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Dada
Manifesto
Art
and Anti Art
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Dada
Manifesto
by Tristan Tzara - March 23, 1918
The magic of a word - DADA - which for journalists has opened the
door to an unforeseen world, has for us not the slightest importance.
To launch a manifesto you have to want: A.B. & C., and fulminate
against 1, 2, & 3,
work yourself up and sharpen you wings to conquer and circulate lower
and upper case As, Bs & Cs, sign, shout, swear, organise prose
into a form that is absolutely and irrefutably obvious, prove its
ne plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life in the same
way as the latest apparition of a harlot proves the essence of God.
His existence had already been proved by the accordion, the landscape
and soft words. * To impose one's A.B.C. is only natural - and therefore
regrettable. Everyone does it in the form of a crystalbluff-madonna,
or a monetary system, or pharmaceutical preparations, a naked leg
being the invitation to an ardent and sterile Spring. The love of
novelty is a pleasant sort of cross, it's evidence of a naive don't-give-a-damn
attitude, a passing, positive, sign without rhyme or reason. But this
need is out of date, too. By giving art the impetus of supreme simplicity
- novelty - we are being human and true in relation to innocent pleasures;
impulsive and vibrant n order to crucify boredom. At the lighted crossroads,
alert, attentive, lying in wait for years, in the forest. * I am writing
a manifesto and there's nothing I want, and yet I'm saying certain
things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against
principles (quantifying measures of the moral value of every phrase
- too easy; approximation was invested by the impressionists). *
I'm writing this manifesto to show that you can perform contrary actions
at the same time, in one single, fresh breath; I am against action;
as for continual contradiction, and affirmation too, I am neither
for nor against them, and I won't explain myself because I hate common
sense.
DADA - this is a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot
down; every bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different
subjects and who, instead of situating suitable characters on the
level of his own intelligence, like chrysalises on chairs, tries to
find causes or objects (according to whichever psychoanalytic method
he practices) to give weight to his plot, a talking and self-defining
story. *
Every spectator is a plotter, if he tries to explain a word (to know!)
From his padded refuge of serpentine complications, he allows his
instincts to be manipulated. Whence the sorrows of conjugal life.
To be plain: The amusement of redbellies in the mills of empty skulls.
If we consider it futile, and if we don't waste our time over a word
that doesn't mean anything... The first thought that comes to these
minds is of a bacteriological order: at least to discover its etymological,
historical or psychological meaning. We read in the papers that the
negroes of the Kroo race call the tail of a sacred cow: DADA. A cube,
and a mother, in a certain region of Italy, are called: DADA. The
word for a hobby horse, a children's nurse, a double affirmative in
Russian and Romanian, is also: DADA. Some learned journalists see
it as an art for babies, other Jesus calling the little children unto
him saints see it as a return to an unemotional and noisy primitivism
- noise and monotonous. A sensitivity cannot be built on the basis
of a word; every sort of construction converges into a boring sort
of perfection, a stagnant idea of a golden swamp, a relative human
product. A work of art shouldn't be beauty per se, because it is dead;
neither gay nor sad, neither light nor dark; it is to rejoice or maltreat
individualities to serve them up the cakes of sainted haloes or the
sweat of a meandering chase through the atmosphere. A work of art
is never beautiful, by decree, objectively, for everyone. Criticism
is, therefore, useless; it only exists subjectively, for every individual,
and without the slightest general characteristic. Do people imagine
they have found the psychic basis common to all humanity? The attempt
of Jesus, and the Bible, conceal, under their ample, benevolent wings:
shit, animals and days. How can anyone hope to order the chaos that
constitutes that infinite, formless variation: man? The principle:
"Love thy neighbour" is hypocrisy. "Know thyself"
is utopian, but more acceptable because it includes malice. No pity.
After the carnage we are left with the hope of a purified humanity.
