PROCLAMATION
WITHOUT PRETENSION BY Tristan Tzara|
PROCLAMATION
WITHOUT PRETENSION BY Tristan Tzara |
Art is going to sleep for a new world to be born
"ART"-parrot word-replaced by DADA,
PLESIOSAURUS, or handkerchief
The talent THAT CAN BE LEARNED makes the
poet a druggist TODAY the criticism
of balances no longer challenges with resemblances
Hypertrophic painters hyperaes-
theticized and hypnotized by the hyacinths
of the hypocritical-looking muezzins
CONSOLIDATE THE HARVEST OF EXACT CALCULATIONS
Hypodrome of immortal guarantees: there is
no such thing as importance there is no transparence
or appearance
MUSICIANS SMASH YOUR INSTRUMENTS
BLIND MEN take the stage
THE SYRINGE is only for my understanding. I write because it is
natural exactly the way I piss the way I'm sick
ART NEEDS AN OPERATION
Art is a PRETENSION warmed by the
TIMIDITY of the urinary basin, the hysteria born
in THE STUDIO
We are in search of
the force that is direct pure sober
UNIQUE we are in search of NOTHING
we affirm the VITALITY of every IN-
STANT
the anti-philosophy of spontaneous acrobatics
At this moment I hate the man who whispers
before the intermission-eau de cologne-
sour theatre. THE JOYOUS WIND
If each man says the opposite it is because he is
right
Get ready for the action of the geyser of our blood
-submarine formation of transchromatic aero-
planes, cellular metals numbered in
the flight of images
above the rules of the
and its control
BEAUTIFUL
It is not for the sawed-off imps
who still worship their navelBy Tristan Tzara
From "Dada Manifesto" [1918] and "Lecture on Dada" [1922],
translated from the French by Robert Motherwell, *Dada Painters and Poets*,
by Robert Motherwell, New York, pp. 78- 9, 81, 246-51; reprinted by pernlission
of George Wittenborn, Inc., Publishers, 10l8 Madison Avenue, New York 21, N.Y.
*There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work
of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself.
It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away. Every
page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic
frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles,
or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight,
betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing,
riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania
for improvement.
I say unto you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we are not sentimental.
We are a furious Wind, tearing the dirty linen of clouds and prayers, preparing
the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition.* We will put an end to
mourning and replace tears by sirens screeching from one continent to another.
Pavilions of intense joy and widowers with the sadness of poison. Dada is the
signboard of abstraction; advertising and business are also elements of poetry.
I destroy the drawers of the brain and of social organization: spread demoralization
wherever I go and cast my hand from heaven to hell, my eyes from hell to heaven,
restore the fecund wheel of a universal circus to objective forces and the imagination
of every individual.
Philosophy is the question: from which side shall we look at life, God, the
idea or other phenomena. Everything one looks at is false. I do not consider
the relative result more important than the choice between cake and cherries
after dinner. The system of quickly looking at the other side of a thing in
order to impose your opinion indirectly is called dialectics, in other words,
haggling over the spirit of fried potatoes while dancing method around it. If
I cry out:
Ideal, ideal, ideal,
Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge,
Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,
I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all other
fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so manv
books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom,
and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological
curiosity; a private bell for inexplicable needs; a bath; pecuniary difficulties;
a stomach with repercussions in life; the authority of the mystic wand formulated
as the bouquet of a phantom orchestra made up of silent fiddle bows greased
with philtres made of chicken manure. With the blue eye-glasses of an angel
they have excavated the inner life for a dime's worth of unanimous gratitude.
If all of them are right and if all pills are Pink Pills, let us try for once
not to be right. Some people think they can explain rationally, by thought,
what they think. But that is extremely relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous
disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of men and systematizes
the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism
which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first
place. Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, he has demonstrated
the truth and established the correctness of these opinions? Logic imprisoned
by the senses is an organic disease. To this element philosophers always like
to add: the power of observation. But actually this magnificent quality of the
mind is the proof of its impotence. We observe, we regard from one or more points
of view, we choose them among the millions that exist. Experience is also a
product of chance and individual faculties. Science disgusts me as soon as it
becomes a speculative system, loses its character of utility-that is so useless
but is at least individual. I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science
that finds everything in order. Carry on, my children, humanity . . . Science
says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash
your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist
virgins . . . I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle
to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's own littleness,
to fill the vessel with one's individuality, to have the courage to fight for
and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller
into economic lilies.... Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation
of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in
destructivc action: *Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now
by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition
of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social
hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every
object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash
of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada;
abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the
future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate
product of spontaneity:* Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony
to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph
record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it
be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest
one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable
or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them -with the extreme
satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least-with the same intensity in
the thicket of one's soul-pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with
bodies of archangels. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and
interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies:
LIFE
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I don't have to tell you that for the general public and for you, tlhe refined
public, a Dadaist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only a manner of
speaking. When these same people get close to us, they treat us with that remnant
of elegance that comes from their old habit of belief in progress. At ten yards
distance, hatred begins again. If you ask me why, I won't be able to tell you.
Another characteristic of Dada is the continuous breaking off of our friends.
They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender his resignation
from the Dada movement *was myself.* Everybody knows that Dada is nothing. I
broke away from Dada and from myself as soon as I understood the implications
of *nothing.*
If I continue to do something, it is because it amuses me, or rather because
I have a need for activity which I use up and satisfy wherever I can. Basically,
the true Dadas have always been separate from Dada. Those who acted as if Dada
were important enough to resign from with a big noise have been motivated by
a desire for personal publicity, proving that counterfeiters have always wriggled
like unclean worms in and out of the purest and most radiant religions.
I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don't expect
to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you exist. You haven't
the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my children happy. But in your
hearts you know that isn't so. You will say: I exist to guard my country, against
barbarian invasions. That's a fine reason. You will say: I exist because God
wills. That's a fairy tale for children. You will never be able to tell me why
you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about
life. You will never understand that life is a pun, for you will never be alone
enough to reject hatred, judgments, all these things that require such an effort,
in favor of a calm level state of mind that makes everything equal and without
importance. Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return
to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada covers things with an artificial
gentleness, a snow of butterflies released from the head of a prestidigitator.
