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Dadá: El cambio radical del siglo XX (Argumentos nº 495)
«Se invita a los jóvenes artistas de Zúrich para que acudan con sus propuestas y aportaciones sin que importe su orientación particular.» Así decía el llamamiento que Hugo Ball publicó en un periódico de Zúrich el 2 de febrero de 1916 cuando decidió fundar el mítico Cabaret Voltaire, la cuna del dadaísmo. Y lo hizo sin saber quiénes acudirían ni qué llevarían. Tres días más tarde, el Voltaire abrió sus puertas sin ninguna planificación previa. «Mítico» es un adjetivo que suele asociarse, con frecuencia, al dadaísmo y a algunos de sus geniales Tristan Tzara, primero en Zúrich y luego en París, junto a André Breton, futuro padre del surrealismo; George Grosz en Berlín, donde también destacaron artistas como Raoul Hausmann y Hannah Höch, pioneros del collage y del fotomontaje, y Richard Huelsenbeck, autor del insustituible Almanaque dadá; la pareja Duchamp-Picabia con su dadaísmo neoyorquino… Pero, como oportunamente se pregunta el autor de este libro, ¿qué hubo de verdad y qué de mito en el origen y la evolución del dadaísmo? En cualquier caso, esta amena y documentada biografía colectiva, en la senda de los trabajos de historia narrativa de Barbara Tuchman y Peter Gay, retrata las figuras y los momentos más brillantes de un movimiento que transformó radicalmente el arte del siglo XX y cuyas ramificaciones llegan hasta nuestros días. Una revolución antiacadémica y provocadora que, partiendo de la idea de destrucción, logró construir obras artísticas y literarias de una frescura y una vitalidad que aún no se han apagado. Sin dadá, nos dice Jed Rasula, hoy no tendríamos collages musicales, ni fotomontajes, ni happenings… Y ni siquiera habrían existido el surrealismo, el pop art y el punk. «Sin dadá, la vida moderna tal como la conocemos difícilmente podría calificarse de moderna.»
493 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 2, 2015
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September 5, 2024
So far, Dada is the only art movement that Zurich has contributed to the world, unless you count performative tutting when the train to Hardbrücke is 0.01 seconds late. It's not, let's be honest, the most artistically creative city in the world – and perhaps it's telling that most of those who came together in the early days of Dada were not locals.
But then Zurich in those days – which is to say during the First World War – was even more polyglottal and multinational than it is now. If it wasn't quite an Alpine Tangier, it was at least gesturing in that direction. A neutral haven surrounded by belligerents, Switzerland was full of spies, revolutionaries, cowards, shirkers, baffled refugees, high-minded pacifists, shell-shocked invalids and rampaging bastards.
Dada was well represented by all of the above. Some, like the German Hugo Ball, had tried to enlist multiple times and been turned down for medical reasons; others, like Hans Arp, had carefully evaded service (a latter-day Odysseus, he pretended to be mad: called before a military tribunal, Arp wrote down his date of birth as instructed, and then started adding the figures together like it was a maths problem). Tristan Tzara was a Romanian exile, Richard Huelsenbeck a physician who considered the German state ‘a cultural association of psychopaths’. Sophie Täuber – a local, at last – was a pioneering performance artist and member of Rudolf Laban's infamous school of modern dance, which practised nudism and free love and was considered by some as a glorified seraglio.
They congregated at the Cabaret Voltaire (which is still around), putting on shows which combined random folk songs, nonsensical sound-poems, simultaneous shouting in multiple languages, elaborate dances, masques, glorified sessions of audience abuse, and things that were deliberately none of the above. There was always something silly about it, and indeed something juvenile about it (Pythonesque, in fact), but the practitioners took it seriously too. Logic and culture had led Western civilisation to a dead end. To paint in oils, or compose a villanelle, after Verdun, seemed absurd if not embarrassing, or indeed offensive. Culture now had to be broken down completely, and rebuilt.