I always speak about myself because I don't want to convince, and
I have no right to drag others in my wake, I'm not compelling anyone
to follow me, because everyone makes his art in his own way, if he
knows anything about the joy that rises like an arrow up to the astral
strata, or that which descends into the mines stewn with the flowers
of corpses and fertile spasms. Stalactites: look everywhere for them,
in creches magnified by pain, eyes as white as angels' hares. Thus
DADA was born* , out of a need for independence, out of mistrust for
the community. People who join us keep their freedom. We don't accept
any theories. We've had enough of the cubist and futurist academies:
laboratories of formal ideas. Do we make art in order to earn money
and keep the dear bourgeoisie happy? Rhymes have the smack of money,
and inflexion slides along the line of the stomach in profile. Every
group of artists has ended up at this bank, straddling various comets.
Leaving the door open to the possibility of wallowing in comfort and
food.
Here we are dropping our anchor in fertile ground.
Here we really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced
the trembling and the awakening. Drunk with energy, we are revenants
thrusting the trident into heedless flesh. We are streams of curses
in the tropical abundance of vertiginous
vegetation, resin and rain is our sweat, we bleed and burn with thirst,
our blood is strength.
Cubism was born out of a simple manner of looking at objects: Cezanne
painted a cup twenty centimetres lower than his eyes, the cubists
look at it from above, others complicate it appearance by cutting
a vertical section through it and soberly placing it to one side (I'm
not forgetting the creators, nor the seminal reasons of unformed matter
that they rendered definitive). * The futurist sees the same cup in
movement, a succession of objects side by side, mischievously embellished
by a few guide-lines. This doesn't stop the canvas being either a
good or a bad painting destined to form an investment for intellectual
capital. The new painter creates a world whose elements are also its
means, a sober, definitive, irrefutable work. The new artist protests:
he no longer paints (symbolic and illusionistic reproduction) but
creates directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, rocks, or locomotive structures
capable of being spun in all directions by the limpid wind of the
momentary sensation. * Every pictorial or plastic work is unnecessary
, even if it is a monster which terrifies servile minds, and not a
sickly-sweet object to adorn the refectories of animals in human garb,
those illustrations of the sad fable of humanity. - A painting is
the art of making two lines, which have been geometrically observed
to be parallel, meet on a canvas, before our eyes, in the reality
of a world that has been transposed according to new conditions and
possibilities. This world is neither specified nor defined in the
work, it belongs, in its innumerable variations, to the spectator.
For its creator it has neither case nor theory. Order = disorder;
ego = non-ego; affirmation - negation: the supreme radiations of an
absolute art. Absolute in the purity of its cosmic and regulated chaos,
eternal in that globule that is a second which has no duration, no
breath, no light and no control. * I appreciate an old work for its
novelty. It is only contrast that links us to the past. * Writers
who like to moralise and discuss or ameliorate psychological bases
have, apart from a secret wish to win, a ridiculous knowledge of life,
which they may have classified, parcelled out, canalised; they are
determined to see its categories dance when they beat time. Their
readers laugh derisively, but carry on: what's the use?
There is one kind of literature which never reaches the voracious
masses. The work of creative writers, written out of the author's
real necessity, and for his own benefit. The awareness of a supreme
egoism, wherein laws become significant. * Every page should explode,
either because of its profound gravity, or its vortex, vertigo, newness,
eternity, or because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of
its principles, or its typography. On the one hand there is a world
tottering in its flight, linked to the resounding tinkle of the infernal
gamut; on the other hand, there are: the new men. Uncouth, galloping,
riding astride on hiccups. And there is a mutilated world and literary
medicasters in desperate need of amelioration.
I assure you: there is no beginning, and we are not afraid; we aren't
sentimental. We are like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of
clouds and prayers, we are preparing the great spectacle of disaster,
conflagration and decomposition. Preparing to put an end to mourning,
and to replace tears by sirens spreading from one continent to another.
Clarions of intense joy, bereft of that poisonous sadness. * DADA
is the mark of abstraction; publicity and business are also poetic
elements.
I destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organisation:
to sow demoralisation everywhere, and throw heaven's hand into hell,
hell's eyes into heaven, to reinstate the fertile wheel of a universal
circus in the Powers of reality, and the fantasy of every individual.
A philosophical questions: from which angle to start looking at life,
god, ideas, or anything else. Everything we look at is false. I don't
think the relative result is any more important than the choice of
patisserie or cherries for dessert. The way people have of looking
hurriedly at things from the opposite point of view, so as to impose
their opinions indirectly, is called dialectic, in other words, heads
I wind and tails you lose, dressed up to look scholarly.
