalklitterung als Darstellung des Dada Baargeld (Typical Vertical Mess as Depiction of the Dada Baargeld, 1920)

der Antike (Improved Works from Antiquity), such as his Venus von Milo I, now lost, where he placed a photograph of himself over a reproduction of the sculpture. John Heartfield comments on this work in the Dada-Messe catalogue, claiming that Schlichter has revitalised the antique statue of a goddess by combining it with a contemporary head. Other works by Schlichter, such as Venus von Milo II or Apollo aus Pompeji, both lost, also combined antique sculpture with contemporary elements. A related work, Schlichter’s collage Phänomen-Werke (Phenomenon-Works, 1919–20),37 includes a reproduction of Polyclitus’ Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer) from the fifth century bce (Bergius 2003: 207–8). Placed on a table to the left of a scene in a bordello, it is reduced to little more than a stump: one-armed, legs amputated and headless, blood dripping from the open wound of the neck, upper arm flayed, torso bound by a corset, sex replaced by an ineffectual fragment of metal pipe. Schlichter has thus debased the ancient canon of bodily perfection, grounded on perfect symmetry and harmonious interrelations between its parts, reducing it to an assemblage of ugly disjunctive fragments, inescapably evoking the shattered remnants and clumsy prostheses of the war veteran. In his introduction (‘Zur Einführung’) to the Berlin Dada-Messe, the Dadaist Wieland Herzfelde rejects the cult of classical art: ‘The past remains important

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and authoritative only to the extent that its cult must be combated. The Dadaists are of one mind: they say that the works of antiquity, the classical age, and all the “great minds” must not be assessed … with regard to the age in which they were created, but as if someone made those things today’ (2003: 102).38 By appropriating images from antiquity and combining them with photographic fragments from contemporary reality, the Dadaists derided the cult of classicism, smashing the pedestals which marked the venerable distance of Apollos and Venuses, disfiguring the statues and confronting them in the contemporary agenda of a society which could no longer justifiably believe in harmony or perfect proportions. In both Germany and France their position challenged the orchestrated drive in the immediate post-war period to restore the idea of the centrality of the healthy, perfect body, as manifested in the promotion of the perfectibility of the body through sport.

Vive le sport! ‘LA MISE SOUS WHISKY MARIN / SE FAIT EN CRÈME KAKI & EN CINQ ANATOMIES / VIVE LE SPORT / MAX ERNST’. These words (untranslatable), drawn from the exhibition catalogue of Ernst’s first Paris exhibition at the Librairie Sans Pareil in May 1921, La mise sous whisky marin, highlight the importance of sport – in particular, boxing, gymnastics (Turnen) and bodybuilding – in popular culture in post-war France and Germany. The post-war promotion of health, the body and sport was obviously linked to the healing of the national body after the loss and crippling of a generation of young men. Body-building was a redemptive action compensating for the violence done to the body in the war, as well as a form of sublimation. The German popular press promoted the images of sportsmen and sportswomen as models of health and fitness, prototypes of social integration and epigones of modernity. The modern, trained body, furthermore, satisfied the efficiency and productivity of the assembly line in industry and, less openly acknowledged, prepared a new generation for military service. We find evidence of this new culture in the many photographs of Dadaists as sportsmen – boxers, cyclists, gymnasts: for example, Hausmann in the pose of a body-builder, flexing his muscles on a Berlin rooftop (reproduced in Der Dada 3 (1920), 9), or Grosz posing next to a punching ball in his studio (c.1920). Their photomontages also showed the modern sportsman or sportswoman, as in those of Hannah Höch where dancers, gymnasts and athletes, images of the physically liberated New Woman, are juxtaposed with images of modernity, as in Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919–20).39 Their paintings too develop the theme of the sportsman. In 1920–21 Grosz

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produced six works in pen, ink and watercolour to illustrate an article on his new painting titled ‘Zu meinen neuen Bildern’, published in 1921 in Das Kunstblatt. In contrast to the grotesque figures of his satirical watercolours and drawings of 1920–22 (which will be discussed in chapter 5), these works, executed in the rationalist Neusachlichkeit or New Objectivity style, depict simplified faceless figures, closer to automata than to human form. In Sportsmann (1922),40 the round punching balls or weights are echoed in the featureless head of the figure. In Der neue Mensch (New Man, 1921), the male figure is depicted as both boxer (alongside a punching ball hanging in his studio) and engineer (an engineer’s drawing is visible on an easel), the New Man of Weimar Germany, striding towards a utopian future (figure 3.8).41 This featureless mechanical figure, informed by Constructivism, is linked to communism’s collective ideal: ‘Man is no longer an individual represented in subtle psychological terms, but rather as a collective, almost mechanical concept’, writes Grosz in ‘Zu meinen neuen Bildern’ (1921: 14).42 The works are not devoid of humour, however, since in John Heartfield’s photomontage Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (Everyman his own football), for instance, reproduced on the cover page of the only issue of the magazine of the same name (15 February 1919), he depicts his brother Wieland Herzfelde as a composite figure whose torso is replaced by a huge football; he wields a walking

3.8  George Grosz, Der neue Mensch (New Man, 1921)

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3.9  Cover of Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (1919)

stick and lifts his hat in greeting (figure 3.9). This rather ridiculous and playful depiction of the bourgeois suggests a formal individual ego and a (self-)satisfied paunch, archetype of a complacent collectivity, object of the Dadaists’ jibes and attacks.43

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3.10  Max Ernst, La Santé par le sport (1920)

The aesthetic norm for the healthy body was clearly drawn from the atemporality of the classical Greek body, eliding in the process the all-too-present patched-up bodies, prosthetic limbs and the taylorised body. This classical, idealised body, toned through sport and body-building, is subjected to playful parody in Max Ernst’s photomontage La Santé par le sport (Health Through Sport, 1920), now lost (figure 3.10). It is based on the photograph of a male nude, adorned with an ornate fig leaf, taking up an art studio pose for the camera in mock imitation of the stance of the classical statue, with one support leg and

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one free leg. The pastiche also targets the popular genre of physical culture photographs widespread in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century France and Germany, in which body-builders, promoted as prototypes of health and masculinity, were shot in poses drawn, unimaginatively, from classical statuary. Ernst parodies this ideal and its ideological implications of nation-building and morale-boosting by feminising the figure (which sports a crocheted butterfly face), desacralising the classical ideal via contemporary middle-class leisure (a golf club) and ridiculing his mastery (he holds the cross-section of an alligator brain). Alongside such pastiches of contemporary activities, however, competitive sport can also be envisaged, in a wider sense, as the rejection of tradition and the actual embracing of modernity, via ‘a broad metaphor for opposition and struggle’ (Kramer 2014: 252), especially among the Berlin Dadaists. The motif of boxing, in particular, adopted by the Dadaists from the cabaret tradition, was extended beyond the image of resistance or opposition into that of physical attack. Tzara’s poem ‘Boxe’ (1919), reproduced in SIC 42–3 (1919), references boxing not only explicitly as theme but also implicitly via its form, its short, punchy lines printed in various typefaces functioning like a series of pugilistic blows to the reader’s sense of poetic decorum (figure 3.11). Similarly, in René

3.11  Tristan Tzara, ‘Boxe’ (1919)

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Clair’s Entr’acte (1924), disembodied white boxing gloves appear to punch the spectator, as if to knock her out of a passive viewing position. Sport figures again in Max Ernst’s photomontage the punching-ball ou l’immortalité de buonarroti ou dadafex maximus (1920; see figure 8.2). This time, what is at stake is the broader context of an attack against a stuffy tradition: in this Oedipal mise-en-scene, the father-figure – whether law-giver (Caesar) or artistic model (Michelangelo), political or aesthetic authority – is reduced to a two-dimensional cardboard cutout, an item of sports equipment to be pummelled by the son.44 The Dadaists, in short, cannibalised images with the aim of exploding the illusions fostered in the myths of post-war France and Germany: of a wholesome Marianne as the reconstituted body of France, the poilu as the striding hero, the ideal body forged through sport. Recycling, abusing and debasing images, they critiqued the ‘return to order’, whether represented by the tradition of ‘le dessin français’ or the cult of body-building, through often abrasive pastiche and parody. While the post-war doxa sought to naturalise the classical body as an organic whole, the Dadaists put the body on display as artifice (Picabia), fetish (Man Ray), fragment (Baargeld) or performance (Ernst, Grosz). Debasing, mutilating or dismembering the neo-classical body, their images mark a violent shift from a traditional aesthetic, based on an idealised representation, to a modernist aesthetic, reconfiguring the body as overt fabrication, montage. It is this category of images, exposing the fragmented or the hybrid, promoting mechanical forms and techniques, which will be explored in the following two chapters. The Dadaists, far from being mere iconoclasts, are both Luddites and engineers.

Notes 1. ‘ces figures humaines, devenues à leur tour cibles d’un dérisoire champ de tir: la peinture elle-même.’ 2. See the extended discussion of this period by Kenneth Silver (1989: 219–98). 3. Europe also saw a turn to conventional religious symbolism, whence the large number of crucified Christs featured on German monuments, and of resurrected Christs in France. 4. The postcard is reproduced in Le Bon (2005: 937). 5. ‘l’inauguration ininterrompue de ces monuments aux morts qui subsistent de nos jours comme témoins d’un âge de vandalisme.’ 6. ‘Les hommes couverts de croix font penser à un cimetière.’ 7. ‘J’aime la guerre les épidémies les accidents/ Qui grimpent après les larmes joyeuses des passions / Allemands les déteste je / Guerre la pendant que cela pour est c’ / Possible loin plus le resté suis-je / Maintenant je vais tâcher de les voir de plus près / Avant comme / Avant le labyrinthe du thon salé.’

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8. ‘La femme qui se trouve en ce moment près de moi caresse ses seins, les pointes sont rouges; sur chaque sein il y a un portrait, à gauche Foch, à droite le Soldat Inconnu. Son ventre est peint en blanc, ses jambes en jaune, hélas! Elle danse le tango! Ses fesses sont prises dans une boîte à bougies, le dessus de la boîte est fendu ainsi qu’une tirelire, de cette fente s’échappent des perles bleues, je les enfile. Les bras de cette femme sont en plâtre, sans articulations, elle les tient écartés, en croix. Tout à coup, elle s’arrête de danser et je me sens pris de vertige dans le silence impressionnant.’ 9. Georges Braque, Canéphore (1922), oil on canvas, MNAM Centre Pompidou, Paris. 10. Fernand Léger, Le Mécanicien (1920), oil on canvas, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. 11. ‘Dada a donné un clystère à la Vénus de Milo et a permis à Laocoon et ses fils de se soulager, après des milliers d’années de lutte avec le bon saucisson Python.’ 12. See also Bouiller (2004). 13. ‘Le maître de Montauban a été considéré par la jeunesse comme un guide et un précurseur, son oeuvre est devenue un drapeau et a pris pour les hommes d’aujourd’hui un sens qu’elle n’eut pas pour ses contemporains.’ 14. ‘les cubistes … devaient plus tard reprendre en les poussant plus loin les procédés d’Ingres, et il n’est rien qui ressemble davantage à un tableau d’Ingres que ­certains tableaux cubistes de Picasso.’ 15. Francis Picabia, Sainte Vierge, reproduced in 391 12 (1920), 3. 16. Francis Picabia, Mouvement Dada, reproduced in Der Dada 4–5 (1919), 2. 17. The same year Marius de Zayas curated in New York an exhibition of French art, ranging from Ingres and Delacroix to Dadaists Francis Picabia, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Marcelle Duchamb [sic]. 18. J.-A.-D. Ingres, Oedipe et le sphinx (1827), oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris. La Feuille de vigne was painted over Les Yeux chauds, based on a technical drawing of a turbine brake (Camfield 1979: 169). 19. ‘Quand Ingres écrivit: “Le dessin est la probité de l’art”, il pensait que le dessin et la peinture étaient purement arts d’imitation. / Messieurs les charpentiers constructeurs élèvent un échafaudage autour d’une cathédrale construite par Ingres. / Ils regardent cette cathédrale, les enseignes lumineuses et les machines ainsi que la grenouille regardait le boeuf… Ce qu’ils appellent bâtir, c’est fabriquer, leur art est un cancer s’alimentant de la jobarderie d’amateurs crédules.’ 20. ‘Classiques par leur conception linéaire et leurs références iconographiques, modernes par leur schématisme chromatique et leur scrupuleux respect de la planéité de la surface, La Nuit espagnole et La Feuille de vigne sont un double pied de nez aux laudateurs des Anciens comme aux fanatiques des Modernes.’ 21. Francis Picabia, Dresseur d’animaux (1923), enamel paint on canvas, MNAM Centre Pompidou, Paris. 22. Gino Severini, Pierrot with Guitar (1923), oil on canvas, Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam. 23. Another example of Ingres reworked is Picabia’s frontispiece for Erik Satie’s Relâche (1924), which quotes Ingres’s Apothéose d’Homère (1827) in a playful mode. 24. The drawings, originally in Breton’s collection, were acquired by the MNAM

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Centre Pompidou and displayed in the exhibition Man Ray, Picabia et la revue ‘Littérature’ (2014). 25. J.-A.-D. Ingres, Le Bain turc (1862), oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris. 26. ‘Ici nous trouverons un nombril qui s’égare vers les côtes, là un sein qui pointe trop vers l’aisselle.’ 27. ‘deux vertèbres de trop, et un sein déraisonnablement placé sous le bras!’ 28. ‘Cette courbe adorable du dos, si déliée, si souple, si longue, il l’allongera encore, malgré lui, pour mieux rendre apparent à autrui le trouble qu’elle lui inspire.’ 29. ‘Voici profanée l’anatomie, cette science sacrée, cette clef de voûte du temple de l’Académisme décadent.’ 30. J.-A.-D. Ingres, Jupiter et Thétis (1811), oil on canvas, Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence. 31. ‘une forme inventée, une chose chaude et sinueuse faite pour caresser et enveloper sensuellement.’ 32. Reproduced in Littérature 13 (June 1924). 33. See Bate (2004: 112–44) for an analysis of Le Violon d’Ingres in terms of its ‘Oriental signifier’. 34. J.-A.-D. Ingres, Baigneuse Valpinçon (1808), oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris. 35. ‘tel détail, telle jambe, n’est perceptible, accessible à la memoire et disponible, bref, n’est RÉEL, que si le désir ne le prend pas fatalement pour une jambe … L’objet identique à lui-même reste sans réalité.’ 36. Not only is classical art travestied, but also avant-garde movements like Cubism, as in Baargeld’s Ordinäre Klitterung. Kubisher Travestit vor einem vermeintlichen Scheidewege (Vulgar Mess: cubistic transvestite at an alleged crossroards, 1920), which depicts a female figure dressed in furs dominating the figure of Cubist artist Albert Gleizes astride a phallic-shaped geometrical construction; or Grosz and Heartfield’s ‘corrected masterpiece’, Pablo Picasso. La Vie heureuse. (Dr Karl Einstein gewidmet) (1920), a reproduction of Picasso’s collage Jeune Fille (1913) overlaid with further collaged elements. The photomontage, reproduced in the Dada-Messe exhibition catalogue, is lost. 37. Rudolf Schlichter, Phänomen-Werke (1919–20), collage with watercolour on paper, private collection. 38. ‘Die Vergangenheit ist nur noch insofern wichtig und maßgebend, als ihr Kult bekämpft werden muß. Insofern sind sich die Dadaisten einig, sie sagen was die Antike, die Klassik, all die großen Geister geschaffen haben, darf nicht … gewertet werden in bezug auf die Zeit, da es geschaffen wurde, sondern so, als ob heute jemand diese Dinge herstellt.’ 39. Hannah Hoch, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919–20), photomontage, collage and watercolour, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. See also Baargeld’s der sportsmann max ernst beim training am 100 m-Ständer, listed in the Dada-Vorfrühling exhibition in Cologne, and his Vive le sport!, exhibited at the Berlin Dada-Messe (both works are lost). For an analysis of the importance of sport and modernity in France and Germany, respectively, see Garb (1998); Jensen (2010); Kramer (2014). 40. George Grosz, Sportsmann (1922), pen, black ink and watercolour, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alisa Mellon Bruce Fund.

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41. Reproduced in Das Kunstblatt 5:1 (1921), 10. 42. ‘Der Mensch ist nicht mehr Individuell, mit feinschürfender Psychologie dargestellt, sondern als kollektivistischer, fast mechanischer Begriff.’ Grosz was a member of the Communist Party between 1918 and 1923.  43. See Kramer (2014: 255–7) for a detailed analysis of this work. 44. This work is discussed in chapter 8.

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4 Hybrid bodies (I): the impossible machine

Man made the machine in his own image. Paul B. Haviland (1915: 1)

On 18 February 1918 at the Berliner Sezession on the Kurfürstendamm Richard Huelsenbeck declaimed his ‘Erste Dada-Rede’ on the occasion of the first Berlin Dada soirée. Art was, for him, contingent on the immediacy of contemporary events: ‘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 the last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash’ (trans. in Motherwell 1951: 40).1 The Sezession was simultaneously hosting a retrospective exhibition of the artist Lovis Corinth, whose armoured male figures and fleshy female nudes, as in Im Schutze der Waffen (Protected by Weapons, 1915), represented the regeneration of a specifically German art, defending a militaristic nationalist position (Doherty 2005: 87–8). In defiance of Corinth’s paintings, Huelsenbeck countered that the art of today was not represented in the escapist heroic-erotic figures depicted on the walls around him, but, as a product of its time, in the fragmented and dismembered body. The gradual degradation of the human form in art had already been the subject of much debate in 1916, as we saw in chapter 1 with Hugo Ball: ‘The image of the human form is gradually disappearing from the painting of these times and all objects appear only in fragments. This is one more proof of how ugly and worn the human countenance has become, and of how all the objects of our environment have become repulsive to us’ (1996: 55). For Raoul Hausmann, too, anthropomorphism had had its day; the human form was reduced to the everyday, reified, replaced by the mechanical: ‘The beauty of our daily life is defined by mannequins, the art of hairdressers, the exactitude of a technical

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construction! We are striving again toward conformity with mechanical work processes: we will have to get used to seeing art emerging in the factories!’ (1921: 285).2 The Dadaists abandoned traditional figurations of the human form as a harmonious unity, opting instead for bodies that are often fragmented, hybrid or monstrous, disjunctive assemblages of incompatible and irreconcilable parts. This chapter and the next explore those reconfigurations of the human figure through the concept of the hybrid, looking at human-machine or human-animal (re)configurations in terms of a binary concept where machine and organic forms clash and clatter. It investigates, firstly, the mecanomorphic drawings of Duchamp, Picabia and Jean Crotti, whose feminisation of the machine subverts it mainly by drawing analogies between machine parts and sexual activities. The analysis then turns to the mechanisation of the body in the works of the Berlin Dadaists, whose brutal exposure of dismembered, prosthetic, mechanised bodies in the early 1920s turns to photomontage to launch a virulent satire of the technological utopia of the machine-body. In the following chapter their other hybrid – the human-animal – will be examined through the lens of Bakhtin’s analysis of the grotesque.

Man as machine In La Description du corps humain (Description of the Human Body, 1647), René Descartes developed the notion of the machine as a model for the human body: it was seen as a clock, made of wheels and counterweights, while the veins and intestines were compared to pipes. In his essay L’Homme machine (1747), Julien Offray de la Mettrie extended the Cartesian mechanistic model of man as an enlightened machine, now embodied in the automaton, examples of which include Jacques Vaucanson’s contraptions, such as the Automaton Flute Player, or Theodor von Kempelen’s mechanical chess-player – a­nthropomorphic machines which reach beyond the functional to embody fantasy and desire. Later, in a nineteenth-century Europe in the throes of rapid industrialisation, the human as machine gave way to the idea of the ‘human motor’ as a metaphor for the dynamics of industrialism. Once wastage was deemed unacceptable in the quest for efficiency, late nineteenth-century studies of human and animal bodies by Eadweard Muybridge or the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey focused primarily on the body in terms of movement. Their findings were extended in the 1920s in Taylorism and Fordism, which sought the rationalisation and standardisation of the worker’s gestures in order to maximise performativity. The tool or machine was integrated into the model as an extension of the capacities of the body and, with the repetitive motions and inflexible timing imposed by the assembly line, the human

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worker became a mechanical being indistinguishable from the machine which, according to Anson Rabinach, ‘dissolved the anthropomorphic body as a distinct entity and made the industrial body a sophisticated analytics of space and time’ (1990: 87). Many avant-garde artists saw in the machine a blueprint for a revolution which, it was believed, would usher in a utopian society of order, harmony, speed and efficiency. Their opponents, on the other hand, adopted a critical stance via, for instance, the recurrent metaphor of the ‘bachelor machines’ (‘les machines célibataires’, Carrouges 1954). The French writer Alfred Jarry mocked both science and sentiment in his Surmâle (1902), which included a boisterous account of sexual intercourse as a purely mechanical activity. And in Impressions d’Afrique (1912), the writer Raymond Roussel imagined machines based, subversively, on irrational mechanisms instead of the widespread belief in mechanical rationality. Among the avant-garde who celebrated technology through the image of the human figure as a perfectly functioning machine, the Futurist iconography of the warrior discussed in chapter 2 produced images like Boccioni’s Carica dei Lancieri (Charge of the Lancers, 1914; see figure 2.1), in which the cavalry is depicted as a dynamic mechanical-organic whole, formed from the fusion of body, weapon and horse. Similarly, in Severini’s Armoured Train in Action (1915), the troops are merged with their metallic surroundings, man and machine fused in the vision of an efficient technological utopia. When the Dadaists positioned themselves in relation to this debate they treated the man-machine combination not in the positive terms of dynamism and energy celebrated by the Futurists, nor in terms of the utopian aesthetics promoted by Léger. Their own positions towards the machine remained more ambivalent: for some celebratory, for others critical of technological modernity. While images of the human–machine hybrid of the New York and Paris Dadaists are often based on the engineer’s drawing, the Berlin Dadaists favoured (photo)montage techniques as the aesthetic equivalent of the prosthetic industry or the assembly line. While Paris and New York Dadaists are essentially ironic engineers, Berlin Dadaists are angry Luddites.

Feminising the machine3 ‘We are living in the age of the machine. Man made the machine in his own image’, wrote writer and photographer Paul B. Haviland in Alfred Stieglitz’s New York avant-garde review 291 in 1915. Picabia, a friend of Stieglitz, shared Haviland’s enthusiasm for American progress and technology, displaying it on his arrival in New York in 1915 in an article titled ‘French artists spur on American art’ (New York Tribune, 24 October 1915):

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Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression … The machine has become more than a mere adjunct of human life. It is really a part of human life – perhaps the very soul. (Picabia, quoted in Camfield 1979: 77).

In the technological utopia of the Western world, the machine was a new god, albeit on occasion an ironic god, as shown in Morton Schamberg and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven assemblage God (1917),4 constructed with found materials: a plumbing tube mounted on a wooden mitre box. Mechanical imagery, Picabia declared in the same interview, was now to be co-opted for the creative process: ‘I have enlisted the machinery of the modern world, and introduced it into my studio … I mean simply to work on and on until I attain the pinnacle of mechanical symbolism’. However, many Dadaists refused to simply adopt the machine aesthetics of Futurism, or of American modernist artists such as Morton Schamberg, whose Painting (Formerly Machine) and Mechanical Abstraction of 1916, with their precise draughtsmanship, underscore the aesthetic qualities of machine forms. Nor did they celebrate the machine itself, preferring instead its mechanical symbolism or symbolic transformation (Bohn 1980: 447). Hence, for their mecanomorphic works, Duchamp, Picabia and Jean Crotti sourced their material in mechanical drawings and transformed it, thereby cocking a snook at the widely admired mechanical sphere, by drawing analogies between the machine or its movements and human sexual activity. According to Alexander Partens, in an article titled ‘Dada-Kunst’ (‘Dada art’): ‘An explosive imagination was at work, whereby the most banal and mechanical, caught in a brutal grip, were suddenly filled with a new, alien life in which irony, eroticism, scorn, joy and fatigue resonated curiously’ (1920: 90).5 Irrationalised, feminised and eroticised by these artists, capitalism’s machines were ironically rerouted. For example, for his painting Fille née sans mère (Girl Born Without a Mother, 1916–17; figure 4.1), Picabia painted over the illustration of a steam engine: the title is a parodic allusion to the birth of Eve, while the gold background recalls early European images of the Virgin. In the 1915 article quoted above, Haviland offered an enthusiastic portrayal of woman as machine: ‘She has limbs which act; lungs which breathe; a heart which beats; a nervous system through which runs electricity.’ In this extended metaphor Haviland was, of course, also perpetuating traditional gender roles, even describing woman as mindless (‘Man gave her every qualification except thought’) and dependent on male control for action and direction (‘She submits to his will but he must direct her activities. Without him she remains a wonderful being, but without aim or anatomy’). His reference to the machine as a ‘daughter born without a mother’ openly reprises Fille née sans mère (Girl Born Without a Mother), Francis Picabia’s pen-and-ink drawing produced earlier the

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4.1  Francis Picabia, Fille née sans mère (Girl Born Without a Mother, 1916–17)

same year, which exploits a traditional gendered opposition between femalecoded organic curvilinear forms evoking buttocks or breasts, and male-coded verticals and diagonals suggesting pistons and springs.6 In fact, the image of the machine as daughter of men – and without any female contribution – was widespread at the time; Guillaume Apollinaire was to take it up in his influential text ‘L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes’ (1917): ‘Machines, daughters of men and who have no mother, live a life in which feelings and passion are absent’ (‘Des machines, filles de l’homme et qui n’ont pas de mère, vivent une vie dont les sentiments et les passions sont absents’, 1991: 949). The Dadaists undertook to subvert and re-semanticise the machine by appropriating diagrams of actual machines, then perverting them by introducing apparently random elements into the works. This could be done, for example, simply by adding aleatory titles and inscriptions devoid of any obvious relation to the mechanical image, as in Picabia’s Intervention d’une femme au moyen d’une machine (1915).7 In an untitled text published in 291, Picabia commented on the disjunctive relation between title and mechanical image: ‘In my work the title is the subjective expression, the painting is the object. But this object is nevertheless somewhat subjective because it is the mime – the appearance of the title; it provides to a certain point the means of understanding the potentiality

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– the very heart of man’ (1916: 3).8 For example, the origin of Picabia’s painting L’Enfant carburateur (The Child Carburettor), exhibited at the Paris Salon d’Automne in 1919, has been traced to the diagram of a carburettor reduced to an abstract composition of simplified geometrical forms (Camfield 1979: 130). The functional nature of the engineer’s drawing is perverted, however, not only by affixing an incongruous title but also by giving the mechanical parts absurd or poetic labels: ‘dissolution de prolongation’, ‘méthode crocodile’, ‘sphère de la migraine’, ‘détruire le futur’, ‘flux et reflux des résolutions’. A rational image thus collapses into an irrational object, producing a work that Picabia termed a ‘mime’ or ‘­pantomime’, a mix of irony and irrationality. Picabia resorted to a number of female-coded machines in his mecanomorphic works, both drawings and paintings, as in Voilà la femme (1915), which depicts a symmetrical mechanical structure, executed with the precision of an engineer’s drawing; a work which, as Camfield notes, can be read as ‘an icon-machine or machine-goddess’ (1966: 316), the piston shaft and cylinders suggesting sexual activity. It is clear that Picabia’s mecanomorphic works are closely linked to his time in the USA and his friendship with Stieglitz as well as Duchamp, who had a studio in New York. Picabia first went to America in 1913 when he attended the Armory Show, then again in 1915 when he produced many of his machine works. Some of these can be read as a positive symbolic depiction of the modern liberated American woman. His Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity, 1915; see figure 1.2) is based on the drawing of a spark plug, with the ironically sentimental words ‘For-ever’ stamped on it. The sharp-edged drawing suggests an androgynous figure, interpreted rather negatively by a contemporary critic in the New York Evening Sun (12 October 1915) as an embodiment of the New Woman: ‘Picabia has an admirable Patent Office diagram or design of a straight cylinder with bolts and washers firmly placed. It is labeled in French “Portrait of a Nude Young American Girl.” And on part of the mechanism is printed the word “Forever.” This may be intended to show that the young American girl is a hard, unchangeable creature without possibilities’ (quoted by Homer 1975: 110). Writing much later, Barbara Zabel is somewhat less acerbic when arguing that the young American girl signals ‘the shifting contours of gender difference’ (1996: 282). Zabel reads ambivalence there too as not only marking the destabilisation of traditional gender roles, and the collapse of categories such as human/mechanical, male/female, but also revealing ‘the threat of control by the machine and by the liberated female’ (1999: 27). This, then, could connect to the young American girl as an embodiment of modernity, her ‘pert mechanical verticality coding for the emerging Jazz Age “flapper”’ (Jones 1998: 154). The drawing thus exemplifies a certain ambivalence towards American culture, seen as dominated by technology, materialistic values and ‘modern’

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4.2  Francis Picabia, Américaine, cover of 391 6:1 (1917)

women. Indeed, the eroticisation of the spark plug has generated multiple readings, linked variously to the voracious female as ‘allumeuse’ (Buffet-Picabia [1949] 1951: 258), and, for Agnes Meyer, ‘the spark that ignited the new energies of the Stieglitz group’ (Homer 1975: 114). The semantic field remains the same in Picabia’s Américaine, reproduced on the cover of 391 in 1917 (figure 4.2). Based on a photograph of Edison’s lightbulb, with the words ‘flirt’ and ‘divorce’ reflected on the glass, it enacts an elliptical (male) narrative of the modern American woman as primarily a sexual being. Clearly, the eroticised femininity of the machine, in such works, is used not only to express a celebration or a critique, but also to voice male anxiety regarding the new social and sexual freedom demanded by women and, no doubt, projecting Picabia’s own ‘equivocal masculinity’ (Jones 2002). The ambivalent attitude towards women implicit in such mechanical drawings recurs in de Zayas’s visual poem ‘Femme’, reproduced in 1915 in 291 opposite Picabia’s Voilà Elle, a mecanomorphic drawing (figure 4.3). According to a contemporary critic, purportedly quoting the artists themselves, these two works

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4.3  Marius de Zayas, ‘Femme’, and Francis Picabia, Voilà Elle (1915)

were portraits of the same woman, but produced ‘without collusion’ (Camfield 1966: 315). The similarity of theme and composition (the central vertical form and diagonal) would suggest, nevertheless, a real dialogue between the two artists rather than some chance resemblance. Picabia’s schematic ‘compositeimaginative machine’, combining real and imaginary machine parts (Camfield 1966: 315), can be interpreted in terms of sexual symbolism since it appears to be made up of pulleys or pipes with words suggesting parts of the female body. The tubular forms and pistol shape to the left are coded masculine. The pistol is linked by a pulley to a target coded as female sex (as encountered in La Nuit espagnole, discussed in chapter 3). De Zayas’ poem consists of phrases printed in various typefaces arranged to produce an abstract composition, which echoes shapes in Picabia’s drawing. In this experiment in caricature or ‘psychotype’, typography has both a verbal and a visual dimension. De Zayas presents an ambivalent portrait of woman: on the one hand, she is described as a modern emancipated woman (‘she is not afraid of pleasure … she is totally immersed in the extremes of her pleasures’9); yet she is, simultaneously, reduced to her appetite for sexual pleasure. Indeed, for David Joselit the poem contains ‘vicious moments of misogyny’ (2005: 230): the woman portrayed is purely mechanical and lacks intellectual qualities (‘no intellect … cerebral atrophy caused by pure materiality’10).

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Further examination suggests, moreover, that the diagram also points to male and female sexual organs in a mechanistic sexual encounter. According to Camfield (1966: 315), the mechanical portrayal of the sexual activity of this ‘automatic love machine’ can be usefully compared to Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass). Such images draw on Rémy de Gourmont’s popular Physique de l’amour. Essai sur l’instinct sexuel (1903), where sexual intercourse is treated as a purely mechanical process in which the female-machine is to be wound up by the male-key. Elsewhere, a number of other proto-Dada and Dada images allude to sexual activity as an interlocking of mechanical parts. Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass), suggesting a mechanical sexual act, devoid of all emotion, was interpreted by Breton precisely as ‘a mechanistic, cynical interpretation of the amorous phenomenon’ (‘une interprétation mécaniste, cynique, du phénomène amoureux’): the passage of the woman from a state of virginity to one of non-virginity considered as a theme of fundamentally asentimental speculation – resembling an extra-human intent on imagining this type of operation. What is lawful and rigorous is merged with the arbitrary and the gratuitous. We quickly end up giving in to the charm of a kind of grand modern legend, where everything is united through lyricism. (Breton 2008: 461–2)11

If the viewer detects a ‘lyrical’ element in Picabia’s mecanomorphic works, it is often provided by the titles and inscriptions. For example, in Machine tournez vite (Machine Turn Quickly, 1916–17)12 the large cog is labelled ‘Homme’ and the smaller cog ‘Femme’; while the title Parade amoureuse (Amorous Parade, 1917) suggests a sexual encounter between the two intertwined forms based on an electrical apparatus drawn from a scientific diagram (figure 4.4). Les forces mécaniques de l’amour en mouvement (Mechanical Forces of Love in Motion, 1916),13 the title of a work by Jean Crotti (who shared Duchamp’s New York studio in 1915), also invites a sexual interpretation of the brightly coloured circular forms and darker metallic shapes on a glass panel. In an interview for the Evening World (4 April 1916), Crotti claimed that his painting represented ‘love in the most primitive sense’ (quoted in Taylor 2005: 283), the brightly coloured disks symbolising hope (green), love (red) and the ideal (blue). Such examples present not only a coalescence between machine and sexuality, but also a sublimation of the machine via its very détournement, in a process that can usefully be read through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘desiring-production’, as suggested by Hal Foster (1991: 70). The becomingmachine of the body is simultaneously a becoming-erotic of the machine, and thus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘interfere[s] with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction …

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4.4  Francis Picabia, Parade amoureuse (Amorous Parade, 1917)

breaking down is part of the very functioning of desiring machines’ ([1972] 1983: 31–2). While many of these mecanomorphic images can be deciphered in terms of an encounter between male and female elements, albeit often thanks solely to the prompt of title, inscription or the artist’s own commentary, some of them

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4.5  Suzanne Duchamp, Un et une menacés (Male and Female Threatened, 1916)

resist via a more ambiguous narrative. Among these is Suzanne Duchamp’s Un et une menacés (Male and Female Threatened, 1916; figure 4.5), exhibited at the 1920 Salon des Indépendants. This work depicts two interlocking mechanical forms: a diagonal form resembling the arm of a crane with a suspended pincer-like appendage, and a rectangular form with a winch and a plumb line. The title

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obviously invites decipherment in terms of male and female forms. Camfield (1999: 86) labels the crane arm and plumb line as male elements, the pincers and circular forms as female, while Hemus (2009: 136) reads the crane along with the pincers as male. However, the pincer shape could equally well be interpreted as a grasping male action, while the plumb line has a vulvular shape. Such hesitation in clearly identifying distinctive male and female parts is also encoded in the title, since the source of the threat could be interpreted as the dissolving of gender categories. Max Ernst’s Deux figures ambigues (1919–20) harbours a similar ambiguity, encoded in both figures and title.14 It is clear, in short, that while mechanical symbolism provided artists like Picabia with new possibilities of constructing and extending the image of the body, it also allowed satire of the technological utopia of the machine-body by feminising the machine, and by de-eroticising/dehumanising sexuality, reduced to a repetitive, mechanical and, ultimately, masturbatory activity. In Berlin Dada’s mechanical-body images, too, ambivalence persists. On the one hand, the Dadaists consider themselves monteurs or fitters, thus merging artistic and industrial production. Grosz, projecting utopian collective man in the guise of a mechanical being, acknowledges this in ‘Zu meinen neuen Bildern’ when he writes: ‘Once more stability, construction and practical p ­ urpose – e.g. sport, engineer, and machine but devoid of futurist romantic dynamism’ (1921: 14).15 And yet his 1920–22 paintings of faceless mannequin figures in anonymous urban spaces (see chapter 3) enact dehumanisation. As for Otto Dix’s veterans, far removed from the gleaming machine, they point to the failure of modern technology to patch up the shattered body that it has itself produced so ­successfully (as will be argued in the next chapter).

Berlin Dada and photomontage16 The First World War left Germany with more than two million dead, over four million wounded and almost three million with disabilities. The large numbers of shell-shocked (Zitterer) or crippled or amputated (Kriegskrüppel) veterans shattered both the traditional comforting concept of the organic unity of the body and the integrity of the self, and the belligerent modernist ideal of the hero as machine, enshrined in Ernst Jünger’s armoured soldier as a model of masculinity. Prosthetic surgery, which developed rapidly, aimed at reintegrating the warwounded individual into the labour market. In his satirical ‘Prothesenwirtschaft: Gedanken eines Kap-Offiziers’ (1920: 669–70; 1982: 137–8), Raoul Hausmann cynically lists the advantages of ‘a prosthetic economy’. The Prothetiker was widely promoted as an upwardly mobile individual, an ideally equipped worker, the mix of human and machine parts fully adapted to the assembly line, capable of a twenty-five-hour day (prostheses never tire), paid low wages (since an

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incomplete man) and charged high taxes (to repay the state for his prostheses). It is such cynical, self-serving programmes that the Dadaists rebelled against and exposed, often using the very techniques – patching up the body with machine limbs – exploited by Weimar society to turn the veteran into a useful (i.e. productive) member of society. The positive blueprint of the prosthetic man was the battlefield’s heroic man-as-machine and the industrious post-war worker in tune with his machine. In their reaction to such constructions, the Dadaists interjected alternative fabrications which playfully or anxiously displaced, critiqued or parodied man-asmachine. They did this, primarily, by cannibalising machine images in order to subvert the smooth functioning normally promoted, generating images of the human body as an organic–mechanical hybrid. Among these constructions, the male figure in George Grosz’s watercolour and collage Daum marries her pedantic automaton ‘George’ in May 1920. John Heartfield is very glad of it (1920; figure 4.6),17 where the bridegroom, or ‘pedantic automaton’, made up of an assemblage of machine parts – adding-machine chest, tubular arms, pressure gauge penis – is depicted as a mere cog, dehumanised, crushed and devoid of agency (two disembodied hands are feeding a paper strip of numbers into his head, like early mechanical computer tape). The figure is far from the ideal heroic Neuer Mensch, yet still fully adapted to the mechanics of post-war production. Recognising in Grosz’s figure an example of ‘a Taylorized clerk, a rationalized Angestellter’ or white-collar worker, Brigid Doherty argues that ‘the little automaton is an absurd embodiment of an ideology of work’ (1999: 159, 162). Satirising the commodified body of post-war capitalism, the human figure is demoted to an assemblage of disjunctive elements, contraption rather than machine, whose parts rattle and jam, in contrast to the smoothly running machine the media promoted as characteristic of both war machinery and post-war capitalist industrial production. The ‘automaton’ in Grosz’s Daum marries is a disjunctive figure created via photomontage, the technique par excellence which replicates, aesthetically, both prosthetic industry and assembly line. Photomontage effectively both represents the disjunctive body and is itself a disjointed body. The artist has recycled elements drawn from the mechanical sphere, removing them from their original spatial context and temporal sequence and reassembling them in a new context. Photomontage thus represents a shift from a traditional aesthetic – in thrall to the seamless body of classical art or the contemporary armoured body – to a modernist aesthetic, now grounded on mechanical fragmentation (re)production and overt juxtaposition. The technique was part of Dada’s promotion of new media such as photography and film, more in tune with the world of modernity, replacing painting, which was considered an outdated medium irremediably linked to bourgeois

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4.6  George Grosz, Daum marries her pedantic automaton ‘George’ in May 1920, John Heartfield is very glad of it (Meta-Mech. Constr. nach Prof. R. Hausmann) (1920)

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aesthetic values. In the role it played in rejecting techniques of realism and notions of artistic originality and subjectivity, photomontage was linked to processes of production and assemblage, accompanied, particularly among the Berlin Dadaists, by a radical refashioning of the status of the artist, redefined as monteur, in a blatant mimicking of the impersonal mechanical operations of machine-parts assembly. Raoul Hausmann put it most clearly in his article ‘Fotomontage’: ‘This term emerged thanks to our aversion to playing the artist; we considered ourselves engineers (whence our preference for workclothes), we meant to construct, to assemble our works’ (Hausmann 1931: 61).18 Grosz also considered the Dadaists’ montage experiments in terms of assembling machine parts. As a result, dadaist works, conceptually associated with technological production, were no longer treated as original creations but, in the words of Herzfelde in the introduction to the catalogue of the 1920 Berlin Dada-Messe, as Erzeugnisse or products. Consequently, the Berlin Dadaists promoted themselves as the ‘Dada-Advertising-Company’ (‘Dada-Reklame-Geschellschaft’), pointing to the collective and resolutely utilitarian techniques of photomontage. The montaged image is thus not merely anti-naturalistic. It constitutes a self-conscious fabrication, a mediated discourse on images and a subversive détournement of their status and function. Indeed, according to Theodor Adorno, reprising an idea frequently expressed by the Dadaists themselves: ‘The principle of montage was conceived as an act against a surreptitiously achieved organic unity; it was meant to shock’ (1984: 204). In his article devoted to ‘Fotomontage’, quoted above, Raoul Hausmann argued that the dialectical structure of photomontage was central to Dada’s social critique: Dada, which was a kind of cultural criticism, stopped at nothing, and it a fact that a large part of the early photomontages attacked the political events of the day with biting sarcasm. … [The Dadaists] were the first to use the material of photography to combine heterogeneous, often contradictory structures, figurative and spatial, into a new whole that was in effect a mirror image, new to the eye and the mind, wrenched from the chaos of war and revolution. And they knew that great propagandistic power was inherent in their method, and that contemporary life did not have sufficient courage to develop and absorb it. (1931: 61)19

By stressing the idea of contradictory structures and, more radically, by foregrounding dissection, photomontage was used by German Dadaists as a privileged vehicle for political satire, since it exposed the fault-lines in the fabrication of official discourses. It follows that, alongside their role as engineers, the Dadaists also imagined themselves as surgeons, subjecting to precise dissection the affabulations of Weimar propaganda. The surgery metaphor appears, for instance, in Benjamin’s text ‘The work of art in the age of its technological reproductibility’. To painting’s magician he opposes film’s surgeon, contrasting

EBSCOhost - printed on 6/7/2019 12:07 PM via UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY SYDNEY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

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the former’s total image to film’s ‘piecemeal [images], its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law’ (Benjamin [1936] 2002: 119). His analysis of film, based on the principle of montage (‘successive changes of scene and focus which have a percussive effect on the spectator’, [1936] 2002: 119) was clearly also applicable to photomontage, and more generally to Dada exhibitions. An early reviewer, discussing the Dada-Messe, developed the metaphor of dissection: Here you see an anatomical museum, in which you can behold yourself ­dissected, not just arm and leg, but head and heart. Not only your very own body, but that of all of you collectively … here is a cross-section cut through you yourself, with all [your] sentimentalities, untruths, enthusiasms, and ­prejudices … without the usual mask of picture-postcard mawkishness. (quoted in Doherty 1998: 75)20

Self-styled mechanics or surgeons though they may have been, the Dadaists also posed as Luddites, doing their best to interrupt or destroy the smooth functioning of the machine, and fabricating, instead, the dysfunctional, impossible machine. To this end the Dadaists appropriated mainly mass-media images, cutting up and reassembling their fragments in jarring combinations, producing new images to celebrate or critique modernity. Montage techniques were already widely used in the advertising and photojournalism of the German popular illustrated press during the 1920s, in publications such as Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ). Text and image juxtapositions in the press were not generally disruptive, of course, unlike Dada montage, whose objective was primarily subversive. Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, for instance, refer explicitly to the popular sources of photomontage, not only the illustrated press but also, in the context of the human figure, a readymade image of the soldier, with pasted heads taken from soldiers’ photographs. Höch recycled mass-media photos of the New Woman in her photomontages, associating female figure and machine images, as in Das schöne Mädchen (1920), which combines images of women from fashion magazines with fragments from advertisements. The central image is that of a woman in a fashionable swimsuit, with bare legs crossed, her face obscured by an outsize light bulb, and carrying a parasol. The diminutive female figure appears to have a large head with a stylish Bubikopf hairstyle, and her face is covered with the fragment of an advertisement. The head of a second female figure, with cutout eyes pasted onto the face, looks out from above the rows of BMW logo signs at the upper right of the photomontage, while an isolated hand holds a large watch. This figure, assembled from human and machine parts, depicts the German Neue Frau, the new socio-economic image of women in the Weimar Republic, a feminine ideal emerging in the world of modernity constructed by the media. Ambivalence complicates the depiction of the female figure, however, since

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she appears as both subject and object, consumer and consumed. She is made up of disproportionate parts, a huge head atop a tiny body, framed and constrained by car parts, threatened by the giant phallic crankshaft alongside her. In reality, although German women had been granted the vote in 1918 and the Weimar constitution guaranteed the right to equal pay, the New Woman was far from enjoying the economic, social and sexual agency attributed to that formal model. Here she remains an attractive faceless commodity, constrained by male symbols of power and industrialisation. While Höch’s depictions of the New Woman constitute a critique of the mass media which had fabricated the fashionable woman, they could also celebrate the liberated woman via images of female figures dancing or diving, as in Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada (1919–20). Similarly, while the Dadaists condemned the capitalist ideology of man-as-machine, whether soldier or factory worker, they also celebrated the New Man, the artist as engineer or revolutionary. For Huelsenbeck (1917), for example, the concept of the New Man was actually a combination of degradation and rebirth, and his photomontages of figures combining human and technological elements, such as his 1920 works Tatlin lebt zu Hause (Tatlin at Home)21 and Elasticum,22 are thus essentially ambivalent, both critical of technology (dystopian) and celebratory (utopian). Unsurprisingly, the military establishment loomed large among the objects of satire. An anti-military assemblage by Grosz and Heartfield, Der wildgewordene Spießer Heartfield (Elektro-mech. Tatlin-Plastik) (The Conformist Heartfield Turned Wild (Electromechanical Tatlin Sculpture), 1920),23 was exhibited at the 1920 Dada-Messe. The assemblage was lost, but was reconstructed for the Stationen der Moderne exhibition held at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 1988. A headless and armless tailor’s dummy is mounted on a slate base, with an illuminated electric bulb for a head, an electric bell on the left shoulder, a revolver on the right shoulder, the right leg amputated and replaced by a Stehlampenprothese or metal prosthesis, the left leg that of a mannequin. The sexual organs have been replaced by a plaster denture, while a broken fork and a rusty knife blade on the lapel stand in for debased military decorations. These also include the Schwarzer Adlerorden (The Order of the Black Eagle), the highest Prussian order, and the Iron Cross on his backside. A cardboard letter ‘C’ and the  number ‘27’ are glued to his chest, referring either to his regiment or to the series number of this mechanical product. Brigit Doherty interprets the figure as a war veteran, whose plaster denture ‘materializ[es] the wounded male libido as a glued-on vagina dentata’, while the light bulb and bell on the left shoulder evoke the apparatus used in the electroshock treatment of shell-shocked soldiers (1997: 118). The prevailing fairground aspect of the figure, however, with its bulb glowing in place of the head and its bricolage construction, alleviates the pathos of the figure.

