Dada finds Life

Some abstract and artistic ways to escape the travesties of life

“We say it; as we see it.

You hear it; as you see it.

What finally echoes, is really it.”

-A. M. Brown

• On 19th March 1919 the first issue of Littérature was published by André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon. The genre was Surrealism. What would there be an entire magazine about untruths??? That is because Surrealism is that which is not untrue; just above realism. A sort of disconnected, abstract way of indicating the truth rather than driving it in with a sharp nail. So juxtapositioned images which contrast each other to drive home the same meaning, abstract art which personifies objects, plays of colours and shapes, sound poetry which more for performance than confirmation to literary syntactical norms; all these got a ‘place’ in surrealism…were recognized. Surrealism was ‘Avant Garde’ or totally experimental and worked at pushing boundaries. May sound a bit over the top but it is a very beautiful and sensitive tool for promoting thought.

Dada does Namaskara

• Coming back to the story of Breton’s magazine; he was forced to terminate publication in August 1921 due to dwindling circulation. In March 1922, however, he relaunched the magazine with the cover illustrating a Man Ray drawing of a shiny top hat, and the title, “Littérature: New Series.”
• Man Ray is the nickname of Emmanuel Radnitsky (1890–1976) an exponent of Dadaism and surrealism who worked a lot with photo art but propagated himself mainly as a painter. So, what was his artwork all about and what is Dadaism? Photographs with superb light play showcasing a serene young woman twinning with a wooden mask which eerily has the same expression…a pair of pursed lips in sunrise colours against the sky… or a rope-tied cloth wrapped parcel, that is Man Ray for you. And Dadaism? Ah well…that is another story in itself. Dada is derived speculatively from the first words spoken by a baby like ‘mama’ ‘dada’ etc… kind of like going back to the basics to understand what went wrong! They say war, imprisonment, abject poverty, hunger, disenchantment with life in general can plough the depths of the artists soul and bring out the best and the worst…well Dadaism tops it all. This intellectual movement emerged from the NetherRealm of the World War 1. The proponents of Dadaism opposed ne-capitalism, war, nationalism etc. and were kind of far-leftist in their ways of expression. Dadaism did not begin as an art movement but as a thought process which seeped so deeply into art that it transformed it. The art of the movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Reaching its heights between 1916 to 1922, it influenced surrealism, pop art, and punk rock. It went against the standards of society. Salvadore Dali is a notable proponent of Dadaism. Tristan Tzara brought Dadaism from Berlin and Zurich to Paris and was the leader or muse for the dadaists of Paris such as Man Ray. Dadaism laughs at the absurdity of existence through the concepts of the grotesque, the absurd, and the macabre e.g. being the dramatic art of Samuel Beckett (Irish Nobel Laureate ) and the so called school of Paris, which included Jean Genet (A petty thief turned political activist who found his God in literature), and Eugene O’Neill (this one was a pure litterateur — Nobel and Pulitzer kinds and who gave us the play Long Day’s Journey into Night).

Dada’s Colour Wheel

• The word “Dada” may be an allusion to an infant’s first words, such as “Mama”. No-one knows who invented the name.
• Breton was so taken up with Man Ray art that he replaced the cover image created by Man Ray with drawings — different each time — by Francis Picabia, to whom he gave carte blanche for each issue. Picabia drew on religious imagery, erotic iconography, and the iconography of games of chance.
• Lots of thought-promoting artwork and writing happened but finally in 1923, again because the magazine was not selling enough, Breton decided to limit the publication to special issues, the first of which appeared on October 15, 1923. However, there was only one more of these, in June 1924, before publication ceased altogether.