I'm not sure I'd go as far as Jed Rasula here, who describes Dada as ‘the most revolutionary artistic movement of the twentieth century’, but it certainly had its fair share of political commitment among at least some of its members. And it spread, as its personnel and ideas dispersed around Europe and beyond – embedding itself notably in Paris, Berlin and New York. There was never a coherent sense of ideology, just a generalised weaponising of chance, destruction, illogic, and isolation – as in André Breton's poem of 1922:
…which is almost too lovely to be Dada at all. Most of the shock value of Dada is gone now; you have to force yourself to remember that in the 1910s and '20s, artistic abstraction and experimentation was seen in some quarters as quite literally an assault on civilisation. ‘Art thought to deviate from mimetic norms,’ Rasula says, ‘was persecuted simultaneously in the United States (as nonart), in the USSR (as an “infantile disorder of Leftism”), and in Nazi Germany (as artistic Bolshevism)’. Still, there was always a market for it somewhere, as most of them realised.
Rasula does make a few little slips. He misspells his French, identifies Zurich wrongly as ‘the Swiss capital’, and confuses flout with flaunt. He also sometimes overwrites (‘On behalf of whom did Dada persist? Where was it going? Whither? Whence? These burning questions leached an acrid smoke’). More broadly, I think there is still a failure to recognise the importance of the women in the group, partly because most of them were dancers and dance has left so little in the historical record: but Emmy Hennings is in many ways the most important Zurich dadaist, and Sophie Täuber also needs more attention. This book is perhaps slightly too traditional from that point of view.
Still, overall it's a solid and wide-ranging study of the movement, which happily does not simply consider Dada to be a primordial form of Surrealism but treats it on its own merits. And it's hard to argue with Rasula's conclusion, that the way Dada incorporated ‘rubbish and clutter, wreckage and chaos’ would have ‘an enduring impact on subsequent artwork in every medium’. If you're someone who's found that tendency often confusing or unappealing, tracing it all the way back to the trenches is a valuable exercise. ‘It's still shit,’ as Tzara explained in one manifesto, ‘but from now on we want to shit in different colours.’ I hope that clears things up.
But then Zurich in those days – which is to say during the First World War – was even more polyglottal and multinational than it is now. If it wasn't quite an Alpine Tangier, it was at least gesturing in that direction. A neutral haven surrounded by belligerents, Switzerland was full of spies, revolutionaries, cowards, shirkers, baffled refugees, high-minded pacifists, shell-shocked invalids and rampaging bastards.
Dada was well represented by all of the above. Some, like the German Hugo Ball, had tried to enlist multiple times and been turned down for medical reasons; others, like Hans Arp, had carefully evaded service (a latter-day Odysseus, he pretended to be mad: called before a military tribunal, Arp wrote down his date of birth as instructed, and then started adding the figures together like it was a maths problem). Tristan Tzara was a Romanian exile, Richard Huelsenbeck a physician who considered the German state ‘a cultural association of psychopaths’. Sophie Täuber – a local, at last – was a pioneering performance artist and member of Rudolf Laban's infamous school of modern dance, which practised nudism and free love and was considered by some as a glorified seraglio.
They congregated at the Cabaret Voltaire (which is still around), putting on shows which combined random folk songs, nonsensical sound-poems, simultaneous shouting in multiple languages, elaborate dances, masques, glorified sessions of audience abuse, and things that were deliberately none of the above. There was always something silly about it, and indeed something juvenile about it (Pythonesque, in fact), but the practitioners took it seriously too. Logic and culture had led Western civilisation to a dead end. To paint in oils, or compose a villanelle, after Verdun, seemed absurd if not embarrassing, or indeed offensive. Culture now had to be broken down completely, and rebuilt.