Dada is immobility and does not comprehend the passions. You will call this
a paradox, since Dada is manifested only in violent acts. Yes, the reactions
of individuals contaminated by *destruction* are rather violent, but when these
reactions are exhausted, annihilated by the Satanic insistence of a continuous
and progressive "What for?" what remains, what dominates is *indifference.*
But with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.
I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the *Nothing*
can be uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that is why it will
be valid for everyone, since everyone is important only for the individual who
is expressing himself.--I am speaking of myself. Even that is too much for me.
How can I be expected to speak of all men at once, and satisfy them too?
Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one doesn't
like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely food for curiosity?
The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions,
their income, their dog. This state of affairs derives from a false conception
of property. If one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and indomitable
intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that can not be shaken. Try to
be empty and fill your brain cells with a petty happiness. Always destroy what
you have in you. On random walks. Then you will be able to understand many things.
You are not more intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.
Intelligence is an organization like any other, the organization of society,
the organization of a bank, the organization of chit-chat. At a society tea.
It serves to create order and clarity where there is none. It serves to create
a state hierarchy. To set up classifications for rational work. To separate
questions of a material order from those of a cerebral ordcr, but to take the
former very seriously. Intelligence is the triumph of sound education and pragmatism.
Fortunately life is something else and its pleasures are innumerable. They are
not paid for in the coin of liquid intelligence.
These observations of everyday conditions have led us to a realization which
constitutes our minimum basis of agreement, aside from the sympathy which binds
us and which is inexplicable. It would not have been possible for us to found
our agreement on principles. For everything is relative. What are the Beautiful,
the Good, Art, Freedom? Words that have a different meaning for every individual.
Words with the pretension of creating agreement among all, and that is why they
are written with capital letters. Words which have not the moral value and objective
force that people have grown accustomed to finding in them. Their meaning changes
from one individual, one epoch, one country to the next. Men are different.
It is diversity that makes life interesting. There is no common basis in mens
minds. The unconscious is inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses
us. It is as mysterious as the last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew
it, we could not reconstruct it.
What good did the theories of the philosophers do us? Did they help us to take
a single step forward or backward? What is forward, what is backward? Did they
alter our forms of contentment? We are. We argue, we dispute, we get excited.
The rest is sauce. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes mixed with a limitless boredom,
a swamp dotted with tufts of dying shrubs.
We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond measure
our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is spontaneity. Not
because it is better or more beautiful than anything else. But because everything
that issues freely from ourselves, without the intervention of speculative ideas,
represents us. We must intensify this quantity of life that readily spends itself
in every quarter. Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has
not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life
is far more interesting. Dada knows the correct measure that should be given
to art: with subtle, perfidious methods, Dada introduces it into daily life.
And vice versa. In art, Dada reduces everything to an initial simplicity, growing
always more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind of creation
and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic reduced to a personal
minimum, while literature in its view should be primarily intended for the individual
who makes it. Words have a weight of their own and lend themselves to abstract
construction. The absurd has no terrors for me, for from a more exalted point
of view everything in life seems absurd to me. Only the elasticity of our conventions
creates a bond between disparate acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do
not exist; what interests me is the intensity of a personality transposed directly,
clearly into the work; the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards
the elements and in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into
a lacework of words and sentiments.
Dada tries to find out what words mean before using them, from the point of
view not of grammar but of representation. Objects and colors pass through the
same filter. It is not the new technique that interests us, but the spirit.
Why do you want us to be preoccupied with a pictorial, moral, poetic, literary,
political or social renewal? We are well aware that these renewals of means
are merely the successive cloaks of the various epochs of history, uninteresting
questions of fashion and facade. We are well aware that people in the costumes
of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as the people of today, and that
Chouang-Dsi was just as Dada as we are. You are mistaken if you take Dada for
a modern school, or even for a reaction against the schools of today. Several
of my statements have struck you as old and natural, what better proof that
you were a Dadaist without knowing it, perhaps even before the birth of Dada.
You will often hear that Dada is a state of mind. You may be gay, sad, afflicted,
joyous, melancholy or Dada. Without being literary, you can be romantic, you
can be dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny, transfigured, vain,
amiable or Dada. This will happen later on in the course of history when Dada
has become a precise, habitual word, when popular repetition has given it the
character of a word organic with its necessary content. Today no one thinks
of the literature of the Romantic school in representing a lake, a landscape,
a character. Slowly but surely, a Dada character is forming.
Dada is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its faults,
with its personal differences and distinctions which it accepts and views with
indifference. We are often told that we are incoherent, but into this word people
try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom. Everything is
incoherent. The gentleman who decides to take a bath but goes to the movies
instead. The one who wants to be quiet but says things that haven't even entered
his head. Another who has a precise idea on some subject but succeeds only in
expressing the opposite in words which for him are a poor translation. There
is no logic. Only relative necessities discovered *a posteriori*, valid not
in any exact sense but only as explanations. The acts of life have no beginning
or end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything
is alike. Simplicity is called Dada.
Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes
me as a boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken language is ample
and adequate for us, but for our solitude, for our intimate games and our literature
we no longer need it.
The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but of a disgust.
Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3ooo years have been explaining
everything to us (what for? ), disgust with the pretensions of these artists-God's-representatives-on-earth,
disgust with passion and with real pathological wickedness where it was not
worth the bother; disgust with a false form of domination and restriction *en
masse*, that accentuates rather than appeases man's instinct of domination,
disgust with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are
nothing but a front for the interests of money, pride, disease, disgust with
the lieutenants of a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile
laws, disgust with the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly
(for why is it more estimable to be red rather than green, to the left rather
than the right, to be large or small?). Disgust finally with the Jesuitical
dialectic which can explain everything and fill people's minds with oblique
and obtuse ideas without any physiological basis or ethnic roots, all this by
means of blinding artifice and ignoble charlatans promises.
As Dada marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in itself. From
all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no pride, no benefit.
It has even stopped combating anything, in the realization that it's no use,
that all this doesn't matter. What interests a Dadaist is his own mode of life.
