Breton's Surrealism

  

 For convenience, my quotations from Breton use the translation by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, readily available at https://monoskop.org/images/2/2f/Breton_Andre_Manifestoes_of_Surrealism.pdf.   References in parentheses are to this text; those in brackets are endnotes.

 

       Surrealism is one of the chief artistic movements of the twentieth century.  Its practices are now not only familiar in countless works of art, but in advertisements and popular culture as well.  Song lyrics (and band names) that would have seemed radically revolutionary in the 1920s had, by the 1960s, become commonplace on popular radio stations.  In spite of earlier precedents for writing that seems Surrealist as well as prior uses of the term by Apollinaire and Yvan Goll, the Surrealists, as an organized cultural formation, are generally traced to André Breton’s 1924 “Surrealist Manifesto.”  For decades Breton defined the movement, notoriously exerting a tyrannical authority over the group, admitting new acolytes and expelling the insubordinate, while maintaining tight control of the brand during his entire life.

     Intended as a revolutionary call to action, Breton’s manifesto might well be read as a look backwards, a belated document of Romanticism.  It is quite natural that he makes an extended example of a passage from the 1796 novel The Monk.  The Surrealist valorization of irrationality and the marvelous would have been familiar to Lewis’s readers over a hundred years earlier.  For Breton “in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest.” (9)

     While Breton’s Surrealist program is wandering and self-indulgent, its general drift is unmistakable.  He seeks to question the value of received ideas and everyday experience, rejecting the limitation of imagination by “the laws of an arbitrary utility”  which confine most peoples’ imagination to “a state of slavery.” (4)  “The case against the realistic attitude demands to be examined,” he insists, since “the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism . . . clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit.” (6)  In reaction against Realism, he quotes a passage from Crime and Punishment, the “purely informative style” of which he declares to be an “unworthy” “school-boy description.” (8)

     In place of a straightforward imitation of ordinary (or dramatic) lived experience, Breton offers new perspectives available in such sources as dreams, madness, chance operations, and the minds of children.  The first of these suggestions flies in the face of the cliché that nothing is more boring than other people’s dreams, a notion seconded by most readers of Anais Nin and Jack Kerouac.  In literature all readers are aware that anything presented as a dream, a vision, a fantasy, or hallucination is likely to be of critical importance in  understanding the narrative in which it is embedded, but these are carefully composed elements of a work of art, not simple transcriptions of real dreams.   Deluded perhaps by such precedents, Breton and others (Gide even) published what purported to be their dreams, but these have attracted little attention, particularly when compared to the concept on which their presentation to the public is founded.  The Surrealist fetishization of dreams is  a modern twist on the ancient idea that at night the gods speak to the sleeper, only in its twentieth century iteration the source of wisdom is not the divine but rather the unconscious.

     In fact the most dreams can do is to suggest possibilities that would not otherwise occur to the writer and to widen the scope of what is permissible in narrative.  The artist must, however, process the raw material presented by this richer inventory of possibilities, selecting those which taste admits whether the decisions be conscious or intuitive.  Fruits of this new freedom are apparent in the devices of magic realism and in metafiction.  Breton had rejected the therapeutic value of dreams claimed by Freudian analysis, but maintained their aesthetic value, a claim which has proven largely fruitless in practice.  His story about Saint-Pol-Roux posting a sign outside his bedchamber declaring “the poet is working” (14) is delightful, but implies nothing about the poet’s actual writing routine.  Far from recognizing the craftsmanship and care that produces worthwhile art, Breton provocatively (and simplistically) claims that the waking state is “a phenomenon of interference” and calls for “sleeping logicians” and “sleeping philosophers.” (12)

     According to Breton what limits the artist, in his terms what keeps “the flag of imagination furled,” is an unjustified “fear of madness.” (6)  Since Breton’s manifesto, the art world has cultivated an appreciation for “outsider art,” what Dubuffet called art brut, many of the most celebrated works of which were made by people diagnosed with major mental illness.  The reader may wonder whether Breton learned anything from contact with people suffering from major mental illness.  To him mad people “derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination,” indeed “they enjoy their madness,” (5) generalizations which would scarcely be consistent with what psychiatric workers and the families of the afflicted observe.  While the art of people like Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger is indeed impressive and beautiful, that is simply because they are outstanding artists, not because of their illness.   On the other hand, Breton notes with satisfaction that Robert Desnos’ drawings were taken to be the work of an insane person, though the artist was not, in fact, mad. (23) 

     Breton names “psychic automatism” as the very heart of Surrealism (26), and “automatism” in English or French can only mean production without conscious control.   The most important element of his free-writing with Soupault is that they make no revisions. (24)  He emphasizes “the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” (26)  Surrealism thus, by only a slight elaboration, became associated with altogether chance operations, the sort called “aleatory” by Werner Meyer-Eppler in 1955.  The notion that a discerning judgment is an obstacle can be entertained only by those who have never devoted prolonged attention to works produced without conscious craftsmanship.. 

     Finally, Breton fancies that wisdom resides in the insights of small children, another Romantic notion straight from Wordsworth.  According to him to find inspiration, one need only “tum back toward his childhood.” (3)  Yet this enlightened early stage is undone by education.  “At an early age children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to thoroughly enjoy fairy tales.” (15)  Some writers, such as Chatterton and Rimbaud, are the more celebrated for writing done in their teens, and parents are fond of quoting their clever sayings of their offspring, but no art whatever by young children is preserved and enjoyed. 

     The barrenness of all these resources – dreams, insanity, suspension of judgement, and the mind of early childhood --  is transformed to luxuriant fruitfulness, however, when Breton’s ideas are read as metaphorical gestures, as figures of speech.  In this rhetorical way, he is recommending writing as weighted with significance as dreams, as daring and innovative as the moves of a schizophrenic’s mind, as unpredictable as randomness, and as fresh and attractive as a child’s imagination.  Reading the manifesto in this way produces ideas far less provocative and dramatic but far more defensible.

     While Breton’s condemnation  of rational cognitive processes pervades the manifesto throughout, providing a polemical froth that he never cares to justify, the real innovation of Surrealism, the acceptance of underdetermined metaphors had more lasting influence.   Many critics and readers are, like Breton, susceptible to “the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations.” (26)  In support he offers the testimony of Apollinaire (who recommended figures of speech with an “extreme degree of immediate absurdity” which “upon closer scrutiny” which may “give way to everything admissible, everything legitimate in the world.” (24) 

     Even more explicit is the prescription he quotes from Reverdy.

 

     It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.

     The more the relationship between the two Juxtaposed realities is distant and true) the stronger the image will be-the greater its emotional power and poetic reality. (20)

 

While clearly going too far in advocating such “modern” images by claiming that there is a direct correspondence between “distance” and value, this formulation states the principle unmistakably.

     Breton proceeds then to provide an example of his own, saying that the apparently meaningless phrase "There is a man cut in two by the window," occurred to him quite clearly but without any cause in prior thought or experience, straight from the unconscious he would have his readers believe. (21)   This verbal “apparition” then stimulates “a whole series of phrases” coming into his consciousness without reflection or intention.  The reader has nothing but Breton’s enthusiasm to indicate that the image has any meaning or that this concatenation of words has the slightest value.

     Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” is less a statement of aesthetic theory or a handbook for practice than a pose, a work of art on its own, regardless of its “truth” or “usefulness.”  As a statement of what might by now perhaps be labeled the “classic avant-garde,” it is bracing in its cheekiness and provocative in its iconoclasm.  In visual art and in literature, Surrealism’s primary contribution was in fact the admittance of novel and “readerly” metaphors, to an extent far beyond what the Symbolists had dared.  Today art-lovers have become accustomed to the use of such figures of speech, finding them far less puzzling than they had seemed a few generations ago.  When “exquisite corpses” are a recommended elementary school exercise and dream imagery fills music videos the time has perhaps come to define what was new and what is lasting about Breton’s Surrealism.

Yvan Goll’s Surrealism

 

Next month I mean to post an analysis of Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto.

 

     While Surrealism is generally identified with André Breton and defined by his manifestos, he was the inventor neither of the movement nor of many of its ideas.  The term had been used in May 1917 by Apollinaire in his program notes for Cocteau’s Parade (a legendary production that featured the work of Massine, Picasso, and Satie) and again a month later for Apollinaire’s own play Les Mamelles de Tirésias.  In October of the same year, only weeks before Breton published his first manifesto, Yvan Goll included an unsigned manifesto he had written as the first article in  his journal Surréalisme.  The inaugural issue which included contributions from Apollinaire, Reverdy, Crevel, Jean Painlevé, and Robert Delaunay among others, turned out to be the only one.  The vagaries of literary fashion have resulted in Breton’s manifestos being reprinted and cited countless times, while Goll’s is quite difficult to find.  After failing to find any English translation, I made my own.