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4.7  John Heartfield, Die Rationalisierung marschiert! (Rationalisation on the March!, 1927)

A later (post-Dada) photomontage by Heartfield depicts a much more ambivalent version of man-as-machine in the figure of the worker. Die Rationalisierung marschiert! (Rationalisation on the March!; figure 4.7) was reproduced in 1927 on the cover of the second issue of the German Communist Party’s satirical journal

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Der Knuppel (The Cudgel), of which Heartfield was then editor.24 The figure is composed of industrial parts pasted together – a stopwatch for a head, pipes, a lever, an industrial spreadsheet. He strides forward, purposefully, grasping in his machine-hand the Socialist Party (SPF) newspaper, Vorwärts. Heartfield is exposing capitalism’s policy of industrial rationalisation, the scientific management of work, where the worker’s movements on the assembly line were broken down and streamlined. The limbs appear roughly welded together to produce a disjunctive entity rather than an ergonomic, well-oiled machine. Instead of the imagined harmonious machine-body relationship of Taylorism, instead of the smoothly functioning mechanics, this figure appears to be the result of an older form of montage, bricolage, a jarring concatenation of disjunctive parts as a parody of the idealised body. This figure is far more artisanal, more regressive than progressive, corresponding to the figure of the cyborg, defined by Matthew Biro as an organic–mechanical construction, ‘a figure of modern hybrid identity’ (2009: 10). Biro refers to the ‘robot’, or automaton, in Czech writer Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. (1920), and draws on the work of Norbert Wiener in the 1940s and 1950s, which viewed humans in terms of cybernetic theory. Biro also draws on Donna J. Haraway’s ‘A cyborg manifesto’, which defines the cyborg as a hybrid figure, ‘a condensed image of both imagination and material reality’ (Haraway 1991: 150). Are thus undermined traditional oppositions such as human/animal and organic/mechanical, and underlying essentialist concepts such as gender, race or class. The figure of the cyborg is important in Heartfield’s photomontage as a construct embodying the contradictions discussed earlier: both anxieties, in the prosthetic assemblage, and dreams, via modernity’s Neuer Mensch. It functions, therefore, as both a positive model of hybrid individual and social identities and promotion for change, and a sharply critical political weapon. As Biro argues about the cyborg in the post-1918 years: ‘In part the sign of a fearful response to the destruction brought about by World War I, the cyborg was, paradoxically, also a creature on which many Weimar artists … could project their utopian hopes and fantasies’ (2009: 1). Heartfield’s cyborg encapsulates this duality: on the one hand, it legitimises the communist worker as an integrated and valorised component of industrial modernity; on the other hand, its disjunctive limbs point to a more critical position, expressing anxiety about the transformation of man into a puppet, manipulated (and broken) by the demands of capitalist production schedules and techniques. The uneasy presence across post-war Europe of the shell-shocked wounded had fundamentally shaken the complacent concepts of body and a unitary self, concepts now further eroded in the rationalisation turning the worker-consumer into a cog in the

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machine, an anonymous (and dispensable) stick-figure in the contemporary metropolis. In their radical opposition to this, the Dadaists promoted representations which critiqued, parodied or displaced the perfect machine-body, the paradigm of modernity, primarily by cannibalising machine images in the (counter-)production of the body as dysfunctional machine. Faced with such images, however, one could argue that Dada bodies are actually less machines – tied to connotations of a functioning totality – than contraptions, resolutely artisanal constructions, made up of mobile parts which continue to collide, rattle and jam, fragments without a synthesis, a trajectory and not a finished product. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write: We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to turn up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer belief in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. ([1972] 1983: 42)

In their collage and photomontage practice, the Dadaists sought to realise not simply deviant representations of body and machine but perverse, hybrid assemblages built from disparate fragments, forcing the viewer to recognise the body as a site of contradiction. In this they incorporate both the trauma of the alienated body and the attempted displacement of that trauma through the ludic or erotic. Contrary to the now-defunct image of the homogeneous and standardised body, or to the body actively enhanced by the tool or weapon of Futurist figurations, the Dada body remains a bricolage, repeatedly bringing to the fore the visibility of the process of assemblage that produced it. As such, it stands as the limit-form of bodily depictions, where the disfigurements of the human figure, like the eroticisation of the machine, are an indirect expression of the violence done to the body, and overt resistance to the cyborg-development of a rapidly changing post-war society.

Notes 1. ‘Die höchste Kunst wird diejenige sein, die in ihren Bewußtseinsinhalten die tausendfachen Probleme der Zeit präsentiert, der man anmerkt, daß sie sich von den Explosionen der letzten Woche werfen ließ, die ihre Glieder immer wieder unter dem Stoß des letzten Tages zusammensucht’ (Huelsenbeck 1920a: 45). 2. ‘Die Schönheit unseres täglichen Lebens wird bestimmt durch die Mannequins, die Perrückenkünste der Friseure, die Exaktheit einer technischen Konstruktion! Wir streben wieder nach der Konformität mit dem mechanischen Arbeitsprozeß:

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wir werden uns daran gewöhnlich müssen, die Kunst in den Werkstätten entstehen zu sehen!’ 3. See analysis by Camfield (1966); Zabel (1996, 1999); Jones (1998). 4. Morton Schamberg and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, God (1917), plumbing tube and wooden box, Arensberg Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. 5. ‘es war eine platzende Phantasie am Werk, für die das Banalste, das Mechanischeste, mit einem gewalttätigen Griff gepackt, plötzlich ein neues fremdes Leben bekam, in dem Ironie, Erotik, Hohn, Heiterkeit und Müdigkeit seltsam vibrierten.’ 6. Francis Picabia, Fille née sans mère (1915), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, reproduced in 291 4 (June 1915), 4. 7. Francis Picabia, Intervention d’une femme au moyen d’une machine (1915), private collection. 8. ‘Dans mon œuvre, le titre est l’expression subjective, la peinture est l’objet. Mais cet objet n’en est pas moins relativement subjectif, car il est le mime – l’apparence du titre; il fournit jusqu’à un certain point les moyens de comprendre la potentialité – le cœur même de l’homme.’ 9. ‘elle n’a pas la peur du plaisir … elle n’est que dans l’exaggération de ses jouissances.’ 10. ‘pas d’intellectualisme … atrophie cérébrale causée par matérialité pure.’ 11. ‘le passage de la femme de l’état de virginité à l’état de non-virginité pris pour thème d’une spéculation foncièrement asentimentale – on dirait d’un être extrahumain s’appliquant à se figurer cette sorte d’opération. Le licite, le rigoureux se composent chemin faisant avec l’arbitraire, le gratuit. On finit très vite par s’abandonner au charme d’une sorte de grande légende moderne, où le lyrisme unifie tout.’ 12. Francis Picabia, Machine tournez vite (1916–17), National Gallery of Art, Washington. 13. Jean Crotti, Les Forces mécaniques de l’amour en mouvement (1916), private collection. 14. Max Ernst, Deux Figures ambigues (1919–20), overpainting, private collection, New York. See chapter 8 for a further development of this theme. 15. ‘Wieder Stabilität, Aufbau, Zweckmäßigkeit – z.B. Sport, Ingenieur, Maschine, doch nicht mehr dynamische, futuristische Romantik.’ 16. For an excellent analysis of Berlin photomontage, see Bergius (2003). 17. The work was reproduced in Der Dada 3 (1920), 3. 18. ‘Dieser Name entstand dank unserer Abneigung, Künstler zu spielen; wir betrachteten uns als Ingenieure (daher unsere Vorliebe für Arbeitsanzüge), wir behaupteten, unsere Arbeit zu konstruieren, zu montieren.’ 19. ‘Der Dadaismus, der eine Art von Kulturkritik war, machte vor Nichts halt, und es ist die Tatsache, daß ein großer Teil der frühen Fotomontagen die politischen Zeiterscheinungen mit beißenden Spott erfolgte. … Sie [die Dadaisten] waren die Ersten, die das Material der Fotographie benutzten, um aus Strukturteilen besonderer, einander oftmals entgegengesetzter dinglicher und raumlicher Art, eine neue Einheit zu schaffen, die dem Chaos der Kriegs- une Revolutionszeit ein optisch und gedanklich neues Spiegelbild entriß. Und sie waren sich darüber klar, daß ihrer Methode eine starke propagandistische Kraft innewohnte, die auszugestalten und aufzunehmen das zeitgenossische Leben nicht mutvoll genug war.’

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2 0. Ernst Cohn-Wiener’s review appeared in Neue Berliner Zeitung (6 July 1920). 21. Raoul Hausmann, Tatlin lebt zu Hause (1920), photomontage and watercolour, Moderna Museet, Stockholm. 22. Raoul Hausmann, Elasticum (1920), photomontage, collage and gouache, Galerie Berinson, Berlin/Ubu Gallery, New York. 23. Grosz and Heartfield, Der wildgewordene Spießer Heartfield (Elektro-mech. Tatlin-Plastik) (1920), reconstruction Michael Sellmann (1988), Berlinische Galerie. The work is reproduced in Huelsenbeck (1920a: 40). 24. Martin Gaughan has analysed this photomontage in the German economic context of taylorisation (2006: 147–9).

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5 Hybrid bodies (II): the grotesque

From the day they are confirmed to the day they are blasted into the paradisiacal beyond, ‘people are pigs’. George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde (1925: 19)

Schwitters’s Merzbau (1919–37) Goethe’s leg; a dental bridge; the mutilated corpse of a young girl; a lover with a prosthetic penis; a bottle of Schwitters’s own urine; a brothel with a three-legged woman; a 10 per cent disabled war veteran with his headless daughter; a headless man and an armless woman embracing beneath the large head of a child ‘with syphilitic eyes’: these are some of the bodily fragments integrated into Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (figure 5.1) and listed in his text ‘Ich und meine Ziele’ (‘Me and my aims’), published in Merz (1931: 115–16). Begun around 1919 in his home in Hannover, its construction, developed as an ever-expanding organic form, continued until 1937 when Schwitters, branded as a degenerate artist, was exiled to Norway. Although the Merzbau was destroyed when his house was bombed in a British air raid in 1943, the various stages of its development have been recorded in Schwitters’s and visitors’ accounts, as well as in photographs.1 The Merzbau was structured on the dual principle of the classical column and the grotto (etymology of grotesque). Construction started with two freestanding columns or Merzsäule. The base was covered with newspaper cuttings and an assemblage of objects, including the death mask of Schwitters’s first son, and titled Kathedrale des erotischen Elends (Cathedral of Erotic Misery). The columns were then integrated into a larger structure, which was covered in plaster and wood, forming cave-like openings that Schwitters filled with fragments. When Hans Richter first saw the ‘Schwitters-Säule’ around 1925, he described it as ‘more than a sculpture; it was a living, daily-changing document on Schwitters and his

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5.1  Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau (1933)

friends … He cut off a lock of my hair and put it in my hole … In others there were a piece of a shoelace, a half-smoked cigarette, a nailpairing, a piece of tie (Doesburg), a broken pen’ (1965: 152). Three years later, when Richter visited Schwitters again, he noted ‘the monstrous growth of the column, covered by other sculptural excrescences, new people, new shapes, colours and details’

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(1965: 153). Further columns and grottos were integrated into the structure of wood, plaster and glass, and the Merzbau finally extended throughout and beyond the house, from attic to cellar, onto balcony and roof. The initial assemblage was thus progressively transformed into an installation in which the spectator could move around. As Schwitters himself observed in 1937, the Merzbau became ‘a sculpture in space, which one can enter, in which one can go for a walk’ (quoted in Cardinal and Webster 2011: 73). The founding private domestic space collapses into public construction, the Merzbau’s proliferating organic forms, orifices and excrescences gradually evoking both the interior and exterior of the body. Constructed as an unfinished, organic entity housing an array of part-bodies, the Merzbau lends itself to a reading informed by Bakhtin’s ‘grotesque realism’, as suggested by Leah Dickerman (2005b: 111–12). As an ever-proliferating organic form, it is ‘a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body’ (Bakhtin 1984: 317). In stark contrast to the control and closure of classical figuration, the grotesque body is open, hybrid, excessive. Within the Merzbau’s physical space, inner cavities and grottoes are filled with the body’s detritus, blood and urine, fingernails or hair, creating a disjunctive form as a concatenation of incompatible and irreconcilable parts. While Dickerman (2005b: 105) underlines the corporeal, scatological implications of Schwitters’s Merz assemblages, resonating with Schmerz (pain) and merde (shit), Dorothea Dietrich (1993: 192) has isolated three types of grottoes incorporating various types of body fragments: Zivilisationgrottoes, filled with dismembered bodies, belonging to the category of the abject; Kulturgrottoes, where body fragments, evoking relics, were covered with the patina of memory; and finally, Freundschaftgrottoes, which housed objects and body-parts fetishistically linked to their owners. The actual spaces are thus shown to be connected not only to the intimacy of friendship but also to the much broader context of German society. Richter’s lock of hair or a fragment of Doesburg’s tie, like parodic religious relics, carry the memory of the individual body; while the Nibelungenhort alludes to German medieval myths, and the Lustmordhöhle, housing the mutilated corpse of a young girl painted blood-red and surrounded by votive offerings, is linked to the climate of violence generated by the proliferation of Lustmord or sex-crimes in post-war Germany (discussed in chapter 8). While the Merzbau was constructed on the dual principles of the grotto and the column, internal and external spaces, the intimate and the social body, it cannot be seen as presenting a simple opposition between the classical and the grotesque, montage and organicity. Instead, the column has been incorporated into the grotto, the classical into the grotesque; architecture has collapsed, morphed into anatomy. It thus displays a marked contrast with the practice

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of the French Dadaists, who adopted an anti-classical style, which, however disrespectful or iconoclastic, still referenced the classical tradition (see chapter 3). Bypassing Winckelmann’s classical aesthetics, the Merzbau turns instead to the example of Northern European artists, in search of a style that would adequately depict material presence. Schwitters, and other German Dadaists such as Otto Dix, found it not only in the grotesque tradition itself, in painters such as Grünewald or Bosch, but in the classical-turned-grotesque, as found in the work of the artists Arnold Böcklin or Lovis Corinth. The Merzbau has to be considered as a living, expanding body, having nothing in common with the closure of the classical or naturalist body.2 Just as the grotto confronts and slowly engulfs the classical column in the Merzbau, so the grotesque challenges and overturns codes of classical aesthetics. A direct threat to established Kantian order, the grotesque rejects the practice of mimetic representation, unsettles the notion of fixed form and, more widely, defies social norms. It is, on the contrary, an open body that, in Bakhtin’s words, ‘outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits … interrogates and subverts the prevailing culture’ (1984: 26). Moreover, as Schwitters stressed, his assemblage was ‘incomplete, precisely on principle’ (‘unfertig, und zwar aus Prinzip’, 1931: 114), a state that Hans Richter refers to as a ‘proliferation that never ceased’ (1965: 153). This aspect of the grotesque, characterised by Bakhtin as ‘exaggeration, hyperbolism, excessiveness’ (1984: 303), is also a feature of Dada caricature and poetry, whose grammatica jocosa constitutes a pendant to the grotesque in the visual field, as will be explored in the following analysis of Huelsenbeck and Grosz’s Phantastische Gebete.

Richard Huelsenbeck and George Grosz’s Phantastische Gebete (1920) Phantastische Gebete (Fantastic Prayers) is a collection of twenty-four poems written by Richard Huelsenbeck, first published in Zurich (Dada Collection) in 1916, with seven abstract woodcuts by Hans Arp. The second edition, published by Malik-Verlag in Berlin in 1920, was illustrated with satirical drawings by Grosz. The poems, designed to be read aloud, were first performed by Huelsenbeck in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, where he accompanied his reading ‘by rhythmically swishing a riding-crop through the air – and, metaphorically, on to the public’s collective behind’ (Richter 1965: 20). The relative freedom of Switzerland allowed for much less constraint than in warring nations, as Huelsenbeck recognised: ‘In the free town of Zurich, where newspapers could say what they wanted, where journals were launched and poems against the war recited, where there were no ration cards and no ersatz goods, men had the possibility to shout out what filled them to bursting point. That is how my “Fantastic Prayers” originated’ (1969: 28).3 Consequently, his poems

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are a savage indictment of ordered society, the military, the church, the bourgeoisie and the political world. In Huelsenbeck’s own words in Dada siegt, which includes a detailed commentary of the poems: ‘They take life as it is, a crazy simultaneous concert of murder, culture scams, erotics and roast veal, they tear up ethics and the lie of personal responsibility, they dissolve life in a laugh, while denouncing the spirit as a replacement for weak muscles’ (1920b: 20).4 The grotesque style of the poems is echoed in the excesses of the language deployed in the Dadaists’ discussions of the texts. According to Hugo Ball, for example, Huelsenbeck’s poetry represented ‘an attempt to create in a clear melody the totality of this unutterable age, with all its cracks and fissures, with all its wicked and lunatic genialities, with all its noise and hollow din. The Gorgon’s head of a boundless terror smiles out of the fantastic destruction’ (1996: 56). Tzara’s review of the poems, ‘R. Huelsenbeck “Prières fantastiques”’, was no less excessive: ‘Energy and speed hurled above the glacier, vertiginous currents bounding more furiously after invisible obstacles, stagnant effervescence blossoming enormously in the air’ (1919: 26; 1975: 402).5 Hans Arp followed suit enthusiastically when writing about the poems: ‘In these poems Huelsenbeck has depicted the hellish haunting of earthly chaos, disorder, vanity and stupidity in vivid proportions, which allows one to oversee the unbelievable insanity of the inhuman drive’ (quoted in Kapfer 1993).6 Like poems by Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, Huelsenbeck’s texts are examples of free verse, what Marinetti termed parole in libertà. However, while Marinetti’s poetic experiments revolutionised the formal aspects of language, Huelsenbeck claimed that the Dadaists wanted from the outset to be revolutionaries of mankind. Huelsenbeck’s language in Phantastische Gebete, freed from formal constraints and normative grammar and semantics, plays with the liberated word in all its materiality and obscenity, an illustration of Bakhtin’s grammatica jocosa. The focus, consequently, is often on the signifier rather than the signified, on sounds, punning, repetition, neologisms or nonsense words, as exemplified in the poem ‘Ebene’, which starts: Schweinsblase Kesselpauke Zinnober cru cru cru Theosophia pneumatica die grosse Geistkunst = poeme bruitiste aufgefuhrt zum erstenmal durch Richard Huelsenbeck DaDa oder oder birribum birribum saust der Ochs im Kreis herum oder Bohrauffrage furt leichte Wurfminen – Rohlinge 7,6 cm Chauceur Beteiligung Soda calc. 98/100% Vorstehend damo birridamo holla di funga quall di mangodamai da dai umbala damo brrs pffi commencer Abrr Kpppi commence Anfang Anfang sei hei fe da heim gefragt (Huelsenbeck 1920: 7)

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Words, defined by Huelsenbeck as ‘autonomous spherical figures, small worlds with their own life and their own laws’ (1920b: 21),7 clearly could not be expected to follow standard rules. Instead they agglutinate or give way altogether to primitive rhythms or simply noise in a material decomposition of language: ‘brrs pffi commencer Abrr Kpppi commence Anfang Anfang / sei hei fe da heim gefragt’. In his review of the poems Tzara noted: ‘The representation of noise sometimes becomes, effectively and objectively, noise – and the grotesque acquires the proportions of swiftly interrupted chaotic sentences’ (1919: 26; 1975: 402).8 Elsewhere, syntactic order gives way to parataxis, the simple but confusing enumeration of disparate words, as in the first line of the poem: ‘Schweinsblase Kesselpauke Zinnober cru cru cru’. In addition, the poems are frequently made up of a collage of heteroglossic discourses, which mix French, German, Latin and imagined African languages, as well as scientific terminology and advertising fragments, giving the poems – for Huelsenbeck at least – a (tenuous) grounding in everyday reality: ‘Newspaper items and advertisements run through the text and have the same value as alien material in painting, they signify a direct return to reality and represent the noise, the screeching of brakes’ (Huelsenbeck 1920b: 21).9 Such inserts include parodic quoting of writers ranging from Horace and Homer to Goethe, Schiller and Marinetti himself, as well as the blasphemous treatment of biblical texts. The voice is thus construed as collective, objective and multi-facetted, in contrast to the subjectivity of the individual ‘I’ of the Expressionists berated by Tzara: ‘Huelsenbeck is among the rare people to have shouted and protested, remaining inaccessible to the ways of crybabies in bowties’ (1919: 26; 1975: 402).10 The language of this poetry is thus formally transgressive, excessive, decomposed: all characteristics of the grotesque. As for the semantic level, here too meaning is hyperbolic and shifting, as in the prose text ‘Die Zylindergiebel’ (‘The Cylindrical Gable’), which actually treats the theme of the grotesque body in a short narrative: The Dadasoph rose up from the dada megalo toilet seat and made the following speech. I am the Dadasoph from beginning to end. I hold a whisky bottle in my left hand and an eraser in my right hand. No-one can do anything to me. The letters dance out of my ears and my belly makes waves to the beat of the Hohenfriedberger march. I crack my whip from east to west and the young lice I wish well shout for joy on my fingers. My head is in the Nile and my legs chop open the Arctic Ocean but nobody knows what use it is. This is Dadaco the book of the sun but even the sun doesn’t know what use it is. Look at the white steam from my nostrils spreading across the earth – see the shadow cast by my lips. I am the young moon standing in waders as the trains depart I am the calf that climbs up the rain gutters in military step. Yes yes that astonishes you, earthly louts and blindworms, that makes you rub your nose

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on the petroleum tank but that’s not the last we’ve heard of that. Somebody came with an accordion and played for the elephant dance. I am the meteorite falling out out of the nipples of the moon. I am the cylindrical gable mounted by John Heartfield. Hey you underground workers and knackers open your bellies wide and trample the hair under your feet. Judgment day has begun the great day of reckoning. (Huelsenbeck 1916: 26)11

Several characteristics identified in the analysis of Schwitters’s Merzbau earlier in this chapter as grotesque, are operative in this poem. The narrator is portrayed from the outset in terms of abjection: ‘The Dadasoph rose up from the dada megalo toilet seat and made the following speech’. He experiences his body not as a distinct entity but as a state where the limits between body and non-body are actually effaced: ‘The letters dance out of my ears and my belly makes waves to the beat of the Hohenfriedberger march … My head is in the Nile and my legs chop open the Arctic Ocean’. Consequently, the narrator’s body disintegrates, engulfing and engulfed by space: ‘Look at the white steam from my nostrils spreading across the earth’. In such a state, conventional notions such as individual identity give way to dispersal in a boisterous concatenation of multiple identities: ‘the young moon … the calf … the meteorite … the ­cylindrical gable’. If we turn now to George Grosz’s series of satirical drawings for the second edition of Huelsenbeck’s poems, it is immediately apparent that while the drawings do not literally illustrate the poems, they share the same themes and satirical spirit. Grosz depicted human types rather than individuals, and his viciously satirical anti-militaristic drawings, expressing his ‘despair, hate and disillusionment’, his ‘utter contempt for mankind in general’ (1946: 146, 147), were based on his experience of wartime Berlin: I drew soldiers without noses; war-cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of horse-blanket; a one-armed soldier saluting a lady decorated with medals who was putting a cookie on his bed; a colonel, his fly open, embracing a nurse; a medical orderly emptying into a pit a pail filled with various parts of the human body. (Grosz 1946: 147)

In drawings designed to evoke the abject and grotesque of wartime and postwar Berlin, Grosz resorts to caricature (from the Italian caricatura/caricare = to load or exaggerate), a technique based on exaggerated or distorted features, frequently executed in a sketch-like linear style, and used to satirical ends. His drawings depict a range of social types: the pot-bellied Spießer or bourgeois; the animal-headed capitalist; the semi-naked prostitute, her breasts visible, ogled by a tiny bald figure and a top-hat-bedecked skeleton (figure 5.2); the priest brandishing a crucifix and lowering his pants; characters drinking, vomiting,

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5.2  George Grosz, illustration from Richard Huelsenbeck, Phantastische Gebete (1920)

toppling over. Such satirical drawings by Grosz were reproduced in a number of Dada publications, such as Der blutige Ernst (1919–20) or Die Pleite (1919–20, 1923–4). Among his many drawings, one portrays an officer and a bourgeois in profile (figure 5.3). These are hybrid figures, the thick-necked officer with

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5.3  George Grosz, illustration from Richard Huelsenbeck, Phantastische Gebete (1920)

bestial features, the bourgeois with a long snout and claw-like hand, ridiculously adorned with pince-nez and cigar, a bottle of alcohol attached to him like a prosthetic limb. Thanks to Grosz’s elliptical style the figures overlap and intersect, merging with each other in their pomposity and grotesqueness, like the self-satisfied governing classes they represent. The pig’s head was in fact

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widespread in German caricature as a critique of the hated capitalist or the military; and, as Huelsenbeck comments in En Avant Dada, the Dadaists did not hesitate ‘from time to time to tell the fat and utterly uncomprehending Zurich philistines that we regarded them as pigs’ (trans. in Motherwell 1951: 23).12 More widely, as revealed in a letter to Otto Schmalhausen, dated 1918, Grosz was convinced that ‘from the day they are confirmed to the day they are blasted into the paradisiacal beyond, “people are pigs”’ (Grosz and Herzfelde 1925: 19).13 We encounter further striking examples of the pig-headed bourgeois in Grosz’s Volkes Stimme ist Gottes Stimme (The Voice of the People is the Voice of God),14 depicting an entire menagerie, not only of pig-headed but, stretching the analogy, also walrus-, donkey- and monkey-headed bourgeois, ecclesiastical and military figures, literally spitting or belching words at each other. The aggressive satire of the military was also at the centre of the 1920 Dada-Messe in Dr Otto Burchardt’s gallery, in which Heartfield and Schlichter suspended from the ceiling a lifesize mannequin in a German soldier’s uniform with the papier-maché head of a pig, titled Preußischer Erzengel (Prussian Archangel; figure 5.4).

5.4  Photograph of First International Dada Fair, Dr Otto Burchard Gallery, Berlin. R. Huelsenbeck, Dada Almanach (1920)

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It was on the occasion of the same exhibition that Grosz published Gott mit uns (God with us, 1920), a portfolio of nine prints (photolithographs) available for purchase, another satirical portrayal of the German military establishment of the Weimar Republic, with their bestial heads and savage deeds. Considered offensive by the military establishment – unsurprisingly, given the importance of the phrase used in heraldry and by the Prussian military since the early eighteenth century – a lawsuit was filed against Grosz and the publisher Wieland Herzfelde. Found guilty of defamation of the military (who still wore it on the buckles of their uniforms), they were fined, copies of the portfolio were seized by the police and the original plates confiscated and destroyed. Such grotesque figures, repeatedly vilified in the satirical texts, images and performances of the Dadaists, were in overt conflict with the establishment’s image of the idealised body of the armoured Freikorps soldier, analysed by Klaus Theweleit (1987) in his study of Germany’s military establishment in the early twentieth century. The figure of the patched-up soldier, unwelcome evidence of failure and defeat, frequently depicted in Otto Dix’s paintings, served a similar end.

Otto Dix and the aftermath of war Not only did the German Dadaists pastiche with verve the icons of the bodyand nation- builders of the early Weimar Republic, as was shown in chapter 3 with reference to Max Ernst’s collage La Santé par le sport, for instance, artists such as Otto Dix, like Grosz and Hoerle, also engaged in an exposé of the violence inflicted on the soldier by depicting amputees or fabricating mismatched bodies made up of disparate limbs and reconstructed faces.15 The presence of 2.7 million war invalids gave rise in Germany to a controversy over the place of the wounded veteran in post-war society: rehabilitation or stigmatisation (Poore 2007: 3)? At one extreme, the war invalid was seen as a symbol of Germany’s defeat and dismemberment, hence was to be kept out of the public sphere. At the other, the soldier could be re-equipped with missing limbs and sent back to the front or reintegrated profitably into the post-war industrial machine, thanks to the important technological advances in prosthetics.16 Debates regarding the artistic representation of these war invalids were similarly polarised. At one extreme, conservative artists and critics condemned the representation of the deformed in modern art and defended the integrity of the body, their position grounded on debates ongoing since the end of the nineteenth century on degeneracy and eugenics, now backed by the contemporary cult of the healthy body. In this context, a speech delivered in 1901 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, ‘Die wahre Kunst’, which condemned the portrayal of extreme

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images of human deformity and called for idealised artistic forms, became all the more relevant in the post-war debate when it was widely quoted in the press. On the other hand, progressive artists frequently resorted to the image of the wounded veteran or the mechanised male body when deriding the rhetoric of heroism, and excoriating militarism, social injustice and capitalism. Faced with the officially promoted invisibility of the war invalid, the Dadaists enforced his visibility, foregrounding and exaggerating his deformities, crutches and prosthetic limbs. Artists such as Grosz and Dix explicitly linked the disabled war veteran and the industrial worker; or the deformed, syphilitic prostitute and the Lustmord victim, as in Dix’s Dirne und Kriegsverletzter (Prostitute and Disabled War Veteran; see figure 8.6), to be discussed in chapter 8, or Grosz’s Daum marries her pedantic automaton ‘George’ (see figure 4.6). Otto Dix (1891–1969) enlisted as a volunteer in a field artillery regiment and served on both the Western and Eastern fronts, where he was wounded on several occasions. His self-portraits reflect a marked shift in his attitude towards war. While his Selbstbildnis als Mars (Self-portrait as Mars, 1915)17 reflects his belief that war was a means of forging manliness, this strong male figure depicted in a dynamic futuristic style of the early days of the war was to give way to the figure of the victim in the post-war works. In 1919 Dix returned to the Dresden Academy of Applied Arts, where he had been a student before the war, and was a founding member of the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe, as well as the Dresden Dada group, along with Otto Griebel, Jurt Gunther and Erwin Schulhof (a pianist who took part in the first Dada soirée in Berlin 1918). They quickly established links with the Berlin Dada group through Grosz and Hausmann, and staged a Dada soirée in Dresden in January 1920, to which Hausmann, Huelsenbeck and Baader contributed, and Dix exhibited at the Dada-Messe in Berlin in 1920. Looking at the six hundred or so drawings and gouaches produced by Dix between 1914 and 1918 depicting the destruction of the war – trenches, ruins, shell craters – the viewer is confronted with an expressionist style or a fragmented, angular cubist style in which human figures are depicted using dynamic futuristic forcelines. In the immediate post-war period, on the other hand, Dix’s style shifted to grotesque realism; in his journal he linked this style to a return to the language of sixteenth-century German artists: ‘What we need in the future is a fanatical and vehement naturalism, a fervent, virile and profound truth like that of Grünewald’ (quoted in Hartley 1992: 106). In the post-war oeuvre, the invisibility of the wounded or maimed body maintained in his wartime sketches gives way to the visibility of the disfigured soldier in public spaces, the post-war streets and cafes of Dresden. Four paintings in particular, dated 1920, depict war victims, crippled, wounded, Schwerkriegsbeschädigte or maimed veterans: Prager Straße (meinen Zeitgenossen gewidmet) (Prague Street (dedicated to my

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contemporaries)),18 Die Skatspieler (The Skat Players; figure 5.5), Die Streichholzhändler I (The Match Seller I)19 and Kriegskrüppel (War Cripples) were all exhibited at the Berlin Dada-Messe in 1920. Designed to counter the official rhetoric of military heroism, the crudeness and violence of the depiction of war invalids and beggars used to expose the reality of the streets of Dresden in post-war Germany shocked the public.

5.5  Otto Dix, Die Skatspieler (The Skat Players, 1920)

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Prager Straße, painted in oil with added collage elements, depicts an officer and a soldier in a street in Dresden, the scene of a massacre of civilians by the Freikorps in 1919, as well as the location of Emil Richter’s gallery where the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe’s exhibition was held in April 1919. Not only do the two men rely on artificial limbs but their amputated bodies are also evoked indirectly in the cut-off arm of the passerby to the left of the painting and the orthopaedic shoe on the right. Even the shop window displays part-bodies: wigs made from real hair, prosthetic female hands and prosthetic limbs for war-wounded, juxtaposed with a mannequin sporting a corset and a neck brace and wielding a crutch. Anti-Semitic pamphlets lie alongside fragments of electoral tracts, and the outline of a scythe and a skeleton have been scratched onto the surface of the paint. The figure of the maimed soldier is a savage indictment of military destruction, a satire of the technology which maimed in war and reconstructed in peacetime and a comment on post-1918 consumerism, in which commodified beauty is overtly anchored in prosthetic culture. Finally, it refers to the propaganda of the early Weimar years, which cynically extolled the wounded war veteran as an ideal worker, the artificial arm a more efficient assembly-line tool than the flesh-and-bone original. The cynical calculations behind this are illustrated by Martin Gaughan, who quotes Henry Ford’s 1923 autobiography on the manufacture of America’s first mass-market car, the Model T. This required 7,882 separate operations of which only 12 per cent needed ‘strong able-bodied and practically physically perfect men … 670 operations could be filled by legless men; 2,637 by one-legged men; two by armless men; 715 by one-armed men, and ten by blind men’ (2006: 148). This coldly productivist position, relating directly to manufacture on the first moving assembly line, is satirised in Schwitters’s lines: ‘The WOMAN charms with her legs / I am a MAN, I have none!’ (‘Das WEIB entzuckt durch seine Beine / Ich bin ein MANN, ich habe keine!’, quoted in Burmeister 2007b: 15). Oil and collage combine again in the production of the equally satirical painting Die Skatspieler, which depicts three crippled veteran officers playing cards in a café. The painting appears to incorporate parodic references to both Cézanne’s solid peasant cardplayers in the Joueurs de cartes series of the 1890s, and Fernand Léger’s heroic mechanical figures in La Partie de cartes (1917; see figure 2.2). As in Prager Straße, the use of collage is significant here since it materialises the theme of (prosthetic) reconstruction and the diversity of materials. The figure on the right, adorned with the Iron Cross, has a jaw replacement made from the silver paper lining of cigarette packets with the inscription ‘Unterfkiefer Prothese Marke Dix’ (‘Prosthetic lower jaw Brandname Dix’) and a photograph of Dix with the caption ‘nur echt mit dem Bild des Erfinders’ (‘genuine only with the picture of the inventor’). The blue uniform is made up of a collaged fragment of the ersatz material used for clothing in post-war Weimar, and the

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figure is holding real collaged cards up close to his eyes with a prosthetic hand. As for the central figure, he is equipped with an artificial lower jaw and left eye, and half a moustache, and he holds his cards with a prosthetic hand and mouth. The figure on the left, for his part, has lost an eye and an arm, holds his cards with his right foot, and has to resort to a long, bright-blue hearing trumpet. The prosthetic legs of these (rebuilt) officers are indistinguishable from the legs of the table, while their shattered faces are grotesquely deformed, their sexual organs miniaturised (figure on the right), displaced (the large thumb on the right-hand figure) or schematised (the penis-like arrow in the fantasy-image on the skull of the central figure). The visibly dismembered and cobbled together is, finally, exacerbated by a revealing exposure of the inside of the head, laying bare the soldiers’ sexual fantasies in images of female legs and the arrow-penis. Anti-war satire in such works is underscored by hyperbolic realism. These are fairground figures, objects of fascination and horror, monstrous bodies (the etymology of monster is ‘that which reveals’) produced in a spirit that recalls the grimacing masks of wartime Zurich Dada, although there is a shift here from the carnivalesque atmosphere of Zurich to the more abrasively political context of Berlin Dada. Here Dix is brutally unmasking the wounds of a society that is trying to disguise them through the continuing myth of the brave German soldier, reconstructive surgery and, more generally, social reconstruction programmes. This is, clearly, art designed to shatter the complacent consensus by provoking shock through crudeness and violence, hence more aggressive than Carl Einstein’s portrayal of it as merely ‘painting as a critical statement’. In his critique of Dix’s 1920s paintings Einstein underlines their ‘pithy objectivity’ and their impact in unmasking the realities of the Weimar Republic: ‘Dix gives this era – which is only the caricature of one – a resolute and technically sound kick in its swollen belly … and produces an upright depiction of its people, their sly faces grinning an array of stolen mugs. … A sloganeering attack against these ridiculous times, iconoclasm’ (1994: 490).20 The impact of Kriegskrüppel or Der Schützengraben (The Trench, 1920–23), is perhaps best understood by today’s viewer when she learns that they were exhibited at the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in 1937 in Munich, and roundly denounced as an insult to the memory of the German soldiers of the Great War. The Trench, now lost, was probably destroyed by the Nazis. For the 1920 paintings under discussion here, Dix resorted to contemporary photographs of war veterans with disfigured faces and amputated limbs, published in Die Freie Welt (issue 2, Summer 1920: 38) and reused later in an anti-war pamphlet, Krieg dem Kriege, by the noted pacifist Ernst Friedrich, published in Berlin in 1924 by the Freie Jugend press (figure 5.6). Friedrich opened an International Anti-War Museum in Berlin, exhibiting photographs and prints, including enlarged prints from his pamphlet, which carried a strong

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5.6  Ernst Friedrich, from Krieg dem Kriege (1924)

anti-war message in response to the sheer destructiveness of modern warfare. Photographs of wounded soldiers, rotting corpses, ruins and rubble were accompanied by captions in four languages, sometimes juxtaposed with contemporary official patriotic propaganda, the aim being, clearly, to expose the lies and hypocrisy of official discourse and warn against the consequences of such ideologically inspired rhetoric. In the last section, ‘The face of war’, the viewer is confronted with twenty-four close-up photographs of facially wounded soldiers, actually drawn from the German military’s own medical archives, brutal contradictions of the erasure at the heart of the rhetoric of heroism. Unsurprisingly, the publication of the pamphlet and the opening of the Anti-War Museum, timed no doubt to coincide with a government campaign to glorify war, antagonised nationalist organisations who sought to have it banned as an insult to the country’s military and biased against official post-war reconstruction programmes. The works exhibited by Friedrich in the Anti-War Museum included Käthe Kollwitz’s Krieg (War, 1923), and Otto Dix’s Der Krieg (1924), a series of fifty etchings based on Dix’s wartime sketchbooks and photographs of trench warfare, published in Berlin by Karl Niederdorf (figure 5.7).21 Modelled on Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–20) and informed by a study of Ernst Friedrich’s photographs in Krieg dem Kriege as well as corpses in anatomy classes, the etchings are among the most powerful indictments of war in twentieth-century art. Henri Barbusse, author of the widely read anti-war novel Le Feu (1916) and who wrote the introduction to Dix’s Der Krieg, felt that far from exaggerating the horrors of war, Dix had presented ‘the apocalyptic hell of reality’. The dominant theme,

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5.7  Otto Dix, Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor (Shock Troops Advance Under Gas), from Der Krieg (1924)

of course, is of wartime destruction and, in particular, organic decomposition via mutilated and wounded soldiers, rotting corpses, skulls, syphilitic prostitutes, shell craters and bombed buildings. The drawings are executed in etching (a technique which allowed the artist to depict his subject in detail) and aquatint (a technique in which the painted areas can be corroded by acid, rendering the decomposition of flesh), as in Tote bei der Stellung bei Tahure (Dead Men near Position at Tahure, 1924; figure 5.8). Harrowing realism (or verism) is underscored by reference to precise dates and locations, as in Gastote. Templeux-la-fosse, August 1916 (Gas Victims. Templeux-la-fosse, August 1916, 1923–24) or Verwundeter (Herbst 1916, Bapaume) (Wounded (Autumn 1916, Bapaume), 1924), endowing each etching with an inescapable documentary dimension. Interestingly, in a 2014 BBC Radio 3 essay, Martin Rawson compared Dix’s Gas Victims with John Singer Sargent’s Gassed 1919 (IWM, London), commissioned by the Ministry of Information. Sargent had been sent to the front in July 1918, where he had witnessed firsthand the effects of mustard gas attacks. The work, 6 m long, was selected as painting of the year by the Royal Academy in London. In a clear intertextual reference to Pieter Brueghel’s Parable of the Blind (1568), the painting’s central response is deemed to be pity, more acceptable no doubt to the post-1918 viewer than horror – which had now become unacceptable to a nation actively erasing

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5.8  Otto Dix, Tote bei der Stellung bei Tahure (Dead Men near Position at Tahure), from Der Krieg (1924)

the reality of the trenches. As an allegory of war, it thus contrasts with the stark realism of Dix’s etching.