But here we approach the great secret.
Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races
and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is
the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly
in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like
dogs and grasshoppers.
Like everything in life, Dada is useless.
Dada is without pretension, as life should be.
Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin
microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that
reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
.
(The signatories of this
manifesto live in France,
America, Spain, Germany,
Italy, Switzerland,
Belgium, etc. but have
no nationality.)
DADA EXCITES EVERYTHING
DADA knows everything. DADA spits everything out.
BUT . . . . . . . . .
HAS DADA EVER SPOKEN TO YOU:
about Italy
about accordions
about women's pants
about the fatherland
about sardines
about Fiume
about Art (you exaggerate my friend)
about gentleness
about D'Annunzio
what a horror
about heroism
about mustaches
about lewdness
about sleeping with Verlaine
about the ideal (it's nice)
about Massachusetts
about the past
about odors
about salads
about genius, about genius, about genius
about the eight-hour day
about the Parma violets
NEVER NEVER NEVER
DADA doesn't speak. DADA has no fixed idea. DADA doesn't catch flies.
THE MINISTRY IS OVERTURNED. BY WHOM?
BY
DADA
The Futurist is dead. Of What? Of DADA
A Young girl commits suicide. Because of What? DADA
The spirits are telephoned. Who invented it? DADA
Someone walks on your feet. It's DADA
If you have serious ideas about life,
If you make artistic discoveries
and if all of a sudden your head begins to crackle with laughter,
If you find all your ideas useless and ridiculous, know that
IT IS DADA BEGINNING TO
SPEAK TO YOU
cubism constructs a cathedral of artistic liver paste
WHAT DOES DADA DO?
expressionism poisons artistic sardines
WHAT DOES DADA DO?
simultaneism is still at its first artistic communion
WHAT DOES DADA DO?
futurism wants to mount in an artistic lyricism-elevator
WHAT DOES DADA DO?
unanism embraces allism and fishes with an artistic line
WHAT DOES DADA DO?
neo-classicism discovers the good deeds of artistic art
WHAT DOES DADA DO?
paroxysm makes a trust of all artistic cheeses
WHAT DOES DADA DO?
ultraism recommends the mixture of these seven artistic things
WHAT DOES DADA DO?
creationism vorticism imagism also propose some artistic recipes
WHAT DOES DADA DO?
WHAT DOES DADA DO?
50 francs reward to the person who finds the best
way to explain DADA to us
Dada passes everything through a new net.
Dada is the bitterness which opens its laugh on all that which has been made
consecrated forgotten in our language in our brain in our habits.
It says to you: There is Humanity and the lovely idiocies which have made it
happy to this advanced age
DADA HAS ALWAYS EXISTED
THE HOLY VIRGIN WAS ALREADY A DADAIST
DADA IS NEVER RIGHT
Citizens, comrades, ladies, gentlemen
Beware of forgeries!
Imitators of DADA want to present DADA in an artistic form which it has never
had
CITIZENS,
You are presented today in a pornographic form, a vulgar and baroque spirit
which is not the PURE IDIOCY claimed by DADA
BUT DOGMATISM AND PRETENTIOUS IMBECILITYParis January 12, 1921
E. Varèse, Tr. Tzara, Ph. Soupault,
Soubeyran, J. Rigaut, G. Ribe-
mont-Dessaignes, M. Ray, F. Pi-
cabia, B. Péret, C. Pausaers
R.Hülsenbeeks, J. Evola, M. Ernst,
P. Eluard, Suz. Duchamp, M. Du-
champ, Crotti, G. Cantarelli, Marg.
Buffet, Gab. Buffet, A. Breton
Baargeld, Arp., W. C. Arensberg,
L. Aragon
For all information
write "AU SANS PAREIL"
37, Avenue Kléber.
Tel. PASSY 25-22
--- From Approximate Man and Other Writings,
Translated and Edited by Mary Ann Caws
(Wayne State University Press)
Reprinted in
"Teachers & Writers Collaborative"
5 Union Square W.
New York City 10003Go Home Subscribe to RALPH Go
Up
DADA MANIFESTO
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 your 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 in 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.
- DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING
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 Jesuscallingthelittlechildrenuntohim 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 born1 , 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 insignificant.
* 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 do not tremble; we are not 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 one 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.
BACK or FORWARD
DADA Manifesto Berlin April 1918 (Huelsenbeck)
What did Expressionism want?It " wanted" something, that much remains
characteristic of it. Dada wants nothing, Dada grows. Expressionism wanted inwardness,
it conceived of itself as a reaction against the times, while Dadaism is nothing
but an expression of the times. Dada is one with the times, it is a child of
the present epoch which one may curse, but cannot deny. Dada has taken the mechanisation,
the sterility, the rigidity and the tempo of these times into its broad lap,
and in the last analysis it is nothing else and in no way different from them.
Expressionism is not spontaneous action. It is the gesture of tired people who
wish to escape themselves and forget the present, the war and the misery. To
this end they invented "humanity," and walked versifying and psalmodysing
along streets on which the escalators rise and descend and the telephones ring
shrilly. The Expressionists are tired people who have turned their backs on
nature and do not dare look the cruelty of the epoch in the face. They have
forgotten how to be daring. Dada is daring per se, Dada exposes itself to the
risk of its own death. Dada puts itself at the heart of things. Expressionism
wanted to forget itself, Dada wants to affirm itself. Expressionism was harmonious,
mystic, angelic, Baaderish-Superdadaist — Dada is the scream of brakes
and the bellowing of the brokers at the Chicago Stock Exchange. Vive Dada!
The execution and direction of art depends on the times in which it lives, and
artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that whose mental
content represents the thousandfold problems of the day, which has manifestly
allowed itself to be torn apart by the explosions of last week, and which is
forever trying to gather up its limbs after the impact of yesterday. The best
and most unprecedented artists will be those who continuously snatch the tatters
of their bodies out of the chaos of life's cataracts, clutching the intellectual
zeitgeist and bleeding from hands and hearts.
Has Expressionism fulfilled our expectations of such an art, one which represents
our most vital concerns?