If I shout:
Ideal, Ideal, Ideal
Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge
Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom
I have recorded fairly accurately Progress, Law, Morals, and all the
other magnificent qualities that various very intelligent people have
discussed in so many books in order, finally, to say that even so
everyone has danced according to his own personal boomboom, and that
he's right about his boomboom: the satisfaction of unhealthy curiosity;
private bell-ringing for inexplicable needs; bath; pecuniary difficulties;
a stomach with repercussions on to life; the authority of the mystical
baton formulated as the grand finale of a phantom orchestra with mute
bows, lubricated by philtres with a basis of animal ammonia. With
the blue monocle of an angel they have dug out its interior for twenty
sous worth of unanimous gratitude. * If all of them are right, and
if all pills are only Pink, let's try for once not to be right. *
People think they can explain rationally, by means of thought, what
they write. But it's very relative. Thought is a fine thing for philosophy,
but it's relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it deadens
man's anti-real inclinations and systematises the bourgeoisie. There
is no ultimate Truth. Dialectics is an amusing machine that leads
us (in banal fashion) to the opinions which we would have held in
any case. Do people really think that, by the meticulous subtlety
of logic, they have demonstrated the truth and established the accuracy
of their opinions? Even if logic were confined by the senses it would
still be an organic disease. To this element, philosophers like to
add: The power of observation. But this magnificent quality of the
mind is precisely the proof of its impotence. People observe, they
look at things from one or several points of view, they choose them
from amongst the millions that exist. Experience too is the result
of chance and of individual abilities. * Science revolts me when it
becomes a speculative system and loses its utilitarian character -
which is so useless - but is at least individual. I hate slimy objectivity,
and harmony, the science that considers that everything is always
in order. Carry on, children, humanity ... Science says that we are
nature's servants: everything is in order, make both love and war.
Carry on, children, humanity, nice kind bourgeois and virgin journalists...
* I am against systems; the most acceptable system is that of have
none on no principle. * To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in
one's own pettiness to the point of filling the little vase of oneself
with oneself, even the courage to fight for and against thought, all
this can suddenly infernally propel us into the mystery of daily bread
and the lilies of the economic field.
DADAIST SPONTANEITY
What I call the I-don't-give-a-damn attitude of life is when everyone
minds his own business, at the same time as he knows how to respect
other individualities, and even how to stand up for himself, the two-step
becoming a national anthem, a junk shop, the wireless (the wire-less
telephone) transmitting Bach fugues, illuminated advertisements for
placards for brothels, the organ broadcasting carnations for God,
all this at the same time, and in real terms, replacing photography
and unilateral catechism.
Active simplicity.
The incapacity to distinguish between degrees of light: licking the
twilight and floating in the huge mouth filled with honey and excrement.
Measured against the scale of Eternity, every action is vain - (if
we allow thought to have an adventure whose result would be infinitely
grotesque - an important factor in the awareness of human incapacity).
But if life is a bad joke, with neither goal nor initial accouchement,
and because we believe we ought, like clean chrysanthemums, to make
the best of a bad bargain, we have declared that the only basis of
understanding is: art. It hasn't the importance that we, old hands
at the spiritual, have been lavishing on it for centuries. Art does
nobody any harm, and those who are capable of taking an interest in
it will not only receive caresses, but also a marvellous chance to
people the country of their conversation. Art is a private thing,
the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product
of a journalist, and because at this moment I enjoy mixing this monster
in oil paints: a paper tube imitating the metal that you press and
automatically squeeze out hatred, cowardice and villainy. The artist,
or the poet, rejoices in the venom of this mass condensed into one
shopwalker of this trade, he is glad to be insulted, it proves his
immutability. The author or the artist praised by the papers observes
that his work has been understood: a miserable lining to a collaborating
with the heat of an animal incubating the baser instincts. Flabby,
insipid flesh multiplying itself with the aid of typographical microbes.
We have done violence to the snivelling tendencies in our natures.
Every infiltration of this sort is macerated diarrhoea. To encourage
this sort of art is to digest it. What we need are strong straightforward,
precise works which will be forever misunderstood. Logic is a complication.