Tzara’s Le Coeur à gaz (1921)22 The body dismembered and partly reconfigured is also the subject of Tzara’s three-act play Le Coeur à gaz (The Gas Heart), although it may appear to be presented in a seemingly more ludic mode than Dix’s depictions of wounded and patched-up veterans. The play was first performed by the Dadaists themselves at the Salon Dada at the Galerie Montaigne on 10 June 1921. It consisted primarily of absurd dialogues between characters named after body-parts, including Eyebrow (played by Tzara), Eye (Aragon), Mouth (Ribemont-Dessaignes), Ear (Soupault), Nose (Fraenkel) and Neck (Péret). Tzara gave minimal stage directions: ‘NECK is above the stage, NOSE opposite above the audience. / All the other characters enter and exit freely. The gas-heated heart walks slowly, great circulation’ (1975: 154).23 The play was received with shouts of mockery, some members of the audience storming out during Tzara’s prologue. A second performance took place at the Soirée du Coeur à barbe organised by Tzara at the Théâtre Michel on 6 July 1923. The event included music by Georges

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Auric, Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky; films by Hans Richter, Sheeler and Man Ray; and Ribemont-Dessaignes’s play Mouchez-vous. Le Coeur à gaz had a cast of Dadaists (Baron, Crevel, Pierre de Massot) and professional actors from the Théâtre de l’Odéon (including Pierre Bertin and Marcel Herrand). Sonia Delaunay designed cubist-style cardboard costumes, which did not attempt to identify the body-parts, and the sets were provided by the Russian artist Naum Granovski. The performance was rudely interrupted by Breton, who, protesting against what he perceived as the conventional theatrical aspect of the performance, leapt onto the stage, boxed René Crevel’s ears and broke Pierre de Massot’s arm with his walking stick. He was joined by Aragon, Péret and Éluard. The evening ended in chaos, with the intervention of the police, and marked the final split between Tzara and Breton, as recalled in detail by Georges Hugnet (Richter 1965: 190). While Tzara was intent on continuing Dada activities, Breton was keen to explore new fields. In the short prologue to the text, Tzara had asked the audience not to take the play seriously: ‘It is the only and the greatest three-act hoax of the century; it will please only industrialised imbeciles who believe in the existence of men of genius’ (1975: 154).24 While the actors were asked to consider the play as if it were a masterpiece like Macbeth or Chantecler, the playwright was to be treated with absolutely no respect.25 ‘Lightheartedness in the major key of laughter’ (‘Corps léger en rire majeur’): the play, made up of absurd dialogues – or rather, a series of disconnected ­monologues – between absurd characters, can actually be read as a playful parody of traditional theatre, and is thus characteristic of Dada theatre. In Tzara’s words, ‘the subtle invention of the explosive wind, scenario in the audience, visible direction, grotesque props’ (1920b: 17; 1975: 564).26 As Nose comments: ‘Your play is charming but we can’t understand a word’ (‘Elle est charmante votre pièce mais on n’y comprend rien’). And indeed – pace Breton – the absurdity of the dialogues, the mobility of the characters and their component parts, and the absence of a coherent plot underscore the ludic dimension of the text. This is further evidenced in the formally subversive use of language for, as Tzara writes in ‘Dada manifeste sur l’amour faible et l’amour amer’ (1920): ‘Thought is produced in the mouth’ (‘La pensée se fait dans la bouche’, 1975: 379), implying no doubt that it is all hot air. As in Schwitters’s text analysed earlier in this chapter, grammatical rules are broken with gusto, generating among other examples of Rabelaisian grammatica jocosa: ‘I am cold, I am afraid, I am green I am flower I am gasometer I am afraid’ (‘j’ai froid, j’ai peur, j’ai vert j’ai fleur j’ai gazomètre j’ai peur’); ‘vertebrate Easter in a military cage’ (‘Pâques vertébrés en cage militaire’). The audience is left with the impression that language in the play is both voided and self-generating, like the creeping expansion of Schwitters’s Merzbau, one sound eliding into another, as,

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for example: ‘Eyes replaced by motionless navels’ (‘Les yeux remplacés par les nombrils immobiles’) or ‘the man with mollusc wounds wool chains’ (‘l’homme aux plaies mollusques laines chaînes’). Language is, moreover, both repetitive (‘Mais oui mais oui mais oui mais oui mais oui…’) and cumulative (‘the hand shows the left eye the right eye the forehead the eyebrow the forehead the eyebrow the left eye the left ear lips chin neck’27). Consequently, the aleatory listing of body-parts and the random criss-crossing of speech add up to neither whole body nor coherent meaning. And the characters themselves, bundled – rather than composed – around bodily fragments, reveal their lack of substance and sense of cohesion: ‘He is no being since he is made up of bits’ (‘Il n’est pas être car il est composé de morceaux’), says Ear; while Mouth observes: ‘I am alone in my wardrobe and the mirror is empty when I look at myself’ (‘Je suis seule dans mon armoire et la glace est vide lorsque je me regarde’). Yet the play cannot be dismissed as simply playful nonsense, because when it is historically contextualised, its subversive elements can be seen to involve more than language games. As Stanton B. Garner has argued, the play ‘reflects and interacts with the historical moment it seeks to challenge’ (2007: 501), namely the traumatic experience of the First World War. ‘Have you felt the horrors of the war?’ (‘Avez-vous senti les horreurs de la guerre?’), one character asks pointedly. The title itself alludes to a more markedly serious theme in its reference to the use of poison gas and the revulsion caused by its appalling effects on troops. The names of the characters reduce the soldiers to dislocated, indeed disembodied members and the text draws attention to wounds and disfigurement: ‘Hey you over there, the man with starshaped scars, where are you running to? … Hey you over there, the man with wounds, molluscs, wool, chains, man full of sorrows and pockets full.’28 The constant metamorphoses to which the body is subjected in the play could, nevertheless, be considered as opening onto a euphemisation of the disfigured or wounded body. This is suggested, for example, in metaphors where body-parts lose their materiality when they fuse with, or are transformed into, non-corporeal elements: ‘what can you do with the bells of the eyes’ (‘et que faites-vous des cloches des yeux’); ‘your eyes are stones because they can only see rain and cold’ (‘vos yeux sont des cailloux car ils ne voient que la pluie et le froid’). Elsewhere, while the shifting between the two is reversed, the euphemisation is retained, when the limits of the body are subtly transgressed by giving non-human elements human attributes: ‘the bearded sky’ (‘ciel à barbe’); ‘time is sporting a moustache’ (‘le temps porte des moustaches’). For Garner, the remaking of the body via post-war reconstructive technology is referenced in Tzara’s text through ‘the fragmented body … refigured through perceptual and imaginative juxtapositions into something provisional and strange … The perceptual field of Tzara’s play becomes a site for extravagant corporeal refashioning’ (2008: 512). Such ‘extravagance’ undermines the

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notion of euphemisation, and suggests that these ever-shifting reconfigurations of the body, irrespective of the ludic mode in which they are generated, remain stubborn and all-too-visible remnants; at best a partial and, as Garner recognises, always provisional patching up of the wounded body. In short, the excess that drives early twentieth-century grotesque – evidenced in Tzara’s juxtapositions, Merz’s organic accretions, or Grosz’s grotesque naturalism – serves primarily to reveal the failure of post-war reconstruction of mutilated Man.

Notes 1. For descriptions of the Merzbau and its construction, see in particular Schwitters’s own inventory in ‘Ich und meine Ziele’ (1931); Dietrich (1993: 164–209); Elger (1998: 193–205); Cardinal and Webster (2011: 69–75). The Merzbau was reconstructed by Peter Bissegger in 1981–83 at the Hannover Sprengel Museum (see Orchard 2007). 2. Lynda Nead describes the contained female nude in western culture as follows: ‘forms, conventions and poses of art have worked metaphorically to shore up the female body – to seal orifices and to prevent marginal matter from transgressing the boundary dividing the inside of the body and the outside, the self from the space of the other’ (1992: 6). 3. ‘Im freien Zurich, wo die Zeitungen sagen konnten, was sie wollten, wo man Zeitschriften gründete und Gedichte gegen den Krieg vortrug, hier wo es keine Brotkarten und keinen “Ersatz” gab, hier hatte man die Möglichkeit, alles das hinauszuschreien, was einen bis zum Bersten erfüllte. So entstanden meine “Phantastischen Gebete”.’ 4. ‘Sie nehmen das Leben wie es ist als ein wahnwitziges Simultankonzert von Morden, Kulturschwindel, Erotik und Kalbsbraten, sie zerfetzen die Ethik und die Lüge der personlichen Verantwortlichkeit, sie lösen das Leben in ein Gelachter auf, indem sie den Geist als eine Verdrängung fur schwache Muskeln denunzieren.’ 5. ‘Energie et vitesse lancées au-dessus du glacier, courants vertigineux bondissant avec plus de fureur après les obstacles invisibles, effervescence stagnante s’épanouissant énormément en haut.’ 6. ‘Huelsenbeck hat in diesen Gedichten den hollischen Spuk der irdischen Verwirrung, Unordnung, Eitelkeit, Dummheit in einem anschaulichen Großenverhältnis dargestellt, welches den unfaßlichen Irsinn des unmenschlichen Treibens sinnfallig zu uberblicken erlaubt.’ 7. ‘sphärische Gebilde für sich, kleine Welten, die ihr eigenes Leben und ihre eigenen Gesetze haben.’ 8. ‘La représentation du bruit devient parfois réellement, objectivement, bruit – et le grotesque prend les proportions des phrases vite entrecoupées et chaotiques.’ 9. ‘Zeitungsnotizen und Annoncen durchlaufen den Text und sind hier von demselben Wert wie die fremden Materialen in der Malerei, sie bedeuten ein direktes Zurückkehren zur Realität und versinnbildlichen das bruit, das Gekreisch der Bremsen.’

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10. ‘Huelsenbeck est un des rares qui, ayant crié et protesté, restera inaccessible aux chemins des pleurnichards travesties en papillons.’ 11. ‘Da erhob sich der Dadasoph von der Brille des Dada-Riesen-Abtritts und hielt folgende Rede. Ich bin der Dadasoph von Anbeginn bis zum Ende. Ich halte die Schnapsflasche in meiner linken Hand und das Radiergummi in der rechten. Mir kann keiner. Die Buchstaben tanzen zu meinen Ohren hinaus und mein Bauch schlägt Wellen nach dem Takt des Hohenfriedberger. Ich schlage mit meiner Peitsche von Osten nach Westen und die jungen Läuse denen ich wohl will jauchzen auf meinen Fingern. Mein Kopf liegt im Nil und meine Beine hacken das Eismeer auf doch niemand weiß wozu es gut ist. Das ist Dadaco das Buch der Sonne aber auch die Sonne weiß nicht wozu es gut ist. Seht den weißen Dampf der sich aus meinen Nüstern über die Erde verbreitet – sehet den Schatten den meine Lippen werfen. Ich bin der junge Mond der in Wasserstiefeln bei der Abfahrt der Züge steht ich bin das Kalb das an den Regentraufen im Parademarsch hinaufsteigt. Ja ja da staunt Ihr Erdlümmer und Blindschleichen da reibt Ihr die Nase an dem Petroleumtank aber es ist noch nicht aller Tage Abend. Jemand kam mit der Ziehharmonika und spielte den Elefanten zum Tanze auf. Ich bin der Meteor der aus den Brustwarzen des Mondes fällt. Ich bin der Zylindergiebel den John Heartfield montiert. Hé Ihr Erdarbeiter und Abdecker sperrt die Bäuche auf und tretet das Haar unter Eure Füße. Das Gericht beginnt der große Tag der Abrechnung ist da.’ 12. ‘auch hin und wieder den feisten und vollkommen verständnislosen Züricher Spießbürgern zu sagen, daß wir sie für Schweine … hielten’ (Huelsenbeck 1920d: 4). 13. ‘von der Confirmation bis an das Abknallen ins jenseitige paradiesische Treiben, “Menschen sind Schweine”.’ 14. Reproduced in Der Gegner 1:2 (17 June 1920), 28–9. 15. See Cork (1994: 251–5). 16. On the development of the prosthetic industry in wartime and post-war Europe, see Amy Lyford’s excellent study (2007). 17. Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis als Mars (1915), oil on paper, Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart. 18. Otto Dix, Prager Straße (meinen Zeitgenossen gewidmet) (1920), Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. 19. Otto Dix, Die Streichholzhändler I (1920), Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. 20. ‘Dix tritt dieser Zeit, die nur Persiflage einer solchen ist, enschlossen und technisch gut montiert in den geblähten Bauch … und zeigt aufrichtig ihre Menschen, deren gerissene Gesichter zusammengeklaute Fratze grinsen. … Parole Angriff gegen die in sich lächerliche Zeit: Bildersturm’ (1923: 98–9). 21. The series is discussed in Cork (1994: 273–9). 22. The text was first published in Der Sturm 13:3 (5 March 1922), 33–42; Tzara (1975: 153–79). 23. ‘COU est au dessus de la scène, NEZ vis-à-vis au-dessus du public. / Tous les autres personnages entrent et sortent ad libitum. Le coeur chauffé au gaz marche lentement, grande circulation.’ 24. ‘c’est la seule et la plus grande escroquerie du siècle en 3 actes, elle ne portera bonheur qu’aux imbéciles industrialisés qui croient à l’existence des génies.’ 25. ‘Actors are asked to give this play the attention worthy of a masterpiece the likes

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of Macbeth and Chantecler, but to treat the author, who is not a genius, with little respect and to observe the absence of seriousness of the text which brings nothing new to theatrical techniques.’ (‘Les interprètes sont priés de donner à cette pièce l’attention due à un chef-d’oeuvre de la force de Macbeth et de Chantecler, mais de traiter l’auteur, qui n’est pas un génie, avec peu de respect et de constater le manque de sérieux du texte qui n’apporte aucune nouveauté sur la technique du théâtre.’) 26. ‘l’invention subtile du vent explosif, le scénario dans la salle, régie visible et moyens grotesques.’ 27. ‘l’aiguille montre l’oreille gauche l’oeil droit le front le sourcil le front le sourcil l’oeil gauche l’oreille gauche les lèvres le menton le cou’. 28. ‘Hé là-bas, l’homme aux cicatrices d’étoile, où courez-vous? [...] Hé là-bas, l’homme aux plaies mollusques laines chaînes, l’homme aux peines diverses et aux poches pleines.’

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6 Performance spaces: fairground, cabaret, exhibition

The public needs to be violated in unusual positions. Francis Picabia (1978: 25)

In Dada’s privileged spaces – the fairground, the cabaret, the exhibition, the cinema – from Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire to the Salle Gaveau in Paris, via the Cologne Brauhaus Winter brewery or Otto Burchardt’s Berlin art gallery, it is enlightening to consider dadaist activities in terms of performance rather than simply spectacle, process rather than product. Although the term ‘performance art’ was first used around 1970 to describe art events from the late 1950s, its roots are evident in the avant-garde, above all in Futurism and Dada.1 It is based on the concept of the work of art as event instead of the modernist concept of art as material object or, in the neat formulation of Lucy Lippard, on the notion of ‘artas-action’ rather than ‘art as objet d’art’ (1970: 1). For Thomas Elsaesser, Dada cinema in particular was not only a model ‘for representing the relation of body to social environment’ but also ‘for conceptualising the art-work as event, rather than as object, no longer as products but as circuits of exchange for different energies and intensities’ (1996: 14). This notion of the artwork as event entails the proximity of performer and spectator, and the Dadaists roundly rejected the distance between actor and spectator, between work of art and viewer. A rejection which led, in fact, to confusing the two roles and privileging unmediated forms of performance like those found in vaudeville and cabaret. Such popular entertainment forms, largely through humour and shock tactics, engage and provoke the audience, a provocation systematically invited, incited, by the Dadaists themselves.

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Fairground While the Zurich Dadaists re-enacted the carnival in their Dada evenings at the Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada (see chapter 2), the Paris Dadaists were frequent visitors to the fairground, as noted by Maxime Alexandre in his memoirs: ‘In the evenings, three or four of us would sometimes go to Luna-Park, at the Porte Maillot. Breton, usually so serious and majestic, would have great fun and never missed any of the many attractions of the fair which was open all the time’ (1968: 178).2 The attractions of the funfair – the bearded lady, exploding heads, levitating bodies, disappearing acts and magic tricks – characteristic of the carnivalesque spaces of popular entertainment, fed directly into the paradigm of bodies fragmented, transformed or dissolved in Dada. Performance even led the Dadaists themselves to adopt on occasion the persona of the clown or trickster (see chapter 8); and while Breton would later dismiss some of Dada’s techniques as ‘fairground tricks’ (‘ruses de baraque foraine’, 1999: 467), the fairground is actually a recurrent theme, especially among the Paris Dadaists. The target, in a wide variety of forms, is a central feature of the fairground and one which, in the shape of the body as target, recurs frequently in Dada works. In contrast to the image of the target in Hans Richter’s 1928 film Vormittagsspuk, however, where it is juxtaposed with the shattering of the body (see chapter 8), the Paris Dadaists strike a less sinister note. Among images of the target, a photograph of the 1920 Festival Dada presents Breton posing as a rather stiff and self-conscious Père Ubu (figure 6.1). He stands holding a large placard in front of him with a target at the centre and the words (signed Picabia): ‘In order to like anything, you have to have seen and heard it for a long time, you bunch of fools’.3 The photographed pose foregrounds the theme of the individual as object of violence: displaced to the fairground, it shows the Dadaists playing leapfrog over the First World War in a return to earlier nondestructive references, the violence done to the body on the battlefield shifted to ludic fairground re-enactment. Such playful substitutions for the body, however, as Donald Winnicot would argue, can be interpreted as a defensive tactic against social disruption or chaos, since ‘organized nonsense is already a defense just as organized chaos is a denial of chaos’ (1971: 56). Looking back to Picabia’s La Nuit espagnole (see figure 3.1), discussed in chapter 3, we could add that the denial inscribed in the body-as-target can also be displaced to the erotic. In that work the female figure, overlaid with two concentric circles over breast and sex, and painted bullet holes, is openly transformed into an eroticised target. Indeed, the juxtaposition of nude female figure and target is a recurrent theme in Picabia’s paintings: for example, in Optophone I (c.1922)4 a female figure floats in the centre of a target consisting of concentric circles based on a diagram of magnetic fields, light waves or a longitudinal wave

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6.1  Portrait of André Breton at the Festival Dada (with placard by Picabia) (1920)

(Camfield 1979: 193). For Marcella Lista, ‘the motif of the target, overlaid with female nudes, marks a shift from the optical to the tactile’ (2005: 5). And tactility, it will be argued later in this chapter, is central to Dada performance. Far from being unique or unusual, the playful quality of the photograph of Breton discussed above fits easily within the many fairground photos taken by the Dadaists in the immediate post-war period, during their evenings at the Luna-Park or the foire de Montmartre. Fairground booths offered not traditional photography but a fantasy world of Chinese shadows, tableaux vivants, deforming mirrors, trick photography, painted scenes with passe-têtes or holes for the head (as in the photograph of a cardboard clown with the head of Breton). More complex scenes were not rare: planes, bicycles or cars, as in the photograph dated 1923 of Éluard (at the wheel), Simone Breton, Jacques Delteil, Gala Éluard, Robert Desnos and Breton, with Ernst alongside on a bicycle (figure 6.2). Any pretence of photographic naturalism was, obviously, irrelevant, given the visible artifice of the mise-en-scene, gaily underscored by the stiff pose of the figures in a spontaneous parody of the formal group portrait.

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Beyond the game, however, group photographs, along with manifestos, were also means for avant-garde movements such as Dada and Constructivism to forge and/or assert their collective identity, merging the individual in the collective and reinforcing its esprit de corps. Being the work of Dadaists, the serried ranks of formal photographs give way in these fairground shots to playful elements, mock performance, a pastiche of the formal photo. One example among many is a photograph taken in January 1919 of Breton, René Hilsum, Louis Aragon and Éluard, in frontal pose, sporting false beards or moustaches à la Barrès, holding up a copy of the journal Dada, asserting through their disguise, pose and published forum a collective spirit or identity (figure 6.3). The theatrical pose recurs in a photograph of the 1921 Barrès trial: the accused, represented by a dummy, is carried onto the stage for his mock trial, alongside Breton dressed as a shop window mannequin.5 Taken in November of that same year, Man Ray’s photograph of the Paris Dada group might appear at first to be closer to the formal group photograph: the Dadaists pose in two rows, with Paul Chadourne, Tzara, Soupault and Serge Charchoune in the back row, and Éluard, Jacques Rigaut, Mick Verneuil-Soupault, RibemontDessaignes in the front (figure 6.4). Yet codes of portraiture are mocked here too, since each individual is sporting an odd object, like the emblems of medieval saints: Tzara brandishes his walking stick, Charchoune holds a long tube, Rigaut a glove, and in one version of the photograph Éluard holds up a photographic self-portrait by Man Ray. As Janine Mileaf and Matthew Witovsky note, the interplay between object and individual ridicules the solemnity that normally accompanies such group shots, punctured by a ‘common Dada practice of placing surrogates in group photographs as a means to deflate the unifying myth of “being there” usually projected by pictures of social bonding’ (2005: 367). These photographs should, consequently, be considered as constructed or ‘performed’ portraits, in which, according to Clément Chéroux, ‘the collective gesture prevails over representation’ (2009: 27). The theatricality and artifice of the photographs are emphasised in the Dadaists’ frontal poses and overtly melodramatic gestures, as in Tzara, Richter and Arp indulging in boyish pranks in the streets of Zurich in 1917: pastiching an athletic group (figure 6.5), or mimicking an attack outside the Elite Hotel. The frontal framing and the acrobatics produce a deliberately posed and clown-like effect. A photograph like this not only constitutes a performance in itself, it can also record a real performance, such as the shot of Éluard, Soupault, Breton and Fraenkel rehearsing the play Vous m’oublierez, which was performed on 28 March 1920 at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre (figure 6.6), or the photograph of the participants in the Barrès Congress in 1922. Indeed, the frontality of the poses and the impossible, anachronistic juxtapositions of figures, as displayed in Ernst’s Au rendez-vous des amis

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(1922) – Ernst on Dostoevsky’s knee, or Raphael alongside Éluard, for example – are further reworkings of fairground booth photographs. The photographs of the Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists held in Weimar in September 1922 seem to have been infected by the Dada spirit, in their boisterous interplay of the conventional and the subversive. The convention of posing rows of individuals (present in what appears to be an earlier photograph of the same group) is shattered into disorderly ranks which refer nevertheless to a world of ironic chivalry: a formal Tzara, in cape, monocle and black gloves, is engaged in a baise-main with Nelly van Doesburg; Theo van Doesburg, wearing a large paper hat, wields his walking stick as a sword; Peter Röhl blows a rolled-up paper, trumpet-like, in Tzara’s ear; and Hans Richter lies supine, speared by Werner Graeff’s walking stick. Trick photography provides another example of their appropriation of popular fairground techniques. A photograph of Marcel Duchamp taken at the Broadway Photo Shop in New York, for instance, represents a five-way portrait (figure 6.7). Using a hinged mirror, depicting him in profile, three-quarters and from the back, it represents Duchamp and four reflections, seemingly sitting round a table. Trick photographic portraits of this kind were widely available in studios set up in amusement parks and at carnivals and exhibitions; indeed, the multiple shots of an individual were also used to photograph criminals. Not surprisingly, the potential offered by trick shots was also of benefit to dadaist filmmakers when seeking to defamiliarise such subjects as Paris streets or the human figure. The Dadaists turned to pre-war cinema, the films of Georges Méliès and the Lumière brothers, who had themselves been influenced by popular fin-de-siècle entertainment models, in particular the magic theatre, fairground and music hall. Even as they openly parody such outdated modes of spectacle, the Dadaists play nostalgically with the magical phantasmagoric images of popular entertainment predicated on excess (the carnivalesque, the burlesque, the ecstatic), illusion and the display of primal or infantile emotions. In Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1926), for example (discussed in chapter 8), there is a reminder of fairground optical devices like the chromatrope (a lantern slide made up of two patterned glass discs revolving in opposite directions to produce circular images); in Entr’acte (Intermission, 1924) René Clair shoots moving objects through the deforming mirrors of fairground booths, or a funeral procession against the background of an empty fairground. As a replay of the proximity of fairground performance, the film-as-spectacle can screen the magician-cinéaste himself, as in the opening shot of Emak Bakia (1926), where Man Ray appears as cameraman; in the shot of Léger filming his own reflection in a deforming mirror at the start of Ballet mécanique (1923–24); or again towards the end of Entr’acte, where the hunter-magician conjures away the mourners and the coffin itself. The Méliès intertext is present, in turn, in the cliché of the male conjuror

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6.2  Photograph of Dada group at Montmartre Fair (1923)

6.3  Photograph of Dada group with a copy of Dada 3 (1919)

6.4  Man Ray, photograph of Dada group (1922)

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6.5  Photograph of Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Hans Richter in Zurich (1917)

6.6  Photograph of Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, André Breton and Théodore Fraenkel – Dadaists at performance of Vous m’oublierez (1920)

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6.7  Five-way photographic portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1917)

performing feats of magic on a female subject, as in Emak Bakia, where the close-up shots of fragmented female body-parts, legs, breasts or eyes recall the fairground female assistant sawn in two. But it is without doubt in Entr’acte, René Clair’s twenty-minute film based on notes for a scenario by Francis Picabia and described by Richter as ‘funereal grotesque’ (1965: 198), that the fairground topos – as theme, location, a­ mbiance – is the most developed.6 Sequences from the film were shot at the various Luna-Park attractions at the Porte Maillot fairground, their variety explained perhaps in part by the fact that it was originally designed to be projected, like early films shown during vaudeville shows, during the intermission of Picabia’s ‘ballet instantanéiste’ Relâche (No Performance), with music by Eric Satie. Relâche itself – with its acrobatics, handstands and human pyramids – was already indebted to popular circus or cabaret shows, and the metamorphosis of bodyparts throughout Entr’acte echoes the substitution tricks played out in vaudeville shows. Dada films generally favour the isolated gag over a sustained narrative, a feature which links them to the films of the Lumière brothers or Méliès, for whom film was less a medium for telling stories than a ‘cinema of attractions’ (Gunning 1990). Such film, in its fragmentation, was to have a direct shock impact on the spectator, in marked contrast to the passive consumption of ­narrative film and its implied logic. In Clair’s short filmed prologue for Relâche, a cannon rolls back and forth under its own volition on the roof of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, while Picabia and Satie – ‘unforgettable vision of Satie: white goatee beard, pincenez, bowler hat and umbrella’ (Clair 1970: 27)7 – dance and leap clown-like in slow motion around the cannon. Eventually they load it, firing a volley directly

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at the camera and audience. This embodied assault against the audience was followed by a later shot of white boxing gloves superimposed first against a black ground, then against a busy Paris street, aiming a blow at the camera-spectator. Indeed, the first act of Relâche itself unfolded against a background of over three hundred spotlights directed relentlessly at the audience; and the ballet ended with Picabia and Satie puncturing any lingering illusion by driving onto the stage in a Citroen. The first part of the film is a montage of shots relating to the modern city and the fairground theme: the moving lights of merry-go-rounds; revolving dolls on a shooting gallery with balloon heads alternately inflating and deflating; a bearded ballerina (recalling Méliès’s Jack Jaggs and Dum Dum, 1903). Filmic trick shots – among them superimpositions, split screens, dissolves, inverted images, diagonally shot images – defamiliarise reality and, in particular, the human figure, which is presented from multiple angles and in constant transformation: a ballerina’s tutu and legs shot from below resemble an opening and closing flower; when the camera cuts to the face of the dancer it turns out to be a male figure (Picabia) wearing a false beard; faces are shot upside-down; a female dancer’s arms dissolve to water, and water dissolves to eyes. Throughout the film the human figure is rendered unstable and vulnerable: body and nonbody merge, gender distinctions are relativised, body limits are transgressed. The second part of the film develops a seemingly more coherent narrative, in which a funeral procession for the hunter is euphemised as a carnival procession: the hearse, like a float, is drawn by a camel; bourgeois mourners in top hats are rendered ridiculous as they leap forward in slow motion. The hearse (recalling Mack Sennett’s Heinze’s Resurrection, 1913) gathers speed. People, cars, bicycles, boats and a plane join the chase as in a popular Keystone Cops film, where fairground madness spills onto Paris streets in a rapid succession of images, forming a boyishly exuberant reference to the fast pace of urban modernity, highlighting the artificiality of the sedate, respectful pace of the traditional social ritual. As the speed increases, the hearse travels on the rollercoaster and into the country; the coffin falls off the hearse; the hunter (i.e. the corpse) resuscitates and, waving his stick like a magician’s wand, brings about the disappearance of the mourners, then of himself. But when the word ‘FIN’ appears on the screen, the hunter-magician (played by actor Jean Börlin) suddenly breaks though the screen, falls to the ground, is kicked, flies back through the screen in reverse motion, as ‘FIN’ reappears. Such abrupt disruptions on the diegetic level force the viewer to confront the work of the signifier and, as in the opening shots when the audience is directly assaulted by the firing of the cannon, prevent passive consumption of the film by abolishing the frontier between viewer and performance. Finally, closure itself is playfully withheld since, ‘in the end, the narrative corpus, like the corpse in the story, refuses to be put away and must suffer one last repetition and reversal’ (Abel 1984: 382). This performance of the

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death-and-resuscitation of the main character plays out, in burlesque mode, the theme of death and rebirth with which the work of Ernst and Hoerle also engages (see chapter 7). It is clear that the spectators’ bodily involvement is central to Dada film as performance, as Christopher Townsend argues rightly: ‘an engaged s­ ubjectivity – we can describe it as “kinematic”, understanding kinesis in its corporeal sense, rather than as disinterestedly “cinematic”’ (2011: 43). Audience reaction and participation were not only provoked from the outset but were openly invited, for instance via the printed announcement for the performance on the back cover of 391 (issue 19, October 1924): ‘Bring your dark glasses and something to block your ears. Reserve your Seats. Former Dadas are asked to come and demonstrate above all to shout: “DOWN WITH SATIE! DOWN WITH PICABIA! LONG LIVE THE NOUVELLE REVUE FRANÇAISE!”’8 The objective was clearly not just a reaction to a specific work or performance, but active participation in the positions and activities of a movement. For the first performance of the ballet on 4 December 1924, Picabia sold whistles to the audience to encourage – and increase the rowdiness of – their participation, and the audience did indeed react as invited. Initial restrained laughs and muted protests gave way to shouting and whistling, drowning out Satie’s music. As René Clair records with satisfaction: The bearded ballerina and the funeral camel were received as fitting, and when the whole audience felt itself swept away on the roller coaster of the amusement park, their howls brought the general disorder and our pleasure to their peak … Thus was born, amid sound and fury, this little film the end of which was greeted with applause as loud as the catcalls and whistles. (1970: 27–8)9

For the enthusiastic Clair, ‘the public was real, alive’ (‘c’était un vrai public, un public vivant’, 1970: 28). The central paradigm of bodies fragmented, transformed or dissolved in the funfair or early cinema – the bearded lady, exploding heads, levitating bodies – is characteristic of the carnivalesque space of popular entertainment. Yet these limit-bodies remain only slightly subversive, for the deflated balloon-head ­re-inflates, the corpse resuscitates, evidence that popular entertainment formulas operate at the limits of social codes, articulating the pre-conscious, questioning – but sustaining – the social order. As John Cawelti puts it: ‘Formulas enable the audience to explore in fantasy the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden and to explore in a carefully controlled way the possibility of stepping across this boundary’ (1976: 35). The spectators thus relive – and relieve – their fundamental fears and impulses in a framed context; they play with possibilities within which they can manage their anxiety or sadistic impulses. The operation

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is clear in the films of Méliès, for instance, popular with both audiences and Dadaists. They present, as Linda Williams (1981) has argued, a symbolical re-enactment, obsessively repeated, of mastery over the threat of gender difference, played out in the scenarios of female dismemberment/reintegration or disappearance/reappearance. Dada film, in turn, parodies with gusto these earlier modes of entertainment: in the corpse turned magician, defusing the threat of both gender difference and disintegration and death; in the head shot at the centre of the target on a shooting gallery, where the soul escapes in the form of a dove, thus reworking age-old religious symbolism and deflecting the anxiety of death.

Dada cabaret: poetry ‘Dada is the cabaret of the world as much as the world is the Dada cabaret’ (‘Dada ist das Cabaret der Welt so gut, wie die Welt das Cabaret Dada ist’), declared Huelsenbeck in ‘Ein Besuch im Cabaret Dada’ (‘A Visit to Cabaret Dada’, 1920c: 8). Indeed, for the Dadaists, the cabaret, in the form of Dada events, was clearly a fruitful extension of the space of the fairground. And whether in Zurich, Berlin or Paris, the Dadaists performed their poems, plays, manifestos and dances to an audience which was invited, indeed incited, to participate. A flavour of the evenings is perceptible in ‘Chronique zurichoise 1915–1919’, where Tzara evokes one of the early Zurich Dada events, held at the Cabaret Voltaire on 26 February 1916: Gala night – simultaneous poem 3 languages, protest noise Negro music / Hoosenlatz Ho osenlatz / piano Typerrary Lanterna magica demonstration last proclamation!! invention dialogue!! DADA!! latest novelty!!! Bourgeois ­syncope – the big drum – red light, policemen – songs cubist paintings postcards Cabaret Voltaire – patented simultaneous poem Tzara Ho osenlatz and van Hossi Hü ülsenbeck Hoosenlatz whirlwind Arp. (trans. in Motherwell 1951: 235)10

This account exposes an element central to these events, namely language as action, subversion and performance. Dada poems were, in fact, far less a semantic reality than a bodily one; less a written genre than a vocal one. When seeking to define Dada poetry one can situate it broadly in the context of avant-garde experimentation in poetry, related in part to the Russian Futurists, the zaum or transrational poems of Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Krutchenik, in their search for a primitive, incantatory sound, as in Ball and Tzara’s poems. On the other hand, it can also be linked to Italian Futurists, to Marinetti’s parole in libertà and Francesco Cangiullo’s bruitist experimentation in poetry as concrete matter, the materiality of sound and rhythm, or the combination of aural and visual elements – influences found in Hausmann’s works. While Kandinsky’s Klänge

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(1913) and Marinetti’s parole in libertà were actually performed at the Cabaret Voltaire shortly after its opening in February 1916, Dada poetry should be seen as distinct from futurist poetry. While Marinetti practised a form of mimeticism in his use of rhythm and onomatopoeia, Dada poetry proves to be essentially pre-linguistic. If language there is, it is the vestigial traces thereof, or the flux of emergence of articulated language – an experiment in language in the act of being articulated. As Tobias Wilke comments, the sound poem can be seen ‘as a transitional space between sounds and words, as a bi-directional process in which words simultaneously “end and begin”, emerge and dissolve’ (2013: 645). It is primarily the materiality of language that is embodied in Hausmann’s ABCD (1923–24), a photomontage self-portrait in which Hausmann’s openmouthed head with a round monocle shape over one eye (made from a metal gear-like form) is superimposed with, and framed by, pasted letters, words and images, including tickets, circular shapes, a Czech banknote, and an anatomical plate.11 The letters ‘ABCD’ and the fragment of a night sky issue from the poet’s wide-open mouth, suggesting both acoustic and visual, or ‘optophonetic’, qualities, the raw material of a phonetic poem at the moment of creation. They are both echoed and extended above Hausmann’s head (‘ABCDEF’) and abbreviated to the right of the photographed face (‘AB’). Below the head, Hausmann has pasted the fragment of an announcement for a performance of a recital of optophonetic texts performed with Schwitters in Hannover in 1923, ‘Als Seelenmargarine’. The letters ‘VOCE’ (‘voice’) appear to the left, while to the right of the head is pasted a fragment of a set of letters, typographically similar to Hausmann’s Plakatgedichte or poster poems. Below the head, two globes and a long, printed paper shape might suggest a phallic form, pointing towards a vulva-shaped letter O. The juxtaposition of mouth and sexual organs underscores the generative physiological or eructive creation of the optophonetic poem, in which the letters ‘ABCD’ form the basic constituents of language. The gynaecological diagram in the lower part of the photomontage alludes, yet again, to the organic nature of his poetry. Hausmann’s photomontage thus illustrates the physiological dimension of language, explicitly grounding poetry in corporeality. ‘Thought is produced in the mouth’ (‘La pensée se fait dans la bouche’), declared Tzara (1975: 379), although his many scatological images, where language is evoked as fart, spit or shit, might suggest a preference for the nether regions, as when he declares: ‘I prefer the poet who is a fart in a steam-engine’ (‘Je préfère le poète qui est un pet dans une machine à vapeur’, 1963: 56). Arp, in turn, would later recall Dada poems written with Tzara and Serner, such as ‘Hyperbole du crocodile-coiffeur et de la canne à main’: ‘Automatic poetry issues straight from the entrails of the poet or from any other organ that has stored up reserves … It crows, curses, sighs, stammers, yodels, just as it pleases. Its poems are like nature: they stink,

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laugh, rhyme, like nature’ (1948: 46; 1966: 309).12 Dadaist poets, in short, strove to release words from their semantic function in favour of their concrete phonetic and physiological existence, as sounds and rhythm rather than pitiful word and meaning. Poetry was, therefore, both pre-linguistic and beyond language. As babbling, whistling, stuttering or stammering; as farting, shitting, sneezing or laughing, it was less a means of expression than the liberation of psychophysiological energies, as found in zaum poetry, the voicing of an inner dynamic which Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky calls evocatively ‘the original dance of the speech organs’ (quoted in Wilke 2013: 653). Performance was, consequently, at the heart of the Dada poem: ‘it located speech in the body, not merely on a page or in an object, but in a speaking subject’ (Demos 2003: 150). During Dada evenings in Zurich, poems were shouted or howled, accompanied by gesture, mime and dance, in a fully bodily experience, focused on sound, rhythm and breathing. Here, again, we have the benefit of Tzara’s own record of a performance of Dada poems at one of the early Zurich events, at the Waag Hall on 14 July 1916: gymnastic poem, concert of vowels, bruitist poem, static poem chemical arrangement of ideas, ‘Biriboom biriboom’ saust der Ochs im Kreis herum, vowel poem aaô, ieo, aiï, new interpretation the subjective folly of the arteries the dance of the heart on burning buildings and acrobatics in the audience. More outcries, the big drum, piano and impotent cannon, cardboard costumes torn off the audience hurls itself into puerperal fever interrrrrupt. (trans. in Motherwell 1951: 236–7)13

For Hugo Ball, too, poems were weapons hurled against all instrumental uses of language, ‘the language that journalism has abused and corrupted’ (1996: 71). In a mock-biblical tone he criticises the generalised degeneration of language in contemporary Germany: ‘The word has been abandoned; it used to dwell among us. / The word has become commodity. / … The word has lost all dignity’ (1996: 26). Against the reification of a language exploited and debased by politicians and journalists in capitalist and jingoistic war propaganda, the Dadaists launched a project to revitalise language, in a seemingly paradoxical movement which was both regressive (a childhood babble, an infantile pleasure in rhythmic sounds) and progressive (exploring the potential, the stammerings of a new language). The liberatory potential they found in this new language is clearly acknowledged by Hausmann: ‘When language becomes petrified in the academies, it takes refuge among children and mad poets’ (‘Le langage, si on le pétrifie dans les académies, s’enfuit chez les enfants et les poètes fous’, 1958: 53). Their position gave rise to various types of poems, performed at the Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada. Firstly, the simultaneous poem, or Simultangedicht, defined by Ball as ‘a contrapuntal recitative in which three or more voices

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speak, sing, whistle, etc., and at the same time in such a way that the elegiac, humorous, or bizarre content of the piece is brought out by these combinations’ (1996: 57). This was often accompanied by noises (‘an rrrrr drawn out for minutes, or crashes or sirens etc.’) – mechanical noises in particular – always at risk of engulfing the human voice. Here, the best-known example is undoubtedly ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’ (‘The Admiral is looking for a house to rent’), its ‘score’, by Tzara, reproduced in Cabaret Voltaire (Tzara 1916: 6–7; 1975: 491). It was performed in 1916 by Tzara, Huelsenbeck and Janco, relating three different accounts (in French, English and German) of an admiral looking unsuccessfully for a house to rent, and accompanied by whistles, drums and cries. Other simultaneous poems include Tzara and Huelsenbeck’s ‘Dialogue entre un cocher et une alouette’ (‘Dialogue between a coachman and a lark’), also published in Cabaret Voltaire (Tzara and Huelsenbeck 1916: 31; Tzara 1975: 492–4), and Tzara and Arp’s ‘Balsam cartouche’ (Tzara 1975: 496). In the cacophony of multiple voices involved, words become sounds become noise, like a parodic Gesamtkunstwerk. It is no longer the written text but the voice, in its confrontation with a hostile world, that is central to the poem, as Ball explains: ‘The “simultaneous poem” has to do with the value of the voice … it shows the conflict of the vox humana [human voice] with a world that threatens, ensnares, and destroys it’ (1996: 57). Sounds and rhythm, rather than words, also take centre stage in Huelsenbeck’s Negergedichte and Tzara’s ‘chants nègres’ or negro songs. Huelsenbeck had sung his production with Ball in Berlin cabarets before performing them at the Cabaret Voltaire and later in the Galerie Dada in Zurich, to the accompaniment of African drums and dancing. In one of these, ‘Die Primitiven’ (from his collection of poems Phantastische Gebete), Huelsenbeck even invents a new language reminiscent of the sounds and rhythms of African songs: indigo indigo Trambahn Schlafsack Wanz und Floh ondigo indigai umbaliska bumm DADAI (Huelsenbeck 1920e: 13)

Such texts reflect the Dadaists’ abiding fascination for, and idealisation of, the so-called primitive, which Ball defines as ‘the primeval strata, untouched and unreached by logic and by the state apparatus’ (1996: 75). In addition, when describing Huelsenbeck’s recitals, Ball underscores their performative dimension: ‘When he enters, he keeps his cane of Spanish reed in his hand and occasionally swishes it around. That excites the audience. … His nostrils quiver, his eyebrows are arched. His mouth with its ironic twitch is tired but composed.