No! No! No!Have the Expressionists fulfilled our expectations of an art that
brands the essence of life into our flesh?
No! No! No!Under the pretext of inwardness the Expressionist writers and painters
have closed ranks to form a generation which is already expectantly looking
forward to an honourable appraisal in the histories of art and literature and
is aspiring to honours and accolades. On the pretext of propagating the soul,
their struggle with Naturalism has led them back to those abstract, pathetic
gestures which are dependent on a cosy, motionless life void of all content.
Their stages are cluttered with every manner of kings, poets and Faustian characters,
and a theoretical, melioristic understanding of life — whose childish
and psychologically naïve style will have to wait for Expressionism's critical
afterword — lurking at the backs of their idle minds. Hatred of the press,
hatred of advertising, hatred of sensationalism, these indicate people who find
their armchairs more important than the din of the streets, and who make it
a point of pride to be conned by every petty racketeer. Their sentimental opposition
to the times, no better nor worse, no more reactionary nor revolutionary than
any other, that feeble resistance with half an eye on prayer and incense when
not making papier maché cannon balls from Attic iambics — these
are the characteristics of a younger generation which has never known how to
be young. Expressionism, which was discovered abroad and has quite typically
become a portly idyll in Germany with the expectation of a good pension, has
nothing more to do with the aspirations of active people. The signatories of
this manifesto have banded together under the battle cry of
DADA !!!!to put forward a new art which they hope will realize new ideals. But
what is DADAISM?
The word Dada symbolises the most primitive relation to surrounding reality,
a relation with which Dadaism in turn establishes a new reality. Life appears
as a simultaneous confusion of noises, colours and spiritual rhythms, and is
thus incorporated — with all the sensational screams and feverish excitements
of its audacious everyday psyche and the entirety of its brutal reality —
unwaveringly into Dadaist art. This is the clearly marked dividing line which
separates Dada from all previous artistic directions, most particularly from
FUTURISM, which recently some imbeciles took to be a new version of impressionist
realization. For the first time Dadaism has made a break with the aesthetic
approach to life by rending all the slogans of ethics, culture and inwardness,
which are mere cloaks for weak muscles, into their component parts. The
BRUITIST poemdepicts a tram as it is, the essence of the tram complete with
pensioner Jones's yawns and the squeal of brakes.
The
SIMULTANEIST poemdemonstrates the sense of throwing everything into a jumble;
Mr Jones sits reading while the Balkan Express crosses the bridge at Nish and
a pig whimpers in the cellar of Bloggs the butcher.
The
STATIC poemtransforms words into individuals; from the three letter words appear
the woods with treetops, foresters' liveries and wild sows, perhaps even a guest
house, perhaps Bellevue or Bella Vista. Dada leads to incredible new possibilities
and forms of expression in all of the arts. It turned Cubism into a dance on
the stage, it has disseminated the BRUITIST music of the Futurists (whose purely
Italian concerns it has no desire to generalize) across all of Europe. The word
Dada itself points to the internationalism of the movement, which is not tied
to borders, religions or professions. Dada is the international expression of
our times, the great malcontent among artistic movements, the artistic reflection
of all these offensives, peace conferences, tussles in the vegetable markets,
dîners at the Esplanade etc. etc. Dada demands the use of
new materials in painting.Dada is a CLUB, founded here in Berlin, which one
may join without any obligation. Here everyone is chairman and anyone can have
his say on artistic matters. Dada is not a pretext for the ambitions of a handful
of literati (as our enemies would have you believe). Dada is a state of mind
which can reveal itself in each and every conversation, so that one is compelled
to say: this man is a DADAIST, but that man is not. For this reason the Club
Dada has members the world over, in Honolulu as well as in New Orleans and Meseritz.
In some situations being a Dadaist might demand that one is more businessman
or party politician than artist — just incidentally an artist —
for being a Dadaist means allowing oneself to be hurled by things, means being
opposed to all stagnation, and that sitting for a moment in a chair is to put
one's life at risk (Mr. Wengs had already pulled the revolver from his trouser
pocket). A piece of cloth rips between one's fingers, one says yes to a life
wishing to elevate itself by negation. Affirmation — negation: the gigantic
hocus-pocus of being fires the nerves of the true Dadaist — that's how
he lies around, goes to the shoot, cycles — half Pantagruel, half St.
Francis, laughing and laughing. In defiance of the aesthetic-ethical outlook!
Against the anaemic abstraction of Expressionism! Against the world-reforming
theories of literary blockheads! And for Dadaism in word and image, for the
spreading of a Dadaist course of events throughout the world. If you are against
this manifesto you are a Dadaist!
Tristan Tzara. Franz Jung. Georg Grosz.
Marcel Janco. Richard Huelsenbeck. Gerhard Preiß.
Raoul Hausmann. Walter Mehring.
0. Lüthy. Fréderic Glauser. Hugo Ball.
Pierre Albert Birot. Maria d'Arezzo. Gino Cantarelli.
Prampolini. R. van Rees. Madame van Rees.
Hans Arp. G. Thauber. Andrée Morosini. François
Mombello-Pasquati.
Trans. MG
DADA MANIFESTO
To launch a manifesto you have to want: A. B. & C., and fulminate against
1, 2, & 3, 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.
Everyone does it [imposes one's A. B. & C.] in the form of a crystal bluff-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 impulsive and vibrant to
crucify boredom.
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 DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING
...on the other hand, there are: the new men. Uncouth, galloping, riding astride
on hiccups.
Psychoanalyses is a dangerous disease, it deadens man's anti-real inclinations
and systematizes the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth.
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 having none on no
principle.
Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work
is the product of a journalist...
What we need are strong, straightforward, precise works which will be forever
misunderstood. Logic is a complication. Logic is always false.
The Dada Manifesto was written in 1918 by Tristan Tzara, whose group Dada (as
well as the Dada Movement) was later abandoned for the Surrealist Movement.