I'm not sure I'd go as far as Jed Rasula here, who describes Dada as ‘the most revolutionary artistic movement of the twentieth century’, but it certainly had its fair share of political commitment among at least some of its members. And it spread, as its personnel and ideas dispersed around Europe and beyond – embedding itself notably in Paris, Berlin and New York. There was never a coherent sense of ideology, just a generalised weaponising of chance, destruction, illogic, and isolation – as in André Breton's poem of 1922:
Leave everything.
Leave Dada.
Leave your wife, leave your mistress.
Leave your hopes and fears.
Drop your kids in the middle of nowhere.
Leave the substance for the shadow.
Leave behind, if need be, your comfortable life
and promising future.
Take to the highways.
…which is almost too lovely to be Dada at all. Most of the shock value of Dada is gone now; you have to force yourself to remember that in the 1910s and '20s, artistic abstraction and experimentation was seen in some quarters as quite literally an assault on civilisation. ‘Art thought to deviate from mimetic norms,’ Rasula says, ‘was persecuted simultaneously in the United States (as nonart), in the USSR (as an “infantile disorder of Leftism”), and in Nazi Germany (as artistic Bolshevism)’. Still, there was always a market for it somewhere, as most of them realised.
On another occasion Arp observed [Kurt] Schwitters struggling with a piece of glass that wouldn't quite attach to a construction. Asked what he was going to do, Schwitters responded: “Put up the price.”
Rasula does make a few little slips. He misspells his French, identifies Zurich wrongly as ‘the Swiss capital’, and confuses flout with flaunt. He also sometimes overwrites (‘On behalf of whom did Dada persist? Where was it going? Whither? Whence? These burning questions leached an acrid smoke’). More broadly, I think there is still a failure to recognise the importance of the women in the group, partly because most of them were dancers and dance has left so little in the historical record: but Emmy Hennings is in many ways the most important Zurich dadaist, and Sophie Täuber also needs more attention. This book is perhaps slightly too traditional from that point of view.
Still, overall it's a solid and wide-ranging study of the movement, which happily does not simply consider Dada to be a primordial form of Surrealism but treats it on its own merits. And it's hard to argue with Rasula's conclusion, that the way Dada incorporated ‘rubbish and clutter, wreckage and chaos’ would have ‘an enduring impact on subsequent artwork in every medium’. If you're someone who's found that tendency often confusing or unappealing, tracing it all the way back to the trenches is a valuable exercise. ‘It's still shit,’ as Tzara explained in one manifesto, ‘but from now on we want to shit in different colours.’ I hope that clears things up.
January 8, 2018
This was an unexpected book. I literally found it on our porch, a gift from Joel. The subject itself was a fuzzy footnote of European history and even that was largely Tzara, who I always imagined in some abstract cafe hectoring the somber Lenin and perhaps buying a drink for James Joyce.
I stepped aside from my Greek Project and plunged within. The initial Dadaist episode in Zurich is remarkable as an event but I am less convinced as a movement. One member quipped in a manifesto, I am opposed in principle to manifesto. I am also opposed to principles.
I admit I learned a great deal about figures like Duchamp. I enjoyed the spectacle of Eluard punching Tzara. I did grow weary of the incessant pillow talk. Was Dada a typographical movement rather than a torque of poetry, music and painting? Dada began midway through the Great War in the shrieking silence of Switzerland. There is difficulty in gauging the ultimate effect of these aggregate activities: sound poetry, atonal music, found object collages, image montage. I can always speculate but without much purchase. Surrealism and Constructivism are obviously linked not specifically in a causal way. One can rhapsodize about Borges and predecessors. One can remain anxious about any influence.
While I enjoyed the book, this was largely because of my unfamiliarity with certain figures. I fear the absence of a thesis or metric would’ve been problematic otherwise.
I stepped aside from my Greek Project and plunged within. The initial Dadaist episode in Zurich is remarkable as an event but I am less convinced as a movement. One member quipped in a manifesto, I am opposed in principle to manifesto. I am also opposed to principles.