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He reads, accompanied by the big drum, shouts, whistles, and laughter’ (1996: 55–6). While Huelsenbeck would seem to have simply invented his own ‘African’ language, albeit infiltrated with German words, Tzara actually undertook research into poems translated from African, Malgach and the South Pacific – including Maori – sources. The results are shown in the ‘vers nègres’ that he published in Dada journals, for example ‘Chanson du cacadou de la tribu Aranda’ (Dada 1, 1917: 8; Tzara 1975: 451) and ‘La Chanson du serpent’ (Dada 2, 1917: 16; Tzara 1975: 452). Going one stage further in the disintegration of reified language, Ball took the phoneme as the basic unit in his Lautgedichte (1916), or sound poems, which, according to Hausmann (1980: 39), originated with Paul Scheerbart’s ‘Kikakoku’ (1900) and Christian Morgenstern’s ‘Das Grosse Lalulà’ (1905). In his journal entry of 23 June 1916, Ball provides a simple explanation for his experiments in the fundamentals of language: ‘I have invented a new genre of poems, poetry without words or Lautgedichte, in which the balance of the vowels is weighed and distributed solely according to the values of the initial sequence’ (1996: 70). Ball’s poems are thus marked by the absence of syntactic and semantic structures: ‘We have now driven the plasticity of the word to the point where it can scarcely be equaled. We achieved this at the expense of the rational, logically constructed sentence’ (1996: 67). The poems, published posthumously, included ‘Totenklage’, ‘Seepferdchen und Flugtische’ and ‘Gadji beri bimba’. This last poem reads: tuffm im zimbrabim negramai bumbalo negramai bumbalo tuffm i zim gadjama bimbala oo beri gadjama gaga di gadjama affalo pinx gaga di bumbalo bumbalo gadjamen gaga di bling blong gaga blung (Ball 1996: 70)

These poems were first performed by Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire on 23 June 1916. He was carried onto the stage encased in a cylindrical cardboard costume, the collar made from a sheet of red and gold paper tied with a bow, and a blue-and-white striped Schamanenhut (Shaman’s hat). Standing on an Oriental rug decorated with rectangular and circular shapes, surrounded by three musicstands, he embarked on a rotating performance (see figure 2.4). The recital started and ended with ‘Gadji beri bimba’, facing the wall; ‘Labadas Gesang an die Wolken’ was recited after rotating to the right; and ‘Karawane’ to the left. Commenting on his own performance, Ball noted: The stresses became heavier, the emphasis was increased as the sound of the consonants became sharper … Then I noticed that my voice had no choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation, that style of

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liturgical singing that wails in all the Catholic churches of East and West. … I began to chant my vowel sequences in a church style like a recitative. (1996: 70)

The costume’s erasure of the performer’s body was combined – if one is to believe Ball – with the seemingly spontaneous emergence of language and the objectification of the voice, as spelt out in his ‘Dada Manifesto’: ‘It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat miaows. . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh’ (1996: 221). The physiological dimension of language is stressed here using corporeal metaphors, fragments of the human body evoking the emergence of the poem, between incipient articulate language and sound, the play on assonance and alliteration, the repetitive babbling of the child, and a magical incantation. According to critic Erdmute Wenzel White, ‘Ball’s Lautgedichte convey the physical substance of sound, sound as guttural rumblings, sound as voice, generated by lungs, larynx, vocal chords, tongue, and lips, producing sudden trills and sibilations’ (1998: 106). For Rudolf Kuenzli, too, Ball’s sound poems ‘indicate his rather desperate search for a new beginning by going back to the origin, the logos, the magical world of the child’ (1979: 69). For T. J. Demos, Ball’s performance at the Cabaret Voltaire evoked, more dramatically, the ‘traumatic repetition of the stunted communicative abilities of the traumatised trench warrior; and the desire for a new quasireligious or primitivist refounding of the word’ (2003: 149). For the audience at such evenings, the end result was both the collapse of conventional language and the tentative, clown-like steps towards a new language. While Ball’s Lautgedichte were based on the phoneme, whether vestige of the old word or advent of a new language, Hausmann sought to venture yet further in the disintegration of language in his optophonetic poems by identifying the individual letter as the basic element. Consequently, poems like ‘OFFEAHBDC’ (1918), ‘fmsbwtözäu’ (1918), ‘Kp’erioum lp’erioum’ (1919) or ‘Bbb’, ‘grun’, are marked firstly by a strong visual presence, thanks to Hausmann’s experiments with typeface (figure 6.8). The importance of typography and page layout for the performance of the poem is evident in a text like ‘Kp’erioum Ip’erioum’.14 Not only are letters visual signs, they also have an acoustic dimension, printed in different typefaces and sizes to indicate rhythm, speed and pitch, thus taking on ‘the character of musical notation’ (Hausmann 1958: 59). Consequently, the poem having both an optical and a vocal dimension, ‘naturally these posterletter-poems had to be sung! DA! DADA!’ (Hausmann 1980: 43). The poem was, concretely, an acoustic sign. Hausmann’s ‘Seelen-Automobil’ poems, for instance, were performed at the Dada soirée of 30 April 1919, where Hausmann himself explained the corporeal dimension of these texts, his breathing techniques (each line corresponds to a breath), the position of the tongue,

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6.8  Raoul Hausmann, ‘Kp’erioum lp’erioum’, Schriftkonstruktion aus dem Dadaco (1919–20)

the use of the vocal chords. He defines the poem specifically as ‘an action of respiratory and auditive associations, linked inseparably to the unfolding of time’ (1958: 59).15 Sounds have become incipient words: Solao Solaan Alamt lanee laneao amamb ambi ambée enebemp enepao kalopoo senou seneakpooo sanakoumt saddabt kadou koorou

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korrokoum oumkpaal lapidadkal adathoum adaneop ealop noamth (Der Dada 3, 1919: 9).

Hausmann later recorded several of his optophonetic poems, providing evidence that performances were a form of improvisation, combining letters from various Plakatgedichte, repeating lines of letters in a half-singing voice, with various rhythms, volume and pitch, his voice sometimes reduced to a whisper, a stutter, snorting and hissing, sometimes accompanied by drum-like beats on a wooden box. A key question remains: are Dada sound poems pathological or utopian? For art historian Brigid Doherty, Hausmann’s optophonetic poems have to be interpreted in terms of the traumatic shock experienced by the soldier in the First World War: ‘Spoken, “OFFEAHBDC” is a poem in which we can hear something like the coming back to language experienced by the war neurotic following a shock treatment … the poster poem shows language lost and partly recovered through experiences of traumatic shock’ (1997: 125). The association is justifiable, but such poems can also be interpreted in a broader sense, as the first stammerings of a new language freed from conventions, less pathological than liberatory.

Exhibition(ism): assaulting the spectator ‘The audience needs to be violated in unusual positions’ (‘Le public a besoin d’être violé dans des positions rares’), proclaims Picabia (1978: 25), a line which reflects the repeated taunting of their audiences at Dada performances. Examples include the pistol brandished at the opening night of Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias (1917) by Jacques Vaché, kitted out in an English officer’s uniform; the whistles distributed to the audience of Relâche (1924) to encourage their reactions; the cannon and boxing gloves aimed at the camera in Entr’acte; Huelsenbeck brandishing his cane while shouting his poems at the audience, to the accompaniment of the beating of drums. Success here meant disruption, commotion, as Huelsenbeck recalls: ‘I would often recite the poem “Rivers” because it contains extremely daring images and always brings out the audience’s antagonism’ (1969: 21). Seeking similar outcomes, other Dadaists took their provocative gestures out of the cabaret and into public spaces. ‘Oberdada’ Baader, for instance, made several public appearances: declaring himself a candidate at the Reichstag in Saarbrucken; interrupting a mass at Berlin Cathedral; throwing leaflets among the Weimar National Assembly, proclaiming himself ‘The President of the Earth’ (Bargues 2017: 49–50). But it is with Ribemont-Dessaignes’s text ‘Au public’, recited by nine

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performers at the Dada soirée at the Grand Palais on 5 February 1920, that we encounter the most sustained assault on the audience: Before descending amongst you in order to pull out your decayed teeth, your scabby ears, your canker-ridden tongues. Before breaking your rotting bones – Opening your bilious stomach and removing, for use as livestock feed, your swollen liver, your filthy spleen and your diabetic kidneys – Before ripping off your vile sex, incontinent and slimy – … Madam, your gob smells of pimps’ sperm. In the morning – Because at night it’s like the backside of an angel in love with a lily – Pretty, isn’t it? Farewell, my friend. (Ribemont-Dessaignes 1920b:18)16

This onslaught was followed up two months later at the Dada soirée at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre (27 March 1920) by manifestos, plays (including Breton and Soupault’s S’il vous plaît), sketches and a musical piece of arbitrarily chosen notes, Pas de la chicorée frisée, composed by Ribemont-Dessaignes and played on the piano by Marguerite Buffet. The composer himself recounted with élan and amusement the scandal caused: ‘I was drowned in an unbelievable racket, a combination of terribly unharmonious music, the continuous murmurings, shouting and whistling of the audience, all combined in a loud noise of shattered glass of the most curious impact’ (1958: 70–1).17 Later the same year, at the Festival Dada at the Salle Gaveau, the public, attuned by now to the (pleasures of) scandal and provocation, had come armed with eggs, tomatoes and meat from the local butcher’s, with which they enthusiastically bombarded the Dadaists on the stage (Ribemont-Dessaignes 1958: 74). The Dada evenings at the Cabaret Voltaire, and later at the Galerie Dada, would seem to have inherited the practice of audience participation, and provocation, from the raucous world of variety theatre, but pushing it to extremes: ‘A variety show, as they say now, but caustic and disarming’ (‘Spectacle de Variétés, comme on dit maintenant, mais corrosif et désarmant’, Ribemont-Dessaignes 1958: 70). The tradition is well explained in an article by Marinetti: The Variety Theatre is the only spectacle that makes use of audience collaboration. The public is not static like a stupid voyeur, but joins noisily in the action, singing along with songs, accompanying the orchestra, communicating with the actors by speaking up at will or engaging in bizarre dialogues. The actors even bicker clownishly with the musicians. … And since the audience collaborates in this way with the actors’ imaginations, the action develops simultaneously on the stage, in the boxes, and in the orchestra. (Rainey et al., 2009: 160)

Enthused by this collapse of conventional barriers, the Dadaists understood performance as an instrument of scandal and provocation, and as a result of

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their open terrorist tactics the audience shifted from passive spectator to active participant. Richter describes this move during the Cabaret Voltaire evenings: ‘Bells, drums, cow-bells, blows on the table or on empty boxes, all … excited, by purely physical means, an audience which had begun by sitting impassively behind its beer-mugs. From this state of immobility it was roused into frenzied involvement with what was going on’ (1965: 19). The performers’ aggressive interventions defamiliarised perception and destabilised the spectator, the violence on stage deliberately seeking to incite correspondingly violent reactions in the audience. Faced with insults and ridicule, the audience would laugh, shout, boo and finally exit noisily. Such audience reactions are recorded with evident satisfaction in Tzara’s ‘Chronique zurichoise 1915–1919’: ‘shouting and fighting in the hall, first row approves second row declares itself incompetent the rest shout … the people protest shout smash windowpanes kill each other demolish fight here come the police interruption’ (trans. in Motherwell 1951: 236).18 Jolted out of its passivity, the audience was to be released to free their minds. And it is from this perspective that key episodes can be read as a ritualistic blinding, symbolic of the destruction of normal perception, aimed at liberating the mind’s inward gaze and unleashing a flow of uncensored associations: the cannon aimed at the camera-audience in Entr’acte, or the recurrent theme of the violated eye in Dada, as in Ernst’s collage engraving for the cover of Répétitions (1922), which represents a disembodied hand manipulating a string threaded through the eye (a precursor of the hand in the opening sequence of Buñuel and Dalí’s 1929 film Un chien andalou, where the eye of a woman is slashed by a razor).19 At times, roles would be reversed and the audience became the actors. In early 1923 Schwitters was invited by Theo van Doesburg, one of the founders of the De Stijl movement, to participate in a series of Dada performances in the Netherlands, with the Hungarian artist Vilmos Huszár and Petro [sic] van Moorsel, also known as Nelly, a professional pianist. On the first of these evenings in The Hague, while van Doesburg, elegantly dressed in a dinner jacket and a white bow tie and monocle, read on stage his manifesto ‘Wat is Dada?’, Schwitters, seated incognito among the audience, started to bark, croak and crow loudly (Dachy [1994] 2011: 396–7). This was followed by Schwitters declaiming his poem ‘An Anna Blume’, Huszár performing a shadow play with his Mechanical Dance Figure, while van Moorsel played piano pieces by Vittorio Rieti. On this and other occasions, the public reacted vociferously, shouting and imitating the Dadaists, unwittingly becoming themselves participants in the performance. During one performance, while Schwitters was reading his texts, members of the audience came onto the stage and presented the Dadaists with a bouquet of rotting flowers, a laurel wreath and cabbage leaves; while on another occasion, Nelly harangued the public, shouting that since they had

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starting acting like Dadaists, the Dadaists would now become the public (Le Bon 2005: 938). Dada evenings did not have a monopoly on audience intervention, however, because it was actively encouraged at Dada exhibitions too. At the 1920 DadaMesse, for instance, visitors were invited to manipulate the elements of Otto Dix’s Moveable Figure Picture, which included the fragment of a female nude, a male figure and a bull’s head. Some of the private views were even orchestrated in the style of early happenings, as with the Cologne Dada group (Arp, Baargeld and Ernst), under the name Centrale W/3. Excluded from participating in the exhibition organised in April 1920 by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kölner Künstler (Association of Cologne Artists) at the Kölner Kunstgewerbemuseum (Cologne Museum of Applied Arts), Baargeld and Ernst rented the covered courtyard of the local brewery Brauhaus Winter for their own exhibition, Dada-Vorfrühling (Dada Early Spring).20 The entrance into the courtyard was through an arched gateway, and past a public urinal and a young girl in a white communion dress reciting obscene poetry. Many of the works were simply propped against the walls or laid on the floor. The catalogue listed three works by Arp, one by Picabia (oeil rond), seventeen by Ernst (including erectio sine qua non, hypertrofie-trofäe and falustrata, which was made up of doll parts), two wooden reliefs by Willy Fick, who was listed as vulgärdilettant, and nine by Baargeld. His contribution included antropofiler Bandwurm and fluidoskeptrik der Rotzwitha von gandersheim, a fish tank filled with red-dyed water, simulating blood, with a mannequin’s hand emerging from it, a wig floating on the surface and an alarm clock immersed in the tank. On the opening night Willy Fick, swamped in a huge chequered coat, embarked on an absurd explanation of his collage technique in front of an unfinished collage, Voyage to the Centre of the Earth, which had a carpenter’s tape measure suspended in front of it. The accompanying catalogue included an entry by Baargeld and Ernst, simultantriptychon: die Dadaisten und Dadaistinnen, which was actually a list of Dadaist friends who would, it was promised, transform themselves into flowers (‘verwandeln sich in blumen’). It remains unclear whether this was a work or a performance; or, indeed, whether such distinctions were even pertinent. The catalogue also included a claim that visitors would become (un)willing Dadaists: ‘every visitor to this exhibition is predestined to be a dadaist either he smiles frankly in which case you can approach him as a noble dadaist or he falls victim to the crazy delusion of anti-dadaism realising too late that he combines in himself the butcher and the sacrificial lamb … he is the dadaist par excellence’.21 Clearly, since visitor reaction was the aim, thus turning the Dada performance into a truly collective event, provision had to be made for this. Hence, for instance, one of Ernst’s wooden sculptures exhibited in the courtyard had an axe attached, and visitors were free to attack the work. The ploy was obviously

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successful, since the sculpture had to be replaced several times in the course of the exhibition (Kriebel 2005: 230). The Kölnische Volkszeitung (1 May 1920), reviewing the exhibition in an article titled ‘Der Letzte Schrei’ (‘The Latest Outcry’), quotes a similar (though less destructive) intervention solicited from the public: in one of the incomprehensible ‘drawings’ there was a lot of white paper left over, and beneath it was written, ‘Every visitor to this exhibition is entitled to enter a dadaist or anti-dadaist motto on this drawing. Trespassers will not be prosecuted’. A considerable number of visitors took advantage of this invitation. It turned out that none of them was a Dadaist, although some certainly made no bones about their opinion. (quoted in Camfield 1993: 70–1)

Unsurprisingly, incensed visitors often had negative reactions to such dadaist provocations, and the exhibition space was attacked and works were defaced. Complaints led to the police closing the exhibition for twenty-four hours on charges of fraud, pornography and breach of public safety. The delighted Dadaists were especially amused by the fact that the incriminated ‘pornographic’ object was actually a print of Dührer’s Adam and Eve (1504), which Ernst had pinned onto his sculpture Ein Lustgreis vor Gewehr (Old Lecher with Rifle, 1920), listed in the catalogue as a Monumentalplastik (Monumental Sculpture). It was a wooden assemblage made from hat blocks, hat boxes and turned balustrades mounted on an easel with helmet and gun added, to which he had appended the following caption: ‘Old Lecher with Rifle protects the museum’s spring apparel from Dadaistic interventions (L’état c’est MOI!)’.22 While the work was lost, like many Dada pieces, it fortunately survives in a photograph taken in 1920 of Max and Luise Ernst with Paul and Gala Éluard. Charges were dropped and the exhibition soon reopened, the Dadaists making the most of the publicity in a new poster which read: ‘Dada triumphs! Reopening of the Exhibition Closed by the Police / 37 Schildergasse / Dada is for Peace and Order!’23 In an interview for the Cologne press in 1966, Willy Fick recalled wryly: ‘The citizens of Cologne were as appalled as if a murder had taken place … I think they would have understood us much better without the police’ (quoted in Littlefield 1988: 16). Ernst, too, made the most of the opportunity generated by the charges brought against Baader and himself: ‘You two are swindlers! Frauds! Cheats! ... In demanding an entrance fee for what was represented to the public as an art exhibition you committed a fraud, because your exhibition has nothing to do with art.’ He would later recall the tongue-in-cheek seriousness with which he countered the charge: ‘We said quite plainly that it is a Dada exhibition. Dada has never claimed to have anything to do with art. If the public confuses the two, that is no fault of ours’ (quoted in Stokes 1998: 53).

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6.9  Photograph of the Dadaists in front of the Sans Pareil bookshop at opening of Max Ernst’s exhibition (1921): René Hilsum, Benjamin Péret, Serge Charchoune, Philippe Soupault, Jacques Rigaut, André Breton

Cajoling and bullying visitors into participating was rife, too, at the private view of Max Ernst’s first Paris exhibition, La mise sous whisky marin, which took place on 2 May 1921 at René Hilsum’s bookshop-gallery Au Sans Pareil. It was staged, tellingly, much less as a social event than as an openly provocative Dada performance. A photograph of the Dada group taken outside the Librairie Au Sans Pareil in 1920 before the opening shows Soupault standing on a stepladder holding a bicycle and Rigaut by the feet, surrounded by Breton, Hilsum, Péret and Charchoune (figure 6.9). On the opening night Jacques Rigaut stood at the entrance to the exhibition, counting in a loud voice the cars and pearls drawing up in front of the gallery. Visitors – among them André Gide, enveloped in his famous cape, and the artist Kees van Dongen – were then greeted by insults hurled at them from inside a cupboard, while flashing lights, absurd phrases and strange sounds assaulted them through a trapdoor to the cellar. Aragon impersonated a kangaroo; Breton munched matches; Soupault and Tzara played hide-and-seek among the guests; Ribemont-Dessaignes shouted out repeatedly ‘It’s raining on a skull’ (‘Il pleut sur un crâne’); while Péret and Charchoune shook hands endlessly (d’Esparbès 1921). The general anarchic tone was well encapsulated in the advertisement for the exhibition, which

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promised the visitor: ‘Admission free, hands in pockets … Easy exit making off with a painting’ (‘Entrée libre mains dans les poches … Sortie facile un tableau sous le bras’).

From battlefield to fairground: regressive or revolutionary spaces? There is little doubt that regression was a form of resistance for the Dadaists, a reaction to the socio-economic disruptions, the psychological upheaval caused by the war and the enforced return to order in an increasingly commodified and mechanised modernity. This was manifested in their return to the childhood pleasures of the fairground and the circus, the nostalgic images of the pre-war magic theatre or early cinema, the transgression of limits in the phantasmagoric body, the recurrent tropes, particularly in Zurich Dada, of circuses, fairs and magic, or the experiments in sound poetry. This was apparent to a number of contemporary critics, as revealed in a review by Max Osborn of Grosz’s works at the Dada-Messe. Linking anger and regressive uncontrolled fantasy, Osborn wrote: ‘Grosz has developed a style appropriate to his rage, in the manner of street urchins who deface walls and fences with graffiti. He swims in the tide of “infantilism.”’24 They thus fit the findings of Freudian psychoanalysts Karl Abraham and Sándor Ferenczi who, in Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses (1921), also observed such regressive returns to infantile modes in the dysfunctional behaviour and language of shellshocked soldiers in wartime. The link was not always read positively, of course, as we see in France where the contemporary playwright Henri-René Lenormand (1920) also considered the Dadaists’ return to childhood a form of regression typical of various types of mental disturbance. Stressing the analogy between the language of the Dadaists and the ‘word salad’ and ‘glossolalia’ of those suffering from dementia, Lenormand strongly advised them to turn to psychoanalysis for help. In his outspoken dismissal of such conventional judgements, Francis Picabia penned a ‘Lettre ouverte à Mr Lenormand’, arguing that this supposed regression to childhood was a means of ‘disintoxication’, thanks to which Dada was to be ‘counterpoison for all the Mithridates of your decadent art’ (‘un contrepoison pour tous les Mithridates de notre art décadent’, 1975: 215–17). But beyond the regressive dimension, whatever its cause, and in the midst of the raucously ludic and iconoclastic, Dadaist experiments with sound poems in particular reveal the first stammerings of a new language, however inchoate, freeing itself from the straitjacket of convention. An exploration, far less pathological than utopian, that will be examined in the next chapter.

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Notes 1. For a discussion of Dada performance, see Gordon (1987); Dufour (2012). 2. ‘Le soir, quand nous n’étions que trois ou quatre, nous allions parfois au LunaPark, à la porte Maillot. Breton, d’ordinaire si grave et majestueux, s’y amusait follement et ne ratait aucune des nombreuses attractions de cette foire ouverte en permanence.’ 3. ‘Pour que vous aimiez quelque chose il faut que vous l’ayez vu et entendu depuis longtemps tas d’idiots.’ 4. Francis Picabia, Optophone I (c.1922), ink, watercolour and pencil on board, MoMA, New York. 5. Rachilde, who reviewed the event, compared the mannequin to ‘a poor trader in out-of-date novelties … a waiter waiting for his tip’ (‘un pauvre marchand de nouveautés anciennes … garçon de café qui attend son pourboire’, Comoedia (29 July 1921), quoted in Dachy [1994] 2011: 342). 6. See Townsend (2009) for an analysis of the film as a satire of the French post-war cult of the dead. 7. ‘inoubliable vision de Satie: barbiche blanche, lorgnon, chapeau melon et parapluie.’ 8. ‘Portez des lunettes noires et de quoi vous boucher les oreilles. Retenez vos Places. Messieurs les ex-Dadas sont priés de venir manifester et surtout de crier: “A BAS SATIE! A BAS PICABIA! VIVE LA NOUVELLE REVUE FRANÇAISE!”’ 9. ‘La danseuse à barbe et le chameau funéraire furent accueillis comme il convenait et quand toute la salle se sentit emportée dans le scenic-railway de Luna Park, les hurlements mirent à leur comble le désordre et notre plaisir … Ainsi naquit, dans le son et la fureur, ce petit film dont la fin attire autant d’applaudissements que de huées et de sifflets.’ 10. ‘Grande soirée – poème simultané 3 langues, protestation bruit musique nègre / Hoosenlatz Ho osenlatz / piano Typerrary Lanterna magica démonstration proclamation dernière !! invention dialogue!! DADA!! dernière nouveauté!!! syncope bourgeoise, musique BRUITISTE, dernier cri, chanson Tzara danse p ­ rotestations – la grosse caisse – lumière rouge, policemen – chansons tableaux cubistes cartes postales chanson Cabaret Voltaire – poème simultané breveté Tzara Ho osenlatz et van Hoddis Hü ülsenbeck Hoosenlatz tourbillon Arp’ (Tzara 1920b: 11; 1975: 562). 11. Raoul Hausmann, ABCD (1923–24), ink and collage on paper, MNAM Centre Pompidou, Paris. See analysis by Biro (2007: 33–7). 12. ‘La poésie automatique sort en droite ligne des entrailles du poète ou de tout autre de ses organes qui a emmagasiné des réserves … Il cocorique, jure, gémit, bredouille, yodle comme ça lui chante. Ses poèmes sont comme la nature: ils puent, rient, riment comme la nature.’ 13. ‘poème gymnastique, concert de voyelles, poème bruitiste, poème statique arrangement chimique des notions, Biribum saust der Ochs im Kreis herum, poème de voyelles aaô, ieo, aiï, nouvelle interprétation la folie subjective des artères la danse du coeur sur les incendies et l’acrobatie des spectateurs. De nouveau cris, la grosse caisse, piano et canons impuissants, on se déchire les costumes

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de carton le public se jette dans la fièvre puerperale interomprrrre’ (Tzara 1920b: 14; 1975: 563). 14. Reproduced in Der Dada 1 (1919), 1. 15. ‘une action d’associations respiratoires et auditives, inséparablement liées au déroulement du temps.’ 16. ‘Avant de descendre parmi vous afin d’arracher vos dents gâtées, vos oreilles gourmeuses, votre langue pleine de chancre. / Avant de briser vos os pourris – / D’ouvrir votre ventre cholérique, et d’en retirer, à l’usage des engrais pour l’agriculture, votre foie trop gras, votre rate ignoble et vos rognons à diabète – / Avant d’arracher votre vilain sexe incontinent et glaireux … / Madame, ta gueule elle sent la laitance de souteneur, / Le matin – / Car le soir on dirait le cul d’un ange amoureux d’un lis – / C’est joli n’est-ce pas? / Adieu, mon ami.’ 17. ‘j’etais submergé par un vacarme inoui, fait de la musique terriblement peu consonnante, du murmure continu de la salle, de ses cris et de ses coups de sifflets, qui s’unissaient dans un fracas de verre brisé du plus curieux effet.’ 18. ‘on crie dans la salle, on se bat, premier rang approuve deuxième rang se déclare incompétent le reste crie … on proteste on crie on casse les vitres on se tue on démolit on se bat la police interruption’ (Tzara 1920b: 13; 1975: 563). 19. The success of the Dada evenings was measured to a large extent by the disturbance of the audience, as recorded, for example, by a journalist in 1919: ‘The success was tremendous. An alienist [Psychiater] in the tenth row made a stupid face. A neo-Kantian in the fifteenth row sweated egg-sized drops and mumbled as he grew faint: “synthetic nihilism”. But tears ran down the cheeks of a wounded veteran (Kriegsbeschädigter) in the last row, from which it is to be surmised that in his heart he had answered the question: “What is Dada?” unequivocally’ (‘Dadaismus in der Tribüne’, Berliner Börsen-Courier (2 December 1919); quoted in Doherty 1997: 132). 20. For a discussion of the exhibition, see Littlefield (1988); Stokes (1998: 52–4). 21. ‘jeder besucher dieser ausstellung ist prädestiniert dadaist entweder lächelt er freimütig kann man kann ihn sodann als edeldadaist ansprechen oder er fällt dem irrwahn des antidadaismus anheim zu spät bemerkt er die personalunion von metzger und opferlamm in sich … er ist dadaist schlechthin.’ 22. ‘Ein Lustgreis vor Gewehr schützt die museale frühlingstoilette vor Dadaistischen eingriffen (l’état c’est MOI!).’ 23. ‘Dada Siegt / Wiederoffnung / der polizeilich geschlossenen Ausstellung / Schildergasse 37 / Dada ist fur Ruhe und Orden!’ 24. Max Osborn, ‘Dada’, Vossische Zeitung (17 July 1920), 12, quoted in Doherty (1997: 111). Doherty (1997: 91, n16) also quotes the psychiatrist Werner Leibbrand (1920), who diagnosed Dada’s regressive tendencies in pathological terms, which he identified as ‘jugendliches Irresein’ or dementia praecox, and which he linked to war neurosis.

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7 Death and rebirth: corpse or chrysalis

Max Ernst died on the 1st of August 1914. He resuscitated the 11th of November 1918 as a young man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myth of his time. Max Ernst (1942: 28)

Context: Cologne Dada1 The Cologne Dada group was founded in 1919 as, in Max Ernst’s words, ‘the W/3 group for the idiots of the West, 3 for the 3 conspirators: Hans Arp, J. T. Baargeld and Max Ernst’ (‘la Centrale W/3 pour les idiots de l’Ouest, 3 pour les 3 conjurés: Hans Arp, J. T. Baargeld et Max Ernst’, 1970: 40). They collaborated with Angelika and Heinrich Hoerle, Franz Seiwert, Willy Fick and Anton Räderscheidt. They edited Der Ventilator (January to March 1919), an anarcho-socialist weekly publication part-financed by Alfred Grünwald (later known as Johannes Theodor Baargeld), which included texts and prints by Ernst, Otto Freundlich, Hoerle and Seiwert. Six issues appeared before it was banned by the British occupying authorities under martial law regulations. The group also published Bulletin D (1919; figure 7.1), edited by Ernst and Baargeld, which was the catalogue of the first Cologne Dada exhibition, Section D, held at the Kölnischer Kunstverein (Cologne Art Society) in November 1919; it was confiscated by the British censors. In April 1920 Ernst and Baader edited the only issue of die Schammade, with contributions from the Cologne group as well as Dadaists in Berlin and Paris. Its publication coincided with the Dada-Vorfrühling exhibition organised by the Cologne Dadaists, discussed in the last chapter. A series of portfolios was published by the Schlömilch-Verlag, a small printing press run by Angelika and Heinrich Hoerle from their Cologne address, known by their friends as the ‘dadaheim’. These included Seiwert’s Geschöpfe (Creatures,

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7.1  Cover of Bulletin D (1919)

1919), Heinrich Hoerle’s Krüppelmappe (Cripple Portfolio, 1920), which will be discussed later in this chapter, and Ernst’s Fiat modes pereat ars (Let There Be Fashion, Down with Art, 1920; see chapter 10). In April 1920 Heinrich and Angelika Hoerle, along with Fick, Räderscheidt and Seiwert, who had withdrawn their works from the 1919 Cologne Dada exhibition shortly before it opened, broke with Dada, rejecting it as ‘une entreprise bourgeoise’, in Seiwert’s words (Ernst 1970: 38). They then formed the

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Gruppe Stupid, positioned as a politically radical, revolutionary movement whose aesthetic was linked to Constructivism, stylistically more accessible to a broader public than Dada, and more directly politically engaged than Ernst and Baargeld. This chapter will analyse Max Ernst’s 1920–21 photomontages and collages, and Heinrich Hoerle’s Krüppelmappe. Both artists deal with the theme of death and rebirth in the immediate aftermath of the war. While Ernst’s collages are generally ironic, parodic, even poetic, Hoerle’s lithographs are more cynical and macabre.

Flying men: Max Ernst’s early collages Max Ernst served in the German artillery from 1914 to 1918. In his autobiographical text ‘Some data on the youth of M. E. as told by himself’, he recounts his return from the front in 1918: Dada was the outbreak of a revolt of vitality and rage, the result of the absurdity, the great Schweinerei of this stupid war. Young men, we came back from the war in a state of stupor, and our indignation needed an outlet. It found a natural outlet in violent attacks against the foundations of our civilisation which had brought about the war, against language, syntax, logic, literature, painting. (Ernst 1942: 30)

In the immediate post-1918 period the Cologne Dada group as a whole resorted to the absurd as a reaction against the meaningless excesses of the war. In their works they attacked military violence by vandalising and recycling wartime images; and they responded to the psychological violence of the period, primarily, by mimicking the language of the insane. The present section will focus on works by Ernst himself, as well as the ones he produced with Arp that were labelled with the acronym ‘fatagaga’: ‘FaTaGaGa is the Fabrication de Tableaux Gasométriques Garantis which Arp and I have launched’, wrote Ernst in a letter sent to Tzara (Spies 1991: 271) in response to a circular letter sent by Tzara to the Cologne Dada group in November 1920, requesting material for an anthology of Dada works to be titled Dadaglobe. Ernst sent Tzara three fatagagas, photographic reproductions of collages produced in 1920 in collaboration with Arp.2 These included physiomythologisches diluvialbild, with an accompanying text by Arp – hier ist alles in der schwebe – and, in response to Tzara’s request for a self-portrait, the punching ball ou l’immortalité de buonarotti ou dadafex maximus (see figure 8.2).3 Although the anthology did not materialise, the works were exhibited in Paris with others the following year when Ernst was invited by the Paris Dada group – Breton, Éluard and Tzara – to display his works in a solo exhibition at the Sans Pareil bookshop. The exhibition was

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titled La mise sous whisky marin, and its opening was choreographed as a Dada performance, as discussed in chapter 6 – in the absence of Ernst, however, who had been refused a visa by the occupying authorities in Cologne. The fatagagas, as well as the works that Ernst produced himself, were mainly montages of photographic fragments which were then photographed and printed, often in an enlarged format. This process allowed Ernst to (almost) eliminate the artist’s hand, concealing the method used to fabricate them as well as the original sources of the images. In a letter to Tzara, Ernst wrote: ‘I am enclosing a photo … The sensational thing about it is that it’s done without any work. That’s my mystery!’ (Spies 1991: 270). When he sent Tzara the works to be reproduced in Dadaglobe, he included a specific request: ‘Can you show the engraver how to hide the seams in the reproductions of the pasted pieces (so as to keep the Fatagaga secret a secret)?’ (Spies 1991: 271). A short poetic or absurd text was added, produced by Arp or Ernst, sometimes handwritten around the edge of the montage. Some of the works were also printed as postcards, including die anatomie als braut and die chinesische nachtigall / le rossignol chinois, discussed below. Any notion of the uniqueness of the work of art was thus doubly rejected, by producing a work assembled from quotations or readymade material, and by making multiple copies of the same work. The fatagagas can be situated in the political, ideological and aesthetic context of the immediate post-First World War period, as well as in the specific context of the practice of photomontage. They can be read as a site of ambivalence, both as a satirical comment on wartime and post-war Germany, and as images of rebirth, a dominant theme in the early 1920s, notably in Expressionism, based on the desire for renewal and the myth of creation of new beings after the destruction of war. Thanks to the work of Ludger Derenthal (1995, 2004), the origin of several of the images used in the composition of this group of photomontages is known to be two illustrated publications of wartime planes by Georg Paul Neumann, Flugzeuge (1914) and Deutsches Kriegsflugwesen (1917), published by Velhagen und Klasings as propaganda literature for German aerial warfare. In l’avionne meurtrière (The Murderous She-Plane, 1920), for example, a strange apparition hovering in the sky, half-woman half-machine, evokes an aerial attack (figure 7.2). It is composed of the photograph of a French biplane or Doppeldecker, overlaid with the arms of a statue, the engine casing of the plane resembling a military helmet, flying above a deserted landscape in which two soldiers are carrying a wounded companion. The image was drawn from a pedagogical publication, Lehrmittelkatalog, from which Ernst sourced many of his images (Derenthal 1995: 49). The gesture of the arms evokes the conventional pose of the academic nude, and the nose of the plane the breastplate of an Amazon warrior. Critics have noted the paradoxical nature of the figure, both murderous machine and

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7.2  Max Ernst, Untitled (l’avionne meurtrière/The Murderous She-Plane, c.1920)

seductive female. Richard Cork, for example, refers to it as ‘part machine and part seductive harbinger of death’ (1994: 257); while Elizabeth Legge claims it ‘combines erotic energy and destructive weaponry’ (1989: 2). The paradox is actually embedded in the title itself, l’avionne meurtrière, with its suggestion of the femme fatale, in an image where aggressive female sexuality can be read as a vandalising and feminising of wartime images. Ernst the Luddite has decommissioned the original machine, transforming a functional mechanical form into a fantastical apparition, a hybrid being made up of a clumsy combination of anthropomorphic and mechanical parts. Its derisory power is denoted in the stylised gesture of the arms, not only in an ironic reference to the classical body, as suggested earlier, now definitively fragmented, but also in an allusion to the theatrical gestures or ‘attitudes passionnelles’ of hysterics, as deployed in Jean-Martin Charcot’s Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1876–80). Despite Ernst’s rude dismissal of the political dimension of photomontage – he remarks of the Berlin Dadaists (or ‘Dada-Neoexpressionists’): ‘That’s truly German. The German intellectuals can neither shit nor pee without ideologies’ (Spies 1991: 270) – his photomontages of this period clearly contain strong anti-war connotations. The jarring configuration conjured up is far from the utopian fusion of man and machine of the Futurists, or the rational beauty of the human machine portrayed in Fernand Léger’s paintings. On the contrary, it evokes the uncanny nature of the mechanical-human contraption, staging both death and life drives. L’avionne meurtrière, however, is not simply a satire of war. Ernst is reacting to the psychological violence of the period by mimicking the language of the insane in the neologism of the title. In response to this, Hal Foster (1991) has interpreted Max Ernst’s 1919–20 collages in terms of the psychic disorders suffered by the artist himself during the 1914–18 war. He characterises the mechanical figures as ‘autistic machines’, diabolical female

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machines. The uneasiness of the viewer, for Foster, stems from the fact that the figures produced are socially and psychically ambivalent, mixing both Eros and Thanatos. There is no doubting this traumatic dimension, yet one must also acknowledge an element of playfulness in the ludic manipulation of the traumatic event through tactics of displacement and strategies of recreation. The image is playful in the sense developed by Susan Rubin Suleiman (1990: 4), quoted in chapter 1: as fantasy, creation or parody. Ernst’s laughter here is, no doubt, less mocking than that of the Zurich Dadaists, less caustic than the Berlin Dadaists, more ludic and life-affirming. Indeed, the figure can be perceived as a chrysalis shape, as if a new form of life were seeking to free itself from the old. It is the hybridity of such figures – where images of destruction are conjoined with those of regeneration – that we come to recognise in a number of Ernst’s photomontages, built with the very fragments of the machines of destruction but producing images of the body as the site of possibility. He has thus fabricated a complex image of death and rebirth, in keeping with his autobiographical notes on his wartime experiences: ‘Max Ernst died on the 1st of August 1914. He resuscitated the 11th of November 1918 as a young man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myth of his time’ (1942: 28). The allusion to the alchemical process, where base material is transformed into gold, echoes the Nietzschean theme of destruction followed by figurative rebirth that was widespread – unsurprisingly, no doubt – among artists and writers in the immediate post-war period. But it can also be related to the grotesque, a further combination of the destructive and the regenerative. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque body is not only the locus of resistance against the normative, controlled body; it is also an instrument of revolution, grounded on the seemingly paradoxical notion of degradation leading to rebirth: ‘Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better’ (1984: 21). Hence, the world ‘is destroyed so that it may be regenerated and renewed’ (1984: 48). In the earlier quotation from Ernst’s autobiographical notes, he is mimicking the alienation from the self of the psychically disturbed in the use of the third person; more generally, through his playful recycling of images, he imitates the psychological and physical violence of the post-war period in a form of ‘mimetic adaptation’, to use Hal Foster’s words (2003: 169). Above all, however, he releases the mind, opening the door to the unconscious, to fantasy and play. In this allegory of liberation, the political function of art is conjoined with a therapeutic function. Ernst’s photomontage thus both confronts and displaces the traumatic experience, envisaging a future beyond the fragmented or wounded body. Satirical comment on post-war Germany, definitely, but also

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an exploration of the dreamlike informed by Freud. For Charlotte Stokes, for example, ‘the collage has the edge of Freudian thought in its sexuality’ (1998: 58). Ernst had been a psychology student in pre-war Bonn and we know that he read Freud’s Traumdeutung (1900). In l’avionne meurtrière he is clearly miming Freudian dreamwork: the processes of condensation in the composite machinefemale figure, and displacement in the shift from Thanatos to Eros. It is this suggestive ambivalence – generated by the interaction of satirical comment and dreamlike image – which both characterises Ernst’s photomontages and distinguishes them from the production of Berlin Dadaists. Paradox dominates another photomontage from the same period, titled die chinesische nachtigall/le rossignol chinois (The Chinese Nightingale, 1920),4 which juxtaposes the photograph of an English aerial bomb, sourced from Neumann’s Deutsches Kriegsflugwesen (Derenthal 1995: 48), whose oval shape suggests a head, overlaid with the photograph of a fan, a single eye and a pair of raised arms from the photograph of a female statue or figure, perhaps a hysteric (figure 7.3). The photograph of the bomb has been turned ninety degrees into an upright position, and transformed into an image midway between totem (the bomb immobilised as stone) and female figure (suggested by the fan, the female eye and the graceful gesture of the arms). Consequently, the potential threat of destruction is defused through the recycling of a war image, edging it into an image of seduction and fascination, as in l’avionne meurtrière. It is interesting to note, moreover, that the reference to the bird has a discreet rapport to both Eros and Thanatos: in German the word Vogel is slang for the penis, while the allusion to death is suggested in the reference to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale in which the nightingale’s song revives the dying Chinese emperor. The image is rendered even more enigmatic by the ­accompanying text: 8 different featherdresses together with 2 sections one white one in color 3 robes spotted of amazon skin tunic of finest litmus paper a) on a pedestal b) in a hopping glass cage slightly dearer. (Sudhalter 2016: 32)5

The texts by Ernst and Arp are thus less titles or commentaries than an integral part of the work. Far from anchoring the meaning of the image, however, they constitute a further disruption, increasing the polysemic dimension of the work. Indeed, the texts are often themselves collages of other texts, or pastiches of different types of discourse. In the present example the language of both technical and scientific publications and of advertising has been pastiched. More importantly, however, we can recognise in the syntactic structure of enumeration and

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7.3  Max Ernst, die chinesische nachtigall/le rossignol chinois (The Chinese Nightingale, 1920)

the collage of apparently unrelated words what Benjamin refers to as Dada’s ‘“word-salad”, containing obscene expressions and every imaginable kind of linguistic refuse’ ([1936] 2002: 119), a form of expression clearly recalling the language of the insane. We should note that, during his pre-war studies in psychology at the University of Bonn, Ernst had read the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin

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(1856–1926) as well as Freud, and had worked for some time with mentally disturbed children. Strongly critical of Kraepelin, who claimed that mental illness had an organic cause, he privileged the Freudian psychoanalytical model, in which illness has a psychic origin. He was particularly interested in contemporary debates on the links between creativity and insanity. We know that he arrived in Paris in 1922 with Hans Prinzhorn’s book of drawings of psychiatric patients in his luggage, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill, 1919). Prinzhorn, the director of a collection of artworks of the mentally ill at Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic, had developed a theory of six psychic drives dominant in all artistic representation, but especially apparent in the art of the mentally ill. In their fatagagas, Ernst and Arp target the works of the insane, in parodic mimicry of their psychopathological texts. Firstly, in their text–image combinations (particularly in the framing of the image by a text); secondly, in the semantic disruptions (‘in a hopping glass cage’ [‘in hüpfendem glaskäfig’]) or hybrid portmanteau words (‘featherdresses’ [‘federkleider’]), verbal equivalents of the hybrid image, which mimic schizophrenic language; and thirdly, in adopting the precision of scientific language (lists marked ‘a)’, ‘b)’ and so on) to absurd ends. The 1914–18 war had spawned not only a malaise regarding the integrity of the body, as enacted in Ernst’s photomontages, but also growing doubts regarding the role of language itself as the expression of so-called rational man. Alienation from the body is paralleled by an estrangement from rational language and an exploration of limit-forms of expression, as found in the language of the insane, the child or the poet. Just as traditional pictorial syntax is disturbed by the juxtaposition of disparate elements, or anatomical figuration disrupted by fragmentation, so too the syntactical and semantic structure of the sentence is dislocated. Ernst thus appropriates the art and language of the mentally ill to forge a critique of the social order. In her study of Max Ernst’s post-war images Samantha Kavky maintains that ‘Ernst adopts the perspective of a male hysteric in his images of war-torn landscapes and the dismembered or hysterical bodies of both men and women … a world filtered through neuroses as a subversive challenge to the patriarchal institutions of authority’ (2012: 37). However, the destabilisation of language is not only the expression of a profound malaise in post-1918 German society; it is also conjoined with a desire for liberation, which the language of the insane offered the iconoclastic Dada artist and poet – a language freed, at least for the Dadaists, from social and mental constraints, the straitjacket of logic and convention (Legge 1989: 49). It is important to note, in this context, that similar experiments were being carried out by the French poets Breton and Aragon, who studied Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet and Joseph Babinski during their medical training in 1917 at the Val-deGrâce military teaching hospital in Paris for the treatment of shell-shocked