     Both Breton and Goll had a band of partisans and the meaning of the term Surrealism was debated for a time in journals and cafés, but this dispute arose as much from friendships and early associations as from disagreements about theory.  (In fact, the Surrealist group always included artists with a wide variety of styles.)  Goll, born Isaac Lang in Alsace-Lorraine, went on to write Expressionist plays and screenplays and to translate Joyce’s Ulysses.  His books of poetry were illustrated by such artists as by  Georg Grosz, Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger (Der Neue Orpheus) and Pablo Picasso (Élégie d'Ihpetonga suivi des masques de cendre).

     Goll’s version of Surrealism has in common with Breton’s the preference for unlikely metaphor, the sort of juxtaposition identified with Lautréamont’s formula from Les Chants de Maldoror: “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”  In Goll’s words “The most beautiful images are those that bring together bits of reality far distant from one another as directly as swiftly as possible.”  This emphasis on the vividly presented image constitutes the modernity of the technique he prescribes, emphasized by his requirement that poetry should be “direct” and “intense” and avoid “abstract or second-hand notions” such as “logic, aesthetic theory, grammatical effects, and word-play” (while apparently allowing his own governing theory).

     Goll takes the opposite of Breton’s position from the start, however, when he acknowledges “reality” as “the basis for all great art.”  Indeed, all art might equally be described as Goll defines surrealism, as the “transposing of reality into a higher plan,” in other words, the phenomenal world filtered through the artist’s consciousness.  Art, he maintains, is put together out of the “raw material” of experience like the wallpaper included in a Cubist collage or the use of overheard talk mentioned by Max Jacob, or, indeed, the sources of any writer who makes something new based on experience.

     Goll dismisses popular entertainment, for him an oddly broad term covering not only both ballet and the music hall, but “all curious and picturesque art, art founded on eroticism and exoticism, strange art, unsettled art, frivolous and decadent art” as well.  He rejects Dada as well which for him consists of simply seeking to épater les bourgeois. 

     Most pointedly he condemns Breton’s Surrealism without naming his rival, saying that it, too, aims only at scandal and sensation and, with its fascination with dreams, erroneously makes of Freud “a new Muse.”  Goll insists as an axiom that “our physical organism” “instructs us that reality is always right” and “that life is truer than thought.”

   The fact is that his assertion that modern art centers on the image has proven substantially true in terms of the history of poetry.  From the Imagists through the Objectivists and later the practitioners of what some call the “deep image” and some “leaping images” this focus remained central for much of the twentieth century.  

     Goll’s place in the origin of Surrealism has been largely obscured by Breton’s success in assuming the role of leader of the Surrealist movement, with the authority to define the meaning of the term.  Yet both as a poet and as a critic Goll merits the attention of the historian of modern art and in particular of the avant-garde.  Evaluation of the following manifesto is perhaps the initial step in reassessing his significance in the art of the twentieth century.

 

 

 

 

Yvan Goll’s Surrealist Manifesto

 

     Reality is the basis of all great art.  Without it there is no life, no substance. Reality is the earth under our feet and the sky over our heads.

     Everything that the artist creates has an origin in nature. The Cubists, when they were new, understood that, as humble as the purest primitives, they lowered themselves radically into the simplest object, into what is valueless, and went so far as to stick a piece of wallpaper onto a painting, in all its reality.

     This transposing of reality into a higher (artistic) plan constitutes surrealism.

     Surrealism is a concept arising from Guillaume Apollinaire.  Looking at his poetic body of work, we find the same elements as in the earliest cubists: the words of everyday life possess for him a “strange magic” and it is with these, the raw material of writing, that he worked.  Max Jacob tells how one day he simply noted down words and phrases he overheard on the street and made of them a poem.

        With this raw material alone, he formed poetic images.  Today the image is the criterion for good poetry.  The rapidity of association between the first and second impression constitutes the quality of the image. 

    The first poet observed, “The sky is blue.”  Somewhat later, another declared, “Your eyes are blue like the sky.”  A good while later another ventured to say, “You have the sky in your eyes.”   A modern will cry out, “Your heavenly eyes!”  The most beautiful images are those that bring together bits of reality far distant from one another as directly as swiftly as possible. 

     Thus the image has become the most appreciated element in modern poetry.  Before the beginning of the twentieth century it was the ear that determined the quality of poetry: rhythm, sonority, cadence, alliteration, rhyme, all are for the ear.  In the last twenty years, the eye has had its revenge.  It is the century of movies.  We communicate better with visual signs.  And it is speed that makes quality today.

     Art is an emanation of human life and the human organism.  Surrealism, the expression of our own age, takes into account takes into account the symptoms that characterize our time: it is direct, intense, and it pushes back against those arts that rest on abstract or second-hand notions: logic, aesthetic theory, grammatical effects, and word-play.

     Surrealism would not be satisfied to be the mode of expression of a coterie or a country: it will be international; it will absorb all the “isms” that share Europe and will gather up the vital components of each.

     Surrealism is a vast movement in our time.  It signifies health and will with ease hold off the tendencies to decomposition and morbidity that come up wherever something is being built.

     The art of entertainment, of the ballet and the music hall, all curious and picturesque art, art founded on eroticism and exoticism, strange art, unsettled art, frivolous and decadent art will soon cease to amuse a generation that, after the war, needed only to forget.

      And the counterfeit of Surrealism which some ex-Dadas dreamed up to continue to shock the bourgeoisie, will soon be out of circulation.

     They affirm “the omnipotence of the dream” and make of Freud a new Muse.  That Dr. Freud makes use of dreams to cure highly terrestrial problems is all very well.  But to apply his doctrines to the world of poetry, is that not to confound art and psychiatry?

    Their concept of a “psychic mechanism based on the dream and the free play of thought” can never be strong enough to conquer our physical organism, which instructs us that reality is always right, and that life is truer than thought.

       Our surrealism recovers nature, the primal emotions of man, and proceeds, with entirely new artistic material, toward creation, toward an act of will.

Notes on Recent Reading 46 (Kleist, Didion, Soupault)

The Prince of Homburg (Kleist)

     To me the most striking thing about this play is not the prominence of an extreme military code of discipline not irrelevant to the author’s family, for centuries prominent in the Prussian army.  The Prince wins a great victory, but, due to his love-dreaminess, violates orders.  For this he is condemned to die.  In the end the Elector pardons him buts finds him (temporarily) too scrupulous to accept this mercy.  We may be reminded of a samurai story, though for Kleist the whole tension is, I suppose, between heart and mind.  Among the numerous complications even this thread of the plot engenders are the questions of whether the Elector had been sincere (he certainly seemed to be) when threatening the firing squad and what role the unanimous petition from other soldiers may have had.  The most dramatic and radical questions arise with the final words of the play in which the Prince, who had been subjected to a mock execution, asks if he is dreaming and Kottwitz replies “Ein Traum, was sonst," causing the protagonist to fall into unconsciousness again. 

     Perhaps the most emotionally powerful portion of the play is the pathetic passage in which the noble and courageous warrior is reduced by fear of death to abject begging. 

     The play has been justly compared to Shakespeare’s late romances for its hovering between comedy and tragedy and its magical resolution. 

 

 

 

A Book of Common Prayer (Didion)

     In Joan Didion’s reports from Central America in the New York Review of Books, later the basis for her 1983 book Salvador, the revolutionary crisis was unforgettably described.  There can be little doubt that her fierce images and ideological restraint informed the opinion of at least the American intelligentsia.  Before the violence, supported always by a pernicious US influence, became so widespread, she had depicted a fictional banana republic in her 1977 novel, set in a Boca Grande that is strikingly reminiscent of O. Henry’s Anchuria in Cabbages and Kings.   The utter and complete corruption, the domination by wealth and guns, the oligarchy that always governs in spite of democratic and left-wing charades, are historically accurate and unfortunately remain the norm in Central America.  Even when revolutionaries came to power they turned into the tyrants their younger selves had despised. 

     That society, though, is purely the setting, establishing the tone of cynical self-absorption that is normal in Boca Grande, within which the drifting Americans, in particular the distrait Charlotte Douglas, pass their time.  The narrator Grace Strasser-Mendana, who, like everyone else, has no political values, is practically the only realistic dependable observer, her accuracy buttressed by her scientific training.  Yet in the last line she reflects, “I have not been the witness I wanted to be.”