« back
klicken Sie hier für dieses Manifest auf Deutsch
monsieur antipyrine's manifesto
by tristan tzara
14th july 1916
DADA is our intensity: it erects inconsequential bayonets and the Sumatral head
of German babies; Dada is life with neither bedroom slippers nor parallels;
it is against and for unity and definately against the future; we are wise enough
to know that our brains are going to become flabby cushions, that our anti dogmatism
is as exclusive as a civil servant, and that we cry liberty but are not free;
a severe necessity with entire discipline nor morals and that we spit on humanity.
DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but
from now on we want to shit in different colours so as to adorn the zoo of art
with all the flags of all the consulates.
We are circus ringmasters and we can be found whistling amongst the winds of
fairgrounds, in convents, prostitutions, theatres, realities, feelings, restaurants,
ohoho, bang bang.
We declare that the motor car is a feeling that has cosseted us quite enough
in the dilatoriness of its abstractions, as have transatlantic liners, noises
and ideas. And while we put on a show of being facile, we are actually searching
for the central essence of things, and are pleased if we can hide it; we have
no wish to count the windows of the marvellous elite, for DADA doesn't exist
for anyone, and we want everyone to understand this. This is Dada's balcony,
I assure you. From there you can hear all the military marches, and come down
cleaving the air like a seraph landing in a public baths to piss and understand
the parable.
DADA is neither madness, nor wisdom, nor irony, look at me, dear bourgeois.
Art used to be a game of nuts in May, children would go gathering words that
had a final ring, then they would exude, shout out the verse, and dress it up
in dolls' bootees, and the verse became a queen in order to die a little, and
the queen became a sardine, and the children ran hither and you, unseen.
Then came the great ambassadors of feeling, who yelled historically in chorus:
Psychology Psychology hee hee
Science Science Science
Long live France
We are not naive
We are successive
We are exclusive
We are not simpletons
and we are perfectly capable of an intelligent discussion.
Be we, DADA, don't agree with them, for art isn't serious, I assure you, and
if we reveal the crime so as to show that we are learned denunciators, it's
to please you, dear audience, I assure you, and I adore you.
,,.,,/.,
Three Tzarian Pieces
by Tristan Tzara, translations by Julian Semilian
This translation is dedicated to Gisele Semilian (1907-2000)
Inscription on a grave
And I felt your sad and immaculate soul
Like you feel the moon floating quietly
Behind the drawn curtains.
And I felt your poor and timid soul
Like a beggar, with his hand out before the gate,
Fearful to knock or to walk in,
And I felt your humble and frail soul
Like a tear unwilling to step over the eyelid's doorstep
And I felt your clenched and moistened by distress soul
Like a handkerchief in your hand that tears will
drizzle on,
And today, when my soul would get lost in the night,
Only the memory of you clutches it
With unforeseen fingers of phantasm.
Introduction to Don Quixote
Flight of nimble and hasty horse was my life
I knew to scour the entire world
Only one girl was dear to me
And I slept till late in the morning
The old horse split up into sections
Which will turn into hands of worms by mice to be chewed
My love: see the learning you don't find in books
Sit quietly by the table and sew
I'll tell you what awaits you down the road
Sew my thought on a silk dress
Until your pupils hurt -- and you'll be a bride
Until my thought will be a book
Fleurs pour Layson (after
Tristan Tzara)
Long tall Layson, construction girl
Black gown and ermine collar
I fed-ex you flowers because:
you're
an artist and you:
Make silver rings with your fingers!
And because you wear burgundy boxer shorts of silk
And once you told me you went to dominatrix school
You're tall in the hall with a lily in your hair
Sheer pantyhose the kind I've seen on Salvadorian girls
And doesn't entrance on them but enraptures
On you partly I think because the hall is lit by candelabras
Long tall construction girl I hand you my
Soul.
Paint it chartreuse like a chair with little yellow
Daisies and violet gladiolas but make sure
You don't breathe in the paint it isn't good for you
your health is frail, I heard, then:
Paint me a nimbostratus or ash rocumulus
Cumulonimbus and cotton candy cirrus with rosy streaks
Because clouds are like bed sheets or boxer shorts
When you're tall in the hall in sheer
pantyhose
and candelabras
Why don't we have sushi anymore?
Scold me severely if I was disgusting
Then I'll bring you a new sunflower
You're tall and slender you'll put it in water
serenely
by the window
In sheer pantyhose below the candelabras in Catalonian plazas« back
dada manifesto
by tristan tzara
23rd march 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.
DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING
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 Jesuscallingthelittlechildrenuntohim 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.
* in 1916 at the CABARET VOLTAIRE in Zurich
« back
manifesto of monsieur Aa the antiphilosopher
by tristan tzara
5th february 1920
without the pursuit of I worship you
which is a French boxer
maritime values as irregular as the depression of Dada in the blood of a bicephalous
animal
I glide between death and the vague phosphates that scratch slightly at the
common brain of dadaist poets
luckily
because
gold
mine
tariff's and the high cost of living made me Decide to abandon D's
it isn't true that sham dadas have Deprived me of them because
here's enough to bewail the nothing that is called nothing
and I've cleared illnesses at the customs
I the carapace and umbrella of the brain from noon till two o'clock
two hour's subscription
superstitious releasing the mechanism
of the spermatozoon ballet that you'll find being dress-rehearsed in all the
hearts of suspect individuals
I'll eat your fingers a bit
I'm renewing your subscription to the celluloid love that creaks like metal
gates
and you are idiots
I shall come back once in the guise of your renascent urine as the obstetric
wind of joie de vivre
and I'm going to establish a boarding school for poets' supporters and I've
come again to start again
and you're all idiots
and the selfkleptomaniac's key only works with crepuscular oil on every knot
of every machine there's the nose of a new-born baby
and we're all idiots
and very suspect of a new form of intelligence and a new logic after our own
manner
which isn't at all Dada
and you're letting yourselves be led astray by Aaism
and you're all idiots
poultices
of the surgical spirit of purified sleep
of bandages
and of virgin
idiots
???????>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
« back
tristan tzara's manifesto
by tristan tzara
19th february 1920
Have a good look at me!
I'm an idiot, I'm a practical joker, I'm a hoaxer.
Have a good look at me!
I'm ugly, my face has no expression, I'm small.