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soldiers evacuated from the front. Fascinated by their patients’ delirious utterances, they too saw in these expressions of a disturbed ego the possibilities of a radically new and disturbing kind of poetry, liberated from rational and traditional aesthetic constraints. Hysteria, treated by psychologists and physicists as a pathological phenomenon, was, on the contrary, welcomed by the Dadaists as a form of psychic liberation from the constraints of rationality, and mimicked in their boisterous re-enactments of the terrors of war (as was shown in chapter 2). It was later to be resorted to by the Surrealists as a privileged means of poetic expression, as in Breton and Éluard’s Immaculée conception (1930), which openly imitated the language of the insane. In short, just as Ernst deviates photography from its mimetic role, endowing it with a critical or poetic function, similarly he exploits psychoanalytical strategies not for their clinical function but for their parodic or poetic possibilities. Trauma evoked and displaced is also present in santa conversazione (1921; figure 7.4), in which the reference to the war is present in the reprise of the photograph of a swing-winged aeroplane, the French Marcay-Moonen, sourced in Neumann’s Flugzeuge (Derenthal 1995: 54). Since the origin of the image is scarcely recognisable, the reference to the war is actually almost deleted. The wings of the plane have been transformed into the lungs of a female figure, whose right arm and leg, exposing veins and muscles, are drawn from an anatomical chart. Moreover, several intertextual allusions overlay (and further repress) the reference to the war. For Samantha Kavky (2012: 52–3), for instance, the image can be read as a subversion of the traditional iconography of the Annunciation. A second intertextual reference appears to support this, namely an allusion to ‘A childhood memory of Leonardo da Vinci’ (1919), in which Freud discusses Leonardo’s vulture fantasies in relation to the shadowy presence of a vulture in his Virgin Child and St Anne (which also ties in with Ernst’s title, santa conversazione). The confusion between human and animal is interwoven with a recurrent childhood memory of Ernst himself, linking the death of his pet cockatoo and the birth of his sister Loni. The original image has been fully integrated into the new, however, covering over the references to war. Ernst later reworked the image as an oil painting titled La Belle jardinière (The Beautiful Gardener, 1923), which has disappeared but which featured in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich (1937) where, somewhat ironically, the female figure was attacked as an example of an ‘insult to German woman’. Another example of the conjunction between wartime and religious imagery is Le Massacre des innocents (1920),6 in which the flying figure painted green in the upper left of the collage combines the angel from Stephan Lochner’s Nativity and a German glider (‘Lilienthal’schen Gleitflieger’), drawn from Deutsches Kriegsflugwesen (Derenthal 2004: 18). Allusions to war are thus conjoined at times with other references, particularly in photomontages where an original war-related image can be scarcely

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7.4  Max Ernst, santa conversazione (1921)

recognisable once transposed into its new context. For instance, the photomontage die anatomie als braut (1921) has been assembled from the photograph of an articulated mannequin stretched out in a bathtub (originally the cockpit of a French biplane, reproduced in Derenthal 2004: 21), so that the body appears to be compressed inside a metal cylinder (figure 7.5).7 The figure has a shaved head and a part-helmeted face, a windpipe is visible in the open neck, the torso is made from an inverted military helmet, the left arm is drawn from a mannequin figure and the right arm is missing. Thanks to Derenthal we know that the source of the collage parts was Neumann’s Deutsches Kriegsflugwesen. Biplane parts have been transformed into body-parts, telescopic sight to windpipe, joystick to entrails, motor to torso: ‘An image, designed to demonstrate technical achievements developed for war, was transformed by Max Ernst into

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7.5  Max Ernst, die anatomie als braut (Anatomy as Bride, 1921)

murderous achievements of men with a disability’ (Derenthal 2004: 20–1).8 Werner Spies refers to this image as ‘a requiem of war’ (1991: 74), but one can go further and say that the photomontage is situated at an intertextual crossroads where the theme of war encounters psychiatric and alchemical discourses. The psychiatric reference, in this case, is revealed in the pictorial motif of the female body constrained by a restrictive device, drawn from illustrations of psychiatric patients in straitjackets, as in works by Kraepelin. A similar image is present in the collage Die Leimbereitung aus Knochen (The Preparation of Bone Glue), reproduced on the title page of Dada au grand air / Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol, published in summer 1921, sourced in a medical engraving illustrating diathermy treatment (Spies 1991: 89). Elizabeth Legge (1989: 49)

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suggests that, seen as a figure of inversion, it evokes not physical constraint but the alleged mental freedom of the insane, in opposition to the straitjacket of logic. As such it can be linked to the image of the chrysalis. The human body as chrysalis was actually to become a recurrent image in Ernst’s paintings, from the insect-human figure in Arrivée des voyageurs (The Arrival of the Travellers) from Le Malheur des Immortels (1922; see figure 11.2) and Sainte-Cécile (1923),9 where the female figure is breaking out of a brick casing, to Le Jardin de la France (The Garden of France, 1962),10 in which a naked female figure reclines within an open shell-like form. Clearly, the hope of rebirth encoded in the image of the chrysalis is linked to contemporary medicine, since the Musée du Valde-Grâce (which opened in 1916) displayed, among its collection of surgical instruments, casts and prostheses, photographs of surgical reconstructions of wounded soldiers. In so doing, according to Amy Lyford, the collection ‘appropriated male mutilation to demonstrate the promise of bodily reconstruction’ (2007: 48). Geoffrey Hinton (1975: 294) has claimed that die anatomie als braut was sourced in the illustration of an alchemical device used for purification rites. While this contradicts Derenthal, who, as mentioned, identified the image as the cockpit of a biplane, it illustrates the desire to mask originals and has the benefit of pointing to the alchemical dimension of the collage and the link with purification rites in the process of death and rebirth. The image is clearly ambivalent: the anguish of restriction or burial is conjoined with the ecstasy of madness or rebirth. Ernst has appropriated a cliché of the Expressionist avant-garde in the image of death and rebirth, an image overdetermined here by the allusion to the alchemical process, linked in turn to his frequent use of alchemical metaphors to describe the collage process as a transmutation of the banal, the death and rebirth of the image: WHAT IS COLLAGE? Simple hallucination, according to Rimbaud, the mise sous whisky marin, according to Max Ernst. It is something like the alchemy of the visual image. THE MIRACLE OF THE TOTAL TRANSFIGURATION OF BEINGS AND OBJECTS WITH OR WITHOUT MODIFICATION OF THEIR PHYSICAL OR ANATOMICAL APPEARANCE. (Ernst 1970: 253)11

We can thus conclude that in die anatomie als braut we witness a significant shift from satire to suggestion or hallucination, the creation of new images rather than simply comments on reworked old images. It is this open-ended, hallucinatory indefiniteness of Ernst’s photomontages that attracted the Paris Dadaists, who admired Ernst’s works for their exploration of the dreamlike. Indeed, André Breton was to praise Ernst’s collages more for their imaginative and ­surreal qualities than for their critical dimension.

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As for Paul Éluard, he also celebrated the spirit of liberation embodied in Ernst’s collages, freed from the rubble of reason which had brought about the disasters of the war. In a passage quoted by Ernst in his ‘Notes pour une biographie’, Éluard writes: ‘Around 1919, at a time when imagination was trying to overcome the sad monsters the war had nurtured, Max Ernst decided to bury ancient Reason, which had caused so many disturbances and disasters, not beneath its own ruins … but beneath the free representation of a liberated universe’ (quoted in Ernst 1970: 20).12 One should add that the shift from the use of modern photographic images to old-fashioned engravings also provides evidence of a shift in interest from the reference to a contemporary external reality (the political, satirical dimension of Ernst’s photomontages) to the evocation of an internal reality (the poetic or surreal quality of his collages based on engravings). Ernst’s own writings corroborate this since, after 1921, they reveal a shift from the notion of the artist as engineer to the artist as alchemist or magician. He moves from a technical discourse focusing on the fabrication of photomontage, to a metaphorical discourse where the transformation of the collage elements to create a new reality or surreality is translated into alchemical language, as in the text quoted above.13 This is also accompanied by a significant transformation in technique, from photomontage to collage engravings, highlighted by the fact that, from the early 1920s, Ernst started to source his images in pre-war publications, which gradually replaced the wartime images of his 1919–20 photomontages. This regression to pre-war intertexts can be read as a form of resistance to modernity as recently experienced, marked by a move in the artist’s work from the satirical exposure of a historical period to the playful juxtaposition of old-fashioned images. He returns to the magical re-enactment of childhood images, plundering illustrations from late nineteenth-century popular science publications such as La Nature, images of experiments in physics, mechanical inventions or early bicycles. These images, already outdated in the 1920s, often have a surrealist quality in themselves, prior to the collagist’s intervention. Ernst appropriates early machines, for instance, and makes them serve another function: des éventails brisés (Broken Fans), a collage from Les Malheurs des immortels (1922), depicts a male figure riding a paddle-cycle (figure 7.6). His movements have been decomposed, recalling the experiments of Jules-Etienne Marey, whose analysis of the movements of the human body at work – early time-and-motion experiments – was later exploited, as we saw, in post-war Taylorism. Here, in reaction, Ernst is rejecting the instrumentality of the world of productivity by removing the paddle-cycle from the water to a landscape of hills, fusing it with an upside-down crocodile. Man is thus relocated in harmony with the machine, in an image evoking liberation rather than constraint, the open flight

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7.6  Max Ernst, des éventails brisés (Broken Fans), from Les Malheurs des immortels (1922)

of the imagination rather than the arrested flight of the recycled wartime planes discussed earlier. Like Tatlin’s Letatlin (1930–32), where man is at one with his artificial wings (referencing here too earlier machines – Leonardo da Vinci – rather than modern technology), Max Ernst’s collages suggest that the trauma has effectively been displaced and that his earlier chrysalis figures, seeking to free themselves from the shards of wartime technology, have finally taken flight and are whole again. Max Ernst’s photomontage practice, we can conclude, thus has a dual function: subversive – divert photographs from their original function, vandalise the very machines used in the destruction of the First World War, parody the irrational utterances of the damaged and insane; and creative – machine parts as graphic metaphors for bird wings or breasts, a bomb defused to produce an image of fascination and seduction, new chrysalis forms, emerging new bodies freeing themselves from the old. Ernst thus combats classical art and the militaro-industrial world that demeaned it through use as a cultural figleaf, by bricolage strategies that perturb the smooth functioning of both the machine and the body. Blurring facile and convenient distinctions, he produces instead the irrational machine or contraption – feminised in l’avionne meurtrière, totemised in die chinesische nachtigall – or the body as a limit-form of representation, occupying an ambivalent space, which harks back to the battlefield yet also haunts the space of dreams. Similarly, through a dislocated syntax and

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disparate juxtapositions, he perturbs the complacent belief in the transparency of language. Max Ernst is, in short, a Luddite who cannibalises and reroutes images and language, with the aim of discrediting the conventional, and a visionary who creates – out of photographic and textual spare parts – new and liberating images: the New Man, freed from the shrapnel and the straitjacket of both immediate past and manipulated present.

Wounded men: Heinrich Hoerle’s Die Krüppelmappe (1920) In marked contrast to Ernst’s playful positive take on the prosthetic body and his utopian images of the chrysalis or flying body, fellow Cologne Dadaist artist Heinrich Hoerle presents, with Die Krüppelmappe (The Cripple Portfolio), an altogether more cynical comment on the damaged body and mind of the veteran soldier. According to Dirk Backes: ‘It seems that Hoerle was interested in the first place in Dada’s aggressive-ironic position, less than its artistic programme or artistic techniques like collage or overpainting of trivial models’ (1981: 27).14 Die Krüppelmappe remains, nevertheless, a comment full of pathos. Born in Cologne, Heinrich Hoerle (1895–1936) joined a travelling circus in 1910, then attended the School of Applied Arts in Cologne. In 1914 he was declared unfit for military service, but manpower demands by 1917 saw him enlisted in the artillery as a telephone operator and, later, awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. In 1919–20 the flat he shared with his wife Angelika Hoerle became a regular meeting-place for the Cologne Dada group. His Krüppelmappe is a collection of twelve lithographs produced between late 1918 and November 1919. Like Ernst’s Fiat modes pereat ars (see chapter 10) they were published in 1920 by the Hoerle’s own press, Schlömilch Verlag, with financial support from Cologne’s city council. The series was first exhibited in January 1920 at the Cologne Museum of Applied Arts.15 The twelve lithographs, which represent wounded veterans with amputated limbs and grotesque prostheses, develop the theme of the physical and psychological suffering and subsequent alienation of the mutilated soldiers. They include stark depictions of the unemployed with amputated arms, the breadwinner (Der Ernährer) as a legless beggar, a wife fondling the prosthetic arm of her impotent husband (figure 7.7). They constitute a powerful and at times bitter comment on disturbed male subjectivity and damaged gender relations in post-1918 Germany. Some of the prints evoke, equally starkly, the fantasies of this diminished figure, and in particular, of the amputee. Hallucinationen (Hallucinations), for instance, depicts an armless veteran looking – with longing or terror? – at a flowerpot sprouting hands (figure 7.8). Freundlicher Traum (Friendly Dream) evokes the sexual fantasies of the impotent male in its depiction of a mutilated war

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7.7  Heinrich Hoerle, Das Ehepaar (Married Couple), lithograph no. 3, from Die Krüppelmappe (The Cripple Portfolio, 1920)

veteran whose prosthetic leg, which has become an erect penis, sprouts a plant rising from a glass on a pedestal. In a variation of this theme, Der Mann mit dem Holzbein träumt (Dream of the Man with the Wooden Leg), a supine chrysalis-like male figure in a desert landscape dreams that his leg stump has metamorphosed into a gigantic penis sprouting a plant from which fruit is being picked by a floating figure (figure 7.9). Hoerle depicts a nightmare world of grotesque metamorphoses and uncertain bodily limits, of fragmentation and the dispersal of self: tree roots grow feet, plants sprout human limbs, bodies merge with the earth. In the first print, Helft

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7.8  Heinrich Hoerle, Hallucinationen (Hallucinations), lithograph no. 9, from Die Krüppelmappe (The Cripple Portfolio, 1920)

dem Krüppel (Help the Crippled), for example, the body is hidden beneath a blanket which merges with the undulating lines of the barren landscape, abolishing the boundary between body and physical environment (figure 7.10). In Am Wegende (End of the Road), a man with stumps for legs walks along a winding road, the absence of legs grotesquely projected onto a tree with claw-like roots. The landscape has become a psychological space, an unstable projection of physical pain

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7.9  Heinrich Hoerle, Der Mann mit dem Holzbein träumt (Dream of the Man with the Wooden Leg), lithograph no. 7, from Die Krüppelmappe (The Cripple Portfolio, 1920)

and mental anguish. Sabine Kriebel is sensitive to this when she writes that the obsessively repeated wavy lines evoke trauma ‘in which the compulsion to repeat an action signals an attempt to expunge a traumatic memory from the mind’: Equating line with tremors of the psyche, Hoerle’s haunting images seek to evoke pathos in the viewer. But there is an acrid irony operative in these works, generated by the combination of emotive line and grotesque subject matter, that pits sentiment against terror and hallucinatory imagination against bitter lucidity, transforming emotive psychological portraits into an astringent postwar commentary. (Kriebel 2005: 228)

In seeking such effects, Hoerle’s prints combine a range of styles: Jugendstil in the arabesques of the sexual dreams; expressionist in the nightmarish animation

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7.10  Heinrich Hoerle, Helft dem Krüppel (Help the Disabled), lithograph no. 1, from Die Krüppelmappe (The Cripple Portfolio, 1920)

of tree roots; verist in the figures of Kriegsbeschädigte in Germany’s city streets (as in George Grosz’s prints of 1920); and, above all, grotesque, with its hybrid forms and mutating bodies, best suited to the depiction of disturbed psychological states and the critique of a collapsed society. While the theme of death and rebirth is present in these lithographs, as it is in Ernst’s photomontages, Hoerle’s depictions of sprouting limbs, flowering penises and multiplying body-parts

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remain essentially cynical, implying the implausibility – if not the impossibility – of rebirth. They thus constitute a marked contrast to the ultimately life-­affirming collages of Ernst, and to his more playful parody of the prosthetic body. The prints of Krüppelmappe, consequently, were compared by contemporary reviewers to Goya’s macabre Horrors of War, and received as a powerful anti-war protest, deploring the damage to soldiers’ bodies and minds in wartime and their subsequent impotence and alienation in post-war society. They are critical of the war machine which amputated body-parts and mangled minds, and of the post-war industrial machine which exploited prosthetic surgery to transform them into an efficient, mindless workforce. It was in this vein that the Cologne Dadaist Franz Seiwert (who shared Hoerle’s condemnation of the post-war situation) included in his article ‘Krupp Krüppel’ (1920) a poignant reference to Krüppelmappe: ‘Can you see the wretched ones, your brothers, who can no longer live, yet who are not entirely dead either, and now stand in the streets as memorials to your guilt?’16

Un-man or New Man? Such contrasts generate a complex picture, since to place Ernst’s flying man alongside Hoerle’s suffering man is to be confronted by the paradox of modern man as exposed by the Dadaists. On the one hand, Ball and others denounce the extreme effects of the battlefield on the soldier, who ‘suffers from the dissonances to the point of self-disintegration’ (1996: 66), who had survived the devastation of no man’s land only to be dehumanised and alienated. As Sandra Gilbert concludes: ‘The gloomily bruised modernist antiheroes [became] not just No Men, nobodies, but not men, unmen. That twentieth-century Everyman, the faceless cipher … is not just publicly powerless, he is privately impotent’ (1987: 198). And yet, on the other hand, the recycling of war images in Ernst’s photomontages searches beyond their satirical impact, making them ultimately life-affirming in their enactment of the narrative of death leading to rebirth. The human figures of both Ernst and Hoerle, clearly, are made up of a combination of organic and mechanical elements, yet in their prosthetic status they differ greatly. Part of this difference can be tracked via a comment made by Freud in Civilisation and its Discontents (1930) where he writes: ‘Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown onto him and they still give him much trouble at times’ (1961: 39). The pertinence of this point for our analysis is clarified by Tim Armstrong who, in an observation on Freud, differentiates between a ‘negative’ prosthesis, which, in replacing a body-part, covers a lack, and a ‘positive’ prosthesis, which extends bodily capacity (1998: 77–8). In Hoerle’s oeuvre the veterans are equipped with such negative, inadequate

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prosthetic limbs, clumsy, out of proportion and inefficient. His amputee gazes ruefully at prosthetic hands growing out of plant pots, forever out of reach. His legless veteran shuffles past a tree whose roots resemble the feet or claws he lacks. Otto Dix’s veterans, too, are cobbled together from absurd, ill-fitting replacements for severed or smashed body-parts, producing beings scarcely human. In Hal Foster’s words: ‘Not even “a man without qualities”, the Dadaist is a man without a man; the opposite of the Super-Man, he is an Un-Man’ (2003: 175). In Max Ernst’s early photomontages, on the contrary, the imaginary extensions of the body offer the vision of a positive prosthetics and a promise of freedom, embodied in the image of the chrysalis. This imaginary extension of the body, nevertheless, does not open onto Futurism’s dynamic technological man or Constructivism’s perfectly functioning man-machine, largely because it is not progressive. Ernst’s man-machine conjunction, remains joyfully regressive, a return to the utopianism and marvel of nineteenth-century inventions. Regressive should not be seen as synonymous with escapist, however, because, in retaining their jubilatory, totally gratuitous and non-productive status, Ernst’s creations openly cock a snook at the debased, utilitarian human-machine conjunction of the post-war Taylorism that the First World War had abetted and accelerated.

Notes 1. On Dada in Cologne, see Herzogenrath (1980); Stokes (1985, 1998); Riha and Schäfer (1995); Kriebel (2005). 2. For an analysis of Ernst and Arp’s fatagagas see Riha and Schäfer (1995); Adamowicz (2001). 3. Arp provided the title, a mix of English, French and Latin. 4. The title can be linked to Otto Flake’s description of Hans Arp as ‘mystic without fanaticism, full of Chinese wisdom, spoken through the mouth of a nightingale’ (‘Mystiker ohne Fanatismus, voll chinesischer Weisheit, gresprochen durch den Mund einer Nachtigall’, quoted in Burmeister 2007a: 84). Ernst’s choice of French or English for his captions and titles was a deliberately anti-nationalist stance. 5. ‘8 verschiedene federkleider nebst 2 / querschnitten enimal weiß einmal farbig / 3 roben gesprenkelt aus amazonenhaut / tunique aus feinstem lakmuspapier / a) auf postament b) in hüpfendem glaskäfig ein wenig teurer’. 6. Max Ernst, Le Massacre des innocents (1920), photograph with watercolour, gouache and black ink on paper, Art Institute, Chicago. 7. Reproduced in Das Junge Rheinland 2 (1921), 6, under the title Die Anatomie schulfertig. 8. ‘Ein Bild, das die für den Krieg entwickelten technischen Errungenschaften demonstrieren sollte, wird von Max Ernst in ein Bild vom im Krieg durch diese mörderischen Errungenschaften versehrten Menschen umfunktioniert.’ 9. Max Ernst, Sainte-Cécile (1923), oil on canvas, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

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10. Max Ernst, Le Jardin de la France (1962), oil on canvas, MNAM Centre Pompidou, Paris. 11. ‘QU’EST-CE QUE LE COLLAGE? / L’hallucination simple, d’après Rimbaud, la mise sous whisky marin, d’après Max Ernst. Il est quelque chose comme l’alchimie de l’image visuelle. LE MIRACLE DE LA TRANSFIGURATION TOTALE DES ETRES ET OBJETS AVEC OU SANS MODIFICATION DE LEUR ASPECT PHYSIQUE OU ANATOMIQUE.’ 12. ‘Vers 1919, à l’heure ou l’imagination cherchait à dominer, à réduire les tristes monstres que la guerre avait fortifiés, Max Ernst résolut d’ensevelir la vieille Raison qui causa tant de désordres, tant de désastres, non sous ses propres ­décombres … mais sous la libre représentation d’un univers libre.’ 13. For a detailed study of Max Ernst and alchemy, see Warlick (2001). 14. ‘Es scheint also, das Hoerle an Dada in erster Linie das aggressiv-ironische interessierte, weniger als kunstlerisches Programm oder kunstlerische Techniken wie die Collage, die Ubermalung trivialer Vorlagen.’ 15. Two of the prints were reproduced in Die Aktion 10 (1920: 439) and 31–32 (1920: 442), a pacifist journal edited by Franz Pfemfert. The complete series is reproduced in Backes (1981: 210–11). 16. ‘Sieht ihr die Armen, eure Bruder, die nicht mehr leben können, aber auch nicht ganz tot sind und nun als Denkmäler eurer Schuld in den Straßen stehen?’

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8 Fluid bodies, shifting identities

We want to bring forward a new kind of human being, one whose contemporaries we could wish to be, free from the tyranny of rationality, of banality, of generals, fatherlands, nations, art-dealers, microbes, residence permits and the past. Hans Richter (1965) L’IDENTITE SERA CONVULSIVE OU NE SERA PAS. Max Ernst (1970: 269)1

In his hallucinatory account of an evening at the Cabaret Dada in Berlin in 1919, ‘Ein Besuch im Cabaret Dada’, Richard Huelsenbeck (1920c: 7–9) evokes the constantly shifting identity of the performers. A priest first appears in disguise (he wears violet underpants and a wig adorned with peacock feathers); his body is disintegrating (when he speaks his teeth fall out); the frontiers between his body and the outside world are abolished (express trains are standing on his neck, a rabbit is pulled out of his toes); he is at once human and non-human, a tulip from Valparaiso, a butter churn from the Bismarck Archipelago, or the moon. Later, when the Dadasoph appears, people ask ‘Is he a man or an animal?’ (‘Ist er ein Mann oder ein Tier?’), and when the President of the Universe is brought in on a huge sofa, gallons of hot water flow out of his ears. After a heated discussion, the conclusion is that the Dadasoph is an animal. The performers are portrayed as undergoing a sense of shifting physical and psychological identity, in keeping with the Dadaists’ challenge to the principle of a stable, unified ego and their rejection of the notion of identity itself, as essentialist concept or ontological given. Part of the process of undermining the concept of an immutable individual essence, their position is close to an awareness formulated later by Jacques Lacan, for whom the notion of the unified self is grounded on an illusion and constantly threatened by regression:

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Here we see the ego, in its essential resistance to the elusive process of Becoming, to the variations of Desire. This illusion of entity, in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a constant danger of sliding back again into the chaos from which he started; it hangs over the abyss of a dizzy Assent in which one can perhaps see the very essence of Anxiety. (Lacan 1953: 15)

In a similar vein, in a call to undo the supposed unity and uniqueness of the self, Hugo Ball launched an appeal: ‘Discard the Ego like a coat full of holes. You must drop whatever cannot be sustained. There are people who simply cannot bear to give up their Ego. They imagine that they have only one specimen of it. But man has many Egos, just as the onion has many skins’ (1996: 29). The Dadaists’ playful juggling with their alter egos takes centre stage in Huelsenbeck’s text quoted above, where the characters of the ‘Dadasoph’ and the ‘President of the Universe’ are pseudonyms for Hausmann and Baader. Alternative names proliferated among the other Berlin Dadaists too: Huelsenbeck doubling as Weltdada, Höch as Dadasophin, Heartfield as Monteurdada, Grosz as Propagandadada, Walter Mehring as Pipidada. In clear contrast with the Expressionists’ concept of the New Man, which posits identity as a coherent totality, Dada’s New Man is characterised as multiple and mutable. Identity, set free, is thus materialised as process, as found in Bakhtin’s grotesque body (discussed in chapter 5), which is defined precisely, in Bakhtin’s terms, as ‘a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body’ (1984: 317). Identity is further defined as contradiction: hence, in ‘Vom Konflikt des Eigenen und Fremden’ (‘On the conflict between one’s own and that of the other’), Otto Gross, a wayward student of Freud, posits an unresolved conflict between self (subjective entity) and other (social authority), resulting in a ‘seelische Zerrissenheit’ or inner disunity (1916: 4). In their texts and images, the Dadaists return repeatedly to the issue of the nature of identity or, more precisely, identity as nature. Endlessly contrarian, Dada identity, including gender identity, is de-essentialised; it is performed, as a construct, a fiction, an affabulation, in line with Judith Butler’s position on ‘the reconceptualization of identity as an effect, that is, produced or generated’ (1990: 147). In the first part of this chapter, identity as process and multiplicity will be discussed in the context of the Dadaists’ self-portraits, in both their texts and images, while the idea of the constantly shifting self will be explored in the figure of the jester in Hans Richter’s film Vormittagsspuk. The second part of the chapter will focus on issues relating to gender identity: the analysis of shifting gender roles in depictions of the couple will be followed by the questioning of gendered oppositions and, finally, the creation of crossgendered identities.

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Dada self-portraits In many of their self-portraits the Dadaists discarded the quest for an objective likeness in favour of identity depicted as fictional, shifting or contradictory. This erosion is playfully evoked in Duchamp’s five-way portrait (1917), discussed in chapter 6 in the context of the fairground (see figure 6.7). An example of fairground trick photography, it displays five versions of the portrait of Duchamp sitting at a table, shot from various angles, using the technique of hinged mirrors. Which is the original Duchamp, which the reflection? Is the distinction still pertinent when the multiplication of self-images in this portrait undoes photography’s claim to capture a stable singular likeness? In 1921 Tzara launched his Dadaglobe project with the aim of compiling an anthology of the Dada movement. The project was never completed but in a recent exhibition and publication, Dadaglobe Reconstructed (Kunsthaus Zurich and MoMA New York, 2016), the event was recreated by Adrian Sudhalter and her team from a wealth of material relating to the original project. In response to Tzara’s letter requesting contributors to the publication to send, among other documents, ‘a clear photo of your head (not body), which you can alter freely, although it should retain clarity’ (quoted in Sudhalter 2016: 40), several of the Dadaists chose to submit photomontage self-portraits and make the most of the opportunity to ‘freely alter’ their appearance. In order to debunk the alleged transparency of the photographic image, the contributors favoured the openness of photomontage, which ‘constructs, alters, conceals, or otherwise destabilizes [identity]’ (Sudhalter 2016: 42). On the political level, the Dadaists’ rejection of a fixed identity marked their resistance to the League of Nations’ officialisation of personal identity by the introduction of passports in post-war Europe, regarded by many as a restriction on open identity and free movement (Sudhalter 2016: 26). They reacted, therefore, by staging the self as mobile, malleable or multiple, thus enacting the shift from essence to the more slippery notion of process. Moreover, it is clear that the playfulness of the photographs and photomontages submitted to the Dadaglobe project, far from historicising and reifying Dada as an identifiable movement, reassert its ironic or sceptical laughter. Among the many contributions, a portrait by Sophie Taeuber, Selfportrait with Dadakopf (1920), openly mocks photography as a means of reflecting an individual human likeness: she poses behind a semi-abstract painted wood object (Taeuber’s own sculpture Dadakopf, 1920), partly hiding her face, which is further obscured by a hat and veil.2 The juxtaposition with the wooden sculpture marks a shift from figuration to abstraction, dismantling the supposed subjectivity of the self-portrait in favour of the objective presence of the Dada Head. A similar disappearance of the individual physical subject is enacted in the photograph of

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Taeuber’s ‘abstract dance’ at the Galerie Dada in Zurich in 1917, discussed in chapter 2 (see figure 2.6), where her body is completely hidden by a cardboard costume and large mask. In both her portrait and dance pose, Sophie Taeuber presents the self in terms of a mise-en-scene or performance, enacting identity as event and process. This key performative dimension of self-presentation is also present in Blumenfeld’s self-portrait, Bloomfield, President – Dada – Chaplinist (1921; figure 8.1), sent to Tzara (the phrase ‘à mon cher Tzara!’ is handwritten over the top left of the image) for inclusion in Dadaglobe. It is a photocollage consisting of a turn-of-the-century postcard of an exotic female dancer covered in a thin veil, over which Blumenfeld has pasted his head, shirt and tie, topped by a woman’s turban. Blumenfeld’s self-portrait, reproducing the extraverted mise-en-scene of an exploded fictional identity, was accompanied by a letter sent to Tzara (dated 3 April 1921): ‘For your DADAGLOBE my portrait. I am the erotic PRESIDENT of the DADA movement. I am the inventor of orphic Chaplinism’ (quoted in Sudhalter 2016: 101).3 Yet another contribution to the Dadaglobe anthology, Max Ernst’s the punching ball ou l’immortalité de buonarotti ou dadafex maximus (figure 8.2) again depicts the self in performative terms. This self-portrait humorously stages an Oedipal conflict in which Ernst (inscribed ‘Dadamax’) props up the cutout photograph of a female figure onto which is pasted an écorché head from an anatomical engraving, identified as ‘caesar buonarotti’, presenting the miniaturised and feminised father as lawgiver (Caesar), artistic model (Michelangelo) and emperor (Kaiser Wilhelm). In opposition to Ernst-père (the Sunday painter who had once felled a tree in his garden because it did not fit into the realist landscape he was painting), Ernst-son repeatedly overturned the conventions of pictorial syntax in his Dada experiments; and in overt opposition to the Renaissance artist, he abandoned palette and brush in favour of scissors and paste. During the Dada years the rebel son, rejecting filiation and paternal(istic) law, presents himself not only as self-generated (‘Dadamax the self-constructed small machine’) but also as multifarious, as evidenced in the many names he attributes to himself: not only Dadamax, but also Dada Ernst, max ernst or Dadamax ERNST. Moreover, an improbable and gleefully plural identity is also evoked through the metonymical series or list of fictitious selves in his Design for an Exhibition Poster (1921),4 where Ernst has combined a photograph of himself, samples of his work, and a caption which enumerates the totally absurd personae of the artist: ‘Max Ernst is a liar, legacy-hunter, scandalmonger, horsedealer, slanderer and boxer.’5 A similar arbitrary listing of implausible alter egos is to be found in an unpublished text fragment entitled Wer ich bin (Who I am), written by Erwin Blumenfeld (Bloomfield): ‘I play the following roles with the art of deceit: human being, Jew, infant whose testicles have been stolen, painter-poet-prince, thinker, stinker.

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8.1  Erwin Blumenfeld, Bloomfield, President – DADA – Chaplinist (1921)

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8.2  Max Ernst, The punching ball ou l’immortalite de buonarroti or dadafex maximus (1920)

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But I am always aware that these are roles that can roll out of my fingers any time’ (quoted in Adkins 2008: 103). These are consciously assumed fantasy identities, their fictitious nature underlined in Ernst’s use of the impersonal third person or in Blumenfeld’s recognition of the self-portrait as an ‘art of deceit’, their comic interchangeability signalled by both the technique of enumeration and the mode of hyperbole. These catalogues of arbitrary attributes constitute constantly proliferating ‘cadavres exquis’: they are a collation of disparate elements in a decentring process in which any supposed final identity is always deferred. For Huelsenbeck: The Dadaist exploits the psychological possibilities inherent in his faculty for flinging out his own personality as one flings a lasso or lets a cloak flutter in the wind. He is not the same man today as tomorrow, the day after tomorrow he will perhaps be ‘nothing at all’, and then he may become everything. He is entirely devoted to the movement of life, he accepts its angularity – but he never loses his distance to phenomena, because at the same time he preserves his creative indifference, as Friedlaender-Mynona calls it. (trans. in Motherwell 1951: 43)6

For Salomo Friedlaender, German philosopher, poet and satirist, modern man’s condition is characterised by the loss of a ‘differentiated ego’, a notion developed in his concept of ‘schöpferische Indifferenz’ or creative indifference (1918). This is understood in the sense of in-difference or non-differentiation, the creative encounter between polarities such as art and life, self and other, whereby the notion of a distinct(ive) or fixed self is replaced by the idea of a contradictory or conflictual self. It is within this conceptual framework that the Dadaists, in their self-portraits, attacked conventional thinking and played with limit-forms of physical and psychological identity. For Tzara, for example, writing in the sole issue of New York Dada (April 1921), the Dadaist is ‘a new type’ with a manifold, totally improbable identity, expressed yet again in a list: ‘a mixture of man, naphtaline, sponge, animal made of ebonite and beefsteak prepared with soap for cleansing the brain’. Such arbitrary, implausible limit-attributes of identity suggest one of the ways in which Dada can be linked to postmodernism’s decentred subject, which Mark Pegrum identifies, significantly, with the jester figure (2000: 78).

Hans Richter’s Vormittagsspuk (1928): men at play The paradigm of the self as multiple and mutable was a permissible fantasy when materialised in the figure of the jester, whose changing shapes, jokes and pranks defy rational behaviour and reverse conventional social order. In his discussion of the recurrent character of the jester in Dada, Richard Sheppard (1983) draws on Bakhtin’s spirit of carnival and Carl Jung’s Schelmenfigur or

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trickster figure. Among Dada’s jester characters he lists Hans Arp’s kaspar (‘kaspar ist tot’), Schwitters’s Anna Blume (‘An Anna Blume’), Huelsenbeck’s Mafarka (Phantastische Gebete) and Ball’s Koko (Tenderenda). They share creative and destructive energies, a capacity to change shape, overturn hierarchies, turn the world upside down or dissolve into nature. Other jester figures include the elusive spirit Macchab (a pseudonym), who signs articles in the pages of Der Ventilator (1919), a satirical left-wing weekly edited by Baargeld and Ernst and distributed at factory gates in Cologne. Macchab appears all at once as elegant dandy, harlequin with a death’s head mask, or victim of the revolution. Sabina Kriebel comments on this ‘exquisite, mutable jester’ as ‘a phantom embodiment of an unconscious that refuses to be repressed, operating as an insistent, taunting reminder of a recently traumatic past. Macchab’s tenacious yet mocking presence wants to transform tragic memory into skeptical consciousness, refusing therapeutic mourning by being seditious’ (2005: 220). The jester is once again an incarnation of the spirit of revolt, embodying Dada’s vitality and its resistance to the twin spirits of the age: the post-1918 ambience of incalculable loss and destruction, and the complacent, compensatory return to order and rationality. The character of the jester is perhaps best embodied in Dada film, a privileged medium for questioning the stability of the body as a distinct(ive) unity and staging, instead, the self in a state of flux. Through techniques such as superimpositions and dissolves, montage or optical tricks, bodies are free to merge or fragment, multiply or disintegrate, reify or revive. Tellingly, Dada films sometimes betray an ambivalence that signals both nostalgic regression to pre-war magic theatre and radical explorations of physical and psychological identities. A film such as Hans Richter’s Vormittagsspuk (1928) – ‘a true Dadaist document’, according to the filmmaker himself (Richter 1965: 198) – combines both, offering a playground for adolescent boys to indulge in playful antics, and portraying physical identity as a mode of constant transformation: faces sprout beards, bodies are dismembered or decapitated, a disembodied head becomes a target or a rotting mask, severed hands wave. Images speeded up, slowed down or reversed transform bodies into automata, lending them a comical unbalanced aspect. The characters are engaged in mechanically repeated actions, frantically absurd activities – going up-down a ladder, walking vertically, crawling on all-fours. Male characters are engaged in fruitless chases (after hats) or ever-repeated gestures (walking off the screen) in incomplete narratives where desire is constantly thwarted: hats are just out of reach; the top of the ladder is never reached. Above all, characters no longer have a transparent, utilitarian relationship with objects, as Richter comments: ‘[The film] showed the revolt of objects: hats, cups, ties, hoses, etc., against man’ (1965: 198). The characters prove unable to control the objects around them: hats fly, ties untie,

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revolvers revolve without human agency. The human is, finally, displaced by objects, now become active subjects living a life of their own. The bourgeois world, symbolised above all by the ever-elusive hat, is ridiculed. Through such figures of destabilisation – bodies lacking stable contours or identity, actions lacking in finality – the male self is repositioned as the decentred subject, split, fragmented, displaced or dissolved in the other, portrayed as the jester in a crisis of masculinity and a counter-image to the armoured and efficient males depicted in German propaganda. At the end of the film, in what appears to be a return to order, broken cups are reassembled and return to their saucers, hats recover their heads, and the world seems to recover its banality: ‘In the end the old hierarchy of man-master and object-slave was re-established. But for a short time, the audience had perhaps begun to doubt the inevitability of normal “subject–object” relationships’ (Richter 1965: 198). Viewed as a political satire, that ‘rebellion’ of objects – portraying the breakdown of institutional social structures in Germany with the rise of National Socialism – ensured that the film was confiscated by the Nazis. Alongside an unpalatable topic like the crisis in masculinity, as portrayed by the jester figures in Vormittagsspuk, the Dadaists also explored the crisis in traditional gender roles in post-war Europe, notably in their depictions of couples. It was to lead to a radical questioning of gender differentiation.