     Marin comes across with very little personality, hardly even a true believer, so dulled she is in defensive insouciance.  She seems purely a reflection of the then-current news of the Symbionese Liberation Army (though the originals were more touching and true and finally tragic).  I would have thought that there might have been room for a few manifestations of idealism or nobility from the Boca Grande guerilleros as well.  Ah well, once again, history has vindicated cynicism.

     For me the best passages were those in which the characters tossed aggressive verbal barbs amongst themselves, getting nowhere at all.  At times they sounded almost like Ronald Firbank characters.  Good fun there.

 

 

 

Lost Profiles (Soupault)

     The subtitle of this slim 1963 volume, “Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism,” is better justified than the title itself.  The old avant-garde has been canonized and what had once been rebellious groupings apart from the prior artistic power structure have now becomes standard art history.  Which is not to say boring.  Here one may find reminiscences of Breton, Crevel, and Reverdy from a central figure in Paris Dada and a co-founder of Surrealism (though he was expelled for refusing to join the Communist Party).  He conveys the ambience of the early twentieth century counterculture, emphasizing rebellion and the role of scandal.  Those who came of age in the sixties might find his account of the scenes of his youth particularly engaging. 

     He records portraits of Apollinaire, Henri Rousseau, and some less likely figures such as Proust and Joyce as well as an appreciative piece on Baudelaire.

     This edition was translated by Alan Bernheimer with a pleasant afterword by Ron Padgett and published by City Lights.

 

 

Tristan Tzara, Poet of Manifestos

Numbers in parentheses refer to Tzara’s manifestos listed just following the essay. I used Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries translated by Barbara Wright from Riverrun Press, New York to avoid quoting in French and including translations. The originals are readily available.
Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.


Tristan Tzara pioneered the development of the manifesto as a literary form, [1] a movement across movements that persisted throughout the twentieth century and, in a quieter form, into the present. To me his poetry and drama generally work best in performance. While on the printed page the appeal of much of his work is less apparent, his manifestos retain their lively and likable energy.

The invention of this new genre, as well as the reinvention of performance poetry, was, perhaps, natural given Dada’s profound and polemical skepticism. For Tzara, Arp, and others a fiercely radical questioning approaches nihilism like an asymptote, yet their political, aesthetic, and spiritual idealism remains always a flicker, peyrceptible to the discerning reader. In the realms of conceptual art, chance, and the privileged valuation of the ephemeral, Tzara’s early twentieth century pronouncements are groundbreaking.

To be sure, Tzara could not have been clearer about his manifestos being anti-manifestos. In his seminal “Dada Manifesto” he notes the paradox and readily admits his self-contradiction: “I am writing a manifesto and there is nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.” He later writes under the guise of Monsieur AA, the Antiphilosopher. Dada, he says, “doubts everything.” “Everything we look at,” he insists, “is false.” “We don’t accept any theories.” Dada is “a word that throws up ideas so they can be shot down.” (2)

Playing up the destructive potential of his position in dramatic form, he proclaims ”there is great negative, destructive work to be done.” Dada is “like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing for the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration, and decomposition.” (2) Anticipating Jimi Hendrix, he calls for musicians to smash their instruments on stage. (3)[2] “Every act,” according to him, “is a cerebral revolver shot.” (6)

If nothing whatever can be known, making everyone an "idiot,” as Tzara calls himself and his readers alike (5), what then? If the poet is a mere “fart in a steam engine,” (7) what more can be said? Avoiding as Gorgias had done millennia before, the desolate and boring aporia that might result from a conviction that Truth is altogether inaccessible, Tzara turns to his own subjectivity. This is essential because, “a work of art is never beautiful, by decree, objectively, for everyone.” (3) Since every consciousness is unique, the individual must shed “the pursuit of I worship you.” (4) Authority, including Tzara’s authority, is illusory. Thus the manifesto reader must not be “led astray by Aaism,” (4) that is to say, by the very document he is reading. Tzara rejects the very possibility of discursive thought. Some explain, he says, while others learn, but both deceive themselves. Abolish both the teacher and the learner and you have dada. (7) He calls, in fact, for “NO MORE WORDS,” though he cannot avoid using words as he does so. (5)

Only by entering into his own mind can the poet make progress: “With the words I put down on paper I enter, solemnly, into myself” (6) Tzara refers to this inward turning as “selfkleptomania.” (7) To him he is simply making explicit what is inevitable in any case. As he says, one may try to write a manifesto, but “it’s your autobiography that you’re hatching under the belly of the flowering cerebellum.” (7)

The dominant result of this introspection is an extraordinary ebullience, irrational exuberance and high spirits arising from some unquestioned, unquestionable base in a pyrotechnic display of excited language. Delightful little verbal displays pop off here and there. He maintains, for example that art is to be identified not only with Dada, but equally with plesiosaurus or handkerchief. (3) He renews the reader’s subscription to “the celluloid love that creaks/ like metal gates” (4) The phrase “for the saxophone wears like a rose the assassination of the visceral car driver” occurs in the middle of a passage as scintillating and fast-moving as the world of subatomic particles. That passage ends “thus drummed the maize, the alarm and pellagra where the matches grow.” (6) At times, Tzara’s manifestos are so rich in this pure poetry that one feels as though one is eating bonbons. “Dada is a dog – a compass –the lining of the stomach – neither new nor a nude Japanese girl – a gasometer of jangled feelings.” (7) And so it goes, infused with wild unpredictable imagination and passionate enthusiasm.

In the end, “Dada is our intensity.” Spectacle rules: “We are circus ringmasters.” “It’s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors” (6) the cosmos then becomes a marvel, “the spermatozoon ballet” (4), at which one can only look on in wonder.

Yet, Tzara sounds a word of warning. Significance is lurking in the shadows. “While we put on a show of being facile, we are actually seeking for the secret essence of things.” (1) Tzara’s pseudonym on top of a pseudonym for several of his manifestos is M. Antipyrine, a name suggesting a healing nostrum. The psycho-aesthetic-spiritual solution suggested by Tzara (and other Dada artists) has much in common with Zen Buddhism. [3]

Tzara’s pseudonym with its associations with the French word triste draws attention to the universal suffering that motivates the Buddhist search for enlightenment. [4] He repeats the line “You’re all going to die,” (7) as if this fact poses the essential problem of life. The solution to this problem is in both cases experiential rather than logical. Tzara insists that “logic is always false,” (2) a contention that, were it not so baldly stated, could be a portion of a Zen sutra. He speaks nearly explicitly about enlightenment: “We really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the trembling and the awakening.” (7) Dada arises not from intellection but from living: Dada, Tzara says, is “the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, freaks, and irrelevancies: LIFE.”(3) The twentieth century artist recalls Nagarjuna and Advaitist Vedanta when he proclaims that dualities are a fraud, specifying “order=disorder; ego=non-ego; affirmation=negation.” (2) [5]

Finally, and most dramatically, Tzara agrees with the sages that we are really liberated all along, though unconscious of the fact. Nothing really changes with sublime knowledge. One returns at last to the point one had occupied all along. The “three laws” of God are “eating, making love, and shitting.” (6) The story is told of Baizhang Huaihai among others that, when asked how he pursued enlightenment, replied “When hungry, I eat; when tired, sleep.” Yet somehow, in both cases, everything is transfigured.


1. Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto 1916
2. Dada Manifesto 1918
3. Unpretentious Proclamation 1919
4. Manifesto of Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher
5. Tristan Tzara
6. Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher Sends Us this Manifesto
7. Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love


Endnotes

1. The word manifesto had earlier been used for many political declarations such as Bolivar’s “Cartagena Manifesto,” Peel’s “Tamworth Manifesto,” and, most notably, Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century several anarchist manifestos appeared. Very likely the move from the social realm to the aesthetic was facilitated by the military analogy suggested by the term avant-garde.

2. Hendrix did this at Monterey in 1967, but he had been preceded by Jerry Lee Lewis destroying pianos in the 1950s as wel l as by Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck and others. In the realm of avant-garde art, Nam June Paik smashed a violin in 1962 as part of his "One for Violin Solo" and the gesture had become enough of a convention that a Destruction in Art Symposium was held in London in 1966 which involved a number of “destruction events.” Two years later a similar event was held in New York City. Oddly, Townshend had studied with Gustav Metzger who was the central figure in the London symposium.

3. I am hardly the first to note the similarities. See, for instance, Won Ko’s Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi and Their Fellow Poets.