I'm like the rest of you!1
But ask yourselves, before you look at me, whether the iris by which you dispatch
arrows of liquid sentiments isn't in fact fly-shit, if you belly's eyes are
not sections of tumours who looks will at one moment emerge from some part of
your body in the form of a blennorrhagic discharge.
You see with your navels - why do you hid from your navels the ridiculous spectacle
we offer them? And lower down, women's genitals, love, pure love, naturally
- rare steaks and oil painting. Everybody who looks and who understands can
easily be classified somewhere between poetry and love, between steak and painting.
They'll be digested, they'll be digested. I was recently accused of the theft
of some furs. Probably because people thought I should still be classified as
a poet. One of those poets who satisfy their legitimate need of cold onania
in hot furs. H a H u, I know other, equally platonic, pleasures. Ring up your
family on the telephone
and piss down the hole designed for musical, gastronomic and sacred nonsense.
DADA suggests 2 solutions:
NO MORE LOOKS!
NO MORE WORDS!2
Stop looking!
Stop talking!
For I, chameleon alteration infiltration with convenient attitudes - multicoloured
opinions for every occasion size and price - I do the opposite of what I recommend
to other people.3
I've forgotten something:
where ? why ? how ?
in other words:
the ventilator of cold examples will serve the fragile snake of the procession
and I have never had the pleasure of seeing you, my dear, the ear will take
itself out of the envelope rigid like all marine equipment and the products
of Aa & Co's firm, chewing-gum for example and dogs have blue eyes, I drink
chamomile tea, they drink the wind, DADA introduces new points of view, people
site down now at the corners of tables, in attitudes which lean a bit to the
left and to the right, that's why I've quarrelled with Dada, insist everywhere
on the suppression of the Ds, eat Aa, brush yourself with Aa toothpaste, buy
your clothes at Aa's. Aa is a handkerchief and genitals blowing their noses
rapid collapse - made of rubber - noiseless, needs neither manifestos nor address
books, it gives a 25% discount buy your clothes at Aa's he has blue eyes.
1 I wanted to give myself a bit of publicity.
2 No more manifestos.
3 Sometimes.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
« back
monsieur Aa the antiphilosopher sends us this manifesto
by tristan tzara
22nd may 1920
Long live the undertakers of the combine!
Every act is a revolver shot - both the insignificant gesture and the decisive
moment are attacks (I open the fan of knock-outs for the distillation of the
air that separates us) - and with the words put down on paper I enter, solemnly,
into myself.
In the scalp of notions I implant my 60 fingers and brutally shake the curtains,
the teeth, the bolts of their joints.
I shut, I open, I spit. Careful! The moment has come when I should tell you
I've been lying. If there is a system in the lack of system - that of my proportions
- I never apply it.
In other words, I lie. I lie when I apply it, I lie when I don't apply it, I
lie when I write that I lie because I do not lie - because I have lived the
mirror of my father - chosen from the profits of baccarat - from town to town
- for myself has never been myself - for the saxophone wears like a rose the
assassination of the visceral car-driver - he's made of sexual copper and leaves
of racecourses. Thus drummed the maize, the alarm and pellagra where the matches
grow.
Extermination. Yes, naturally.
But doesn't exist. Myself: mixture kitchen theatre. Long live the stretcher-bearers
of the convocations of ecstasies!
Lying is ecstasy - which lasts longer than a second - there is nothing that
lasts longer. Idiots brood over the century - they start all over again several
centuries later - idiots remain within the circle for ten years - idiots hover
over the dial of a year - Myself (an idiot) I stay there for five minutes.
The claim of the blood to distribute in my body and my event the accidental
colour of the first woman I touched with my eyes in these tentacular times.
The bitterest banditry is to finish one's thought-out phrase. The banditry of
the gramophone, the little anti-human mirage that I like in myself - because
I believe it to be ridiculous and dishonest. But the bankers of language will
always get their little percentage on the discussion. The presence of (at least)
one boxer is indispensible for a match - affiliated members of a gang of dadaist
assassins have signed a self-protection contract for operations of this sort.
Their number is extremely limited - the presence of (at least) one singer for
a duet, or (at least) one signatory for a receipt, of (at least) one eye for
sight, being absolutely indispensible.
Put the photographic plate of the face in the acid bath.
The shocks that have sensitized it will become visible and will surprise you.
Punch yourself in the face and drop dead.....>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
« back
dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love
by tristan tzara
12th december 1920 preamble = sardanapalus
one = suitcase
woman = women
trousers = water
if = moustache
2 = three
stick = perhaps
after = sightreading
irritant = emerald
vice = screw
october = periscope
nerve =
or all this drawn together in any old savory, soapy, brusque or definitive order
- drawn by lot - is alive.
It is thus that over and above the vigilant spirit of the clergyman built at
the corner of every road, be it animal, vegetable, imaginable or organic, everything
is the same as everything that is not the same. Even if I didn't believe it,
it's the truth of the fact that I've put it on paper - because it's a lie that
I have FIXED like a butterfly on a hat.
Lies circulate - welcome Mister Opportune and Mister Convenient: I arrest them
- they're turning into the truth.
Thus DADA takes on the job of the two-wheeled cops and of undercover morality.
Everyone (at a certain moment) was sound in mind and body.
Repeat this 30 times.
I consider myself very likeable.
Tristan Tzara
II
A manifesto is a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretensions
is to the discovery of an instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic,
parliamentary, agronomical and literary syphilis. It may be pleasant, and good-natured,
it's always right, it's strong, vigorous and logical.
Apropos of logic, I consider myself very likeable.
Tristan Tzara
Pride is the star that yawns and penetrates through the eyes and the mouth,
she insists, strikes deep, on her breast is inscribed: you will die. This is
her only remedy. Who still believes in doctors? I prefer the poet who is a fart
in a steam-engine - he's gentle but he doesn't cry - polite and semi-homosexual,
he floats. I don't give a single damn about either one of them. It's by pure
(unnecessary) chance that the first should be German and the second Spanish.
Far be it from us, in actual fact, the idea of discovering theory of the probability
of races and the epistolary perfection of bitterness.
