Read an Excerpt
Dada Presentism
An Essay on Art and History
By Maria Stavrinaki, Daniela Ginsburg STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9815-0
CHAPTER 1
POSTHISTORY AND PREHISTORY
Voluntary Contraction in the Present: Decision and Heroism
It was that same crepuscular protection provided by the past and future together that Dada refused when it in turn found itself projected into its own present, in the midst of the Great War. Richard Huelsenbeck, in importing the word Dada from Zurich to Berlin, contributed in many different ways to creating a constellation of artists grouped around that name. In his April 1918 Dadaist manifesto, he wrote:
Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. 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. 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.
For Huelsenbeck, holding fast to one's own time took a certain physical, intellectual, and moral courage and was even proof of heroism — albeit a heroism diametrically opposed to the kind that for the past four years had been required on the battlefield in the name of the eternity of nations. Against this mythical eternity, which produced nothing but the catastrophe of history — war — Dadaist heroism threw itself into the present, which, exactly because it was uncertain, seemed to be the only type of time favorable to the exercise of freedom. Only the present could allow another history to surge up, a history emancipated from servile obedience to the past and the chaste utopia of the future.
It was not the sentiment of transition in the strict sense of the word that characterized Dada's conception of its historical belonging — not, at least, in the sense of a bridge connecting the past to the future. Instead, the zone these artists inhabited was cut off and suspended; it was a narrow plank, hazardous terrain. In 1916, when the name Dada was first pronounced at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, giving nominal unity to the multiform, if not disparate, activities that took place within its walls (poetry recitals, musical performances, songs, dances, performance art avant la lettre, and plastic productions of all kinds), these artists were aware that their "space of experience" and "horizon of expectation" had been seriously jarred. These two metahistorical categories were developed by the historian Reinhart Koselleck during the 1970s, and they account for an underlying process inherent in the modern conception of history: the acceleration of time that resulted from the human belief in the feasibility and perfectibility of history, beginning with the French Revolution, and systematically led to the shrinking of experience, which was replaced by an enlarged horizon of expectation. Encouraged by the philosophy of history and rationalist theories of progress, this projection in advance of the future implied that the present was inadequate to any experience transmitted by the past and was perhaps even incapable of generating its own experiences: "This accelerated time, i.e., our history, abbreviated the space of experiences, robbed them of their constancy, and continually brought into play new, unknown factors, so that even the actuality or complexity of these unknown quantities could not be ascertained."
In a now famous essay from 1933, "Experience and Poverty," Walter Benjamin observed that World War I was a crucial cause of the present's elusiveness. The experience of the front, where technology had finally replaced humans on the field of battle, devalued all previously acquired experience — leaving recognizable only the clouds in the sky, as Benjamin put it — and in turn became incommunicable. Many artists sought to repress this muteness and sublimate it in inaugural language; in a move typical of the apocalyptic dialectical conversion of catastrophe into benediction, they dreamt of erecting modern cathedrals on the fields of ruins. For these artists — for example, the Expressionists and Futurists — the pulverized past made it all the more easy to construct a hypertrophied future. Their reaction fit perfectly within the temporal dynamic described by Koselleck.
But there were also artists for whom the view from the field of ruins revealed a blocked horizon. Such were the Dadaists. For Huelsenbeck — who was not only an actor in the Dada movement but also its urgent and assiduous historiographer — it was already clear in 1920 that Dada had developed in an age that presented intellectuals with "a large and difficult task," in that it was "harder than in quiet times to balance out the measure of personality and establish the orbit from which one [could] grow up as a self-possessed presence." Of predecessors and tradition, nothing remained; these could neither accelerate nor hinder the course of things. As for the future, various activists thought that they could remedy the collapse of the notion of historia magistra vitae (history as life's teacher) with the belief that history was on their side. But for Huelsenbeck, if history had a lesson to teach, it was that of its contingence or, worse, its impassive identity. For those intellectuals and artists who found comfort neither in the past nor in the future, the only remaining choice was to gain a foothold in the present, which was by definition fleeting and more threatening than ever.