4. In fact the name Tristan is Celtic meaning noise, and is not derived from the Latin tristis, though the association is prominent in Tristan and Iseult as well as with Tzara, who, according to Paul Cernat’s Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, said that it was meant to recall the French phrase “triste âne tzara” ("sad donkey Tzara"). According to Serge Fauchereau's report (also recorded in Cernat), Colomba Voronca recalled Tzara’s explaining it as a play on the Romanian phrase trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country." In 1925 he legally changed his name from Samy Rosenstock to Tristan Tzara.

5. Tzara reinforces the point while incidentally anticipating Derridean deconstruction in section IV of 7.

Dada in America

When I read translations of German Dada poetry recently, I provided a general introduction to the Dada scene including some details about American Dada. As it happened, Duchamp and other avant-garde artists had often visited Kurt Seligmann’s home in Sugar Loaf, now the site of the Seligmann Center for Surrealism where the talk was given. My summary of information on New York Dada is purely reportage – no original analysis, but it may be convenient for some readers.

1.
     Francis Naumann is the leading scholar on the subject. His New York Dada 1915–1923 is the standard reference, though Rudolf E. Kuenzli’s New York Dada has some good essays and documentary material.


2.
     American Dada arose among immigrants at a time like today when a significant percentage of Americans are immigrants or the children of immigrants. It was, however, sufficiently naturalized that the seminal publication included a cartoon by Rube Goldberg.
     The greatest American-born artist associated with Dada was surely Man Ray who met Duchamp in 1914 and collaborated with him on the New York Dada publication in 1920. Best known for and elegant photography in both conventional and avant-garde styles (including the rayograph), he was an important painter and filmmaker as well. His innovative and accomplished body of work includes assemblages from 1915 (for example, his "Self-portrait" using bicycle bells), kinetic works such as "Rotary Glass Plates," ready-mades like 1921 "Gift," a flatiron with nail-like projections (the original of this poignant self-defeating object exhibited in the first Surrealist art show Paris 1925 was given to Satie and is lost). Like Meret Oppenheim’s cup, saucer, and spoon covered with fur from a Chinese gazelle ("Object") this gift is recognizably Dada as it tightens the knot of dualities and highlights at once the centrality and the futility of art.


3.
     Though Duchamp said, “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges,” a number of Dada journals appeared during the 20s. New York Dada must be the single most important publication. Others magazine was edited by Kreymborg, financed by Arensberg and published Mina Loy, Man Ray, William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, and Marianne Moore. Broom was edited by Harold A. Loeb, Alfred Kreymborg, Slater Brown, Matthew Josephson, Malcolm Cowley, and Lola Ridge. The Blind Man was edited by Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roche, and Beatrice Wood and published Walter Arensberg, Mina Loy, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, Stieglitz, Joseph Stella and, in number two, protested the exclusion of Duchamp’s “Fountain” from the unjuried Independents’ show. Rongwrong was edited by Duchamp, Roche, and Wood.
     The most important formation of Dada in this country was formed by Picabia and Duchamp in their alliance with Stieglitz, his gallery 291 and the patronage of Walter Arensberg.


4. Two Characters

     Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) came to the US in 1910 where she worked as an artists’ model and wrote Expressionist and Dada poetry as well as making collages and found sculpture, most notably a piece of drain pipe she titled God. There is evidence, including a letter of Duchamp that she is the actual creator of his urinal titled “Fountain.” Became celebrated for stealing and for outrageous costumes, crepe paper in strings from her neck, a bird-cage, an array of spoons hung from neck and arms, sometimes head shaved and painted vermilion, or a bustle with a taillight. When visiting the French consul in Berlin she wore a birthday cake with fifty lighted candles on her head and a necklace of dried figs about her neck from which she offered the bureaucrat a suck now and then. She appeared in Marcel Duchamp’s film The Baroness Shaves Her Pubic Hair. Jane Heap described her as “the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, lives Dada” (“Dada,” Little Review, Spring 1922: 46). Wallace Stevens was quoted as saying he was afraid to come below 14th Street for fear of encountering her. Djuna Barnes mourned her death in transition. Her poems in German have never been translated.

     Arthur Cravan used many pseudonyms and most of his biographical details are uncertain. He was born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, Oscar Wilde’s nephew. He is known to have been a thief, forger, draft-dodger, sailor, and lumberjack, but his greatest non-literary glory was his prize-fighting. He sponsored his trip to America by a fight with world champion Jack Johnson in the Canary Islands. (He had convinced Johnson’s promoters that he was the European champion. (In fact he had managed, by an unlikely but legitimate series of events, to be named light heavyweight champion of France in 1910.) The bout with Johnson ended in the almost immediate knockout of the inebriated Cravan.
     He edited -- in fact he wrote -- the journal Maintenant from 1911-15. In it he once claimed to have met a living Oscar Wilde. The New York Times dispatched a reporter to see if it might be true.
     Following Picabia's suggestion, he left Barcelona early in 1917 and came to New York, where Duchamp and Picabia arranged for him to give a lecture on modern art at the Grand Central Gallery. He wrote Willard Bohn, whom he had defrauded by selling him a fake Picasso, that he was “going to America to see the butterflies. Perhaps it is absurd, ridiculous, impractical, but it is stronger than I.” Oddly, he added that another of his goals in America was to “make friends with a giraffe.” The audience for his lecture contained many wealthy art patrons who waited for over an hour for Caravan to make an appearance. When he did show up, drunk and semi-coherent, many were concerned that he would damage the painting by the academic American artist Alfred Sterner hanging behind him. He proceeded to curse and sputter and had just begun to disrobe when the police arrived and took him away. Walter Arensberg got him out.
     He fled to Canada when the US began drafting people, using new forged documents, and was on his way to South America with his wife Mina Loy when he vanished. Many suspected he was still around, especially when faked Wilde memorabilia hit the European markets, offered by individuals using his pseudonyms.
     Of the painter Marie Laurencin, Apollinaire’s mistress, Cravan observed: “Now there’s someone who needs somebody to lift her skirts and stick a fat [...] somewhere to teach her that art isn’t just little poses in front of a mirror [but rather] walking, running, drinking, eating, sleeping and relieving oneself.” Apollinaire then challenged him to a duel, which resulted in a rather ignominious apology from Cravan.

5.
     There was a half-baked attempt to revive Dada organized by Americans who had spent time in France including Malcolm Cowley and Matthew Josephson. They spoke of hiring a hall to “give a literary entertainment, with violent and profane attacks on the most famous contemporary writers, court-martials of the most prominent critics . . .all this interspersed with card tricks, solos on the jew’s harp, meaningless dialogues and whatever else would show our contempt for the audience and the sanctity of American letters.” (Josephson had denounced the French in the Little Review as chameleons for leaving Dada for Surrealism.)


6.
     From one of the last nonprofessional literary theorists Kenneth Burke who in his essay “Dada, Dead or Alive” says America has too little tradition to need Dada; in fact, according to Burke, “America is Dada in its actual mode of life, and has produced popular artists to express this Dada.” He mentions Krazy Kat and vaudevillian Joe Cook who “was an incredible juggler, could walk a tightrope, ride a unicycle, mime, and perform many other circus skills with ease.” He played piano, violin, and ukulele, told absurd and often lengthy humorous stories and built very complex Rube Goldberg-type devices to perform simple tasks. His nickname was “One Man Vaudeville.”
     A friend writes from Canada: "A neighbour, moving near by, was for some days involved in the turmoil of resettling; and his dog, to that extent dis-orbited, walking a quarter of a mile up the road to explore the new territory, stopped gravely to observe me in the garden. His owner is James MacDonald; so I, not knowing the dog's name, and yet hoping to find some bond of communication between us, called out, 'Heigh, MacDonald.' Whereupon MacDonald, agreeably surprised by hearing this familiar name, entered the garden and stood beside me. I next asked, 'How's business?' and MacDonald presented his ears to be scratched. I scratched his ears, and he forthwith began attempting the virtue of my leg, so that in anger I ordered him out of the garden. Later I reflected on this strange encounter: how quickly our acquaintance had ripened into friendship, our friendship deepened into intimacy, and our intimacy burned itself out in passion-and in this rapid telescoping of events, I decided, there was Dada."


7.
     Over a number of years Duchamp posed in drag as Rrose Sélavy, an alias first written originally "Rose Sélavy" (an actual double pun in French based on phonetic transcription and concatenation of two common popular expressions: "C'est la vie!" ["That's life!" -- "Tough luck!"] and the other expression "La vie en rose" ["Life in Pink" (the good life)]) to further the parody of the marketing of the perfume "Belle Haleine". The alias was later changed to Rrose Sélavy to force pronouncing the first "R" (against normal French articulation) so that it becomes "Eros, c'est la vie) ["Eros, that's life"]. Man Ray was asked to make several photographic portraits of Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy.
     Duchamp with Ray and Katherine Dreier founded the 1920 “Société Anonyme – the Museum of Modern Art,” an art center in New York which influenced the Rockefeller-funded Museum of Modern Art in 1929.