III
We have always made mistakes, but the greatest mistakes are the poems we have
written. Gossip has one single raison d'être: the rejuvenation and maintenance
of biblical traditions. Gossip is perfecting itself, encouraged by the state-controlled
tobacco company, the railways, the hospitals, the undertaking industry and cloth
factories. Gossip is encouraged by the culture of the family. Gossip is encouraged
by Peter's pence. Every drop of saliva that escapes from a conversation is converted
into gold. Since the people have always needed divinities to protect the three
essential laws, which are those of God: eating, making love and shitting, since
the kinds are on their travels and the laws are too hard, the only thing that
counts at the moment is gossip. The form under which it most often appears is
DADA.
There are some people (journalists, lawyers, amateurs, philosophers) who even
think that other forms: business, marriages, visits, wars, various conferences,
limited companies, politics, accidents, dance halls, economic crises, fits of
hysterics, are variations of dada.
Not being an imperialist, I don't share their opinion - I believe, rather, that
dada is only a divinity of the second order, which must quite simple by placed
beside the other forms of the new mechanism of the religions of the interregnum.
Is simplicity simple, or dada?
I consider myself rather likeable.
Tristan Tzara
IV
Is poetry necessary? I know that those who shout loudest against it are actually
preparing a comfortable perfection for it; they call it the Future Hygienic.
People envisage the (ever-impending) annihilation of art. Here they are looking
for a more art-like art. Hygiene becomes mygod mygod purity.
Must we no longer believe in words? Since when do they express the contrary
of what the organ that utters them things and wants?* Herein lies the great
secret:
Thought is made in the mouth.
I still consider myself very likeable.
Tristan Tzara
A great Canadian philosopher said: Thought and the past are also very likeable.
* Thinks. wants, and wishes to think
V
A friend, who is too good a friend of mine not to be very intelligent, said
to me the other day:
a shudder
IS ONLY THE
a palmist
WAY PEOPLE SAY
good morning
good evening
AND
WHICH DEPENDS ON THE FORM
THAT HAS BEEN GIVEN
TO
its forget-me-not
his hair
I answered
YOU ARE RIGHT
idiot
prince
BECAUSE I AM
CONVINCED OF THE
contrary
Tartary
naturally
we hesitate
WE ARE NOT (DO NOT)
right. I am called
THE OTHER
wish to understand
Since diversity is diverting, this game of golf gives the illusion of a "certain"
depth. I support all the conventions - to suppress them would be to make new
ones, which would complicate our lives in a truly repugnant fashion.
We wouldn't know any more what if fashionable: to love the children of the first
or second marriage. The "pistil of the pistol" has often landed us
in bizarre and restless situations. To disorder meanings - to disorder notions
and all the little tropical rains of demoralisation, disorganisation, destruction
and billiard-breaks, are actions which are insured against lightning and recognised
as being of public utility. There is one known fact: dadaists are only to be
found these days in the French Academy. I nevertheless consider myself very
likeable.
Tristan Tzara
VI
It seems that this exists: more logical, very logical, too logical, less logical,
not very logical, really logical, fairly logical.
Well then, draw the inferences.
"I have."
Now think of the person you love most.
"Have you?"
Tell me the number and I'll tell you the lottery.
VII
A priori, in other words with its eyes closed, Dada places before action and
above all: Doubt. DADA doubts everything. Dada is an armadillo. Everything is
Dada, too. Beware of Dada.
Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man's normal condition, is DADA.
But the real dadas are against DADA.
The selfkleptomaniac.
The person who steals - without thinking of his own interests, or of his will
- elements of his individual, is a kleptomaniac. He steals himself. He causes
the characters that alienate him from the community to disappear. The bourgeois
resemble one another - they're all alike. They used not to be alike. They have
been taught to steal - stealing has become a function - the most convenient
and least dangerous thing is to steal oneself. They are all very poor. The poor
are against DADA. They have a lot to do with their brains. They'll never get
to the end of it. They work. The poor are against DADA. He who is against DADA
is for me, a famous man said, but then he died. They buried him like a true
dadaist. Anno domini Dada. Beware! And remember this example.
VIII
TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put
them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
Them poem will resemble you.
And there you are - an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even
though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.*
________________________________________________________________________
* Example:
when dogs cross the air in a diamond like ideas and the appendix of the meninx
tells the time of the alarm programme (the title is mine) prices they are yesterday
suitable next pictures/ appreciate the dream era of the eyes/ pompously that
to recite the gospel sort darkens/ group apotheosis imagine said he fatality
power of colours/ carved flies (in the theatre) flabbergasted reality a delight/
spectator all to effort of the no more 10 to 12/ during divagation twirls descends
pressure/ render some mad single-file flesh on a monstrous crushing stage/ celebrate
but their 160 adherents in steps on put on my nacreous/ sumptuous of land bananas
sustained illuminate/ joy ask together almost/ of has the a such that the invoked
visions/ some sings latter laughs/ exits situation disappears describes she
25 dance bows/ dissimulated the whole of it isn't was/ magnificent has the band
better light whose lavishness stage music-halls me/ reappears following instant
moves live/ business he didn't has lent/ manner words come these people
IX
There are some people who explain, because there are others who learn. Abolish
hem and all that's left is dada.
Dip your pen into a black liquid with manifesto intentions - it's only your
autobiography that you're hatching under the belly of the flowering cerebellum.
Biography is the paraphernalia of the famous man. Great or strong. And there
you are, a simple man like the rest of them, once you've dipped your pen into
the ink, full of
PRETENSIONS
which manifest themselves in forms as diverse as they are unforeseen, which
apply to every form of activity and of state of mind and of mimicry: there you
are, full of
AMBITIONS
to keep yourself on the dial of life, in the place where you've only just arrived,
to proceed along the illusory and ridiculous upward path towards an apotheosis
that only exists in your neurasthenia: there you are, full of
PRIDE
greater, stronger, more profound than all the others.
Dear colleagues: a great man, a little one, a strong, weak, profound, superficial
one,
that's why you're all going to die.
There are some people who have antedated their manifestos to make other people
believe that they had the idea of their own greatness a little earlier. My dear
colleagues, before after, past future, now yesterday,
that's why you're all going to die.