Dada’s dysfunctional couples 7 Husband and wife? The whore and her client? The sexual commodity and the taylorised worker? Flesh and machine? Berlin Dadaist George Grosz’s watercolour and collage Daum marries her pedantic automaton ‘George’ in May 1920. John Heartfield is very glad of it (1920; see figure 4.6) was discussed in chapter 4 in relation to the human–machine hybrid. It can also be read as a humorous and satirical wedding portrait. Grosz’s diminutive groom George is formed from an assemblage of machine parts, while the bride (Daum–Maud, Berlin designer and model Eva Peter, whose photograph is pasted on the top left of the work) combines a body painted in watercolour and collaged hair, eyes, boot-tops and a piece of real lace. Instead of wearing the traditional virginal white gown, she is scantily dressed. She towers over the diminished male figure, exposing her plump body, breasts and sex to an apparently indifferent groom. The couple is portrayed puppet-like: a disembodied hand plays with Daum’s nipple, while two female hands above the male figure appear to be feeding a paper-strip of numbers into his head. The major shifts in gender roles during and after the First World War have been explored by a number of historians and art and literary critics, often informed by feminist and gender studies. 8 This section examines the shifting and uneasy gender relations in Dada and post-Dada Germany, as enacted in

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images of the dysfunctional couple. Official discourses across Europe, wishing to suppress the traumatic images of wartime violence and the resulting gender imbalance, vigorously promoted the return to traditional gender and social roles in male body-building, female domestic roles and natalist policies. Dada counter-discourses challenged the social and ideological values for which an entire generation of young men had been sacrificed, producing works which not only exposed troubled male–female relations – the consequence of the death of the myth of the hero, the growing social and sexual emancipation of women and the rejection of the repressive patriarchal family – but also actively explored the possibility of new gender relations. Dada’s depictions of the couple both perform and critique the constructions of male and female identities in post-1918 Europe and, unsurprisingly, reflect the sometimes-contradictory positions of the Dadaists themselves on the question. Nevertheless, their works challenge patriarchal codes embodied in the bourgeois couple, questioning a wide range of oppositions traditionally thought of in simple binary terms: masculine/­feminine, dominator/dominated, aggressor/aggressed, European/ non-European. Grosz’s Daum marries, a telling example, foregrounds the plight of the physically mutilated and mentally disturbed veteran, and the role of women in their troubled relations with crippled husbands or lovers returning from war. In so doing, it exposes the growing destabilisation of traditional roles and the institution of marriage in post-war society, and satirises the much-hyped cult of masculinity that sought to disguise the collapse. Studies of the period have shown convincingly that social and psychological insecurities in the immediate post-war period were manifested in uneasy and often violent gender relations. Soldiers returned home from the front (after four years of deprivation and mechanised sexual relations in sanctioned brothels such as France’s ‘Bordels Mobiles de Campagne’ or Germany’s ‘Feld-Bordelle’) to women who had replaced men at work, gaining economic and social independence, and hence increased self-confidence (Bridenthal et al. 1983). In Grosz’s collage, for instance, Daum is portrayed as independent woman rather than submissive bride; her predatory claws and aggressive sexual exposure both embody and parody the perceived threat that a liberated female sexuality posed to previously secure constructs of masculine identity. Daum marries thus presents not merely a parody of the bourgeois marriage institution but an acknowledgement of the factors heralding the imminent collapse of the fixed gender identity roles that supported it. The conservative government that came to power in Germany in November 1919 sought to halt this evolution, promoting economic and social programmes of national regeneration founded on a return to the traditional patriarchal structure of the family. In these programmes, relations between the sexes were treated as having an essentially civic function, that of procreation. While the

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young Weimar Republic had the merit of introducing female suffrage in 1919, marriage and divorce rights remained restricted, while birth-control and abortion continued to be illegal. Numerous measures sought to reinstate clearly defined traditional social roles to counter the blurring of gender(ed) roles which had had to be condoned in the economic sphere in furtherance of the war effort. Women, it was argued, having been allowed into the labour market and employed in jobs formerly occupied by men, had exploited the situation in order to enjoy greater social and sexual freedom. To counter this, the legislators maintained that this newly aggressive sexuality had to be brought under control in order to guarantee the stability (and primary function) of the family. The position is clearly represented by Erich Wulffen, a leading criminologist, who, in Das Weib als Sexualverbrecherin (Woman as Sexual Criminal, 1924), argued that woman was dominated by her sexual instincts; that she was, indeed, a whore by nature (Dirnennatur). Similarly, in Dutch gynaecologist Theodor van de Velde’s popular sex manual Die Vollkommene Ehe (The Ideal Marriage), published in 1927, male domination is reasserted since the male is once again credited with the key role of instructor of his partner’s controlled sexual fulfilment. In a bitter parody of the fears and insecurity underlying such regressive attitudes and measures, the female figure in Grosz’s work appears to dominate her male partner, teeth, claws and sex bared, her provocative behaviour underscored by her sexy glance over her shoulder. When satirically reworked in Wieland Herzfelde’s ironic introduction to the 1920 catalogue of the Berlin Dada-Messe, where this work was first exhibited, marriage is said to bring sexual liberation to the female, while her male partner is turned ‘into a little machine within the great gear-works’ (‘zu einer kleinen Maschine im grossen Räderwerk’) with the consequence that, ‘at the very moment the woman is allowed to express all her secret desires, to expose her body – the man turns to other sober-pedantic calculating tasks’ (quoted in Doherty 2003).9 Grosz’s diminutive ‘pedantic automaton’, manipulated and dehumanised, has become an unwitting cog in the modern system in which marriage is itself reasserted as primarily (re)productive. In the face of such a reactionary onslaught, sexual liberation, unsurprisingly, became a central concern of the Dadaists. In his article ‘Der Besitzbegriff in der Familie und das Recht auf den eigenen Körper’ (‘The concept of possession in the family and the right to one’s own body’), for instance, Hausmann develops a radical critique of the patriarchal structure of the family based on power and coercion, and denounces bourgeois marriage as ‘the projection of rape into a right’ (‘die Projektion einer Vergewaltigung in ein Recht’, 1919a: 242; 1982: 34). The same year, in ‘Zur Weltrevolution’ (1919b), he maintains that the communist economic revolution will be successful only when accompanied by a sexual revolution: he rejects patriarchal society and defends – in principle

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if not in practice – women’s sexual freedom. In ‘Schnitt durch die Zeit’ (‘Cut through time’, 1919c) he advocates a utopian concept of marriage, informed by psychologist Otto Gross and based on a shift from Vaterrecht to Mutterrecht on the grounds that the matriarchal system is freed from possessiveness and greed. Hausmann himself, it is worth noting, was married at the time, while also being involved in a relationship with fellow-Dadaist Hannah Höch between 1915 and 1922 – a relationship which he fits into his worldview with a pirouette, describing it as a form of ‘antagonistic equivalence’ (‘antagonistische Gleichwertigkeit’, letter quoted by Lavin 1993: 24). Radical psychologists like Otto Gross and Franz Jung, students (or errant sons) of Freud, appropriated psychoanalysis for their revolutionary programme in post-war Germany, arguing in particular that the patriarchal family was the cause of individual and collective neurosis in society. The Berlin Dadaists for their part, like the Zurich and Paris groups, rejected all forms of bourgeois institutions, based on the conviction that it was, precisely, bourgeois values that had brought about the First World War. Similarly, in Zurich, in his ‘Manifeste Dada 1918’ Tristan Tzara vigorously rejected the traditional family: ‘Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada’ (1918: 3; 1975: 367).10 And in Paris in 1922 André Breton would exhort his comrades – again, as a matter of principle rather than practice? – to abandon their families: ‘Drop your wife, drop your mistress … Abandon your children in the woods … Set off on the roads’ (1990: 263).11 The recurrent image of the dysfunctional couple in Dada is thus a vehicle for the rejection of bourgeois marriage and, more broadly, of the patriarchal society that relied on it. If we turn back to Max Ernst’s 1920 collage the punching ball ou l’immortalité de buonarroti ou dadafex maximus, discussed earlier in this chapter, we now perceive the centrality of the theme. The collage stages a displacement from father–son to husband–wife relations where the father is feminised, fetishised and reified in the two-dimensional image of the cutout doll-like bride, thus compounding rebellion against patriarchal law with a satire of relations within the marriage institution. A further dissolution of categories – in this case human and animal – is staged in an early collage by Max Ernst, Rencontre de deux sourires (Meeting of Two Smiles), from Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s Les Malheurs des immortels (1922; figure 8.3). Here, an eagle-headed male figure in formal dress stands behind a woman whose face has been replaced by a death’s head moth, on a carpet which is in fact the Figaro newspaper (in an ironic allusion to Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, 1784). The woman holds a duckfoot-fan, while a serpent-like form on the floor between the two figures playfully references the Adam and Eve motif. The disruptive effect of this collage is based on the disparity between the highly coded iconographic framework of the formal wedding portrait – debased,

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8.3  Max Ernst, Rencontre de deux sourires (Meeting of Two Smiles), from Les Malheurs des immortels (1922)

however, as an encounter between hairdresser and client – and the masks of bestiality. In this ambivalent space between the veiled and the unveiled, the bestial heads unmask what is normally covered, pointing to what is latent in a social ceremony that veils its libidinal outcome. In this bestial (mis)matching, sexual appetite is displayed rather than contained, taunting the constraints of social codes and ceremonies. The work is thus typical of the contrast between

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the German Dadaists, who draw largely on the German expressionist tradition of the grotesque in their portrayals of the couple, and French Dadaists, who focus more often on the mechanical or mecanomorphic, as portrayed in works such as Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Large Glass), or Suzanne Duchamp’s Un et une menacés, discussed in chapter 4. The disturbed, often openly antagonistic relations between couples are also enacted in Hannah Höch’s photomontages of the immediate post-war period. They depict satirical mises-en-scene of couples, often focusing on the critique of prevailing stereotypes of women and, in particular, their commodification in the popular media in Weimar Germany. The dysfunctionality operative in these works relates to both theme and technique. For example, her Bürgerliches Brautpaar (Streit) (Bourgeois Married Couple (Quarrel), 1919) portrays a female figure, assembled from three photographic fragments, with an oversize child’s head on an adult body (figure 8.4). She looks away from her male companion, in the guise of a sportsman, who is bent under the weight of a huge discus-shaped hat, and appears to be both straining towards and running away from his female companion. The constricted figures are pasted over cutout illustrations of domestic appliances, machines for mincing, mangling, churning and cutting – a metaphor for the strained abrasive relations between the couple. Indeed, in the opinion of Maria Makela (2007: 43), the suspended phallic ‘P’ and vaginal ‘O’ reference the non-consummation of their sexual relationship, ‘PO’ being slang for a child’s genitals. On the broader political level, the photomontage embodies the widespread awareness of strained relations between couples in post-war Weimar Germany, increasingly framed and constrained by consumerism, constricted by conventional models of femininity (as child, commodity and consumer) and masculinity (as athlete and master).12 Finally, to complete the picture, the photomontage should perhaps also be credited with a more personal resonance, in its depiction of both Raoul Hausmann’s ambivalent relation to his wife and Höch’s mocking image of her rival. The commodification of sexual relations can also adopt a more violently satirical – and even misogynistic – form, as we see in George Grosz’s drawings and watercolours of Weimar Germany society, particularly in his images of prostitutes with soldiers or bourgeois males, as in the watercolour and ink work Circe (1927),13 which represents a bestial encounter between prostitute and pig-headed client. The pig’s head was widely used in post-war Germany as a critique of the capitalist or philistine, while the animal imagery here evokes more specifically both the predatory relations between the sexes and the bestial in the human being, exacerbated by the First World War. Maria Tatar (1995: 161) sees the individual psyche at work here, agreeing that the violent depiction of sexuality in Dix and Grosz’s works of this period was an aggressive reaction against Germany’s military defeat, but arguing that the disfigurement of the

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8.4  Hannah Höch, Bürgerliches Brautpaar (Streit) (Bourgeois Couple (Quarrel), 1919)

female body is an attempt to reassert (a devirilised) masculine power. Indeed, in this context, the recurrent motif in Dada of the Lustmord or sexual murder, a staple of the popular press, can be considered the extreme embodiment of the dysfunctional couple, and one that was gruesomely portrayed in contemporary paintings and literature like Grosz’s lithograph Lustmord in der Ackerstraße (Sex Murder in Acker Street, 1916–17), from the portfolio Ecce Homo, in which the female

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8.5  George Grosz, Lustmord in der Ackerstraße (Sex Murder in Acker Street, 1916–17)

victim lies bound, eviscerated and decapitated on a bed in the foreground, while her murderer, braces dangling, furtively washes his hands (of the gore and the act) in the background (figure 8.5). While Grosz’s prostitutes are at times depicted, like their bourgeois clients, as profiteers of Weimar capitalism (as in Circe), Otto Dix’s drawing of a prostitute with a veteran soldier, Dirne und Kriegsverletzter (Prostitute and Disabled War Veteran, 1923), is more ambivalent (figure 8.6). Dix portrays an oddly balanced pair, the prostitute’s physical corruption grotesquely matched by the soldier’s disfigurement: the woman’s face displays signs of syphilis while the face of the man who cowers behind her is disfigured by a gaping wound and a single eye. While she is masculinised (her sores resemble bullet wounds), he is feminised (his wound resembles female genitals; Tatar 1995: 81). In 1920s Germany the prostitute was stigmatised as the embodiment of the gross immorality of unproductive sexuality, hence a perversion of woman’s supposedly maternal nature

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8.6  Otto Dix, Dirne und Kriegsverletzter (Prostitute and Disabled War Veteran, 1923)

and a symbol (and instrument) of the rampant degeneration of the German nation. As Dora Apel writes: ‘Dix plays on stereotypes of the prostitute as morally and physically corrupt, her body the site of rapacious sexuality and dominating physicality in inverse proportion to the diminished and disfigured militarized male’ (1997: 369). Retitled more explicitly Zwei Opfer des Kapitalismus (Two Victims of Capitalism) when it was reproduced in Die Pleite in 1923, any ambiguity surrounding the relations between prostitute and client is erased, the two protagonists, as Tatar has rightly suggested, now explicitly linked as ‘casualties of a society that ­harnesses bodies into service for pay’ (1995: 81).

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The grotesque, in images such as Grosz’s Circe or Dix’s Dirne und Kriegsverletzter, goes further, dissolving convenient and misleading distinctions between male and female, animal and human. The deliberate indistinctiveness thus fostered was enacted in photomontage as a form of critique, dissolving the unquestioned binaries behind categorical boundaries and the obsession for taxonomy (and accompanying ‘characteristics’) that marked Weimar official discourse. In Hannah Höch’s words: ‘I want to blur the firm boundaries that we human beings tend self-assuredly to draw around everything within our reach’ (quoted in Lavin 1993: 167). 14 Racial distinctions, consequently, loom large among the boundaries transgressed in Dada portrayals of the couple. Höch’s Bäuerliches Brautpaar (Peasant Wedding Couple, 1931; figure 8.7), for instance, is an openly satirical comment

8.7  Hannah Höch, Bäuerliches Brautpaar (Peasant Wedding Couple, 1931)

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on National Socialist racist ideology (Makela 1996: 73). The groom is a hybrid figure, an assemblage of Western hat, African head and storm trooper’s boots, while the Aryan blond braids of the bride, also reduced to head and lower legs, frame a monkey’s face. In thus blurring the distinctions between animal and human, Aryan and non-Aryan, in constructing composite figures, the photomontage satirises the nationalist rhetoric of racial purity – claimed to be characteristic of German peasantry, in particular – through a monstrous mismatching not only of body-parts but, in bride and groom, of socialised sexual status. It can be seen, consequently, as a grotesque riposte to the writings of Paul Schultze-Naumburg, appointed director in 1930 of the former Weimar Bauhaus, renamed Hochschule für Handwerk und Baukunst (School of Applied Arts and Architecture), and author of Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race), who criticised modern artists in Germany for their depiction of the deformed and diseased: In matters of human representation, exotic foreign characteristics prevail. Within the latter type, however, it is noteworthy that there is a strong inclination not to represent the nobler instances of the type, but unmistakably those that approximate primitive humans, extending all the way to the grinning mugs of animal-like cave-dwellers. Moreover, we see a preference for and an emphasis on the symptoms of degeneration, as they are known to us from the multitude of the downfallen, the sick, and the physically deformed. (1994: 498)15

In Schultze-Naumburg’s text the interest in non-European cultures among modern artists is derided as an unhealthy impropriety, ‘the nearly perverse ogling of alien races and their behaviour’. Contemporary representations of the human body, filling ‘the horror chambers of museums’, are deplored as primitive and bestial, ‘the grinning mugs of animal-like cave-dwellers’, and considered as indicative of an unhealthy fascination with racial degeneration and the cause of the current atrophy of physical beauty in art. It is this type of discourse that was to be used in the National Socialists’ Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937, where works by Expressionist and other avant-garde artists were attacked as crude and unaesthetic. By staging the grotesque juxtaposition of the conventionally Aryan and the allegedly ‘primitive’ in her photomontage, in deforming, simplifying and exaggerating them, Höch is openly mocking this ideology. A similar theme is present in another montage from the series Von einem ethnographischen Museum, Liebe im Busch (Love in the Bush, 1925), in which the inordinately long arms of a black male figure, ending in white hands or gloves, embraces a white female reduced to head and long trousered legs (figure 8.8). The concatenation of parts seems a playful – albeit still fragmented – promotion of interracial relations, inverting the Nazi racist propaganda against interracial relationships and miscegenation.

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8.8  Hannah Höch, Liebe im Busch (Love in the Bush, 1925)

Masculine/feminine In marked contrast to Surrealism’s concept of ‘amour fou’ or mad love, and its celebration of fusion between male and female, Dada’s images of the couple embody the unstable, at times exploratory and often antagonistic gender relations of the post-war period both in Europe and North America. Nevertheless, while the jarring, derisory assemblages of violent and fragmentary confrontations constitute a critique of traditional and propagandistic constructs of the couple, the adumbration in these images of new forms of sexuality opens up the possibility of liberation from traditional social and psychological norms. Among these were contemporary debates about homosexuality among psychologists, taken up by the Dadaists. For Hausmann, writing in 1919 in ‘Zur Weltrevolution’, homosexuality was a natural drive that was part of an individual’s sexual development and was deemed to be one of the means of overcoming the heterosexual male drive to dominate, possess and control the

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other. Hausmann denounced the repression of homosexuality in bourgeois society as a ‘male tactic to dominate women’ (‘männliche Beherrschungstaktik gegenüber der Frau’, 1919b: 370; 1982: 52). The homosocial/homoerotic couple is portrayed in the untitled photomontage representing a double portrait of Hausmann and fellow-Dadaist Baader, structured as a conjoined figure resembling a playing-card – albeit jesters rather than kings (figure 8.9).16 As for Höch, her depiction of female couples in later photomontages such as Liebe (Love, 1931), which depicts two hybrid female figures (figure 8.10), also raised the possibility of new relations.17 The upper figure with female legs and the upper body and head of an insect hovers over a second figure combining European and African body-parts. Such hybrid figures not only embody the rejection of conventional heterosexual gender relations, they also continue the undermining of oppositions between black/white, human/ animal. Her exploration of gender relations shifted from the early photomontages, which depict disjunctive couples, discussed earlier in this chapter, towards a depiction of the single androgynous figure such as in Dompteuse (The Tamer, 1930).18 In this evolution Höch shares the counter-discourses through which Dada challenged not only traditional gender relations but also, more radically, the notion of immutable gender identities itself. In discarding the idea of fixed difference, Baargeld’s adoption of a female persona in Typische Vertikalklitterung als Darstellung des Dada Baargeld (1920), which juxtaposes a photograph of his head and the bust of the Venus de Milo (see figure 3.7) or Blumenfeld’s Bloomfield, President – Dada – Chaplinist (see figure 8.1), like Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy, exhibited gender as an open, ever-shifting experience. As Picabia advised in ‘Francis merci’: ‘You have to forget which sex you belong to; I am not interested in knowing whether I am male or female gender, I have no more respect for men than women’ (1923a: 6).19 Shifting gender categories, linked once again to awareness of the body as commodity, are enacted in two photographs by Man Ray from 1917–18: the photograph of an eggbeater, initially titled L’Homme (a pun on his name and possibly a disguised self-portrait), and the photograph of an assemblage made up of two light reflectors, glass plates and clothes pegs, which he titled La Femme.20 Traditional taxonomies and the distinctions they generate in the act of defining are thus further destabilised by arbitrarily coding an object male or female. Or is it an arbitrary coding? Francis Naumann reads the circular reflectors in La Femme as breasts, the angular pattern as a Venus flytrap, and the orifice as … an orifice (1988: 77). However, in 1920, probably when he was asked by Tzara to contribute to the Dadaglobe anthology, Man Ray (or Tzara himself?) appears to have inverted the titles, so that the photograph of the eggbeater now bore the title La Femme and that of the light reflectors L’Homme.

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8.9  Johannes Baader and Raoul Hausmann, Untitled (Double Portrait, 1919–20)

Naumann (1996: 25) suggests this might be a private joke on Man Ray’s part to be shared with Duchamp, who had created his alter ego Rrose Sélavy around the same time. It raises nevertheless the question not only of the alleged genderspecificity of inanimate objects (a subject which was discussed in chapter 4 on

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8.10  Hannah Höch, Liebe (Love, 1931)

the feminisation of the machine) or limit-forms of corporeal representation (an issue which will be explored in chapter 10) but also of the possible misogyny of male Dadaists. Shifting gender categories were largely informed by Otto Weininger’s basically misogynistic Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), published in Vienna in 1903, which developed the theory of the androgynous nature of the individual and, while combining male and female principles, retained the conventional notion of the inferiority of woman, since ‘male’ was defined as active, productive, moral, and ‘female’ as passive, unproductive, immoral. In the immediate post-war period, sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who opened an Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin in 1919, promoted the idea of a ‘third sex’, beyond the binary, combining instead traits of both male and female. This merging in the creation of a new androgynous figure is manifest in a number of Dada (self-) portraits, as was noted earlier in this chapter, notably by Man Ray, who in 1921

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8.11  Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Belle Haleine, eau de voilette (Beautiful Breath, Veil Water, 1921), reproduced on the cover of New York Dada (1921)

shot a series of photographic portraits of Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy (figure 8.11). As Amelia Jones puts it: Duchamp’s gesture can be seen … as disrupting patriarchy’s desire to fix firm boundaries defining sexual difference by appropriating the doubly displaced feminine. … Duchamp’s adoption of femininity can be understood as exposing the instability of gender itself as a continually shifting, fundamentally unstable scaffolding of socially articulated role and visually and psychically determined identities. (Jones 1993: 31)

Other key examples of this male–female merging include Höch’s Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada, which features a hybrid figure conjoining a female dancer

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with Grosz’s head; in one of the grottos of Schwitters’s Merzbau, Hausmann’s photograph pasted over the face of the Mona Lisa and titled Monna Hausmann; the name ‘Anna Blume’ pasted over a photograph of Schwitters’s face. The instability of gender distinctions and the subsequent shifting of gender identities is developed in Duchamp’s seven-minute film Anémic Cinéma, an experimental piece shot in 1925 with the collaboration of Man Ray. The rotating spiral shapes repeated throughout the film are a development of Duchamp’s ‘opticeries’, experiments in optical and kinetic machines or ‘rotoreliefs’, which included Rotary Glass Plate (1920) and Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) (1924). For Anémic Cinéma, a fixed camera filmed ten rotating optical disks inscribed with concentric off-centre circular forms, alternating with nine black cardboard rotating disks printed with spiral texts. The film has usually been listed among the abstract avant-garde films of the 1920s, such as Hans Richter’s Rhythmus (1921–25) or Victor Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony (1924), which explore the visual rhythms of moving abstract shapes. Yet Duchamp’s film goes further, undermining the abstract film genre, as well as the machine aesthetic, by infiltrating the shapes with the irrational and the erotic. Man Ray playfully called it Obscenema (1998: 12), and indeed the rhythmic movement of concave/convex patterns and projecting/receding spirals has a quasi-hypnotic effect, in the suggestion of body-parts (lung, breast, eye, phallic and vulvular forms) and bodily sensations (the pulsations of the heart, the rhythms of sexual activity). The erotic dimension of the film has been underlined by a number of critics. Thomas Elsaesser, for example, considers the closed circuits, mirror effects of the spiral forms and punning mechanisms of the texts as essentially autoerotic: ‘The cinema-machine has become a bachelor-machine’ (1996: 24). Dalia Judovitz, on the other hand, interprets the visual ambiguities as a transitional object: ‘The anagrammatic play between the spiral/dart board, female/male and the literary and phonetic elements sets the cinema into motion as a transitional object, as a readymade, a pun whose undecidable character informs its erotic character’ (1996: 53). Visual ambiguity is paralleled by linguistic ambivalence in the wordplay of the spiralling texts and their sexual allusions. In the quasi-palindromic ‘L’aspirant habite javel et moi j’avais l’habite en spirale’, the repetition habite/l’habite suggests the homonymic ‘la bitte’, slang for penis, while ‘l’habite en spirale’ is reminiscent of slang expressions like the English ‘to screw’. The question ‘Avez-vous déjà mis la moelle de l’épée dans le poêle de l’aimée?’ also has overt sexual connotations: based on the pun moelle/poêle, it connotes sexual intercourse, ‘la moelle de l’épée’ as the male, ‘le poêle de l’aimée’ as the female. The word poêle, suggesting both a pan and an oven, is clearly a metaphor for the female sexual organs, an association reinforced by its conjuring up its homonym poil or pubic hair. A further example, ‘Inceste ou passion de

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famille à coups trop tirés’, continues the scatological scabrous theme, tirer un coup being slang for both ‘have a quick screw’ and ejaculate. The shifting and suggestive meanings produced by verbal alliterations and anagrams, the alternating gender identities suggested by the revolving disks, where concave alternates with convex, inanimate plays with animate, male flows into female, such ambiguous forms render obsolete the notion of fixed meanings. A similar ambiguity, both playful and disturbing, is effected through the conflation of gender codes in Anémic Cinéma. Yet they do not appear to produce the resolution of opposites in the figure of the androgyne, as claimed by Katrina Martin: ‘It seems that Duchamp is researching within this ambivalent optical/linguistic motion the representation of a double sexual identity or even the realisation of androgyny which would be absolute union and perfection. It is as if he seeks to master and control fleeting orgasm’ (1975: 60). Do the revolving disks then result in a collapse into gender in-differentiation? For Rosalind Krauss, the advancing and receding pulsating movement is a threat for the viewer, ‘a threat carried by the very metamorphic rhythm itself, as its constant thrusting of the form into a state of dissolve brings on the experience of formlessness, seeming to overwhelm the once-bounded object with the condition of the informe’ (1993: 137). In that case, the structured opposition between terms which produces conventional meaning gives way to a blurring of categories and, indeed, of differentiation itself. However, rather than a dissolution of gender, I would argue that the film enacts an oscillation between male and female positions, in a form of play where fixed gender codes are relaxed rather than renounced, not only (on the level of representation) in favour of fluctuating signs marking the shifting spaces of male and female signifiers but also (on the level of the filmic text) as a more generalised eroticism created through the rhythmic pulsation of the images. Likewise, rather than a blurring of distinctions, these figures present an oscillatory movement between the body and the non-body. A similar oscillation is exploited, perhaps more overtly, in Léger’s film Ballet mécanique (1924), where a moving piston cuts to the bulging stomach of a pregnant woman, and shots of Kiki’s head are interpolated with revolving machine parts and saucepan covers, so that machines and bodies are always on the point of fusing (‘a foot an eye mixed with objects’ [‘Un pied un oeil le tout mélangé aux objets’], observes Léger). Moreover, rapid montage generates a rhythmic movement that eroticises, hence defamiliarises, mechanical objects. The overall effect, however, remains more mechanical and less organic than in Anémic Cinéma. ‘IDENTITY WILL BE CONVULSIVE OR WILL NOT BE’ (‘L’IDENTITE SERA CONVULSIVE OU NE SERA PAS’), writes Max Ernst in his 1936 text ‘Au-dela de la peinture’ (1970: 269, Ernst’s capitalisation), echoing Breton’s

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closing words in Nadja: ‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be’ (‘La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas’, 1988: 753). Whether oscillating between male and female (Man Ray’s Homme and Femme) or engaged in a generalised erotics (as in Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma), the Dada body is the site of contradictory impulses articulated and maintained as multiplicity, undecidability and the liberating absence of limiting contours. In Dada practice, montage (in film and photomontage) was a privileged medium for staging such fluid identities. Film’s shifting signifiers, dissolves, diegetic disruptions or optical tricks allow bodies to merge or explode (Vormittagsspuk), multiply or disintegrate, reify or resuscitate (Entr’acte), constantly defying the notion of the stability of the body as a distinct(ive) unity. Dada’s fluid remappings of identity in the shifting, often perverse, images of the body thus problematise our reading of Dada texts. Their disruptive strategies disorient perception and elicit a reading grounded on the disruption of the symbolic order epitomised in the transgressive body, in the gender in-differentiation of Man Ray’s Homme and Femme, or in the limit-forms of anthropomorphic representation, as was seen in the arbitrary enumerations and the movement towards abstraction of Dada’s self-portraits, or in the ladder sequence of Vormittagsspuk where the male body becomes a rhythmical quasiabstract form. Further questions relating to limit-forms of Dada’s corporeal representations will be developed in chapter 10.

Notes 1. ‘IDENTITY WILL BE CONVULSIVE OR WILL NOT BE’. 2. Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Selfportrait with Dadakopf (1920), Galerie Berenson, Berlin. 3. ‘Pour votre DADAGLOBE mon portrait. Moi je suis le PRÉSIDENT érotique du mouvement DADA. Moi je suis l’inventeur du Chaplinisme orphique.’ 4. Max Ernst, Design for an Exhibition Poster (1921), collage, gouache and ink on cardboard, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Turin. 5. ‘Max Ernst ist ein Lügner, Erbschleicher, Ohrenbläser, Roßtäuscher, Ehrabschneider und Boxer.’ 6. ‘Der Dadaist nützt die psychologische Möglichkeit aus, die in seiner Fähigkeit liegt, seine eigene Individualität loszulassen wie man ein Lasso losläßt oder wie man einen Mantel im Wind flattern läßt. Er ist heute nicht mehr derselbe wie morgen, er ist übermorgen vielleicht “gar nichts”, um dann alles zu sein. Er is der Bewegung des Lebens ganz hingegeben, er steht innerhalb der “Kanten” – aber er verliert doch niemals die Distanz zu den Erscheinungen, weil er zu gleicher Zeit die schöpferische Indifferenz, wie Dr Friedländer-Mynona das nennt, nich aufgibt’ (Huelsenbeck 1920d: 32). 7. See Adamowicz (2015) for an earlier version of this section. 8. See, in particular, Hoffmann-Curtius (1994); Makela (2007). 9. ‘im Augenblick, da die Frau all ihre geheime Lust laut werden, ihren Körper

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lüften darf, – der Mann sich andern nüchtern-pedantisch rechnerischen Aufgaben zuwendet.’ 10. ‘Tout produit de dégoût susceptible de devenir une négation de la famille est dada.’ 11. ‘Lâchez votre femme, lâchez votre maîtresse … Semez vos enfants dans les bois … Partez sur les routes.’ 12. A similar portrayal of strained marital relations is enacted in the watercolour Bürgerliches Brautpaar (Bourgeois Bridal Couple, 1920), private collection. The bride is portrayed as a dressmaker’s dummy, fitted out with a life of domesticity – stove, cooking pot, coffee-grinder and potted plant. But her home is askew and her groom, in formal dress, is no less dehumanised! 13. George Grosz, Circe (1927), pencil, ink and watercolour, 66 x 48, MoMA, New York. 14. ‘Ich möchte die festen Grenzen verwischen, die wir Menschen, selbstsicher, um alles uns Erreichbare zu ziehen geneigt sind.’ 15. ‘In der Menschendarstellung herrschen fremde exotische Züge vor. Innerhalb dieses Typus ist aber wieder eine starke Neigung zu beobachten, nicht die edleren Ausprägungen des Typus zur Darstellung zu bringen, sondern unverkennbar jene dem primitiven Menschen sich annähernde bis zur grinsenden Fratze des tierähnlichen Höhlenbewohners sich verzerrende. Daneben sehen wir überall eine Bevorzugung und Betonung der Erscheinungen der Entartung, wie sie uns aus dem Heer der Gesunkenen, der Kranken und der körperlich Mißgebildeten bekannt sind’ (Schultze-Naumburg 1928: 11). 16. See analysis by Biro (2007: 47–51). 17. After Höch and Hausmann separated in 1922, Höch met Til Brugman, with whom she had a long lesbian relationship. 18. Hannah Höch, Dompteuse (The Tamer), 1930, photomontage and collage, Kunsthaus Zurich. 19. ‘Il faut ignorer à quel sexe on appartient; je ne m’occupe pas de savoir si je suis du genre mâle ou femelle, je n’estime pas plus les hommes que les femmes.’ 20. Man Ray, L’Homme (1918) and La Femme (1918), photographs, MAM, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

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9 Dada’s Africa

bouzdouc zdouc nfoùnfa mbaah nfoùnfa. (Tzara 1975: 87)

Black and white A photograph by Man Ray taken in 1921 and titled Black and White, reproduced in 1924 on the cover of Picabia’s journal 391, juxtaposes on a patterned African textile a wooden Baule male ancestor figure from Côte d’Ivoire with a bronze Art Nouveau statuette of a female nude (figure 9.1). They face each other, the African male figure in profile, the European female figure turned threequarters to the camera. They are wearing similar helmet-shaped headdresses. The female figure appears to be offering a flower to the male. The photograph reproduces the binary construction characteristic of ‘primitivist’ discourse of the time, defined as a Eurocentric construct, opposing Western and non-Western art forms, an opposition underscored by the reference to chess pieces in the photograph’s caption ‘Black and White’. Around 1918 Guillaume Apollinaire had been very influential in placing African fetishes on an equal footing with European sculptures, promoting African and Oceanic artefacts for their auratic and exotic qualities (1960: 553). Responding to this in their rejection of academic art, many artists in the first decades of the twentieth century saw in the alleged simplicity and authenticity of African and Oceanic objects a means of revitalising an exhausted Western artistic tradition (Salmon 1922). At the time, however, contemporary primitivist discourses contrasted an allegedly ‘civilised’ West (the acme thereof being the refinement of the classical) and a ‘barbaric’ other (identified with African or Oceanic sculpture), thus placing them in a hierarchical relation and instrumentalising the non-European artefact. In contrast, for writers like Einstein

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9.1  Man Ray, Black and White, cover of 391 18 (July 1924)

([1915] 2004) and de Zayas (1916), African and Oceanic art was on a par with European art, the equal footing of the two statuettes in Man Ray’s photograph. For Wendy Grossman, the confrontation enacted in this photograph ‘invokes African art as a literal and figurative challenge to the hegemony of Western classical tradition’ (2002: 117). Moreover, the open gesture of the neo-classical statue seems to suggest an exchange, a form of reciprocity, the positioning of Western and non-Western art in a level dialogue, distinct but interrelated.

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The challenge to the supremacy of European art is further actualised in the provocative aphoristic statements framing Man Ray’s photograph on the cover of 391, attacking contemporary art: ‘“What is modern painting?” A load of shit!’ (‘“Où va la peinture moderne?” Aux chiottes!’, signed ‘F. P.’); ‘Among public sales: Shit Collection: works by L. Rosenberg’ (‘Parmi les ventes publiques: Collection Caca: oeuvres de L. Rosenberg’); ‘Painting and its laws. What should come out of cubism’ (‘La peinture et ses lois. Ce qui devrait sortir du cubisme’, signed Albert Gleizes), followed by a Picabian ‘De la MERDE!’ Such scatological statements dynamite the art establishment’s acceptance of the ‘return to order’ (now including Cubism, tamed and nationalised by 1918) in favour of Dada’s enthusiastic promotion of non-European artistic forms, represented here by the African sculpture. The photograph is actually a reworking of an earlier unpublished photograph dated around 1921, in which the same statuettes are paired (and domesticated), this time placed in profile facing each other on two other symbols of European bourgeois culture: a sheet of music and a garden chair.1 These photographs contrast with later works by Man Ray which juxtapose non-Western artefact and European figure. Man Ray had been introduced to African art at the exhibition of African sculpture held at Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in 1914, and he photographed many African artefacts, among them a series combining a female figure, usually Kiki de Montparnasse, with African masks or statues. The best-known is without doubt the 1926 photograph of Kiki juxtaposed with a Baule mask, published in Vogue in May 1926 under the title Visage de nacre et masque d’ébène (Mother of Pearl Face and Ebony Mask). It was later retitled simply Noire et blanche. The photograph is constructed on formal similarities (disembodied heads and oval shapes of human figure and mask) and contrasts (black/white, horizontal/vertical). This is in keeping with Man Ray’s own comments on the structural principle of many of his photographs: ‘I need not one thing but two things. Two things that are not related, but that I bring together in order to produce, by contrast, a plastic poem’ (Bourgeade 1972: 65).2 However, whereas the ‘two things’ retain their autonomy in the earlier photograph of 1924, difference is neutralised in the later 1926 image through the assimilation of (African) mask and (European) head via formal strategies of analogy. What was posited as difference and reciprocity in the early photograph is clearly now replaced by homogeneity and sameness. It would seem that, in the passage from avant-garde journal to fashion magazine, art nègre had become fashionable, integrated into modish photoshots, neutralising difference and staging a unified vision. Man Ray’s numerous conflations of African mask and European female body published in the 1920s and 1930s in both avant-garde journals such as Cahiers d’art and Minotaure, and fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, thus contrast with the more radical confrontation of the earlier photograph.

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Hannah Höch’s photomontages: between museum and fashion journal3 The radical juxtaposition of European and non-European images, and resulting dialogue between elements given equal status, is the subject of a number of Hannah Höch’s works. Among these, a photomontage titled Die Süsse (The Sweet One, 1926) depicts a hybrid figure which combines a Congo mask with a pasted European female eye and lips, a wooden figure from the Bushongo tribe and a modern German woman’s legs and shoes (figure 9.2).4 In this work Höch has very effectively blurred the frontiers between European female figure and African sculpture, challenging the meaningfulness of boundaries between the modern and the tribal, object and body, male and female. Hannah Höch was an active member of the Berlin Dada group. In the 1920 Dada-Messe she exhibited four photomontages, including Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada, two reliefs and two Dadapuppen (Dada Dolls). Yet she was long absent from the history of the Dada movement, and in his account of Dada,

9.2  Hannah Höch, Die Süsse (The Sweet One), from Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (1926)

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Hans Richter (1965: 132) relegates the ‘good girl’ Hannah to the margins of Dada activities. Since Maud Lavin’s groundbreaking 1993 study, however, she has been repositioned as a central participant in Dada activities, and her work has been the object of an increasing number of studies.5 It has also been the subject of several exhibitions, including major retrospectives at Madrid’s Museo de Arte Reina Sofia (2004), Berlin’s Berlinische Galerie (2007) and London’s Whitechapel Gallery (2014). Die Süsse belongs to a series of about twenty photomontages produced between 1924 and 1934 and titled Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (From an Ethnographic Museum). They combine fragments of mass-media photographs of the German New Woman with photographic reproductions of sculptures and masks from Africa, Asia and Oceania. Höch’s interest in non-European art dated from the Berlin Dada period, in particular from her reading of Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture, [1915] 2004). She later claimed that the series Aus einem ethnographischen Museum was inspired by a visit with Kurt Schwitters to the Völkerkundemuseum (Folk Art Museum) in Leiden in 1926. Although Höch herself considered Aus einem ethnographischen Museum as a Sammlung or collection, underscoring the museological reference, they were never exhibited in their entirety in the artist’s lifetime.6 She recycled ethnographic materials in her montages as early as 1923 and would continue to integrate non-European images in subsequent photomontages, which makes it difficult to consider these photomontages as a closed series. Moreover, although some of them carry Roman numerals, there appears to be no coherent sequence to the collection. Höch herself would later situate the series within the contemporary context: ‘With the series From an Ethnographic Museum I wanted to expose the unscrupulous and facile exploitation of African sculptures inundating Europe at that time’ (quoted in Burmeister et al. 2016: 188).7 The photomontages will be discussed here in the ideological and artistic context of 1920s Weimar Germany: on the one hand, in relation to contemporary racist and colonial discourses, and discourses on women; and on the other hand, in the context of the popularisation of non-European cultures in the illustrated press and museum collections. More specifically, the analysis of Höch’s photomontages raises questions relating to the configuration of and confrontation between the European and the non-European body. While several critics have explored Höch’s appropriation of ethnographic images to critique contemporary gender definitions, I will argue that Höch, by fabricating the hybrid or monstrous body, refuses to retrieve either the image of the New Woman or the figure of the non-European. Formally, the photomontages can be considered as informed by both Dada and Constructivism. Berlin Dada was dissolved in 1922 and yet the clashing elements of the works recall Tzara’s statement in his ‘Manifeste dada 1918’: ‘people

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can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh breath’ (1918: 3).8 Moreover, in contrast to her earlier Dada photomontages, such as DadaRundschau (1919), which are dense, complex compositions, the photomontages in the Ethnographic Museum series recall Constructivist compositional principles. For example, Denkmal II: Eitelkeit (Monument II: Vanity, 1926)9 is composed of a composite figure placed on an oversize pedestal, against a ground made up of brightly coloured papers. The series subverts the role of the photograph – and notably the ethnographic photograph – as a medium of empirical truth and objectivity by fragmenting the represented subject, and flattening and fragmenting the pictorial space. As Lora Rempel suggests, in Höch’s photomontages both ‘the body represented in the image’ and ‘the body of the photograph’ are fractured (1994: 154). How, then, can these works be situated in the political and cultural context of 1920s Germany? German fascination for non-European cultures dates largely from the end of the nineteenth century, as testified in the highly popular colonial exhibitions, which included the public display of natives (Völkerschauen) in Berlin and Dresden’s zoological gardens, as well as in the important ethnographic collections which had been set up in the 1880s in Dresden and Berlin during German colonial expansion in Africa. After 1918, defeated Germany had been forced to abandon its domestic and overseas territorial claims, losing its colonies to the Allied powers. In 1918 the Weimar government organised a propaganda campaign for their restitution, on the grounds of economic expansion, ‘national honour’ and the need for Lebensraum (Rueger 1986). In 1923 the French occupying force included colonial troops stationed in the Rhineland, a deeply unpopular move which encouraged the popular press, films and novels to peddle racist fantasies – stories of rape, infection and children of mixed races (Marks 1983). These constitute the target of the parodies in Höch’s photomontages such as Liebe im Busch (Love in the Bush, 1925), discussed above, and Mischling (Half-Caste, 1924).10 Popular interest in the ‘exotic’ continued through the 1920s; Höch would later refer to the ‘bush cult’ of that time (Makholm 2004: 335). It was prevalent in advertisements; in the ‘negrophilia’ of Berlin’s cabarets with La Revue Nègre and Josephine Baker, who for her contemporaries was a heady combination of the modern and the tribal; in the popularisation of ethnographic objects in the illustrated press (notably in Albert Flechtheim’s publication Der Querschnitt); and as a fashionable collector’s item by influential figures such as Han Coray, gallery owner in Zurich, or Paul Guillaume in Paris. Attitudes to black culture, unsurprisingly, divided the Left and Right. In an article on La Revue Nègre titled ‘Die Negern erobern Europa!’ (‘The Negroes are conquering Europe!’), Ivan Goll called on the American black – in his words, ‘a new unspoiled race’ (‘ein neues, unverbrauchtes Geschlecht’) – as a source of

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renewal, to invigorate decadent European society: ‘But the leading role belongs to Negro blood. Its drops are slowly falling over Europe, a long-since dried-up land that can scarcely breathe’ (1994: 560).11 On the Right, as was shown in chapter 8, establishment figure Paul Schultze-Naumburg (1994) claimed, on the contrary, that modern German art had abandoned classical ideals of harmony and measure, and retrograded to the scribbles of cave-dwellers. Höch’s recycling of images from non-European cultures is thus an integral part of the rapprochement between modern and tribal, as a worrying sign of degeneracy for the conservatives, a source of regeneration for the avant-garde. By juxtaposing them with contemporary images of the Neue Frau or New Woman, as she was fabricated in women’s journals, Höch foregrounds the similarity of 1920s right-wing discourse on the German woman with that on non-European societies, focusing on the characteristics they allegedly share – irrationality, primitiveness and uncontrolled sexuality – sources, as we saw, of both fear and fascination. Höch sourced many of her ethnographic images in the illustrated journal Der Querschnitt, a monthly publication popular with the artistic and literary avant-garde. Founded in 1921 by Alfred Flechtheim, it was published by Ullstein, the publishing house where Höch worked as a graphic designer. The cultural relativism which dominated the publication (the word querschnitt means ‘cross-section’) is repeatedly materialised in the juxtaposition of artefacts from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, alongside European art images: a Gabon mask is juxtaposed with a painting by Paul Klee and a Japanese print, for example. At times, photographs of ethnographic objects were presented alongside apparently unrelated material: for example, the photograph of a statue of a Theban goddess illustrates the account of a visit to French engineer Henri Fabre; a New Guinea statue is juxtaposed with a vaudeville performer. Such cases represent examples of ‘soft’ primitivism, the modish appropriation of exotic images – and the stereotyping of ‘black’ culture – in a process intent on the de-specification of the non-European image and its assimilation into popular German culture. It leads art historian Kristina Makholm to claim that Höch’s juxtapositions of modern German woman and African sculpture create a new type of modernist primitivism, examples of ‘self-conscious, media-based parodies of a more ­cynical age … pure image, the simulacrum of the primitive object as seen through the modern mass media’ (2004: 336). Yet such a reading of Höch’s series, as little more than a gently ironic comment on the Weimar Republic’s commodification of exotic art, reduces their radical import. It is arguable, on the contrary, that Höch removes these images from both their ritualistic ethnographic context and their popularised context (the illustrated journal), in order to reconfigure and revitalise them in nowjarring encounters where the ethnographic and the New Woman components,

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9.3  Hannah Höch, Denkmal I (Monument I, 1924), from Aus einem ethnographischen Museum

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9.4  Guro Mask, Côte d’Ivoire (nineteenth century)

held in tension, cohabit uneasily. In so doing, she counters the recuperation and integration of non-European objects within popular German culture, in journals such as Der Querschnitt. Denkmal I (1924) is such an example of a disjunctive assemblage (figure 9.3). Burmeister et al. (2016: 218) have sourced the images used by Höch: she has combined the photograph of the upper body of a Theban goddess referred to above, drawn from Der Querschnitt (Summer 1925), and the leg of film actress Lilian Harvey from BIZ (July 1928) with a Guro mask from the Museum Rietberg in Zurich (figure 9.4), reproduced in Der Querschnitt (Summer 1924). Höch’s montage strategies are reminiscent of Huelsenbeck’s Phantastische Gebete (1916), discussed in chapter 5, with their juxtapositions of German, French, advertising, scientific and invented languages; or of the discordant poetics of Tzara, who mixes fragments from French and African or Malgache languages in some of his poems, producing jarring, irreducible juxtapositions, as in ‘Le géant blanc lépreux du paysage’ from Vingt-cinq poems (Zurich: Collection Dada 1918):

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les microbes se cristallisent en palmiers de muscles balançoires bonjour sans cigarette tzantzantza ganga bouzdouc zdouc nfoùnfa mbaah mbaah nfoùnfa. (Tzara 1975: 87)