Logic is always false. It draws the superficial threads of concepts
and words towards illusory conclusions and centres. Its chains kill,
an enormous myriapod that asphyxiates independence. If it were married
to logic, art would be living in incest, engulfing, swallowing its
own tail, which still belongs to its body, fornicating in itself,
and temperament would become a nightmare tarred and feathered with
protestantism, a monument, a mass of heavy, greyish intestines.
But suppleness, enthusiasm and even the joy of injustice, that little
truth that we practise as innocents and that makes us beautiful: we
are cunning, and our fingers are malleable and glide like the branches
of that insidious and almost liquid plant; this injustice is the indication
of our soul, say the cynics. This is also a point of view; but all
flowers aren't saints, luckily, and what is divine in us is the awakening
of anti-human action. What we are talking about here is a paper flower
for the buttonhole of gentlemen who frequent the ball of masked life,
the kitchen of grace, our white, lithe or fleshy girl cousins. They
make a profit out of what we have selected. The contradiction and
unity of opposing poles at the same time may be true. IF we are absolutely
determined to utter this platitude, the appendix of alibidinous, evil-smelling
morality. Morals have an atrophying effect, like every other pestilential
product of the intelligence. Being governed by morals and logic has
made it impossible for us to be anything other than impassive towards
policemen - the cause of slavery - putrid rats with whom the bourgeois
are fed up to the teeth, and who have infected the only corridors
of clear and clean glass that remained open to artists.
Every man must shout: there is great destructive, negative work to
be done. To sweep, to clean. The cleanliness of the individual materialises
after we've gone through folly, the aggressive, complete folly of
a world left in the hands of bandits who have demolished and destroyed
the centuries. With neither aim nor plan, without organisation: uncontrollable
folly, decomposition. Those who are strong in word or in strength
will survive, because they are quick to defend themselves; the agility
of their limbs and feelings flames on their faceted flanks.
Morals have given rise to charity and pity, two dumplings that have
grown like elephants, planets, which people call good. There is nothing
good about them. Goodness is lucid, clear and resolute, and ruthless
towards compromise and politics. Morality infuses chocolate into every
man's veins. This task is not ordained by a supernatural force, but
by a trust of ideas-merchants and academic monopolists. Sentimentality:
seeing a group of bored and quarrelling men, they invented the calendar
and wisdom as a remedy. By sticking labels on to things, the battle
of the philosophers we let loose (money-grubbing, mean and meticulous
weights and measures) and one understood once again that pity is a
feeling, like diarrhoea in relation to disgust, that undermines health,
the filthy carrion job of jeopardising the sun. I proclaim the opposition
of all the cosmic faculties to that blennorrhoea of a putrid sun that
issues from the factories of philosophical thought, the fight to the
death, with all the resources of
DADAIST DISGUST
Every product of disgust that is capable of becoming a negation of
the family is dada; DADA; acquaintance with all the means hitherto
rejected by the sexual prudishness of easy compromise and good manners:
DADA; abolition of logic, dance of those who are incapable of creation:
DADA; every hierarchy and social equation established for values by
our valets: DADA; every object, all objects, feelings and obscurities,
every apparition and the precise shock of parallel lines, are means
for the battle of: DADA; the abolition of memory: DADA; the abolition
of archaeology: DADA the abolition of prophets: DADA; the abolition
of the future: DADA; the absolute and indiscutable belief in every
god that is an immediate product of spontaneity: DADA; the elegant
and unprejudiced leap from on harmony to another sphere; the trajectory
of a word, a cry, thrown into the air like an acoustic disc; to respect
all individualities in their folly of the moment, whether serious,
fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, decided or enthusiastic; to strip
one's church of every useless and unwieldy accessory; to spew out
like a luminous cascade any offensive or loving thought, or to cherish
it - with the lively satisfaction that it's all precisely the same
thing - with the same intensity in the bush, which is free of insects
for the blue-blooded, and gilded with the bodies of archangels, with
one's soul. Liberty: DADA DADA DADA; - the roar of contorted pains,
the interweaving of contraries and all contradictions, freaks and
irrelevancies: LIFE. |