At bottom, all modernity was a challenge to the present; the fact that it was haunted by nostalgia for the past and an obsession with the future was in fact resounding proof of this challenge. Modernity was marked by moments of crisis, moments such as the years surrounding the Great War, which contracted into a single present, usually involuntarily, as for Orlando, and sometimes deliberately, as for Dada. François Hartog, in his study of the presentism of modernity, pursued Koselleck's hypotheses and found that, in the contemporary temporal configuration,
the distance between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation has been stretched to its limit, to its breaking point, with the result that the production of historical time seems to be suspended. Perhaps this is what generates today's sense of a permanent, elusive, and almost immobile present, which nevertheless attempts to create its own historical time.
Contemporary presentism's quest to produce its own historical time is haunted by commemoration of the past, which is more ghostly than ever. This mournful, obsessive fear of the past is one of the major differences between today's presentism and Dadaist presentism, which was highly festive in nature. Although the present, which rules absolutely, as Hartog writes, is obsessed with the duty to remember and a respect for heritage, Dadaist presentism revolted against any commemorative appropriation of a flawlessly coherent history. The two presentisms — the Dadaists' and ours — correspond to two completely different "regimes of historicity." The present defended by Dada — by its Berlin contingent at least — was a truly revolutionary time, a "time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]," to use Walter Benjamin's expression; it was "a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop." This present methodically deconstructed the historical, economic, and political method of capitalization instituted by German historicism; it did this through a series of precise formal mechanisms and an astonishing philosophical and political argument. As for our own dilated present, it is the expression of an age in which capitalism is hegemonic and revolution as a collective form for the suspension of time seems to belong to the annals of history.
As Huelsenbeck wrote:
No one knows if he will be hit by the wave created by the raging storm at the other end of the world. The nerve-wracking uncertainty is the grisliest tool of the time, a truly demonic device of the machine age. Death approaches and none can look it in the eye; courage in the old sense is in decline; but here and there heroism is blazing and cries its old song of defiance with which humanity has again and again wrested the justification of its being.
This book is dedicated to the Dadaists' heroic presentism in the face of a simultaneous world that spared none and a history whose infernal repetition took away human freedom. To the Dadaists, heroic appropriation of the present bore the ontological weight of a decision — the only intellectually and ethically worthy one. But precisely because their presentism involved a decision, it also promised an alternative, perhaps more credible, conception of the future.
Broadly, the Dadaists' decision to seize the present came out of their rejection of both the historical past and a meliorist future whose exact symmetry was confirmed in the parallel ways they instrumentalized the present. "The Dada person recognizes no past which might tie him down," Raoul Hausmann wrote. "He is held up by the living present, by his existence." The Dadaists inherited their vitalist independence with respect to the historical past from the Expressionists. All the pictorial avant-gardes of the prewar era shared the view of history as a "burden," which Hayden White identified more generally in early twentieth-century literature. This history, seen either as a mechanical accumulation of events succeeding one another in time or as a reservoir of fixed forms fashioned by the past and then erected into models, was violently rejected by artists in the name of their antimimetic stance toward life. Kurt Pinthus, man of letters and the author of an illuminating text on Expressionist temporalities, wrote in 1919 that the past "lies behind us untransformable, already." And what this historicism was to the past, meliorism was to the future: the two presupposed the same reproductive and cumulative understanding of time. The past was the temporal aspect of a passive reality — an ontological, artistic, social, and political reality — that those enraged idealists, the Expressionists, wanted to combat so as to shape it according to the requirements of their spirit.
The heroic overtones of Expressionist idealism aside, the Dadaists did not disagree with the Expressionists' rejection of a fossilized past. What distinguished the two movements was the way they correlated present and future. Whereas the Dadaists wanted to achieve self-possession in the here and now, even in the face of adversity, Expressionist artists were "enem[ies] of the present," as Siegfried Kracauer put it in 1918. To an Expressionist like Pinthus, the present, the quintessence of alienated time (which the Impressionists were mad enough to have elevated into the sole subject of their art), was "a furtively receding nothing." "Only the future is entirely our work," he concluded, as though the only work the Expressionists were sure of having was the work they had not yet accomplished. This projection into an indefinite future was the modern, optimistic, and historically confident version of the famous Pascalian dictum, "We never live, but hope to live."