The question remains as to whether the photomontages are a critique of New Woman or a comment on the display of the ethnographic object. Analyses of Höch’s photomontages, it is true, have focused mainly on her critique of the fabrication of contemporary images of women. Rempel, for instance, argues that the works are ‘an iconoclastic, cannibalistic feasting on the mythical body of femininity and the mass media’s iconography of misogyny’ (1994: 153). Similarly, Lavin claims that the artist’s recycling of stereotypical images of women is, simultaneously, a celebration and a critique of the fabrication of the New Woman in the popular German media. What, then, is the role of the ethnographic element in such an approach? None, for Lavin, who claims that Höch instrumentalised African and Oceanic images in order to critique gender positions: ‘In the series, Höch was not particularly critical of contemporary ethnographic attitudes; instead, she used images of tribal objects and the exhibition format in ethnographic museums almost exclusively to comment on contemporary European gender definitions’ (1993: 160). For Lavin, then, Fremde Schönheit (Strange Beauty, c.1929) is ‘question[ing] contemporary norms of feminine beauty’ (1993: 166). Similarly, Peter Boswell reads female psychology into the images, maintaining that Aus einem ethnographischen Museum ‘provides a profound meditation on the alienation of the female, who is placed on a pedestal and isolated from social intercourse, and whose demeanour is obscured by a mask that both conceals her individual identity and reveals her psychic unease’ (1996: 12). More recently, focusing on the ethnographic object itself, Maria Makela and Kristin Makholm have linked its use to the social and cultural context of 1920s Germany, while reiterating the claim that Höch instrumentalises the ethnographic object. Makela states that ‘grotesque images like Sweet One challenge presumed universals of classical beauty’ (2003: 195); while Makholm, in a discussion of Hörner and Mit Mütze, asserts that Höch ‘utilized the ethnographic object primarily for its power to estrange and make fantastic a photographic portrait’ (2004: 222). There is thus little indication in the critical literature that Höch’s irony targets ethnographic or racial positions themselves. This, obviously, is not to deny that Höch used the ethnographic object in some of her works to comment on women’s traditional roles in 1920s Germany. Indische Tänzerin (Indian Dancer, 1930),12 for example, which combines a still from Carl Dreyer’s film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) with a wooden mask from Cameroon,13 topped with a paper crown of cutout knives and forks, can be read as an ironic comment on the New Woman and her characteristic Bubikopf hairstyle, as queen of domesticity. Alternatively, as Makela argues, it can be

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interpreted as a visual metaphor of Joan of Arc’s inability to speak and be heard: ‘Höch’s Joan of Arc is … a tragic symbol of Everywoman, whose voice is silenced by overdetermined gender roles’ (1996: 69). Moreover, it can also be read as an allusion to disfigured war veterans, with their reconstructed faces, the knives and forks functioning as parodies of surgical instruments: a plausible reading, given the popularity of Ernst Friedrich’s pacifist publication Krieg dem Kriege (Wage War on War, 1924; see figure 5.6). Illustrated with photographs of the war wounded, this was a best-seller throughout the 1920s. The photomontage Mutter (Mother, 1930) provides another example of a critique of women’s roles through the use of the ethnographic object: here, a dance mask of the Kwakiutl people from the north-west coast of North America is pasted over a photograph of a pregnant proletarian woman,14 with the addition of one New Woman eye, taken from a fashion magazine. For Maud Lavin (1993: 160), we are faced here with a stereotypical image of the Urmutter or earthmother. Lavin reads Höch’s image of the working-class woman burdened with unwanted pregnancies as a critique of the anti-abortion laws in Weimar Germany, imposed in support of their aggressive natalist policy – a pertinent reading, given that Höch herself was active in the campaign to legalise abortion. John Heartfield recycled the same photograph in his photomontage Mothers! Let your sons live! (1930),15 adding the image of a dead boy with a gun behind the female figure, with the caption: ‘Forced supplier of human ammunition. Take courage! The state needs unemployed and soldiers!’,16 a more overtly political statement than Höch’s image. However, in these interpretations, the instrumentalised ethnographic component is reduced to prop or foil, recuperated as deforming mirror, or simply envisaged as yet another Other. Such readings are embedded in the binary oppositions which undergird much Western thought, epitomised for example in Lavin’s claim that in these works ‘contemporary femininity is paired disturbingly with the grotesque’ (1993: 167); she is clearly speaking from within traditional Western aesthetic norms when identifying the non-European with the ‘grotesque’, conceived in opposition to the classical Western ideal of the body. Yet it is, precisely, through the notion of the grotesque that I should like to re-evaluate the significance of the ethnographic object in the construction of the body in Höch’s collages. I will argue, on the contrary, that far from being a characteristic of the ethnographic components in themselves, the grotesque is an effect of the disjunctions of the figure as a whole. As we saw in earlier chapters, two approaches to the grotesque body can be distinguished. In the first, the grotesque is seen in opposition to the perfection and closure (finito) of the classical body. Lavin’s analysis of the grotesque is based on this definition. The second (Bakhtinian) model of the grotesque, much more radical, is premised on the concept of the disjunctive body as a montage

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of incompatible and irreconcilable parts. It is this concept of the grotesque that is most productive in reading the Ethnographic Museum photomontages, because they are grounded on the co-presence and collision of tribal imagery and modern female body-parts; they collapse binary structures (classical/­grotesque), undo hierarchies (the African in the service of the European) and celebrate materiality. This notion of the grotesque figure can be fruitfully linked to Julia Kristeva’s definition of the abject: ‘It is not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, order, system. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite’ ([1980] 1982: 4). The common rejection of normative rules and boundaries, adds Kristeva, is compounded by their rejection of binary oppositions: ‘The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny’ ([1980] 1982: 15). Höch’s monstrous figures effectively suspend and neutralise oppositions rather than resolving them. Hence, in Trauer (Sadness, 1925)17 – which combines the lower body of a young tattooed woman from Borneo, a pendant ivory head from Congo, arms and breasts from an African wooden stool and a second set of arms from a European woman – the multiple non-European components are not simply foils to the European body, nor are the parts resolved into a unified figure in an engagingly ‘soft’ primitive fusion or an autonomous form. On the contrary, the body produced remains a jumble of spare parts, the site of an unresolvable confrontation of disparate components, a harsh, satirical, ‘cadavre exquis’. In Höch’s creation – which can be linked to Salomo Friedlaender’s (Mynona) rejection of synthesis in favour of the concept of a ‘balance of differences’ (1918) – both European and non-European body-parts are decontextualised, disoriented and reframed. Differing, and irreconcilable, norms of representation of the body are exposed and maintained in a tense, uneasy equilibrium. Furthermore, by jumbling categories with a clear disregard for racial difference, Höch’s hybrid bodies undermine established ethnic boundaries that served to differentiate and hierarchise self/other and white/black (Frame 1997). The photomontages can thus be read as an overt critique of the evolutionary ladder at the centre of social Darwinism that positioned women and black people lower than the European male. In that context, Höch’s photomontage Negerplastik (figure 9.5) constitutes a comment on the popular media cliché of African culture equated with the allegedly ‘primitive’ (ivory mask from Benin), the woman (female eye pasted over the mask) and the child (torso).18 However, such a reading risks taming the monster. In the photomontages, ethnic difference is neither integrated into a new unity (the scars left by the grafting of partbodies remain visible) nor assimilated and hierarchised (each component resists

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9.5  Hannah Höch, Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture, 1928)

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subordination to a totalising meaning). Instead, the disparate body-parts, the African and European elements, continue to clash and collide, each component remaining an irretrievable alien presence. These monstrous bodies function ‘literally and in every sense’ (‘littéralement et dans tous les sens’, Rimbaud), and their very materiality is designed to resist reductive processes of mediation. Furthermore, the theatrical qualities of these hybrid bodies – the stress on fabrication, frontality, fetishism, fairground freak – are underscored through Höch’s parodic use of bases or pedestals, at times ridiculously tiny and ineffectual, as in Negerplastik, while at others, out of all proportion to the figure, as in the appropriately titled Denkmal II: Eitelkeit (Monument II: Vanity, 1926), which combines an African mask and torso with the legs of a European female. The base in such cases isolates the object, making the status and siting of the figure unstable – no longer either African sculpture (since Höch has taken it out of (aus dem) the museum or the ethnographic photograph) or European body (since she has estranged the legs from the fashion magazine). As a result, such figures are aterritorial and, as such, successfully resist recuperation in terms of contemporary social, aesthetic or scientific norms. In a word, they are – both literally and figuratively – disoriented, or dépaysés. In this context, a work like Entführung (Abduction, 1925),19 the composite image of a wooden sculpture from Congo, Raub der Jungfrauen (Abduction of the Virgins), with added Bubikopf head, base and fruit trees, constitutes an ironic narrative of the process of alienation itself; a process in which components, both African and European, are abducted and disoriented in a radical act of cutting and pasting. In wrenching images from their original context and reassembling them in the same phenomenological space, Höch foils attempts to subordinate one to the other, while refusing to countenance their possible merger (as we saw in Man Ray’s 1924 photograph Black and White earlier in this chapter). In contrast with the Expressionist practice of integrating non-European images into paintings – Nolde’s Masks with Still-Life series (1912), for example, conflates the ethnographic mask, the imaginary mask with objects from the artist’s studio – Höch strenuously resists the reduction of ethnic difference in her works. On the contrary, the components clash, withstanding any gesture of resolution. Moreover, far from proposing a new aesthetic of cultural relativism – the ‘soft primitivism’ of Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre, or the recuperative strategies of the illustrated press with their pairing of modern and tribal images, or again Man Ray’s photographs of 1926 – Höch’s images stress the co-presence of European and African, and can thus be considered examples of ‘hard primitivism’. Unlike the ethnographic photographs of the illustrated press, where the body of the native is kept separate from that of the ethnographer, Höch has generated transgressive, and therefore uneasy, proximity for Western and non-Western bodies. Her grotesque figures undo facile contemporary positions

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of the ‘primitive’ – whether Expressionist, Revue Nègre or Illustrirte – predicated on the notion of retrieval of difference. In her photomontages, the mismatch of limbs is overtly displayed, the grafts kept visible, not merely exposing what is constructed as irreconcilable, but celebrating irreconcilability.20 The analysis developed in these pages has shown ways in which Höch’s photomontage strategies go beyond the simple critique or celebration of the fetishised Neue Frau, or the cultural retrieval of the non-European object. Through her recycling of already commodified images in her use of photographic fragments of part-bodies – lips, eyes, legs as metonymical signifiers of ‘German New Woman’, tribal mask as metonymic signifier of ‘non-European body’ – she reprises in a challengingly ludic mode the strategies of commodity culture. Her playful reclaiming and reconfiguring of part-bodies, her juxtapositions of African statue and European female body-parts to generate a parodic dialogue of fetishes, constitute a deliberate act of disavowal of the commodification of both (normative) European woman and (deviant) African mask. Her resistance to the objectification of the New Woman body and the ethnographic object exposes the capitalist logic that reifies both; and by perversely fracturing body entities, she is denying the appropriation, the colonisation, of both the female and the non-European other. By (summarily) grafting together disparate body-parts, she is defying capitalism’s patriarchal logic predicated in internalised, hence seamless differentiation and subordination. Thanks to her playful juggling and pasting of mismatched body-parts, in the very striking co-presence of disparate limbs resisting mediation and celebrating materiality, both the ethnographic object and the European body retain (recover) their status as unassimilable, radically foreign, bodies.

Notes 1. The photograph is reproduced in Murphy (2009: 113). 2. ‘Moi, il ne me faut pas une chose mais deux choses. Deux choses qui en ellesmêmes n’ont pas de rapport et que je mets ensemble pour créer, par contraste, une sorte de poésie plastique.’ 3. See Adamowicz (2011) for an earlier version of this section. 4. The mask was reproduced in Albert Flechtheim’s illustrated journal Der Querschnitt 4:2–3 (1924), while the tribal figure appeared in Der Querschnitt 5:1 (1925), 8. Höch sourced many of her collage elements in this publication. 5. See for example Rempel (1994); Boswell (1996: 7–24); Makela (2003); Makholm (2004); Burmeister et al. (2016). 6. Sixteen photomontages from the series were shown in her photomontage exhibition in Brno in Czechoslovakia in 1934. 7. ‘Ich wollte mit der Serie: Aus einem ethnographischen Museum die skrupellose

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und simple Verwendung der zu dieser Zeit aus Afrika – Europa überschwemmenden Negerplastik anleuchten. Sie wurde mir zu simpel dem Arbeitsprozeß gewißer Gruppen einverleibt, und ich verquickte also Negerplastik-Elemente mir unserem derzeitigen “Halbwelt-Kulturgot”.’ 8. ‘on peut faire les actions opposées ensemble, dans une seule fraîche respiration.’ 9. Hannah Höch, Denkmal II (Eitelkeit) (1926), collage, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg. 10. Hannah Höch, Mischling (1924), collage, Collection of IFA, Stuttgart. 11. ‘Aber die Hauptrolle hat das Negerblut inne. Langsam fallen seine Tropfen über Europa. Ein längst vertrocknetes Land atmete kaum mehr’ (Goll 1926: 4). 12. Hannah Höch, Indische Tänzerin (1930), collage with ink and metal foil, MoMA, New York. 13. Reproduced in Der Querschnitt 5:2 (February 1925). 14. Reproduced in AIZ 9:10 (1930). 15. John Heartfield, Mothers! Let your sons live!, AIZ 9:10 (1930), 183. 16. ‘Zwangslieferantin von Menschenmaterial. Nur Mut! Der Staat braucht Arbeitslose und Soldaten!’ 17. Hannah Höch, Trauer (Sadness, 1925), from Aus einem ethnographischen Museum, collage on cardboard, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. 18. The title, Negerplastik, references Carl Einstein’s 1915 study; Hausmann gave his own annotated copy to Höch in 1919. 19. Hannah Hoch, Entführung (1925), collage, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The Congo sculpture was originally reproduced in BIZ, Germany’s most popular weekly illustrated newspaper during the Weimar Republic. It was owned by the publishing company Ullstein Verlag, for which Höch worked. 20. Makholm refers to the figures as a ‘jumble of parts – part primitive, part modern – [which] form grotesque bodies that refuse reconciliation’ (2004: 331).

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10 Limit-bodies

DADA est l’enseigne de l’abstraction. Tristan Tzara (1975: 363)1

The lady vanishes In New York in 1921 Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray shot a short film depicting Man Ray shaving the pubic hair of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The ‘first American Dada’, she was a poet, sculptor, shoplifter and performance artist. Her eccentric appearance on the streets of New York, decked out with a coal-scuttle hat and a birdcage necklace, head shaved or dyed, was in itself a Dada event. The film was lost during processing, Duchamp having attempted to develop it in a dustbin.2 Only one frame marking the event has survived, attached to a letter to Tzara from Man Ray, self-styled director of bad movies (‘directeur de mauvais movies’, 1998: 213). The lady was to disappear once again in Man Ray’s film Le Retour à la raison (1923), when the photographic figure of a nude woman appears to the spectator as abstract shapes (see analysis below). In 1923 Hannah Höch visited Schwitters in Hannover, where she contributed to his Merzbau with a grotto incorporating photomontages, described by Schwitters as ‘bordello with a lady with three legs’ (‘Brodell, mit einer Dame mit 3 Beinen’, 1931: 115). The Merzbau was destroyed during the Allied bombings of Hannover in 1943. Such events – bodies lost, destroyed, dissolved – stand as markers of the end of humanism and, as such, are indicative of the end of the centrality that the human figure once occupied in Western art. The body in Dada is marginalised, objectified, fragmented, dissolved, leaving only traces – in a photograph, a memoir, a rectified readymade, an object, an abstract form. We are confronted

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here by what Paul Ardenne refers to as ‘an aesthetics of remains’ (‘une esthétique des restes’) in his discussion of the gradual disappearance of the human figure in contemporary art, leading to his deployment of ‘a grammar of disappearance’ (‘une grammaire de la disparition’) to account for its fragments, displacements and traces (2001: 449). The present chapter will explore some of the Dadaists’ disappearing tricks: the body as trace (in Man Ray’s Le Retour à la raison); the spectator’s physical intervention in Duchamp’s readymades; the body merged with its environment (in Max Ernst’s Fiat modes pereat ars); and the passage from mimetic image to object to abstraction in Dada portraits.

Body to trace: Man Ray’s Le Retour à la raison (1923) Man Ray played a central role in this shift, pushing the boundaries of the human body to their limit in his experimental film Le Retour à la raison (1923), in which the human figure becomes indistinguishable from the objects it is montaged with, and is finally reduced to a trace.3 Man Ray produced this three-minute ‘automatic’ film in twenty-four hours as part of the programme for the last Paris Dada event, La Soirée du Coeur à barbe, organised by Tzara on 6 July 1923 at the Théâtre Michel.4 According to Man Ray, the film was the result of improvised bricolage, montaged from ‘sporadic shots’ (1998: 211) of camera-based images, such as a rotating paper spiral, a light bulb, the lights of a merry-go-round, an optophonetic poem, alternating with kineticised rayographs, produced by placing objects such as drawing-pins, nails or a spring onto strips of photosensitive paper and briefly exposing them to the light. During the screening the film reel broke several times, accidentally adding the audience’s clamours to the event (Man Ray 1998: 213). Le Retour is a non-narrative film, alternating between naturalistic and abstract images, moving from rotating abstract shapes and objects to the human figure and back to abstract forms. Among the rapid succession of images, a sequence of shots of rotating objects, including a paper spiral and a suspended eggbox divider, are followed by shots of a nude female torso, headless and armless, standing in front of a window (figure 10.1). The objects animated through movement acquire anthropomorphic qualities, an impression underscored by their alternation with the revolving torso of Kiki de Montparnasse. For Kim Knowles, these shots of the female figure echo earlier images of moving objects: ‘The nude torso … is compared with these suspended objects, not only in the movement of the body but also in its fragmented suspension within the screen space. Through camera framing, it is “cut” at both the top and the bottom, the dismembered torso floating in an imaginary space’ (2009: 60). The play of the shadow cast by the geometric form of the eggbox divider onto a white wall

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10.1  Man Ray, Le Retour à la raison (1923), still from La Révolution surréaliste 1 (1924)

is replicated in the light and shadow patterns of a curtain projected onto the breasts and stomach of the female figure, while the movement of the eggbox dividers, from right to left and left to right, is echoed in the movement of the nude torso itself. Moreover, as Kiki’s body has been cropped, it appears suspended, just like the eggbox dividers, between animate and inanimate form.

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Man Ray was well aware of this animation of the inanimate when he described the movement of the objects in anthropomorphic terms, referring to ‘huge white pins crisscrossing and revolving in an epileptic dance’, or a drawing-pin making ‘desperate efforts to leave the screen’ (1998: 212). Reciprocally, the rotation of the torso intercalated with rotating objects transforms the body into an object among others. Both body and objects are thus derealised, abstracted through movement and the play on shadows; and the resulting confusion is underscored by a shot of Man Ray’s assemblage Danger/Dancer (1920), ‘an airbrush composition of gear wheels … inspired by the gyration of a Spanish dancer’ (1998: 79), the animation of the object provided, in this case, by smoke. The play of positive and negative images, as though on a screen, clearly harks back to magic-lantern images, as well as acting as a metaphor of the process of the rayograph or, indeed, of film itself. Antonin Artaud adds a helpful dimension here when he refers to film as a surface or a skin, exploiting a wordplay on peau (skin) and pellicule (film): ‘The human skin of things, the dermis of reality, that is what cinema plays with above all’ (1961: 19).5 Dismembered and abstracted, the headless body of the nude model can thus be perceived as mannequin, optical illusion, or simply moving shapes of light and shadow. The patterns moving across the torso, which evoke a form of body art playing on tattoos or scars, animal stripes or the bars of a cage, transform the body into a fluid form whose contours are dissolved in the light and shadow patterns projected onto and around it, thus not only transforming the body into a screen but also effecting a transgression of the limits of the body contained. In a discussion of Man Ray’s photograph of the nude figure, reproduced in 1924 in the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, Rosalind Krauss brings to bear Caillois’s concept of mimicry, which she defines as ‘the inscription of space on the body of an organism’, when she refers to the nude torso ‘as if submitting to the possession by space’, where the facile distinction between body and non-body is blurred (1985: 50). The woman’s body, exceeding its normal anatomical limits, is celebrated as light, space and movement, as an example of what Breton would later define as ‘veiled erotic’ (‘érotique voilée’). The camera actively transforms the female figure through both its juxtaposition with complex shadow patterns and the interplay with other objects with which it is montaged. For Mary Ann Caws, the outcome is enhancement: ‘in no way is the body deformed, it is rather augmented by its natural possibilities’ (1986: 275). Eroticised through the play of light and shadow and the slow rotation, and juxtaposed with the slowly unravelling spiral, the sequence is invested with a tactile quality. In addition, the body is abstracted, transformed into a surface, a screen onto which shadow patterns are projected, caught in an oscillation between figuration and abstraction. Elsewhere, similar examples of abstract-eroticism generated by rhythmic qualities include instances of repeated actions, as in the

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sequence of shots of a woman climbing steps in Léger’s Ballet mécanique (1924), recalling Duchamp’s early painting Nude descending a staircase (1912); or Emak Bakia (1926) with its fetishistic focus on the superimposed images of Rose Wheeler’s legs as she steps out of a car, a sequence which reactivates and extends the film cliché of the Hollywood star. Fleetingness marks the presence of the female body even more in the last part of Le Retour à la raison. Here Man Ray placed the photographic negative of a nude woman, shot partly through glass, over several individual frames, and printed it directly onto the film strip, so that the body, transformed into moving abstract shapes, becomes almost invisible to the eye when viewed at normal projection speed. Kiki’s nude body is thus present yet hidden, a fleeting indexical trace, like a ghostly presence. Commenting on this (dis)appearance, Katharine Conley explains: ‘the viewer registers a retinal trace recognition of a human body mixed in with the inanimate objects made lively by smoke and turning movement’, thus bringing into consciousness the image of his lover Kiki (2013: 32–3). One might add, moreover, that the female body in Le Retour à la raison can be considered as a screen for the projection of Man Ray’s desires and anxieties about the stability of his own self-image. It functions therefore as a form of displaced self-portrait, thus confirming that the Dada quest for the other often mediates a search for self-identity. Other traces of the body in Dada works include semen (as in Duchamp’s Paysage fautif (Wayward Landscape, 1946) or blood (connoted in Duchamp’s La Sainte Vierge (Blessed Virgin, 1920). Among indexical traces is the recurrent image of the handprint. Man Ray’s Self-Portrait (1916, now lost), for example, is an abstract assemblage made from a bell-push, two inverted bell covers and the imprint of the artist’s hand (la main) on white paper as a substitute for his ­signature – a simple game for an artist who would sometimes call himself ‘Main Ray’. Similarly, in a letter to Tzara (dated 31 December 1919), Ernst sent an inked handprint with the caption La Bonne Poignée de moi (A Good Handshake from me). While such indexical traces underline the importance of the tactile in producing a work, tactility, as will be argued in the next section, is also central to the experience of the viewer.

Body to object: ‘rendezvous’ or Duchamp’s readymades In contrast to works by Duchamp in which the human figure is present as an iconographic subject, from his 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, or Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, to Étant donnés (1948–49), his readymades at first appear quite alien to bodily engagement, and to physicality itself. As manufactured objects, they demand the artist’s minimal intervention and the viewer’s cursory or quizzical glance. As conceptual art they seem to invite an almost

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exclusively intellectual engagement with the object. They do, however, involve the body, not iconographically, but in their performative function, since they call for the viewer’s bodily response, a moment in which visuality is replaced by tactile engagement. In an editorial attributed to Beatrice Wood, the author confronts the scandalous ‘Richard Mutt Case’, declaring: ‘Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object’ (Wood 1917: 5). In Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and other readymades, the banal utilitarian function of the commodity object is lost as a result of its decontextualisation, effected partly through its inscription or title, partly through its physical displacement and deliberately provocative misplacement: In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915) and Hat Rack (1917) were suspended from the ceiling in Duchamp’s New York studio; Fountain was hung from a door frame when in the studio, and rotated ninety degrees on a pedestal when in the museum. Further subversion of the commodity object’s utilitarian function is effected when the readymade is considered in anthropomorphic terms. As David Joselit writes, readymades are ‘haunted by a vestigial anthropomorphism, a metaphorical and often literal dispersal or dismemberment of the body’ (1998: 92). In a process resembling Dada’s appropriation of machine images (discussed in chapter 4), Duchamp’s domestic objects have given rise to multifarious anthropomorphic readings. To take a well-known example, Fountain, a public urinal exhibited on its side on a plinth, retains something of the functional association with the needs of the male body, but also analogically with the curves of the female body or more specifically the vulva (figure 10.2). The result is both a metonymical and a metaphorical link to the human body. It has, consequently, been gendered male, female or bisexual. ‘Someone said, “Like a lovely Buddha”; someone said, “Like the legs of the ladies by Cézanne”’ (Norton 1917: 6). It was labelled female by Duchamp himself: ‘On n’a que: pour femelle la pissotière et on en vit’ (2008: 37); while Juan Antonio Ramirez (1998: 56–9) considers it bisexual. Further metaphorical associations have invoked both the religious and the sacrilegious, whether ‘Madonna of the Bathroom’ (Stieglitz) or African mask, ‘conflation of the technological and the tribal’ (Zabel 1999: 35). When discussing the readymades Hat Rack or Trébuchet, George Baker treats them in terms of a ‘concerted anthropomorphism, their phallic limbs or spidery appendages, their closeness – as the kind of supplemental armature that any coat stand is – to the human body’ (2005: 213). These examples of anthropomorphisation of the readymade can be read as a mode of retrieval of the commodified object, a strategy of aestheticisation of the utilitarian object. As such, however, they constitute modes of apprehension

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10.2  Marcel Duchamp, Fountain by R. Mutt, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, Blind Man (1917)

of the object that Duchamp resolutely rejected. When asked by Alfred Barr, for example, ‘But, oh, Marcel, why do they look so beautiful today?’, Duchamp is said to have answered wryly: ‘Nobody’s perfect’ (quoted in Umland and Sudhalter 2008: 120). Indeed, as he maintained in an interview: ‘the choice of

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readymades is always based on visual indifference, and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste’ (Cabanne 1971: 48), making it clear that visual effect or aesthetic quality had little to do with the choice of readymades. The explanation of what appears to be a radical rejection lies partly in the fact that, in such works, visuality is downgraded, displaced, by tactility, as Janine Mileaf rightly argues: as a consequence, ‘the artwork would thereby provoke physical response or even disturbance rather than remote contemplation’ (2010: 2). More important than their iconographic appearance or metaphorisation is, therefore, their performative function, the bodily encounter not only between object and artist but also, more innovatively, between object and viewer. An actual bodily engagement now prioritises the performative and tactile, relegating the representational and visual. These readymades demand a radically new physical response, a concrete ‘rendez-vous’, to use Duchamp’s terms (Schwarz 2008: 126), between viewer and object. As Dawn Ades et al. write, quite simply, ‘[they] invite and anticipate bodily action’ (1999: 161). Examples abound. Prière de toucher (Please Touch) greets the viewer of the 1947 Surrealism exhibition catalogue, for instance, the cover of which is adorned with a pink rubber breast. Similarly, a bicycle wheel mounted on a kitchen stool in Duchamp’s New York studio would be set in motion by the artist or his visitors as they walked past, the gesture transforming it into a kinetic sculpture. Visitors were also guaranteed a sensory surprise when invited to lift the assisted readymade Why not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy (1921), a cage holding a cuttlefish bone, a thermometer and a heap of sugar cubes that turn out to be marble cubes. Potentially more hazardous for a caller, the row of coat pegs nailed to the studio floor, titled Trébuchet (1917), based on a double pun: from the verb trébucher, to trip or stumble, and from chess, in a move where a pawn is sacrificed to make the opponent ‘stumble’. And, as Arturo Schwarz recounts, even when Duchamp suspended Trébuchet from the ceiling it was ‘so that flies might stumble over it’ (2008: 126). The readymades thus seek to incite in the viewer (if she is still simply a viewer) not meaningful or supposedly productive actions, but banal, almost mechanical gestures such as touching, peeing, tripping, spinning. They engage the viewer’s body not in work but in play, as Helen Molesworth suggests: Duchamp’s readymades (re)articulate the working body as humorous. Bodies that continue old motions when new ones are called for and bodies that have become machinic, routinized, or Taylorized are transformed in Duchamp’s studio by his arrangement of the readymades. Laughter is both provoked by the involuntary (tripping) and is itself involuntary, as laughter occurs as an involuntary response to a person or thing not working (properly). (1998: 58)

Molesworth goes on to suggest that ‘through their humorous appeal to slapstick’, such objects subvert the utilitarian function of the object in an openly

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‘anti-Taylorist gesture’ (1998: 56, 58). For Ades et al., the repeated pleasurable actions suggested by these objects can be considered as a critique of commodity fetishism, through their transformation into ‘pleasure-machines’ (1999: 162). One might add, however, that while such readings are fully justified for totally unproductive gestures like the spinning of the cycle wheel, even ‘pleasuremachines’ have a function, whereas the actions incited by several of the objects would seem to generate frustration rather than pleasure: the hat rack, bottle dryer or snow shovel suspended from the ceiling remain out of reach of hat or bottle or hand, while the prosthetic tool In Advance of the Broken Arm is a useless extension of the damaged body. Through decontextualisation, reassignment (détournement) and misplacement these readymades undo functionality and effectively question the relation between object and body, interpellating the viewer, taunting her to intervene, while at the same time rendering intervention quasi-impossible.6

Body to space: Max Ernst’s Fiat modes pereat ars The tracings of space onto the body of the female figure discussed above in Man Ray’s film Le Retour à la raison, and the consequent ‘possession by space’ of the body suggested by Krauss, is paralleled in Max Ernst’s Fiat modes pereat ars (Let There Be Fashion, Down with Art), which also stages (re)configurations of the human figure in space. Fiat modes is a portfolio of eight lithographs (letterpress and lineblock printed on paper) produced in October 1919 and published in January 1920 by Angelika and Heinrich Hoerle’s Schlömilch-Verlag in Cologne, with a subsidy from the Cologne city council. Each plate depicts an overtly theatrical space occupied by surrogate human figures: a tailor’s dummy, featureless automatons, disarticulated puppets, cone-, column- or round-shaped figures (figure 10.3). They present variations on a theme rather than an overt narrative development. The plates were signed ‘Ernst’, ‘Dada Ernst’, ‘max ernst’ or ‘Dadamax ERNST’, evoking the artist’s shifting identities, as discussed earlier. The carefully delineated diagrammatic spaces and the inclusion of text and mathematical formulae within the pictorial spaces are evidence of the influence of Picabia. To this should be added echoes of the pittura metafisica of de Chirico and Carrà, whose works Ernst had discovered in the journal Valori Plastici in Goltz’s bookshop in Munich. Ernst (1970: 31) later remarked that the portfolio was actually a homage to de Chirico. The influence of the two artists is evident firstly in the iconographic motif of the mannequins or puppet-figures in disjunctive spaces. Camfield (1993: 64) notes, for example, that the dressmaker’s dummy in plate 1 recalls Carrà’s L’Ovale delle apparizioni (Oval of apparitions, 1918),7 while the tailor figure is reminiscent of the figure of the father in de Chirico’s drawing The Prodigal Son (1917).8

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10.3  Max Ernst, Fiat modes pereat ars, no. 1 (1920)

Sustaining the iconographic, moreover, the influence of Carrà and de Chirico is evident in the relation between the human figures and the construction of space. Pictorial spaces in Fiat modes are overtly fictional, their artificiality underscored by the resemblance to stage sets. Renaissance linear perspective is distorted through the irrational use of orthogonals, which do not converge on a

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single point but create multiple vanishing points. In plate 7, for example, the left orthogonal is diagonal, giving the illusion of perspectival space, and the lettering on the right recedes into deep space, while the line on the right appears vertical, denying any illusion of depth (figure 10.4). The eye of the viewer thus alternates between a sense of deep and shallow space, for pictorial space has neither the three-dimensionality of classical Renaissance painting, nor the planar surface

10.4  Max Ernst, Fiat modes pereat ars, no. 7 (1920)

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of modernist works, but combines both, as in the large central shape which is both pyramid and triangle. Irrational shading, moreover, further destroys any semblance of mimeticism: the (relatively) naturalistic shadow of the large triangular form is echoed in the non-naturalistic triangular shadow projected by the round figure in the foreground; the protruding phallic shape on the cone projects a shadow below it. In general, the viewer is forced to acknowledge, in clear defiance of logic, that the shadows appear to have more substance than the figures themselves. The constructed character of the spaces as simulacra is underscored by the evocation of theatrical stages with their exaggeratedly tilted planes, as in the steeply receding floorboards in plate 6, recalling de Chirico’s The Seer (1915) or The Disquieting Muses (c.1917).9 Moreover, the theatrical space is sometimes replicated, as in plate 6, where the steep box-like construction above the almost vertical floorboards is mirrored in the smaller inverted box suspended to the left of the lithograph. Returning to plate 7, a second fictional space is suggested as a shop window display, the receding words on the right – ‘ZUR NEUEN KUNST D D’ – inverted, evoking the lettering on a shop front; a space suggested in the title itself, which is a transformation (already twisted in the portfolio’s title) of the familiar saying ‘Fiat ars, pereat vita’ (‘Let there be art, life is transient’). Traditional art, evoked in the inscription, ‘finger weg von der hl. cunst’ (‘fingers off holy art’), has given way to fashion, high art to the figures of commodity culture, dress dummies, automatons and reified human forms. The art of the past has been replaced by a new art form, that of shop windows and mannequins, pointed to by another finger, ‘ZUR NEUEN KUNST? D D’. While these inscriptions appear to elicit a rational interpretation, the remaining inscription – ‘feiner hund und gemeinschaft’ (‘a fine dog and company’) – ­disrupts the illusion and defies analysis, thus introducing yet another disruptive element. The objective of the pictorial device of Albertian perspective was the creation of a unified space in which figures and objects were unambiguously related. In the lithographs, on the contrary, perspective has lost its unifying function: human figures are juxtaposed with cones, circles and cylinders, yet they remain unrelated because of the absence of a coherent perspectival space. The tilted planes frame enigmatic encounters between surrogate and often partial human figures. In plate 7, for example, a geometrical round male figure, substanceless, featureless and armless, yet equipped with solid rectangular legs and a tiny penis repeated in his head and feet, is linked by conflicting orthogonals to a large cone with a tiny female half-figure. The cone, in its turn, is equipped with a cylindrical phallic shape. However, in failing to meet at a vanishing point, the orthogonal lines produce only spatial dislocations. The schematic figures, devoid of unambiguous spatial relationships, appear estranged, the relations between the

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figures themselves and between the figures and their environment remaining indeterminate. The effect is repeated in other plates, where the figures seem to float above the theatre stage, frozen in an alien space or dream environment. In being mediated through geometric shapes or the inanimate forms of puppets or mannequins, the depiction of the human figure has been simplified and reified. Moreover, because of the ambiguities of constructed space, it is caught in the web of geometric shapes or distorting perspectives, so that figure and ground appear to merge. Architecture collapses into stage props; architectural and bodily forms – curves, cones, circles, cylinders, protuberances, orifices – coalesce, so that body and environment become indistinguishable. For Camfield, Ernst has parodied de Chirico’s irrational spaces and simplified human forms: ‘they are toppling, pointing, pierced and piercing, as much male and female entities as architecture’ (1993: 64). Finally, on occasion, architectural or geometrical elements threaten the human figure, as in plate 5, where a toppling cylindrical form is about to crush a tiny male figure while a distant female figure appears caught between two incommensurable spaces. The illusion of frontiers between human figure and the space around it is stripped away and the two merge, shattering any illusions concerning the body’s integrity.

Body to abstraction In Ernst’s Fiat modes the human figure turned geometrical form is located within an interstitial space, neither fully organic nor fully geometric, caught between figuration and abstraction. The tendency towards abstraction preoccupied avant-garde movements, notably Cubist and Futurist artists; and Tzara could even declare in his ‘Manifeste dada 1918’: ‘Dada is the signboard of abstraction’ (‘DADA est l’enseigne de l’abstraction’, 1975: 363). Critics have identified in this tendency the symptom of a time when humanism was being undermined and, consequently, the centrality of the human figure dislodged. Looking at Huelsenbeck’s defence of abstract art, for instance, it is clearly wielded as a weapon against traditional art forms, acquiring both an ethical and a political dimension: ‘Abstract art was for us … tantamount to absolute honor. Naturalism was a psychological penetration of the motives of the bourgeois, in whom we saw our mortal enemy’ (trans. in Motherwell 1951: 24).10 In chapter 2, Dada’s abstraction of the human body was linked to Wilhelm Worringer’s argument that abstraction appears at times of social disturbance, as a reaction against the fears, alienation and distress caused by an insecure reality: ‘The drive to abstraction springs from man’s great inner anxiety in the face of the external world … I should like to call this condition an immense spiritual dread of space’ ([1908] 1963: 49). It follows that adding to this dread the negation of the materiality of the human figure is a further negation of reality. This

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is the position of Philippe Dagen who, in his study of First World War artists, argues that abstraction is a form of resistance against reality. Quoting in support of Hugo Ball’s observation on the gradual disappearance of the human figure in contemporary painting, Dagen comments: ‘[Abstraction] does not free us from the duty to represent, but incarnates the pain that would be caused by representing what is horrible. It is not a denial of the human figure, but a statement of its disappearance. To crushed men and systematic carnage corresponds the disappearance of the human image and the void of the painting’ ([1996] 2012: 256).11 Abstraction, he argues, was a consequence of the recognition of the violence done to the soldier, whose ‘disappearance’ is evidence of the anguish caused by the impossible depiction thereof. One can but agree with this definition of the role of abstraction, while adding the processes of objectification to which the Dadaists resorted, yet another form of resistance against the reality and artistic reproducibility of violence and death. In their representation of the human form, the Dadaists formulate a new pictorial language: subjectivity is dissolved when rejecting mimeticism in favour of the impersonality of objects or abstract forms. For example, in his overpainting c’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme (The Hat Makes the Man, 1920), Ernst used the page of a sales catalogue: some of the hats have been overpainted, others added, and they have been joined up with coloured tubular forms in gouache to suggest human figures, with an added text.12 Taken literally, the title refers to the principle of displacement, from human to object, on which the collage strategy is based; read as a pun, a Freudian reading identifies the hat, a recurrent motif in Dada, with bourgeois repression. Other examples of the impersonality or abstraction of the human form abound: Janco’s masks and Taeuber’s Dada Heads, Hans Arp’s abstract portraits such as La Mise au tombeau des oiseaux et des papillons (portrait de Tristan Tzara).13 All explode the traditional concept of pictorial representation based on physical resemblance. In the same vein, the recurrent theme of the mirror embodies a challenge to the facile notion of representation as a mirror to reality. Here, too, examples are numerous: Philippe Soupault’s Portrait d’un imbecile, an eighteenth-century mirror, and Kurt Schwitters’s Untitled (Assemblage on Hand-Mirror),14 a handmirror covered with collage fragments that obstruct its reflective function. A more poignant reference to the disappearance of the reflection (and, soon, the self) occurs in Tzara’s play Le Coeur à gaz, when Mouth says: ‘Everyone does not know me. I am alone here in my wardrobe and the mirror is blank when I look at myself’ (1975: 174).15 Turning to Picabia, one finds a critique of the mimeticism of the photograph accompanied by an increasingly abstract form of expression. His (self-)portrait La Veuve joyeuse (The Merry Widow, 1921) combines a photograph by Man Ray of Picabia at the wheel of his car above a rough pencil sketch of the photograph

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10.5  Francis Picabia, La Veuve joyeuse (The Merry Widow, 1921)

glued onto the canvas, with added captions ‘photographie’ and ‘dessin’ handwritten beneath the images (figure 10.5). In an open letter to six Paris and New York newspapers after the work was rejected by the Société des artistes indépendants in 1922, Picabia comments: ‘One [of the paintings rejected] is my portrait by me, along with the photograph after which it was done: you know that many of our portrait artists exploit these reproductions’ (1978: 51).16

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Picabia has inverted the usual relation between photograph and sketch, ironically pointing to the pencil sketch as an allegedly faithful (or, at least, subjective) likeness, and thus discarding photography as mere mechanical reproduction. The Merry Widow is, at last, liberated from the pointless need to reproduce a mimetic likeness. Picabia goes one step further towards abstraction – and the arbitrary – in his Portrait de Tristan Tzara (1920; figure 10.6), reproduced in the first issue of

10.6  Francis Picabia, Portrait de Tristan Tzara, Cannibale 1 (1920)

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Cannibale. It is composed of a vertical line bisecting five circles. The name ‘Tristan Tzara’ in the lower part of the diagram is poised between the words ‘illusions’ and ‘certitudes’, mocking the illusory nature of portraiture and shrugging off any certainty as to likeness or indeed meaning of the work, which seems closer to an esoteric diagram than to a human figure. The mystery and evanescence of the work is compounded by the isolated words on either side of the vertical line (‘parfums’, ‘mots vaporisés’, ‘féeries des idées’), as if generated by the central circle inscribed with the word ‘fleur’, and shifting from the sensory to the disappearance of language and the unreality of ideas. At times, the freedom from mimeticism was articulated by substituting an object for the human subject, as seen in several of the portraits exhibited at the Salon Dada in June 1921 at the Galerie Montaigne in Paris, for instance. In New York, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (c.1920; figure 10.7), reproduced in The Little Review (Winter 1922: 40), was an assemblage (now lost) combining the mechanical and the tribal: a clock spring, mechanical gears, with chicken bones and feathers, in a wine glass, playing with both Duchamp’s female persona, Rrose Sélavy, and Elsa’s own androgynous appearance (Zabel 1999: 36). Elsewhere, Elsa decked her own body with curtain tassels and rings, spoons, tomato tins, a birdcage, turning it into an assemblage of incongruous objects. Similarly, several of Picabia’s mecanomorphic images are labelled portraits. In an unusual portrait gallery in 291 (5–6, July–August 1915), Stieglitz (‘This is Stieglitz faith and love’ [‘Ici, c’est Stieglitz foi et amour’]) is portrayed as a camera (cover); the spark plug of the Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans un état de nudité (see figure 1.2) is the portrait of Agnes Ernst-Meyer; Haviland (‘Here is Haviland he is poetry’ [‘Voilà Haviland la poésie c’est lui’]) is represented by a lamp (back cover); and Picabia himself (‘The holy of holies this portrait is about me’ [‘Le saint des saints c’est de moi qu’il s’agit dans ce portrait’]) as an automobile horn. Like Janco’s masks or Taeuber’s Dada Heads, discussed in chapter 2, Hausmann’s Klebebild (glued image or collage) portraits constitute a ludic subversion of the notion of physical resemblance. In the summer of 1919 Hausmann produced three of these portraits, to be published in Huelsenbeck’s unrealised Dadaco project in 1919: Mynona (‘anonym’ reversed, a pseudonym for Salomo Friedlaender), Dr Max Ruest and Gurk, a ‘portrait’ of the poet Paul Gurk, reproduced on the back page of Der Dada 2 in December 1919 (figure 10.8). The collaged elements are recycled from woodcuts, newspaper fragments and the Paris journal Dada. Gurk integrates elements from Der Dada 3: a fragment of Arthur Segal’s woodcut migrates to Gurk’s right eyebrow and hair, while the verbal fragments ‘pan-pan-pan’ from Pierre Albert-Birot’s ‘Crayon bleu’ appear across the figure’s forehead (Benson 1986: 138, 141). The Klebebild displays a shift from representation to construction as Hausmann abandons the subjectivity of

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10.7  Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, photograph of Portrait of Duchamp (c.1920)

the traditional portrait in favour of the objectivity and anonymity of materials appropriated from the media. Volumetric forms are now replaced by the clutter of two-dimensional fragments which stubbornly refuse to cohere into a face. Other instances of the disappearing human figure go even further in discarding mimetic likeness in favour of abstraction.17 Picabia’s La Jeune fille, for example, stands out against the busy graphic elements on the first page of issue 4 of Proverbe (1920): it consists simply of a black circle in an empty space, with

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10.8  Raoul Hausmann, Gurk (1918–19), reproduced in Dada 2 (1919)

the esoteric inscription ‘bracelet de la vie’ (figure 10.9). In his analysis of this work, George Baker identifies the circle with the part object and, reintroducing the evacuated figure, links it to bodily orifices, whether ‘breast, navel, eye, mouth, anus, and of course genital “hole”’. In distinguishing between modernist and dadaist abstraction, Baker recodes the latter ‘as a field of fragmentary,

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10.9  Proverbe 4 (1920)

throbbing body parts’ (2007: 67). Relevant for La Jeune fille, perhaps, it would be hard to link this with another portrait by Picabia, titled Portrait de l’auteur par lui-même, reproduced as the frontispiece of Unique Eunuque, published in 1920 by Sans Pareil: it depicts a double arrow looping round itself and pointing down and up (figure 10.10).