8.
     “The Cheerless Art of Idiocy” in the June 12, 1921 issue of The World Magazine is typical of the few reactions in the popular press. According to Henry Tyrrell the Dadaist is a “perverse and destructive” “child” whose “nursery breathes an atmosphere of decadence and dynamite. That latter word implied “anarchist” (indeed the IWW, many experienced miners, had been known to value the explosive’s expressive power), but Tyrrell does not stop with the altogether accurate charge of political radicalism. He makes it quite clear that the Bolshevist threat Dada presents is merely one instance of the malicious influence of Jews!


9.
     A poem by the painter Charles Demuth the painter published in The Blind Man indicates the significance for American artists of the arrival of the new ideas from Europe. His poem was called “For Richard Mutt.”

For some there is no stopping.
Most stop or never get a style.
When they stop they make a convention.
That is their end.
For the going everything has an idea.
The going run right along.
The going just keep going.

Emmy Hennings (more translations)

I have been working on a translation of Emmy Hennings’ little book Die Letzte Freude (The Last Joy) with a critical introduction. Here are more of the poems (I still would call them works-in-progress). Hennings used short words and simple verse forms associated with German Romanticism, but for me she avoids cloying through her pose of languorous melancholy while confronting the intolerable facts of existence. 

To Franzi 

 I walk alone each city street.

The sun drops low and darkness comes 

Softly then your songs I hum. 

Oh! I feel forlorn and beat. 

In the fading red-tinged light 

(how your mouth could bring such pain!) 

your face so sweet and almost white, 

and so heart-felt your folksong’s strain! 

Eyes acquainted much with tears 

that know the pain of love’s desire, 

two dark, far-off, celestial spheres 

burning with a low, low fire. 

Hypnosis 

My body aches somewhere in some far land, 

for years my limbs have been as dead, 

my feet both feel as though they’re made of lead, 

my breast’s a void, a burned out brand. 

Nothing’s wrong – I suffer painful days, 

I seem to you like something banned. 

I fall asleep as candles blaze 

to light my way to an unknown land. 

                         (for Siurlal) 

A Dream 

We lie under the sea so low 

we nothing know of pain and woe. 

Held we are on every side, 

for water-lilies ring us round. 

We strive and hope and care no more. 

Desire’s gone from us. 

Lover, something still I seek, 

one wish that I still have, 

such longing to feel longing. 

 With Me at Home 

Grandma’s up all through the night – 

light shines through green glass panes – 

by window’s lattice-work 

a sight to see is her pale face. 

The blue room’s furniture all round 

may be the source of all our woe. 

When someone dies, the clock, 

to show its grief, strikes with the sickest sound. 

The rain is beating on the glass. 

A flower’s lit with red. 

A cool wind wafts on past. 

Am I awake or dead? 

A world extends far as can be. 

A clock strikes four so slow, 

but time is nothing unto me. 

Into your arms I go. . . 

             (dedicated to Robert Jentzsch)

Two Poems by Hugo Ball

In Munich Ball was associated with Wedekind in the court theatre, the Kammerspiele. An actor who actually enlisted when the First World War began, Ball was in the army when German invaded Belgium, upon which he concluded that "the war is founded on a glaring mistake, men have been confused with machines.” He deserted, emigrated to Switzerland, and pursued art and anarchism, translating Bakunin. A few years later, however, he followed a spiritual tendency, perhaps similar at root to that animating Arp and Huelsenbeck, but which, for him, resulted to orthodox Catholicism and a pious and quiet lifestyle. Ball was a major practitioner of the sound poem. In the "Dada Manifesto" of 1916, he says “I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat meows,” and that document itself several times leaves off attacking the philistines to lapse toward abstract sound. His most celebrated work of this sort “gadji beri bimba,” was performed by The Talking Heads on a 1979 album. Ball’s other work includes a biography of his friend Hermann Hesse, a novel titled Flametti or The Dandyism of the Poor, and a number of plays, including Michelangelo’s Nose. 

Karawane 

jolifanto bambla o falli bambla 

großiga m'pfa habla horem 

egiga goramen 

higo bloiko russula huju 

hollaka hollala 

anlogo bung 

blago bung blago bung 

bosso fataka 

ü üü ü 

schampa wulla wussa olobo 

hej tatta gorem 

eschige zunbada 

wulubu ssubudu uluwu ssubudu 

tumba ba-umf 

kusa gauma 

ba - umf 

The Dance of Death 

to the tune of “That’s how we live” 

That’s how we die, that’s how we die, 

we die every day

because it is so comfy to let go. 

Mornings still in sleep and dream, 

noontime already there, 

by evening at the bottom of a grave. 

Slaughter is our house of joy. 

Blood is our only sun. 

Death is our sign, our magic word. 

We leave both wife and child, 

What have they to do with us? 

If one relies on us alone . . . 

So we murder, so we kill. 

We murder every day 

our comrades in a dance of death. 

Brother, figure it out with me – 

brother, your breast, 

brother you must fall and die. 

We don’t murmur, we don’t growl, 

We’re quiet every day. 

Until the joint of the hip-bone turns. 

Our camping ground is hard. 

Our bread is dry. 

Bloody and soiled our dear god. 

We thank you, we thank you, 

Dear Kaiser, for your grace 

in deciding to lie down and die. 

Just sleep, sleep soft and still. 

Until you waken our poor body, 

now covered by the lawn.

The Inconsequential Bayonets of Art: Militant Rhetoric and the Avant-Garde

The few discursive notes are indicated by numbers in brackets. Parenthetical references are to the list of Works Cited.