There are some people who have said: dada is good because it isn't bad, dada
is bad, dada is a religion, dada is a poem, dada is a spirit, dada is sceptical,
dada is magic, I know dada.
My dear colleagues: good bad, religion poetry, spirit scepticism, definition
definition,
that's why you're all going to die,
and you will die, I promise you.
The great mystery is a secret, but it's known to a few people. They will never
say what dada is. To amuse you once again I'll tell you something like:
dada is the dictatorship of the spirit, or
dada is the dictatorship of language,
or else
dada is the death of the spirit,
which will please many of my friends. Friends.
X
It is certain that since Gambetta, the war, Panama and the Steinheil affair,
intelligence is to be found in the street. The intelligent man has become and
all-round, normal person. What we lack, what has some interest, what is rare
because he has the anomalies of precious being, the freshness and liberty of
the great antimen, is
THE IDIOT
Dada is working with all its might towards the universal installation of the
idiot. But consciously. And tends itself to become more and more of one.
Dada is terrible: it doesn't feel sorry about the defeats of intelligence.
Dada could rather be called cowardly, but cowardly like a mad dog; it recognises
neither method nor persuasive excess.
The lack of garters which makes it systematically bend down reminds us of the
famous lack of system which basically has never existed. The false rumour was
started by a laundress at the bottom of her page, the page was taken to the
barbaric country where humming-birds act as the sandwich-men of cordial nature.
This was told me by a watch-maker who was holding a supple syringe which, in
characteristic memory of the hot countries, he called phlegmatic and insinuating.
XI
Dada is a dog - a compass - the lining of the stomach - neither new nor a nude
Japanese girl - a gasometer of jangled feelings - Dada is brutal and doesn't
go in for propaganda - Dada is a quantity of life in transparent, effortless
and gyratory transformation.
XII
gentlemen and ladies buy come in and buy and don't read you'll see the fellow
who has in his hands the key to niagara the man with a game leg in the game
box his hemispheres in a suitcase his nose enclosed in a chinese lantern you'll
see you'll see you'll see the belly dance in the massachusetts saloon the fellow
who sticks the nail in and the tyre goes down mademoiselle atlantide's silk
stockings the trunk that goes 6 times round the world to find the addressee
monsieur and his fiancee his brother and his sister-in-law you'll find the carpenter's
address the toad-watch the nerve like a paper-knife you'll have the address
of the minor pin for the feminine sex and that of the fellow who supplies the
obscene photos to the kind of greece as well as the address of l'action francaise.
XIII
DADA is a virgin microbe
DADA is against the high cost of living
DADA
limited company for the exploitation of ideas
DADA has 391 different attitudes and colours according to the sex of the president
It changes - affirms - says the opposite at the same time - no importance -
shouts - goes fishing.
Dada is the chameleon of rapid and self-interested change.
Dada is against the future. Dada is dead. Dada is absurd. Long live Dada. Dada
is not a literary school, howl
Tristan Tzara
XIV
To "prettify" life in the lorgnette - a blanket of caresses - a panoply
with butterflies - that's the life of life's chambermaids.
To sleep on a razor and on fleas in rut - to travel in a barometer - to piss
like a cartridge - to make faux pas, be idiotic, take showers of holy minutes
- be beaten, always be the last one - shout out the opposite of what the other
fellow says - be the editorial office and the bathroom of God who every day
takes a bath in us in company with the cesspool clearer - that's the life of
dadaists.
To be intelligent - respect everyone - die on the field of honour - subscribe
to the Loan - vote for So-and-So - respect for nature and painting - to barrack
at dada manifestations - that's the life of men.
XV
DADA is not a doctrine to be put into practice: Dada - is for lying: a successful
business. Dada gets into debt and doesn't live on its well-filled wallet. The
good Lord created a universal language, that's why people don't take him seriously.
A language is a utopia. God can allow himself not to be successful: so can Dada.
That's why the critics say: Dada goes in for luxuries, or Dada is in rut. God
goes in for luxuries, or God is in rut. Who's right: God, Dada or the critic?
"You're deviating," a charming reader tells me.
- No no, not at all! I simply wanted to reach the conclusion: Subscribe to Dada,
the only loan that doesn't pay.
XVI
howl howl howl howl howl howl howl howl
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Who still considers himself very likeable
Tristan Tzara
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
« back
how i became charming, likeable and delightful
by tristan tzara
19th december 1920
I sleep very late. I commit suicide at 65%. My life is very cheap, it's only
30% of life for me. My life has 30% of life. It lacks arms, strings and a few
buttons. 5% is devoted to a state of semi-lucid stupor accompanied by anaemic
crackling. This 5% is called DADA. So life is cheap. Death is a bit more expensive.
But life is charming and death is equally charming.
A few days ago I was at a meeting of imbeciles. There were a lot of people there.
Everyone was charming. Tristan Tzara, a small, absurd and insignificant individual
was giving a lecture on the art of becoming charming. He was charming, at that.
Everyone is charming. And witty. It's delightful, isn't it? Everyone is delightful,
at that. 9 degrees below zero. It's charming, isn't it? No, it isn't charming.
God isn't up to it. He isn't even in the directory. But even so he's charming.
Ambassadors, poets, counts, princes, musicians, journalists, actors, writers,
diplomats, directors, dressmakers, socialists, princesses and baronesses are
charming.
You're all of you charming, very subtle, witty and delightful. Tristan Tzara
says to you: he's quite willing to do something else, but he prefers to remain
an idiot, a practical joker and a hoaxer. Be sincere for a moment: what I've
just said to you - is it charming or idiotic?
There are some people (journalists, lawyers, amateurs, philosophers) who even
think that business, marriages, visits, wars, various conferences, limited companies,
politics, accidents, dance halls, economic crises, fits of hysterics, are variations
of dada.
Not being an imperialist, I don't share their opinion. I believe rather, that
dada is only a divinity of the second order, which must quite simply be placed
beside the other forms of the new mechanism of the religions of the interregnum.
Is simplicity simple, or dada?
I consider myself rather likeable.
Tristan Tzara