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10.10  Francis Picabia, Portrait de l’auteur par lui-même (Portrait of the Artist by Himself, 1920)

In general, Picabia’s abstract portraits were actively informed by Marius de Zayas’ caricatures or ‘psychotypes’ (Bohn 1980: 446–7). The two men had met in New York in 1913 on the occasion of the Armory Show. De Zayas’s 1913 exhibition of portraits at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery (nine of which were reproduced in Camera Work in April 1914) included a charcoal drawing, a portrait of Stieglitz formed of a vertical line with two columns of superimposed circles, drawn from the photograph of a Polynesian soul-catcher (Bohn 1980: 436), and connoting both vision and the camera lens. In a similar vein, Picabia has

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pared down the human figure to minimalist linear forms. In ‘Le Manifeste du bon goût’ (1923), he readily acknowledges the extreme limits of representation that he had reached in his own radical experimentation in portraiture: ‘I believe I have done everything possible in abstract art, in the art of suggestion. Tracing a line on a canvas and naming it Pierre de Massot, or using a cogwheel for a portrait of Nicole Groult, was going as far as possible in abstraction’ (1978: 122).18 And yet, if abstraction was thus taken to the limit, two possibilities still lay beyond it: the corpse or the skeleton on the one hand; and on the other, the body as other, in its ‘exquisite’ reconstructions.

Notes 1. ‘Dada is the sign of abstraction’. 2. ‘While helping Marcel Duchamp with his research, I had shot a sequence of myself as a barber shaving the pubic hair of a nude model, a sequence which was also ruined in the process of developing and never saw the light.’ Man Ray (1998: 213). 3. See Kim Knowles (2009: 15–61) for an extended analysis of the film. 4. The original title, Retour de la raison, was given by Tzara in the printed announcement of the screening. The title can be read as an ironic reference to the French ‘rappel à l’ordre’ discussed in chapter 3. 5. ‘La peau humaine des choses, le derme de la réalité, voilà avec quoi le cinéma joue d’abord.’ 6. See, however, the work of contemporary artist Sadie Murdoch, discussed in the chapter 11. 7. Carlo Carrà, L’Ovale delle apparizioni (1918), oil on canvas, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; reproduced in De Stijl 2:7 (1919), 74a. 8. Giorgio de Chirico, The Prodigal Son (1917), oil on canvas, Museo del Novecento, Milan. 9. Giorgio de Chirico, The Seer (1915), oil on canvas, MoMA, New York; The Disquieting Muses (1917), oil on canvas, Gianni Mattioli Collection, Milan. 10. ‘Abstrakte Kunst bedeutete uns damals … soviel als unbedingte Ehrlichkeit. Naturalismus war psychologischen Eingehen auf die Motive des Bürgers, in dem wir unseren Todfeind sahen’ (Huelsenbeck 1920d: 5). 11. ‘[L’abstraction] ne libère pas du devoir de représentation, mais incarne la douleur qu’il y aurait à représenter l’horrible. Elle n’est pas dénégation de la figure, mais constat de sa disparition. A hommes broyés et carnage systématique, effacement de l’image humaine et vide du tableau.’ 12. Max Ernst, c’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme (The Hat Makes the Man, 1920), gouache, pencil, oil and ink on printed paper on paperboard, MoMA, New York. 13. Hans Arp, La Mise au tombeau des oiseaux et des papillons (portrait de Tristan Tzara) (1916–17), painted wood relief, Kunsthaus Zurich.

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14. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Assemblage on Hand-Mirror) (1920–22), various materials, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. 15. ‘Tout le monde ne me connaît pas. Je suis seule dans mon armoire et la glace est vide lorsque je me regarde.’ 16. ‘L’un [des tableaux refusés] est mon portrait par moi-même, accompagné de la photographie d’après laquelle il a été fait: vous savez que beaucoup de nos portraitistes abusent de ces reproductions.’ 17. See Verdier (2011) for an analysis of Picabia’s ‘portraits-concepts’ and ‘portraits-objets’. 18. ‘je crois avoir fait tout ce qu’il y avait à faire dans l’art abstrait, dans l’art des suggestions. Tracer une ligne sur la toile, la nommer Pierre de Massot, ou faire le portrait de Nicole Groult avec une roue dentée, c’était aller aussi loin que possible dans l’abstraction.’

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11 Conclusion: exquisite corpses

Ecce homo novus, here is the new man. Richard Huelsenbeck (1969: 31)

Exquisite corpse The crude limit-form of the body that is the corpse has appeared in this study as the violated body of the young girl in Schwitters’s Merzbau (see chapter 5), or in Otto Dix’s series Der Krieg (1924), in particular in images such as Gas Tote (Gas Victims) or Tote bei der Stellung bein Tahure (Dead Men near Position at Tahure; see figure 5.8). The corpse is also central in Grosz’s satirical drawing Die Gesundbeter (The Faith Healers, 1918), reproduced in Gott mit uns, a portfolio of lithographs first shown at the Dada-Messe in 1920, with the caption ‘Le Triomphe des sciences exactes / Die Gesundbeter / German doctors fighting the blockade’ (figure 11.1). It depicts an army doctor, surrounded by a group of seated bestial-headed officers; the doctor is examining a rotting corpse with an ear-trumpet and declaring it kriegsverwendungsfähig or fit for war service. Abbreviated to KV in a speech-bubble, it can also suggest kadavergehorsam or the obedience of a corpse, a tellingly sarcastic term used widely by the German army. Clearly, this constituted a savage indictment of a military establishment which, by 1916, was resorting to ‘unearthing the dead’ in order to send them back to the front as cannon-fodder, past and future corpses to fill the gaps in frontline combat. There was, no doubt, an autobiographical angle to this, too, Grosz himself having been evacuated to a military hospital in 1915, reincorporated in 1917 and released from active service on medical grounds shortly after. The macabre, on the other hand, is defied in the continuous (re)configurations and ‘exquisite’ manipulations of body-parts as a form of life-asserting

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11.1  George Grosz, Die Gesundbeter (The Faith Healers), from Gott mit uns (1920)

resistance to the depressed ambiance of wartime and post-war Europe. The resuscitated body, as we have seen, is partnered with the image of the chrysalis, as in Max Ernst’s 1920 collages, such as l’avionne meurtrière (see figure 7.2) or die anatomie als braut (see figure 7.5), discussed in chapter 7. A similar chrysalisbody is present in the collage Arrivée des voyageurs, from Les Malheurs des immortels (1922), in which the hybrid figure on the left appears to be freeing itself from an insect-like form, staging the becoming-human of the body, albeit an unstable, profoundly unheimlich body combining anxiety and play (figure 11.2). The figure on the right is in a vertical position, but has still to find an appropriate configuration of limbs. As noted earlier, the human body as chrysalis was a recurrent image in Ernst’s paintings, connoting regeneration.

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11.2  Max Ernst, Arrivée des voyageurs (Arrival of the Travellers), from Les Malheurs des immortels (1922)

For Richard Huelsenbeck, degraded and resuscitated bodies cohabit in his account of the New Man in ‘Der neue Mensch’, published in Neue Jugend (May 1917): The new man stretches wide the wings of his soul, he orients his inner ear toward things to come, his knees find an altar before which to bend. He carries pandemonium within himself, the pandemonium naturae ignotae for or against which no one can do anything. His neck is twisted and stiff; he gazes upward, staggering toward redemption like some fakir or stylite; a wretched martyr of all centuries, anointed and sainted, he begs to be crushed, one day to be consumed in the burning heart, racked and consumed – the new man, exalted, erring, ecstatic, born of ecstasy. Ahoy, ahoy, huzza, hosanna, whips, wars of the eons, and yet human, the new man rises from all ashes, cured of all toxins, and fantastic worlds, saturated, stuffed full to the point of disgust with the experience of all outcasts, the dehumanized beings of Europe, the Africans, the Polynesians, all kinds, feces smeared with devilish ingredients, the sated of all genders: Ecce homo novus, here is the new man. (Huelsenbeck 1969: xxxi)

This study has argued that, like Huelsenbeck’s New Man, Dada’s bodies combine the corpse and the chrysalis. On the one hand, the Dadaists flatten, cut

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up, shoot or dismember the neo-classical body, or dismantle and recombine the very instruments of destruction in their critique of post-war society. They cannibalise images with the aim of exposing the illusions wrapped in the myths of post-war Europe: the perfect machine-body in Weimar Germany; Marianne as the reconstituted body of France, or the poilu as the striding hero. They recycle images in their systematic disparagement of the ‘retour à l’ordre’, definitively displacing ‘le dessin français’ through overt pastiche and parody on the one hand, and the introduction of montage techniques on the other. Yet Dada bodies, as limit-forms of representation, inhabit what remains, finally, an ambivalent space, between battlefield and fairground, satire and play, where critique is combined with celebration in a strategy that can be seen as both regressive and revolutionary. Against the neo-classical body they regress to pre-war intertexts (the fairground stand, the shadow theatre). Faced with the realities of adulthood, the Dadaist indulges in infantile sexual fantasies (masturbatory sequences, gratuitous sadistic violence, Oedipal struggles against reified father-figures). Confronted by the narrative of the disjunctive body as a tale of loss, where body-parts evoke an absent whole, the (almost forgotten) narrative of a collective or individual past (wounds of the battlefields, alienation of the factory floor, exile from the nursery), they counter by celebrating its regeneration in ludic reconfigurations. Unwilling to adopt the deliberate amnesia of post-war European society, they recycle the instruments of destruction as images of liberation. The Dadaist thus displays the consciousness of the illusion of wholeness or differentiation by regression to a state of play that, according to Winnicott, can be considered as ‘a sort of ticking over of the unintegrated personality’ (1971: 55), an exploration of a self that is multiple and joyfully or anxiously unstable. By making visible the processes of construction or the pictorial grammar of the body in their assemblages of spare parts, Dadaists force the viewer to acknowledge that the body is fabrication, fiction. However, such limit-­ representations of the body, far from being immobilised in the fixed traces of a trauma, reducible to the nostalgic fragment of a unity which could never be retrieved, are also embryonic forms of possible bodies, new fictive realities. In the pre-history of the images, as in their posterity, their disjunctive members hint at incomplete narratives, traces of traumas, hence outlines of potential narratives. Dada bodies thus inhabit an ambivalent space: they recall the battlefield, the factory, the museum, the nursery; but they also project another (im) possible body, chrysalis or flying machine. As Luddites, the Dadaists cannibalise and disfigure the machine in order to discredit the social and aesthetic values for which it stands. As visionaries, they redistribute the spare parts of the machine, opening onto new, disturbing and liberating images.

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After Dada Concepts of the contemporary body range from the enhanced body, through scientific and media discourses on health and sport, to the body transformed, through tattooing or body-piercing, organ transplants or transhumanism. As for the body in contemporary art since the 1990s, it has often been treated, like Dada, as a limit-form, whether explored through fragmentation (Cindy Sherman, Untitled #261, 1992), dissection (Damien Hirst, Mother and Child, Divided, 1993), endoscopy (Mona Hatoum, Corps étranger, 1994), surgery and digital manipulation (Orlan’s Self-hybridizations), performance (Marina Abramovic) or post-human mutation (Dino and Jake Chapman, Zygotic Acceleration. Biogenetic De-sublimated Libidinal Model, 1995). At times, Dada’s own bodies have been subjected to critical or playful transformation in post-Dada appropriations where artists take up the images which the Dadaists themselves had already recycled, subjecting them to further reworkings. This continuity is evident, for instance, in Damian Hirst’s The Hat Makes the Man (After Max Ernst) (2004), a reworking of Max Ernst’s overpainting c’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme (1920), discussed in chapter 10. Hirst’s overt imitation and transformation re-enacts, on a suitably absurd grand scale, Max Ernst’s own gesture of appropriation: Ernst’s small paper collage (35 x 45 cm) has been transformed into a monumental bronze sculpture (209 x 365 x 300 cm) covered in acrylic paint. The large scale and three-dimensionality lend a playfully dramatic impact to an assemblage of banal objects while emphasising the human figure, not unlike a grotesque remake of Rodin’s Bourgeois de Calais (completed in 1889). Hirst’s transformation of Ernst’s collage, through play with form and material, is clearly a gesture of ironic and ludic complicity with the older artist. Other examples of appropriation also manifest strong formal similarities in the service of an ironic distance vis-à-vis the earlier image, a distance explained in part by the very different (art-)historical contexts in which the works were produced. Among these, a colour photograph by Cindy Sherman, Untitled #261, dating from 1992 (figure 11.3) can usefully be interpreted in dialogue with Ernst’s photocollage die anatomie als braut (1921; see figure 7.5).1 Ernst’s image features a female figure lying in what appears to be a bathtub, her body composed of metal plates and tubular sections.2 In Untitled #261 the artist has assembled parts of plastic mannequins used in medical training in the form of a female body, laid out on a crumpled red sheet, like a scene from a gruesome sex crime. Both works use mannequin forms, triggering the uncanny in the interplay between the animate and the inanimate; they both stage a mise-en-scene of the body, viewed similarly from above and behind in a foreshortened perspective. The bodies are disarticulated (the limbs do not cohere) and abject (recumbent, the

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11.3   Cindy Sherman, Untitled #261 (1992)

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head lower than the rest of the body and, in Sherman’s photograph, the breasts and vagina magnified and verticalised). For Ernst, the disarticulation and re-presentation of the body have a satirical purpose, exposing the memory of the mutilated bodies of wartime Europe and the prosthetic bodies of the post-war years. In Untitled #261, on the other hand, Sherman has disassembled the female body as an object of sadistic desire. The overt artificiality and grotesque appearance of the doll, the unnatural manipulation of its limbs and the garish blue-red colours of the photograph point, in their very excess, to a critical dismantling of male aggression and the stereotyping of women. Sherman’s satirical mechanical handling of the doll also contrasts with Hans Bellmer’s series of Poupées (1935–49) where, on the contrary, the assemblages of disarticulated limbs display the dynamics of castration and desire. Contemporary artists, in contrast to Dada’s nostalgia for the whole body implicit in the aggressive satire of the maiming, amputation and repairing of bodies in the post-1918 world, appear closer to the fetishistic resonance of the part-body, a given in Surrealism and after. By (mis-)quoting and reappropriating Dada’s corporeal images for their own purposes, these artists assert their position as artistic subjects. Some also focus directly on Dada in order to challenge and correct the often edulcorated historiography of the movement. Among these, artists Anna Artaker and Sadie Murdoch, through their use of the photographic archive, confront key issues in Dada, and in particular the elision of women from art-historical narratives, through direct engagement with the historical image. For her 2008 photographic installation Unbekannte Avantgarde (MUMOK Vienna), for instance, Viennese artist Anna Artaker selected from the archive ten group photographs of twentieth-century avant-garde groups (Dadaists, Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, etc.), each portraying a male group with one token female. The series includes the photograph of the Paris Dada group taken by Man Ray in 1922 (see figure 6.4), which was discussed in chapter 6, a photograph often reproduced and which has become an unquestioned document in Dada’s official history. Aware that the presence of women artists and poets in the group has usually been sidelined, Artaker has reproduced the silhouette of each figure in the Dada group photograph and added labels where the names of the men have been replaced by those of the group’s women artists and writers, such as Céline Arnaud, Hannah Höch or Mary Wigman. The label for the only woman in the original, Mick Verneuil-Soupault, is changed to unbekannt or unknown, an ironic comment on the women in the movement, deprived of agency, reduced to anonymity as muse or lover. Artaker thus highlights a fissure in the canon, manipulating Man Ray’s photograph to attack its privileged relation to reality, its unquestioned documentary transparency, thus giving back to the women in the group some visibility and their rightful

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historical place, thereby countering the distortion of the archive that fuels official histories. British artist Sadie Murdoch also challenges official Dada histories, saying in a recent interview that her interest in Dada concerns, primarily, the (mis) representation of its women artists.3 Consequently, like Artaker, she appropriates the photographic archive in order to critique male Dadaist positions. In her 2016 exhibition Sss—Mm, part of the Dada Anders exhibition at Zurich’s Haus Konstruktiv, her strategy involved a physical invasion and occupation of Dada archival photographs with her own body, a process she calls ‘inhabiting the archive’. For example, in a photographic series from 2013 titled As Given, in reference to Duchamp’s Étant donnés (1946–66), Murdoch has photographed her hands in front of photographs of Duchamp’s 1950s cast body-part sculptures, in such a way that they appear to be caressing the sculpture (figure 11.4). Her hand has been covered with grey stage make-up and the fingernails painted to adhere to the black-and-white photographic register of the archive. Responding literally to Duchamp’s injunction to ‘please touch’ (‘Prière de toucher’ – words printed on the cover of the catalogue for the 1947 Surrealism exhibition), she appears

11.4  Sadie Murdoch, As Given 4 (2013)

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to occupy the same space as the objects, and by touching them she changes their significance from conceptual and cerebral to material and sensual. In this performance the role of the woman has shifted from object (or worse, mould) to subject, from passive to active agent, touching and stroking, that is, ‘inhabiting’ the photographs rather than being merely represented in them. The series Rrosebushwheels (2015) features Murdoch’s own body, her limbs dyed blue-grey. In one of the photographs (figure 11.5) she appears to be wearing enlarged photographic reproductions of the moulds for the female figure in Duchamp’s Étant donnés. The mask covering her face is drawn from a photograph of an archival image of the ‘rosebush’ mask worn by English surrealist Sheila Legge, shot in Trafalgar Square in 1936 on the occasion of the London International Surrealism exhibition. Moreover, her dancing pose references photographs of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and, like the New York Dadaist, Murdoch displays active agency over her body. Further, she is holding a replica of the Baroness’s Portrait of Duchamp, an assemblage of wine glass and feathers, thus sharing in the reduction of Duchamp himself to an object (see figure 10.7). Once again, Sadie Murdoch has effected a shift, here from a horizontal (Duchamp’s female figure in Étant donnés) to a vertical position, from passive display of the female body to active performance. Clearly, far from being anti-Dada gestures, Artaker and Murdoch’s photographic interventions are closely related to Dada’s own performances: they co-opt and revitalise through processes of recontextualisation images by the historical Dadaists. And like the Dadaists themselves, they wield appropriation as a tool which, through their bodily interventions in the historical images, empowers them to intervene in Dada historiography, to reassess the contribution of women to this Luddite revolutionary movement, and to foreground its continuing impact on contemporary artists.

Notes 1. See analysis by Iris Müller-Westermann (2008). 2. As Ludger Derenthal (2004: 20) has suggested, Ernst recycled the photograph of a biplane from a wartime publication used as propaganda material for German aerial warfare in a shift from cockpit to coffin, with the aim of exposing the destruction of human lives by modern technology in the First World War. 3. Interview with Sadie Murdoch on the occasion of her exhibition at Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, 2016.

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11.5  Sadie Murdoch, Rrosebushwheels 1 (2015)

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Note: page numbers in italic refer to illustrations literary and art works are found under authors’ and artists’ names ‘n’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page Abraham, Karl and Sándor Ferenzi 138 Abramovic, Marina 234 abstraction 22–3, 29, 35, 95, 207 dance 38, 39–42 film 188, 190 Retour à la raison, Le 208–11 machine 75, 77 portrait 166–7, 219–28 African art 192–3, 200 Man Ray 192–4 Höch 195–205 alchemy 146, 152, 153, 154 Alexandre, Maxime 116 Apollinaire, Guillaume 23, 74, 96, 132, 192 Aragon, Louis 6, 110, 118, 137, 149–50 Arp, Hans 28, 33, 42, 50–1, 171, 220 fatagaga 143–9 poetry 126–7 portrait 220 puppets 38–9 Artaker, Anna Unknown Avantgarde (Unbekannte Avantgarde) 236–7 Artaud, Antonin 210 assemblage 12, 84, 89, 183, 233 see also collage; montage

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automaton 71, 215 Grosz 82, 172–4 see also machine Baader, Johannes 48, 132, 136, 165 and Hausmann Double Portrait 184, 185 Baargeld, Johannes Theodor 68n.36, 68n.39, 135, 141, 171 Typical Vertical Mess as Depiction of the Dada Baargeld (Typische Vertikalklitterung als Darstellung des Dada Baargeld) 59, 60, 184 Babinski Joseph 149 Baker, Josephine 197, 204 Bakhtin, Mikhael carnivalesque 13, 31, 170 grotesque 11, 13, 94, 95, 146, 165, 201–2 grammatica jocosa 95, 96, 110–11 see also laughter Ball, Hugo 26, 32, 42, 70, 127, 128, 161, 171 Ball at Cabaret Voltaire 35, 36 ‘Dance of death 1916’ (‘Totentanz 1916’) 29–30 ‘Kandinsky’ 27–8, 33 masks 35, 37 Sound Poems (Lautgedichte) 35, 39, 129–30 see also Cabaret Voltaire

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Barbusse, Henri Feu, Le 7, 107–8 Bellmer, Hans 59, 236 Benjamin, Walter 4, 13, 84–5, 148 Berlin 6, 65, 70, 98, 106, 132, 145, 146, 164, 165, 175, 196, 197–9 photomontage 81–9 bestial 100–2, 176, 177, 182, 230 Blumenfeld, Erwin Bloomfield, President – DADA – Chaplinist 167, 168, 184 Who I am (Wer ich bin) 167, 170 Boccioni, Umberto Charge of the Lancers (Carica dei Lancieri) 23, 24, 72 Breton, André 8, 78, 110, 137, 149–50, 175, 210 Photograph at Festival Dada 116, 117 Bulletin D 141, 142 cabaret 28–9, 125 Cabaret Voltaire 28–37, 125–32 see also Ball, Hugo cadavre exquis see exquisite corpse Caillois, Roger 210 caricature 12, 53, 77, 95, 98–101, 227 carnivalesque 13, 28, 31, 32, 106, 116, 119, 123, 124 Dance of death (Totentanz) 32 see also Bakhtin, Mikhael; grotesque; laughter Carrà, Carlo 215–16 Chapman, Dino and Jake 234 Charchoune, Serge 118, 137 Charcot, Jean–Martin 145, 149 chrysalis 146, 153, 155, 157, 162, 231, 232, 233 see also death; rebirth Clair, René Entr’acte 66, 119, 122–5 classical 10–11, 46–69, 82, 192, 193 Baargeld 59 Ernst 64, 64–5, 145, 155 Herzfelde 60–1 Höch 198, 200, 201–2 neo-classical 16, 50, 52, 57, 193 see also Ingres, Jean-AugustDominique

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Renaissance 11, 28, 216–17 Schlichter 59–60 collage 11, 12, 13, 15, 89, 97, 105, 220 Ernst 143–55 see also assemblage; montage; photomontage Cologne 141–62, 171, 215 Dada-Vorfrühling exhibition 135–6 Section D exhibition 141–2 Corinth, Lovis 70, 95 corpse 4, 31, 49, 50, 94, 107, 123, 124–5, 142, 230, 232 see also death; exquisite corpse Craig, Edward Gordon The Actor and the Übermarionnette 37 Crotti, Jean 73 Mechanical forces of love in movement (Les Forces mécaniques de l’amour en mouvement) 78 cyborg 88, 89 Dada group performance of Vous m’oublierez 118, 121 Photograph at Montmartre Fair 117, 120 Photograph at the Sans Pareil 118, 137, 137 Photograph in Zurich 118, 121 Photograph with copy of Dada 3, 118, 120 see also Man Ray Dadaglobe 143–4, 166, 167 Dada-Messe 6, 85, 86, 101, 103, 104, 138, 195, 230 see also Herzfelde, Wieland dance 122, 123 Höch 61, 86, 187–8 Laban 39–42 Zurich 29–35, 37–43, 127–8, 166–7 death 12, 31, 32, 124, 125, 184, 220 Ernst 145–7, 150, 153 Grosz ‘Totentanz 1916’ 29–30 Hoerle 160–1 see also chrysalis; corpse; rebirth de Chirico, Giorgio 215–16, 218–19 Degenerate Art exhibition 106, 150, 182 de la Mettrie, Julien Offray 71 Der Querschnitt 197, 198, 199 Descartes, René 71

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Dix, Otto 2, 81, 103–9, 135, 162, 177 grotesque 95, 103–9 Prager Straße 103–5 Prostitute and Disabled War Veteran (Dirne und Kriegsverletzter) 103, 179–81, 180 self-portrait 25, 103 Skat Players, The (Die Skatspieler) 103–4, 104, 105–6 War (Der Krieg) 107–9, 230 Dead Men near Position at Tahure (Tote bei der Stelling bei Tahure) 108, 109, 230 Shock Troops Advance Under Gas (Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor) 108, 107–9, 230 Dresden 103–5, 197 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre Mesure de la France 8 Duchamp, Marcel 13, 50, 207, 211 Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The 46, 78, 177, 211 five-way photographic portrait 119, 122, 166 Fountain by R. Mutt 212–14, 213 and Man Ray Anémic Cinéma 119, 188–90 Belle Haleine, eau de violette 186–7, 187 Murdoch 237–8 ‘opticeries’ 188 readymade 211–15 see also Rrose Sélavy Duchamp, Suzanne Male and Female Threatened (Un et une menacés) 79–81, 80, 177 dummy see mannequin Eggeling, Victor 188 Einstein, Carl Dix 106 Negro Sculpture (Negroplastik) 37, 43, 192–3, 196 Éluard, Paul 110, 117–19, 136, 150 Ernst 154, 175 Epstein, Jacob Rock Drill 24–5 Ernst, Max 5, 27, 141, 211 Anatomy as Bride (die anatomie als braut) 144, 151–3, 152, 234, 238n.2

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Arrival of the travellers (Arrivée des voyageurs) 153, 231, 232 Au rendez–vous des amis 118–19 Broken Fans (des éventails brisés) 154, 155 Chinese Nightingale, The (le rossignol chinois / die chinesische nachtigall) 144, 147, 148, 162n.4 collage 153–4 exhibitions 135, 137–8 fatagaga 143–9 Fiat modes pereat ars 215–19, 216, 217 Hat makes the man, The (c’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme) 220, 234 Health through Sport (La Santé par le sport, ) 64, 64–5, 102 Meeting of Two Smiles (Rencontre de deux sourires) 175–7, 176 Murderous She-Plane, The (l’avionne meurtrière) 144–7, 145, 155 Old Lecher with Rifle (Ein Lustgreis vor Gewehr) 136 Punching Ball, The 66, 143, 167, 169, 175 santa conversazione 150, 151 Young Chimera (Jeune chimère) 2, 11 erotic 59, 81, 89, 116, 145, 188–90, 210 Ingres 55–7 machine 73, 76, 78 Picabia 57, 116–17 ethnography 197, 204 ethnographic object 192, 197–201, 205 Höch 19, 182, 196–205 exhibitions 135–8 see also Cologne; Dada-Messe; Paris exotic 55, 167, 192, 197, 198 Expressionism 9, 14, 23, 28, 37, 41, 50, 97, 144, 153, 165, 182, 204–5 exquisite corpse 6, 12–13, 202, 230–3 fairground 46, 86, 106, 116–25, 138, 166 see also Paris family 173–5 fatagaga see Ernst, Max Ferenzi, Sándor and Karl Abraham 138 fetishism 19, 94, 204, 205, 211, 215, 236 Fick, Willy 135, 136, 141

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film 7, 84–5, 110, 119, 207 see also Duchamp; Clair, René; Man Ray; Picabia, Francis; Richter, Hans First World War 4, 5–6, 7–8, 22–8, 81–2, 116, 177, 220 casualties 7, 48, 180 Ernst 143–53 heroism 7, 49, 50, 66, 161 trauma 31, 89, 111, 130, 132, 145–6, 150, 155, 159, 233 war memorials 48–9, 50, 66n.3 wounded 8, 11, 48, 50, 59, 81, 88, 111–12, 146, 153 Dix 102–9 Hoerle 156–61 see also prosthetics; veteran Freud, Sigmund 7, 14, 33, 147, 149, 150, 161 ‘Thoughts for the times on war and death’ 31 Friedlaender, Salomo (Mynona) 170, 202, 223 Friedrich, Ernst Anti-War Museum 106–7 Wage War on War (Krieg dem Kriege) 107, 106, 201 Futurism 15, 22–4, 73, 115, 125 gender 9–10, 41–3, 167, 172–82, 183–90, 201, 236 androgyny 75, 184, 186–9, 223 couple 172–82 homosexuality 183–4 identity 183–90 machine 72–81 see also family; Hausmann, Raoul; Höch, Hannah; Man Ray; sexuality Gide, André 137 Goll, Ivan 197–8 Gourmont, Rémy de 78 Goya, Francisco Horrors of War 161 Gross, Otto 165, 175 Grosz, George 32, 61, 62, 69n.42, 81, 103, 165 Circe 177, 179, 181 ‘corrected masterpiece’ 68n.36 Dada-Messe 101–2, 138

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Daum marries her pedantic automaton 82, 83, 103, 172–4 Faith Healers, The (Die Gesundbeter) 230, 231 Fantastic Prayers (Phantastische Gebete) 99, 100, 98–101 grotesque 98–102 and Heartfield Conformist Heartfield Turned Wild, The (Der wildgewordene Spießer Heartfield) 86 New Man (Der neue Mensch) 62, 61–2 Sex Murder in Acker Street (Lustmord in der Ackerstraße) 179, 178–9 war 24, 230 grotesque 6, 10–11, 13, 41, 50, 92–114, 122 see also Bakhtin, Mikhael; Dix, Otto; Höch, Hannah; Hoerle; Schwitters, Kurt Hatoum, Mona Corps étranger 234 Hausmann, Raoul 61, 70–1 ABCD 126 and Baader Double Portrait 184, 185 family 174–5 gender 183–4 Gurk 223–4, 225 Höch 175, 177, 191n.17 Klebebild 223 ‘Kp’erioum Ip’erioum’ 130, 131 language 127 Monna Hausmann 188 optophonetic poems 130–2 prosthetics: 81–2 Haviland, Paul B. 72–3, 223 Heartfield, John 60, 62, 86, 165 ‘corrected masterpiece’ 68n.36 cover of Jedermann sein eigner Fussball 63, 62–3 and Grosz Conformist Heartfield Turned Wild, The (Der wildgewordene Spießer Heartfield) 86 Mothers! Let your sons live! 201 Rationalisation on the March 87, 87–8 and Schlichter Prussian Archangel (Preußischer Erzengel) 101 Hennings, Emmy 29–30, 42

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Herzfelde, Wieland 32, 62, 101, 102 Introduction to Dada-Messe catalogue 60–1, 84, 174 Hirschfeld, Magnus 186 Hirst, Damien The Hat Makes the Man (After Max Ernst) 234 Höch, Hannah 195–205 Abduction (Entführung) 204 ethnographic object 19, 182, 196–205 gender 72–81, 181, 183–4 Liebe 184, 186 grotesque 200–2, 204–5 Love in the Bush (Liebe im Busch) 182, 183, 197 marriage 191n.12 Bourgeois Married Couple (Quarrel) (Bürgerliches Brautpaar (Streit)) 177, 178 Peasant Couple (Bäuerliches Brautpaar) 181, 181–2 masks 195–205 From an Ethnographic Museum (Aus einem ethnographischen Museum) 196–204 Monument I (Denkmal I) 199, 199 Monument II (Denkmal II) 197, 204 Negro Sculpture (Negerplastik) 203, 204 New Woman 196–205 Beautiful Girl, The (Das schöne Mädchen 85–6 Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife (Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada) 61, 86, 187–8 Schwitters 196, 207 Sweet One, The (Die Süsse) 195, 195, 200 see also Hausmann, Raoul Hoerle, Angelika 141–3 see also Schlömilch-Verlag Hoerle, Heinrich 141–3 Cripple Portfolio (Die Krüppelmappe) 156–61, 157, 158, 159, 160 Huelsenbeck, Richard 6, 7, 8–9, 26–7, 29, 30–1, 33, 48, 70, 101, 103, 125, 132, 164, 165, 170, 219 Fantastic Prayers (Phantastische Gebete) 95–8, 128, 171, 199 ‘New Man’ (‘Der neue Mensch’) 86, 232 poetry 128–9

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hybrid 70, 114, 231 Höch 184, 187, 195, 196, 202, 204 see also montage identity 164–90 see also gender Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 52–3, 55–7 Ingrism 53 Source, La 46, 47 Picabia 46, 52–7, 67n.23 Man Ray 57–9 insanity 31, 33, 96 language 143, 145, 147–50, 153, 155 Janco, Marcel Cabaret Voltaire 29 Mask 33–5, 34 masks 33–7, 39, 41, 220, 223 Janet, Pierre 149 Jarry, Alfred 72 jester 170–2, 184 Jung, Carl 170–1 Jung, Franz 6, 175 Jünger, Ernst 81 Kandinsky, Wassily 22–3, 125 Kiki de Montparnasse and Man Ray 57, 194, 208–11 Kokoschka, Oskar 23, 35, 37, 41 Kollwitz, Käthe 107 Kraepelin, Emil 148–9, 152 Kristeva, Julia abject 202, 234 Laban, Rudolf von 39 Lacan, Jacques 164–5 language 49, 96–8, 138, 189 Anémic Cinéma 188–9 Cabaret Voltaire 125–32 grammatica jocosa 95, 96, 110–11 see also insanity laughter 13, 31–2, 110, 146, 166, 214 Léger, Fernand Ballet mécanique 119, 189, 211 Soldiers Playing Cards (La partie de cartes) 23–4, 25, 105 Legge, Sheila 238 Lehrmittelkatalog 144

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Lenormand, Henri–René 138 Lustmord 94, 103, 178–9, 234 machine 6, 8, 70–89, 177, 189 avantgarde 23–5, 26 Ernst 144–7, 154–6 gender 72–81 man as 71–2, 81–2, 162, 174, 233 see also abstraction; automaton; Picabia, Francis Mann, Thomas ‘Gedanken im Kriege’ 23 mannequin 11, 70, 81, 86, 101, 105, 118, 135, 151, 210, 215, 218, 219, 234 Man Ray Artaker 236–7 Duchamp 207 Anémic Cinéma 119, 188–90 Belle Haleine 187, 186–7 Emak Bakia 119, 122, 211 gender 184–6, 187, 188–90 Ingres 57–9 Photograph of Dada group 118, 120, 236 Retour à la raison, Le 207, 208–11, 209 Violon d’Ingres, Le 57–9, 58 Visage de nacre et masque d’ébène 194 Picabia 220–1 Marey, Etienne-Jules 71, 154 Marinetti, Philippo Tommasso 22, 133, 125–6 marionettes see puppets masculinity 16, 65, 76, 81, 171–3, 177 masks 32–7, 39–43, 204–5, 166–7 Guru mask 199 see also Ball, Hugo; Höch, Hannah; Janco, Marcel; Taeuber, Sophie Méliès, Georges 119, 122, 123, 125 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 37 military 8, 9, 23, 50, 95–8, 101–5, 143, 149, 180 Grosz and Heartfield 86 Grosz Gott mit uns 102, 230 Heartfield and Schlichter 101 montage 12, 13, 15, 66, 84–5, 88, 94, 201–2 Adorno 12, 84 Höch 196, 199 see also assemblage; Benjamin, Walter; collage; hybrid; photomontage

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Murdoch, Sadie As Given 4 237, 237–8 Rrosebushwheels 238, 239 Duchamp 237–8 Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven 238 Musée du Valde-Grâce 153 Muybridge, Eadweard 71 Neue Frau see New Woman Neuer Mensch see New Man Neumann, Georg Paul 144, 147, 150, 151 Nevinson, C.R.W. Bursting Shell 23 New Man 62, 88, 156, 161–2, 165 see also Huelsenbeck, Richard New Woman 9–10, 61, 75, 85–6 Höch 196–205 New York 6, 72, 75, 170, 207, 223, 227 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 22, 28, 32, 146 Nolde, Emil 41, 204 object 9, 16, 70, 118, 171–2, 195, 188–9 film 188, 190 Retour à la raison, Le 208–11 gender 184–5 portrait 220, 223, 238 see also ethnography; readymade Oceanic art 192, 200 Orlan 234 Paris 6, 32, 72, 118 La mise sous whisky marin exhibition 137–8 Luna-Park fairground 116–18, 122 Soirée du Coeur à barbe 109–10, 208 Péret, Benjamin 110, 137 performance 28–37, 39–43, 115–38 Perrottet, Suzanne 37, 39 photography dada group photos 117–19 Picabia 220 trick photography 119 see also Artaker, Anna; Murdoch, Sadie photomontage 6, 12, 81–9, 14, 166, 181 Höch 195–205 see also assemblage; collage; montage Picabia, Francis 5, 49, 138, 184 Animal Trainer (Dresseur d’animaux) 55 cover of Littérature 55–7, 56

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‘Dactylocoque’ 50 Fig Leaf, The (La Feuille de vigne) 53–5, 54 Ingres 46, 52–7, 67n.23 machine 72–9 Child Carburettor, The (L’Enfant carburateur) 54, 75 Parade amoureuse 78, 79 Man Ray 220–2 portrait 220, 222, 222–3, 223–8 self-portrait Merry Widow (La Veuve joyeuse) 220–2, 221 Portrait de l’artiste par lui–même 226–8, 227 Spanish Night (La Nuit espagnole 46, 47, 54, 55, 57, 116–17 women 75 Américaine 76, 76 Girl Born Without a Mother (Fille née sans mère) 73, 74 Jeune fille, La 224–6, 226 Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity (Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine en état de nudité) 3, 75–6, 223 Voilà Elle 76–8, 77 poetry 125–32, 150 Futurism 125 negro poems 128–9 optophonetic poem 130–2 simultaneous poem 127–8 zaum 127 popular press 61, 85, 178, 197, 200 portrait abstraction 166–7, 219–28 Arp 220 Baader and Hausmann 184, 185 Duchamp 119, 122, 166 object 220, 223, 238 Picabia 3, 51–2, 75–6, 223–8 primitivism 11, 19, 33, 41, 97, 125, 128, 130, 182, 192, 198, 202, 204–5 Prinzhorn, Hans Art of the Mentally Ill 149 prosthetics 1–2, 9, 11, 17–18, 49, 60, 64, 72, 88, 100–6, 153, 215 Hausmann 81–2 Hoerle 156–62

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prostitute 98–9, 103, 177–80 Proverbe 226 psychoanalysis 11, 18, 37, 138, 149 see also Freud; Gross, Otto; Weininger puppets 88, 172, 215, 219 Taeuber 37–9 readymade 211–15 rebirth 86, 124, 142–6, 153, 160–1 see also chrysalis; death Renoir, Auguste 48, 50 return to order 3, 46, 138, 171, 172 Picabia 48–57 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges 5, 110, 118, 137 ‘Au public’ 132–3 Richter, Hans 31, 37, 38–9, 41, 42, 92, 95, 118, 119, 134, 188, 196 Schwitters 93–4, 95 Vormittagsspuk 116, 170–2 Rigaut, Jacques 118, 137 Rimbaud, Arthur 204 Roth, Joseph ‘Menschliche Fragmente’ 8 Roussel, Raymond 72 Rrose Sélavy 184, 185, 187, 223 Russolo, Luigi Revolt (La Rivolta) 22 Salmon, André 192 Sargent, John Singer Gassed 1919 108 Satie, Eric 37, 110, 122–4 Schamberg, Morton 73 and Elsa von Freytag-Loringen God 73 Schlichter, Rudolph Heartfield Prussian Archangel (Preußischer Erzengel) 101 Improved Works from Antiquity (Verbesserte Bildwerke der Antik) 59–60 Phänomenon–Werke 60 Schultze-Naumburg, Paul Art and Race (Kunst und Rasse) 182, 198 Schwitters, Kurt 105, 110, 126, 134–5, 171, 205, 220, 230 grotesque 92–5 Merzbau 92–5, 93, 188, 207, 230 see also Höch, Hannah

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Seiwert, Franz 141, 142 Hoerle 161 self-portrait 166–70 Ernst 143 Hausmann 126 Man Ray 211 see also Dix, Otto; Picabia, Francis Severini, Gino 55 Armoured Train in Action 23, 72 sexuality 41, 78, 80, 145, 173–4, 177–80, 198 see also erotic; gender; Lustmord Sherman, Cindy Untitled #261 234–6, 235 Soupault, Philippe 14, 118, 133, 137, 220 spectatorship 124–5, 132–3, 135, 212–15 Marinetti 133 sport 61–6 Stieglitz, Alfred 53, 72, 75, 76, 194, 213, 223, 227

language 126 Taeuber 42

tactility 117, 210–15, 237–8 Taeuber, Sophie 39 dance 39–41, 42 Photograph of Sophie Taeuber dancing with Janco mask 39–41, 40, 166–7 puppets 37–9 Selfportrait with Dadakopf 166–7 Smereldina, from König Hirsch 37–8, 38 target 25, 46, 77, 116–17, 125 Tatlin, Vladimir Letatlin 155 Taylorism 71, 88, 154, 162 Tzara, Tristan 2, 5, 110, 137, 170, 175, 196–7, 199–200, 219 ‘Boxe’ 65, 65 ‘Chronique zurichoise’ 29, 125, 134 Gas Heart, The (Le Cœur à gaz) 109–12, 220

Weimar Germany 62, 84, 102, 105–6, 181 natalist policy 201 racism 197–8 women in 85–6, 174, 177 Weininger, Otto Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter) 186 Wigman, Mary 236 Photograph, Der Zeltweg 39–41, 40 Winnicott, Donald 233 Worringer, Wilhelm 41–2, 219 Wulffen, Erich 174

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Vaché, Jacques 132 van de Velde, Theodor 174 van Doesburg, Nelly 119 van Doesburg, Theo 119, 134 van Dongen, Kees 137 veteran 9, 48, 52, 59, 60, 81, 82, 86, 92, 173, 201 Dix 102–9, 179–80 Hoerle 156–67 see also First World War; Friedrich, Ernst visuality 212–14 ‘visual indifference’ 13, 214 von Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa 207 and Morton Schamberg God 73 Murdoch 238 Portrait of Duchamp 224, 223

Zayas, Marius de 193 ‘Femme’ 77, 76–7 ‘psychotypes’ 77, 227 Zurich 5–6, 26–45, 95, 125–32

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