     Intellectuals are comforted by the philistinism of the remark sometimes attributed to Goebbels, “When I hear anyone talk of culture, I reach for my revolver,” [1] but the noted Dada poet, anti-fascist, and psychiatrist Richard Huelsenbeck provided its lesser-known complement: “to make literature with a gun in my hand [was] my dream.” (Motherwell 28) In rhetoric, the two balance; in practice, of course, only one of the speakers was armed, and the other was lucky to escape his homeland with his life. We remember, fifty years after the defeat of German fascism, the meaning of the Nazi gun, but what is the meaning of Huelsenbeck’s dream?
     The late seventeenth century trope of the “battle of the books” simply provided an image for the long-familiar pattern produced by the dialectic of tradition and innovation in the procession of literary generations. Before long, the metaphor was embellished through the association of literary styles with “progressive” or “reactionary” attitudes and movements. With the coming of industrial capitalism and the Romantic era the link between new artistic practice and political revolution became considerably stronger.
     The very term avant-garde appears in the late eighteenth century with a purely military meaning. It was first used in the cultural sphere by utopian socialists for whom artists were likely “forward troops” who could educate the masses through the dissemination of radical ideas through their work. (Russell 16) This is plausible, of course, only if one assumes a mass audience for the arts. Raymond Williams notes that, though Shelley’s calling poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the World” is very frequently quoted, the helplessness implied by the term “unacknowledged” is rarely explained. (See Russell 19)
     Since the Romantics artists have been expected to consistently oppose the status quo. Thus the young Wordsworth and Shelley admired the French Revolution; Baudelaire and Rimbaud flirted with the revolutions of 1848 and 1870; and the Nixon White House was chagrined to find that no cultural figure was a guest on whom one could depend to behave. [2] Even on the right, poets have often been fierce social critics, tending even, like Marinetti, Celine, and Pound toward the fascist extreme. While there has been considerable “charitable” poetic sympathy for the humanitarian ideals of progressive causes, there has also been a particular fascination with the destructive content of the radical agenda, the cry to do away with the old. Thus Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau all praised John Brown whose apocalyptic rhetoric and fearless uncompromising acts were the logical end of the antislavery imperative, though more pragmatic abolitionists might question his tactics or his sanity.
     The militant rhetoric of the avant-garde is familiar to us all: Rimbaud calling for the death of the wealthy, chanting the powerful “Perissez! Puissance, justice, histoire, a bas! . . .Le sang! Le sang! ., . . Tout a la guerre, a la vengeance, a la terreur.” (noted in Russell 42-3); Marinetti’s flat declaration: “We will declare war” (quoted in Russell 88); Tzara’s proclamation, “There is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished” (Russell 103); Desnos’ idealization of terror (see Russell 154); Artaud’s denunciation of “all writing” as “pigshit” as his slogan “shit to the spirit” (anticipating the Weather Underground’s trope on a Maoist line: “serve the people . . .shit”); Jolas’ declaration of cultural war; Diane di Prima’s smash and burn rhetoric in Revolutionary Letters which counsels, “avoid the folk/ who find Bonny and Clyde too violent.” (di Prima 12); and Baraka’s dictum: “The Black Artist’s role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it." (Baraka 382)
     It may seem as though in these last examples the putative political values have come to dominate the cultural content. It is true that, quite often, as Berkman found after his attack on Frick, the workers don’t get it. Whole movements have arisen in which the philosophic and artistic formation outweighs the political calculation: Russian anarchists, Goldman’s Mother Earth, The Masses, the rock and roll revolution of John Sinclair, Baader-Meinhof, the Weather Underground in certain phases, the punks and squatters of Berlin and the Lower East Side.
     It is surely not surprising that the very groups most lacking a mass base and a plausible political strategy are those with the most absolute and nihilistic rhetoric. Clearly trade unions, resistance groups, and guerilla armies must address the desires of the population (including their own cadre) for a peaceful and productive life. Those formations which lack a mass base, whose appeal is to alienated intellectual rather than to workers are infallibly the ones producing the noisiest and most violent rhetoric.
     Whereas real politics is a matter of compromise, an aesthetic party with no real following need make no concessions. The ecstatic celebration of destructive rage is a direct reflection of powerlessness. Thus the first signifiers of upheaval are generated by weakness as the language of combat replaces genuine struggle. Politics becomes then a spiritual or symbolic enterprise, as valuable as other such rituals. Civic action becomes self-conscious performance art instead of a technology for influencing the lives of the people, and the Trotskyites split into ever more minute and dogmatic sects, each convinced that the grace of its correct political line will compensate for lack of a constituency and will lead eventually to salvation.
     From the artistic side of the dialectic, art which lacks social and academic authority, which lacks an audience and an economic base, will embrace and intensify its own powerlessness by veering toward the extreme, the unintelligible, the arbitrary. The lack of readers becomes the guarantor of the work’s validity. In Tzara’s phrase, Dada “sets up inconsequential bayonets.” (Motherwell 75)
     Once the position of the avant-garde in literature has been imaginatively constructed, through a series of tropes, into the structural equivalent of the military, a number of propositions become available. An array of possibilities opens out, just as such an array always emerges when any figure of speech enters the realm of the conventional: the original figure occurs, accompanied by its ironic double, by its reversal, by any number and variety of twists – the process is evident not only in high art, but also in heavy metal lyrics, graffiti, and bumper stickers. Thus, if the avant-garde is the equivalent of the military, it may assume the posture of a threat that may overthrow the ruling class. It may on the other hand spotlight its own inadequacy. It may seek to reinforce the state’s genuine military power or it may be aggressively antiwar. The Vietnam era slogan “Bring the war home!” indicated not pacifism but the ambition to pursue armed insurrection. The artist may indulge in self-caricature (or may be ridiculed by opponents) as an absurd and impotent force. (Compare the vision in Dharma Bums of a generation of enlightened backpackers with the contempt with which the Beats were received during the 1950s.) All these mutations and many other point back toward the same basic convention and arise in the first instance from a sense of the irrelevance of art in modern society.
     The definitive moment of the avant-garde is Dada. At no earlier time did artists so radically challenge the conventions of artistic creation, and much of what has passed for avant-garde since has merely replicated the dada gestures. The Dadaist movement was born, though, in political struggle in the real world, in resistance and repulsion against World War I and in particular against German imperial culture.
     The word culture has been highly politicized especially in German usage since the late eighteenth century when Herder protested the claim of superior culture as a justification for imperialism. Many of Dada’s practitioners, especially in the German branch, were active revolutionaries. It is said that Huelsenbeck was made Commissar of Fine Arts in the Bavarian Revolution of 1919. He did, at any rate, feel sufficient distaste for Kultur to define it as “shit,” to call for its violent destruction, and to compose the prescient call to arms Deutschland muss untergehen! In 1920. For Huelsenbeck, “Dada is German Bolshevism.” (Motherwell 44)
     The same malaise and alienation which led to Dada’s birth brought many artists of the avant-garde to political activism as communists, socialists, anarchists, or at least antifascists. The Second Surrealist Manifesto, for example, promises (with a revealing use of the future tense) “we shall prove ourselves fully capable of doing our duty as revolutionaries.” (Lippard 141)
     The Nazi state responded with official denunciations of Dada by Hitler years after whatever influence it had once possessed had waned. Prior to the infamous exhibition of “degenerate” art the Reich sponsored a show of “Dadaistic Works of Shame and Filth.” (Hitler’s exalted idea of the danger presented by the avant-garde was feebly echoed by Jesse Helms’ absorbed interest in a few works of art that have received public funding.)
     The extreme rhetoric of the Dadaists was generated, though, not by the fascist threat in Europe alone, but in the first instance by their marginalization in modern society which they saw as proceeding ever further into mass cultural forms which obscure rather than enlighten. The same reaction represented in Horkheimer and Adorno’s declaration that modern mass “culture now impresses the same stamp on everything” (120) producing a culture without satisfaction where the promise of pleasure is an illusion. (139) Even the “ecstasies” of jazz dancing are mere “pseudoactivity” and “mimicry” (Adorno 292), while high culture has only vestiges of an audience. Lukacs decried a modernism which had displaced the authentic grand European tradition. For him the new style “leads not only to the destruction of traditional literary forms; it leads to the destruction of literature itself.” (45) Like Marx himself, these critics feel powerful nostalgia for earlier days and, doubtless, their own excellent German classical educations, but is the “totality” Lukacs seeks not identical to the “uniformity” that Adorno and Horkheimer lament?
     If popular art is false and high art suicidal and elitist, if society at large regards uncommodified art with placid indifference, art responds by cocking a snoot, which is to say by drawing its metaphorical gun, aggressive language. In its most extravagant forms this desperate appeal for attention approaches the language of total war: “TO THE PUBLIC: Before going down among you to pull out your decaying teeth, your running ears, your tongues full of sores, before breaking your putrid bones . . .Before all that, we shall take a big antiseptic bath, and we warn you, we are murderers.” (Ribemont-Dessaignes in Motherwell 109)
     The posture of this statement indicates not only a rejection of the established social and cultural order, but a profound philosophic skepticism as well. It creates a dead end in thought and artistic practice. This has stalled the avant-garde ever since, rendering it useless as a gadfly to the state and unproductive in new aesthetic ideas. The chief techniques of the Dadaists, abstraction, aleatory composition, performance art, ethnopoetics among them, are still the leading methods today, eighty years after the Cabaret Voltaire. The practitioners of these forms receive foundation grants and university appointments, and it has become virtually impossible to épater les bourgeoisie.
     Evidence of this motif of adversarial militancy, increased rather than calmed when ignored, is abundant and familiar. Janco: “a purifying and scandalous force to consume the past,” Breton’s claim that “a volley shot into the crowd” is “the surrealist act par excellence,” Desnos: “REVOLUTION means TERROR,” Artaud: “I foresee a destruction by fire,” not to mention the very concept of the Theater of Cruelty, di Prima: “The vortex of creation is the vortex of destruction,” and “SMASH THE MEDIA . . . BURN THE SCHOOLS,” Michael McClure: “Revolt necessitates destruction.”
     As the rhetoric of militant revolt is the dominant form of the figure, I will simply note in passing the possibility of significant variations, ironic uses, inversions, and reversals. Among the avant-gardists who came to identify their revolutionary artistic powers with the interests of the state are Mayakovsky (who described himself as a guerilla warrior), Marinetti (whose futurist manifesto declared, “We will glorify war . . . the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and the scorn for women” [Russell 88]), and the poets of “socialist” states such as Cuba, Sandinist Nicaragua, and China (especially during the era of the Cultural Revolution).
     The militant pretensions of the avant-0garde were ridiculed by Baudelaire (who preferred dallying with dandyism and sin, though he did, of course, support the 1848 Revolution). “On the Frenchman’s passionate predilection for military metaphors. In this country every metaphor wears a moustache. The militant school of literature. Holding the fort. Carrying the flag high . . . More military metaphors: the poets of combat. The literature of the avant-garde.” (Baudelaire 188-9)
     The program of the avant-garde have very frequently been attacked by critics from the left such as the Frankfurt School theorists already cited, and by such Marxists as Caudwell for whom surrealism, for example, is self-negating and anarchistic. (110)
     Self-parody is sometimes difficult to define in self-important circles, but it surely includes the burlesque of war in Sloan and Duchamp’s storming of the Washington Square Arch and in the showers of produce tossed at Dadaists and then at Futurists and later reenacted by Carl Solomon in the scene memorialized in Howl. The real crime of the musical Hair was not its cooptation of the counterculture, but the way in which it unashamedly reveals the triviality of coiffure as militance, but also the hollowness of confrontation in their bathetic repetition of the nudity of cast members of the Living Theatre.
     A more thorough review of the forms of the figure of the poet as militant is impossible here. But even the examples cited will suggest that the imagery of the avant-garde artist as destructive warrior has not consistently, simply, and stably signified its opposite: impotence. The rhetoric has claim on further semantic territories which I can here only suggest: art which claims to attack and destroy may simply provide a dream-like wish fulfillment for the aggressive component in human nature. It may satisfy the same fantasies in the minds of intellectuals for which the Mexico Coty civil servant may turn to bloody tabloid newspapers or American youth to the car-in-the-air-shoot-‘em-up school of Hollywood. The same impetus is the realm of art rather than psychology would point toward the critical role of literature, so celebrated since the Romantic era, the tendency of art works to point to problems, tensions, and contradictions in received ideas, in other words to disturb complacency. This is undeniably a function of poetry, though no more than the function of restating the central cultural assumptions and reassuring the reader of the rightness of the status quo.
     The extreme of that critical role is the vatic idea of the poet as a seer whose vision is wholly unlike most peoples, in fact higher, wiser, and more sublime. His task is to shake up his listeners, to undo shortsightedness and replace it with a higher truth. This is the archaic poetic vocation, familiar to students of ethnopoetics, and often conscious invoked in the last few centuries. Indeed the topos of the poet as priest reaches a sort of culmination in recent times when the higher truth the poet reveals may seem nihilistic, bringing news of nothing beyond the signifier’s distress at its own inadequacy, its declaration of epistemological bankruptcy, its self-destroying candor. Benjamin regarded fascism as the force that shaped l’art pour l’art to an end in which the convulsions of violence in war seemed the definitive object of beauty. But his communist alternative has fared little better in history. Beyond the polarities of twentieth century politics lies the final term of interpretation for the images of avant-garde militance: the writers rage not against their weakness in the structure of society, but against the weakness of the word itself.
     The death of the avant-garde has been announced many times,[3] most memorably perhaps by Leslie Fiedler and Hans Magnus Enzensberger during the 1960s. Its resuscitation seems unlikely in a culture whose government can sponsor programs of jazz music and abstract expressionism and instruments of foreign policy and whose advertisers sell blue jeans and cologne with techniques devised for the derangement of the senses. The literary world, including its establishment of editors, foundations, and universities is quick to coopt any radicalism, while art is ever more commodified; those formation and phenomena that seem to resist are marginalized, and non-artistic radical social challenges seem exhausted. Under these conditions an active avant-garde is a wandering corpse, lamenting its own enervation. The imagery can march no further forward.