When it came to highlighting the historical legitimacy of their art and thereby the objectivity of their methods, Expressionist artists thus emphasized the fertility of their age, which they depicted as pregnant with the future. Expressionism had an intermediary temporal status that was explicitly expressed in its forms. As Jean-Claude Lebensztejn explained, the action of colors in Expressionist works was often dissociated from that of lines, and composition straddled abstraction and imitation. But it was above all the principle of dissonance or contrast that manifested Expressionism's intermediary system, a system whose entire meaning was based on an apocalyptic temporality. If the unusual and thereby shocking relationships between colors and forms did harm to the spectator's perception, it was so that it might later do good to his or her soul.
This belief in salvation through destruction translated, of course, into the spatial construction of the paintings, which, through the centrifugal tension that often organized them, signified the immanent destruction of inert matter through the creative force of subjectivity. "Today," announced Franz Marc in 1912, "art is moving in a direction toward which our fathers would never even have dreamed. One stands before the new works as in a dream and hears the horsemen of the Apocalypse in the air. An artistic tension is felt all over Europe." Wassily Kandinsky observed that in the two years separating the first and second editions of the Blaue Reiter Almanach (1912–1914), historical time noticeably contracted: "In the course of these two years we have come closer to the future." This acceleration, which fits the mold of apocalyptic awaiting, whether properly religious or secularized, can be seen in many of Marc's and Kandinsky's works; the taut convexity of their compositions suggests imminent explosion, like an egg on the verge of hatching life (Figure 1). Kandinsky formulated this thesis in The Spiritual in Art without the slightest ambiguity: "Art [that] has no power for the future, which is only a child of the age and cannot become a mother of the future, is a barren art."
Whereas Expressionism's vocation was to give birth to the future, Dadaist practices were defined as children of the present. As we will see, the Dada artists had a different view of genealogy and a different idea of the relationship between forebears and posterity, progenitors and descendants, artists and works. As the architect and adroit observer Ludwig Hilberseimer wrote, they believed that "the true work of art will always be born only from the chaos of time." Within this chaos, the end of time existed side by side with new possibilities, but these were possibilities that began in the now, from a new time. The role of the artist was to forge practices that would reveal the profound ambiguity of the present. This is why such contradictory tactics as eclecticism and primitivism, parody and utopia, were all used in Dadaism as equally appropriate responses. For these artists the future was not to come; it had already arrived.
The Dadaist Present: A Mix of Historicism and Primitivism
It is not insignificant that Dada was invented in a cabaret, where the most historically and formally heterogeneous modes of expression could exist side by side. This did not escape the linguist Roman Jakobson, who in 1921 wrote a brief, but incisive text on Dada.
During the last decade, no one has brought to the artistic market so much varied junk of all times and places as the very people who reject the past. It should be understood that the Dadaists are also eclectics, though theirs is not the museum-bound eclecticism of respectful veneration, but a motley café chantant program (not by chance Dada was born in a cabaret in Zurich).
Indeed, Huelsenbeck described the Cabaret Voltaire as "a catch-all for the most diverse directions in art, which at that time seemed to us to constitute 'Dada.' None of us suspected what Dada might really become, for none of us understood enough about the times." Hugo Ball, describing an evening at the Voltaire, wrote in his journal that "all the styles of the last twenty years came together yesterday." This eclectic logic, which, in the absence of any notion of what a "proper" work might be, turned to the works of others, was pursued in Berlin. In one of the many roles they played between 1918 and 1920, John Heartfield and George Grosz presented themselves as decorators who could create costumes and décors in any style, in the fashion of any ism.
In short, the Dadaists openly gave themselves over to an activity that the nineteenth century had pursued with a blind frenzy. One of the Dadaist responses to the failure of historia magistra vitae was to parody that century's drive to devour history. Huelsenbeck, citing a few lines of Beyond Good and Evil in the Dada Almanac, confirmed the Dadaist debt to Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of historicism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dada Presentism by Maria Stavrinaki, Daniela Ginsburg. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
