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BauDebord/03: Romance&Anarchie!


5. Dadaism, Surrealism & Existentialism

"I have seen a lot of changes in my time... and I have opposed all of them."

When I was young I believed that change was a good thing, seeing that there was so much cruelty and ugliness in the world which needed improving. When I grew a bit older and more cynical, and had more opportunities to observe the results of current changes, I realized that change is not usually a good thing. The most noticable changes which occur in our immediate environment are wrought by Real Estate: in architecture, all change is decided by the people with the money; a Darwinian perspective on competition implies that the people with the most money are by nature the greediest and the least likely to make changes to the benefit of the greater public good, and so therefore they are given the greatest power in our world, the power to make the changes which usually make our world uglier.

One funny paradox about architecture is that slow endurance of time has the power to gradually transform ugly old architecture into beauty. Note for example the Eiffel Tower of Paris, erected for the World's Fair of 1900, and derided at that time as a pinnacle of gaucherie, yet nothing more than the weight of years were required to transform it into an epitome of grace and style. 'Old' architecture is one of the touchstones among those who seek to rebel against the indignity of the new. Our last century was a time of change, of 'Modernism', and many individuals would not be welcoming these modern changes without protest...

The Twentieth century began with the best of intentions, and a smug political complacency in which the nations of Western Europe assumed that their profitable economic domination of the lesser races of the planet would endure for an eternity. This hubris was shaken by the tragedy of the Great War, which taught them that the technological advances which they benefited from were also perfectly capable of eviscerating their own children. While this organized madness transpired, a very different sort of disorganized madness blossumed in a centre of calm in the middle of the European storm.

The English Romantic poets had idealized Switzerland as a haven of political freedom and enlightenment a century earlier. During the Great War, this neutral mountain realm was the preferred destination of young students, objectors, draft-dodgers, and beatniks across the continent. Influential movements in art are often inspired by cultural synthesis, so inevitably one of my favourite moments in art history, Dadasim, came about as the most truly comprehensive international co-production imaginable, represented by young artists and poets from France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Romania.

I tend to get the impression that Romania has functioned as an incubator for the Absurdist influence in 20th century Western culture. Tristan Tzara appeared to be the mastermind behind the birth of Dada (although some accord this honour to Hugo Ball), but in any event we also observe such later figures as Eugene Ionescue and Isadore Isue make the trek from Bucharest to Paris to propogate influential and chaotic world-views.

Dadaism was a trans-national, cross-cultural, multi-media experience. Dadaism was a cabaret, a phenomenon which occurred as a specific event during a specific time in a specific Zurich pub, The Cabaret Voltaire. Dadaism was a variety show which adopted its format from the tradition of vaudeville (a genre which I regret being born a century too late to fully experience) and combined experimental painting, poetry, music, theatrics, improvisation, and pure nonsense: Dada was the birth of modern performance art.

Aside from the participatory roonyesque "hey kids lets put on a show" element of Dadaism, its defining aspect was nonsense. Until this point in history most forms of youth rebellion promised some kind of ideology, however vague or idealistic, to replace the deposed hierarchy, but Dada suggested replacing the existing order with nothing. Dada embraced the irrational as an end in itself. In this respect Dada incorporated an element of farce (or blague as they say might say in French) but this farce now extended to a ridiculous degree. When Marcel Duchamps displayed the prefab toilet as a finished artwork, pretentious analysts since then have claimed that he was making some kind of lofty statement about how artwork functions in a certain context... and perhaps he was, but that wasn't the point, the point was that he was sending a coded "piss-off" message to the bourgeois consumer/audience for art as a commodity.

Dada wasn't serious, Dada was a format which was divorced from responsibility, dada's only responsibility was to have infantile fun, and to tease the audience if they took it too seriously. Dada inadvertantly provided several techniques which were foundational in 20th century art, but I intuitively believe that the initial experimentation with these techniques were often simply unintentional jokes. For example, the techniques of cut-up and collage, the indiscriminate layering of various random words and images, perhaps might have been simply a labour-saving method for achieving an intentionally silly 'nonsense' wallpaper style effect... but when Dadaist practitioners such as Max Ernst and John Heartfield realized that these seemingly random juxtapositions could evoke startling emotional reactions, then the Frankenstein monster called Dada achieved the realization of self-consciousness, and evolved into Surrealism. Somewhere in here fits a comment about the air of deadpan concentration with which Hanoverian baby-talk sound-poet Kurt Schwitters began to engineer elaborate garbage-based constructions.
The aim of Dada was to provoke and have fun. By contrast, the aim of Surrealism was to intentionally produce artifacts, utilizing proto-dadaistic techniques such as evoking the memories of dreams. Like Dada, Surrealism was still often fun, and still often nonsense, but unlike Dada, Surrealism was perhaps serious on at least one other level, that of a return to the production of visual artwork as a form of artifact or commodity.
While Dadasim was a celebration of irrationality, Surrealism was an attempt at a synthesis of irrationality and rationality. As Freud and Jung began to propogate new developments in the science of Psychology and publish documents on the nature of the unconscious, Surrealism ironically adopted the trappings of scientific theory for their activities to a certain degree; their official magazine, The Journal of Surrealist Research, featured a sombre jacket design evocative of dry academic technical publications.

As a literary movement, Surrealism continued developing the semi-random method of 'automatic-writing' and inspired some interesting experiments, but the most clearly talented of the group, the languorously relaxed and effortless poet Robert Desnos, spun profoundly lyrical romantic verse which, viewed in the context of his peers, was remarkable for its graceful modestly and lack of forced eccentricity.

The promotion of Surrealism as an influential art-movement was masterminded by Andre Breton, who envisioned it as a kind of private club with formal guidelines, and of course with himself as the leader. Breton's ambition and domineering nature were so obvious that both his friends and enemies referred to him as 'The Pope'. Personalities associated with the birth of Surrealism such as the arcane avatar of 'The Theatre of Cruelty', Antonin Artaud, and the enviously commercially successful Salvador Dali, were ritualistically excommunicated from the official membership list, often for not much more than mere personality clashes with the imperious Breton. While idea of 'the surreal' as a method and influence in visual art rapidly spread around the world, the social aspect of Surrealism as a group of individuals with common interests degenerated into an insular clique of 'cool' kids. The coherence of the final core group unravelled somewhat when Breton, in a phase of political idealism, convinced his disciples to briefly join the Communist Party, with humiliating results when the commissars to which the artists had humbly submitted responded with condescension and clumsy censorship. Eventually, another big war came along and swept these petty concerns aside...



When the dust began to settle from that all-encompassing trauma which shook the European continent in the Second World War of the mid-twentieth century, two individuals emerged from the ruins of France with a new literary/philosophical movement which soon dominated cultural attention. Existentialism was a theory, a style, and a way of life, represented by Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, veterans of the anti-Nazi Resistance. They explored a pragmatic approach to morality which emphasized an unidealized sense of mature individual responsibility, and they illustrated their theories with crisp functional works of fiction which described the problems and decisions faced by alienated protagonists. Photogenic and articulate, the Existentialists became international media stars, and perhaps for one moment in recent history, young people were almost fooled into thinking that the pursuit of philosophy could be something that was cool or sexy, at least on a superficial level.

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