1. The actual quote is "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" [“Whenever I hear 'culture'... I remove the safety from my Browning!"]. It is sometimes attributed to Goering or Streicher as well, though it comes, in fact, from the first scene of the play Schlageter, written by Hanns Johst and first performed in April 1933, in honor of Hitler's birthday. The leader of the Hitlerjugend Baldur von Shirach, speaks the line as he actually draws a gun in Frederic Rossif’s documentary De Nuremberg à Nuremberg.

2. The experience was repeated during the Bush White House when in 2003 plans for a symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice” had to be abandoned.

3. Including my own “Lament for the Loss of the Avant-Garde.”



Works Cited


Abrahams, Edward. The Lyrical Left. Charlottesville (Va.): University Press of Virginia, 1986.

Adorno, Theodore. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt. New York: Continuum, 2005.


Baraka, Amiri. “State.Meant.” The Poetics of the New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press, 1973.

Baudelaire, Charles. My Heart Laid Bare, trans. Norman Cameron. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1950.

Caudwell, Christopher. Illusion and Reality. New York: International, 1937.

diPrima, Diane. Revolutionary Letters. San Francisco: City Lights, 1971.

Horkheimer, Max. “On the Problem of Truth. Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt. New York: Continuum, 2005.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodore Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder, 1977.

Lippard, Lucy, ed. Surrealists on Art. Englewood Cliffs (N.J.): Prentice Hall, 1970.

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Lukacs, Georg. “The Ideology of Modernism.” Realism in Our Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1964.

Motherwell, Robert, ed. The Dada Poets and Painters: An Anthology. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951.

Poggiolo, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1968.

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Translations from Hans Arp

     Child of an Alsatian mother and a German father, Hans Arp was born in Strassburg at a time when it was German. When it became French again at the end of WWI, French law mandated that he call himself Jean. Thus his very name draws attention to the nationalist contention that struck him as absurd. An originator of the Moderner Bund (“Modern League”) and an exhibitor with the Blaue Reiter group prior to being a founding member of dada in 1916 Zürich. The creator of sublime abstract sculpture and other visual work, Arp is also a major poet. 

      Educated as an artist in both France and Germany, he was already dodging the draft in Switzerland when he was called up. He recounts writing the date in the first blank of a stack of forms, then proceeding to write the date in every other space, after which he painstakingly added the column of numbers thus produced. He then took off all his clothes, folded them with care, placed the paperwork on top and presented the stack to the officer in charge, upon which he was told he was unsuitable for the military. Later associated with the highly political Cologne dada group, he also participated in the first Surrealist show at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. During the ‘thirties he worked with the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création whose members, including Mondrian, Kandinksy, and Mary Cassatt, considered Breton’s Surrealism to be dogmatic. 

     Arp pioneered abstract art, though his early association with Kandinsky is evident in his preference for van Doesburg’s term “concrete” as more appropriate for forms that originate in the mind and occupy space. Regarding “the law of chance as the highest and deepest of laws,” he employed aleatory elements in works such as his randomly tossed papiers déchirés. He loved to reshuffle image sets (as here in “Roses Stroll the Streets of Porcelain” and “Westoily Roses”). His poetry strikes me as a pyrotechnic display of images, a one-man band, a word-collage. He shares with a prominent school of poets today the proposition that, as Jacques Riviére said of the dadaists in general, for them language "is no longer a means; it is an entity." If his lyric persona is sometimes difficult to follow, this is hardly surprising given his goal of “break[ing] down the language into atoms, in order to approach the creative.” 

     In Arp the background is a vast and cosmic laugh and he does not shrink from whimsy, yet he insisted to the end that dada was no farce. Using the same religious language favored by Huelsenbeck, he notes of his circle of young revolutionaries “our lot of earthly joy was meager. But by way of recompense we were visited by angels.” 

Opus Null 

1. 

I am the great great Thisthatthey 

a rig or ous re gime 

the stem of ozone prima qua 

the nameless one-percenter 

The P. P. Tit and trom as well 

trombone without a mouth or hole 

I’m Hercules’ great earthen bowl 

the left foot of the right right chef. 

I am the entire lifetime long 

the ovary’s dozeneth meaning 

totality of Augustine 

in cellulose gown preening 

2. 

He pulls from out his coffin black 

one coffin, then another 

he wraps himself in a black crepe sack 

and weeps with his front end. 

Half wizard and half maestro 

without a cane the time he’ll beat 

a greeny clockface on his hat 

and falls down from the driver’s seat 

With that he pokes the ghetto fish 

off his well-equipped easel. He 

finds his long cubistic socks are torn 

twice in two and thrice in three. 

3. 

He sits with himself in an arc.

A circle sits right by his side. 

A bag that holds a comb that stands 

must be his sofa and his bride. 

The of-of and his left-hand skin 

his own bag and his own life 

and tick and tack and tipp and top 

he own body falls from the wife. 

4.

His steam dynamo turns out 

hat upon hat from his hat and then 

he stands them in formation in 

a ring just as one does with army men. 

He greets them then and tips his hat 

and three times greets them all as friends 

They always trust a caca-you 

replaced by him with caca-too. 

He sees them not but greets them still.

He’s with them and they’re all about. 

The hats are all included 

they screw the top from his ego.

Roses Stroll the Streets of Porcelain 

1.

just on the edge of the fairy-tale 

     the night knits roses for itself; 

the tangle of things resolves into 

     storks, fruits, pharoahs, and harps. 

death puts down its nattering wreath 

     by the root of the void. 

and the storks chatter on chimneystones! 

and the night is a stuffed fairy tale. 

2. 

and the roses stroll the streets of porcelain and 

knit from the tangle of their years 

     one star after another. 

between stars there sleeps a piece of fruit. 

the empty lands stuffed years laughing foot-

lockers dance! 

the storks eat the pharaohs. 

from chimneystones roseblossoms! 

3.

death eats one year after another

and pharaohs eat storks. 

between fruits sleeps a star. often it laughs lightly 

in its sleep like a porcelain harp. 

4.

growing chimneystones eat harps porcelain 

wreaths dance. 

pharoahs have roots of roses! 

the storks pack chimneystones in their footlockers 

and fly off 

     to the land of the pharoahs! 

The Swallow Testicle 

Oh no, oh no, good Kaspar's dead! 

Who now will hide the burning banners in 

cloudbraid 

     and daily build a black mare's nest? 

Who now will turn the coffee mill in its old, old 

barrel? 

And who will lure the idyllic deer 

     from its petrified paper bag? 

Who'll blow the noses of ships, parapluies, wind-

udders, ancestral bees, ozone spindles, 

     and who will bone the pyramids? 

Oh no, no, no, our good Kaspar is dead! Pious 

bimbam Kaspar's dead! 

The shark will rattle his teeth with heartrending 

grief when he hears his given name -- so 

     I sigh on -- his last name Kaspar Kaspar Kaspar. 

Why hast thou forsaken us? In what form has 

your great and beautiful soul 

     transmogrified? Are you a star? or a chain or 

water hanging from a hot whirlwind? or 

     a transparent brick on the groaning drum 

of rocky BEING? 

Now our tops and toes dry up, and fairies lie half-

charred on the funeral pyre. 

Now the black bowling alley thunders behind the 

sun, and no one winds up compasses 

     and pushcart wheels any longer. 

Who now will eat with the phosphorescent rat at 

    the lonely barefoot table? 

Who now will chase the siroccoco devil when he 

wants to fuck the horses? 

Now who'll explain the monograms in the stars? 

His bust will grace the mantel of all the truly noble men, 

but that's no comfort, no tobacco snuff for a 

deadhead skull. 

 Second Hand 

that I as I 

one and two is 

that I as I 

three and four is 

that I as I 

what time now 

that I as I 

it ticks, it tocks 

that I as I 

five and six is 

that I as I

seven eight is 

that I as I 

if it stands it 

that I as I 

if it works then 

that I as I 

nine and ten is 

that I as I 

eleven and twelve is. 

Baobab 

And she was delivered of a healthy strong boy 

who enjoyed the name Baobab. 

The boy grew and grew 

and grew up to the blue of heaven. 

And Baobab’s people liked to look 

right in the eyes of interlocutors.

However, for one as tall as Baobab 

this no longer could be done. 

So they dug out lots of soil 

and opened a great abysmal hole 

in which Baobab entered by choice 

for he too could never bear 

not to look into the eyes 

of those to whom he spoke. 

The earth that they had dug 

they tossed over their starlet’s edge 

into the bottomless space. 

And after Baobab had had passed 

a hundred years in this hole 

he began to dwindle. 

Every day he was smaller and smaller 

until in the end he evanesced. 

Now those who dwelt in that small star 

sat there with nought 

    but a great abysmal hole 

        and one small strip of land around the hole 

and they looked now into the starlet’s abysmal hole, 

 and then over the edge 

     of their small star 

         into the bottomless space 

Westoily Roses 

1.

the roses will be crucified on hats the lips 

the roses fly forth 

the bloody organs drip on the visible 

throne of the half-grown Near Eastern stones and 

on the white skulls the three shaven 

summers and the three shaven 

crosses stagger forward on crutches like the May 

the lyre body tells of bloody slaughter 

against the hairy stones, 

the lyre body shoots out 

a poison foam 

stony crutches bloody noses hairy stones against 

the shavehead skulls 

2.

the lyre body drips blood on the white shirtfronts 

as though in a battle unpacked and tosses its 

three snowballs behind its three summers. 

from the retorts roll the skulls of the Itosis. 

the lips of the hats return on crutches. 

gloves will be crucified on hats. 

the crosses support one another half-human like 

by the bridegroom and the other half-mannish 

by the bridegroom 

3.

the lyre body tells of the birth from foam of a 

half-grown Near Eastern stone must certainly and 

heath-soul sits on a visible throne and 

tosses the bloodier parts of the foolhardy and 

carthardy 

on the fifth of May. then the foam birth shoots 

poisonous accent-hens against the signature-organ of 

the lyre body clings to the clapper by their balled-

up wings 

and rings out and the winged words fly forth. 

wings shave the hairy hearts. 

the air of the bit shakes and calls who goes there. 

and that’s the way it goes up and then down 

like in a letter. 

4.

it rings out in the heart. 

The foam birth wraps white May air in a 

 snow-letter. 

the half-grown Near Eastern stone throws its 

three gloves over its three hats and clings 

to the roses. 

the lyre body shaved the slaughter-clapper. 

winged roses fly to the snow-lyre.

Lament for the Loss of the Avant-Garde

     I grew up committed to the avant-garde. Even beyond partisanship, the concept lay at the basis of my structuring of the world. One pole of every opposition was for me animated with life and energy while the other bore the dead weight of reaction: not only art and politics and religion split into camps of the hip and square, old and young, academic and revolutionary – the principle seemed at the time universal. Remember Norman Mailer’s Village Voice lists from the ‘fifties? Bohr’s model of the atom is square, Heisenberg’s hip, etc. (Though, of course, the wave of the future could involve such radical exhumation of the past as pre-Raphaelitism or Pound’s rereading of the troubadours.)
     This whole bipolar opposition is primarily a Romantic myth. In spite of boasts from millennia of artists and writers that they are “making it new,” and in spite of the line of off-beat artists extending back to archaic schizoid shamans, and the ancient world’s wine-drinker poets (in contrast to the soberly craftsmanlike water-drinkers), the idea of bohemia is, like the term, less than two hundred years old. But its course seems already to be run, though practitioners continue to go through the motions that used to épater the bourgeoisie though now these are the very gestures by which they court the embrace of the same establishment.
     Now it is clear from oral and popular genres that art that defends the status quo may be great. Apart from exotic examples like African sculpture and oral epic, the USA’s greatest contributions to world culture may well be in genuinely popular genres: movies and jazz. But if gestures are to carry meaning at all, the cocked snoot must be distinguished from the glad hand.
     In my opinion the last great era of the avant-garde was launched by the dadaists in the early part of the past century and ripened in the great surrealist ventures of the next few decades. Admittedly, even here it was possible for a perversely conservative entrepreneur like Dali to evolve, but surely Franco and the Pope always knew he was a character to keep at arm’s length even if the buyers of his millions of limited editions did not.
     The performances at the Café Voltaire genuinely amazed the public and went near the limit in cracking art’s possibilities. No second appearance of Picabia in a tutu could replicate the first. Beyond sound poetry, what? Not only did these artists do things never dared before in the realm of taste and semiotic manipulation; they were altogether serious in their fierce opposition to those who held economic power. Whether communist like Breton and Huelsenbeck or anarchist like Bunuel, they struggled with the ruling class for control of art.
     Now the Rockefeller Foundation is pleased to fund work that resembles nothing so much as the performance of the Duke and the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn; the largest museums speculate on novelty; we find that the CIA promoted abstract expressionism as part of the cold war, and the once-radical designs of the Bauhaus embody the glittery apparition of American wealth in lower Manhattan. Andy Warhol, who seriously took up the task of representing the icons of our culture, not just soup cans and celebrities, but crack-ups as well, began in corporate advertising and spawned the Interview sensibility which fawns on the rich and finds those who are vicious as well (such as the Marcoses and the Shah of Iran) particularly piquant Mapplethorpe, too, for all the fuss once attendant on his shows, displays flawlessly elegant academic/advertising skills and is attacked only by know-nothings, with everyone in the art world from old line to young lions defending him.
     Even real art brut styles have been easily digested from Rouault to Red Grooms, and what passed a few generations ago for derangement of the senses now sells jeans and cologne on MTV. Conceptual art may have been the last theoretical gasp of the avant-garde, for once everything is assimilated to art, what boundary remains to be challenged? What is the next move?
     I offer no prescriptions for the resuscitation of the avant-garde. Some alternatives are clear: among the more common already current are antiquarianism, deeper probing of sore psychic regions, the sleazier sorts of pop culture, and borrowing from the tribal. I lament the passing of the avant-garde, and suggest we be conscious of its implications. What changes in society, in art, and in their relation have rendered obsolete the idea of an avant-garde, so seminal these past few centuries? Surely among the assassins of the avant-garde are the continuing marginalization of art, the greedy commodification of art processes, and the collapse of radical challenge in non-artistic realms. Under these conditions an active avant-garde would be a zombie-like walking corpse.