I admit I learned a great deal about figures like Duchamp. I enjoyed the spectacle of Eluard punching Tzara. I did grow weary of the incessant pillow talk. Was Dada a typographical movement rather than a torque of poetry, music and painting? Dada began midway through the Great War in the shrieking silence of Switzerland. There is difficulty in gauging the ultimate effect of these aggregate activities: sound poetry, atonal music, found object collages, image montage. I can always speculate but without much purchase. Surrealism and Constructivism are obviously linked not specifically in a causal way. One can rhapsodize about Borges and predecessors. One can remain anxious about any influence.
While I enjoyed the book, this was largely because of my unfamiliarity with certain figures. I fear the absence of a thesis or metric would’ve been problematic otherwise.
January 12, 2018
Excellent read on the beginning of Dadaism. Rasula truly brings the individuals to life in ways I have never read in any other book concerning Dadaism. Characteristics of both the human element as well as the surroundings in which things occurred are clearly explored.
A must read for those interested in this art movement that can speak to even our time.
A must read for those interested in this art movement that can speak to even our time.
April 7, 2016
Not enough focus is given in Rasula's book to the women of Dada: Beatrice Wood (an intimate of Duchamp), The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Hannah Höch, Emmy Hennings, and Sophie Tau(e)ber (Arp). They never DID get sufficient attention in the patriarchal society of the earlier 20th century, but the author should've been more aware of them because they've been coming to the fore since the 1990's. On the whole, I found the book interesting, though I kept looking for a reference to Beatrice Wood. All I could find was Beatrice Huelsenbeck, Richard's wife, but now I know the reference has to do with Dante's Beatrice, not her. I've since research her more, and found she lived to age 105. More here: https://youtu.be/x93cKZlCSG4
August 1, 2015
I enjoyed this book enormously, or most of it, anyway. Dada has always fascinated me (I have just started reading a book on Picabia which I purchased in 1970, for instance), but for the first time, I think I understand what it was. I give Rasula full credit for this, and for creating a decidedly scholarly book which is surprisingly readable.
While Dada was a hugely influential movement, it really lasted for only about ten years directly following World War I. It was never really organized. People who called themselves Dadaists lived the movement in divergent ways, and other people who denied being Dadaists were nevertheless very consistent with it.
So what was it? Basically, it was a state of mind which challenged the orthodoxies which the founders thought had caused World War I. It aimed to fight pretension, "was just something you were" as Rasula puts it. In a sense, anything which broke the mold in the arts was consistent with Dada. It was also genuinely international, involving individuals from many countries and having an impact in even more.
Almost every artist of consequence in the first half of the 20th Century seems to have had some connection with Dada, as a participant, or having been influenced by it. The list is too long to include here. Movements which were influenced by Dada include Surrealism, Futurism, Cubism, Constructivism and probably others. But Dada also influenced most other forms of artistic expression: dance (Isidora Duncan), Architecture (Bauhaus), theater (Jarry, Cocteau), Music (Schoenberg, Poulenc, Satie, Milhaud, Honegger), Poetry (Eliot, Pound, Apollinaire), even comedy (the Marx brothers, Monty Python, Firesign Theater).
Like most movements, there were many contradictions. The Dadists mostly came from middle class or wealthy families, but assailed the bourgeoisie which had spawned them. They hated pretension, but had a sense of moral superiority which bordered on arrogance. And, as Rasula points out, they "repudiated art by making it." They also only included women in their inner circle very rarely.
My goodness, did they live large. They were frequently sexually promiscuous, generally alcoholic, in some cases used opium heavily, and often had many wives (well, three, anyway for a few of them), many liaisons and even an occasional menage a trois. Rasula includes astonishing detail on all this.
This book is impressive that so much of the history of Dada has been recorded in other languages than English, especially French and German, and Rasula brings all that to the reader in English (thankfully). He also avoids the all too common scholarly practice of including phrases and long quotations in languages other than English.
So why not five stars? The last third of the book spends a lot of pages on Constructivism, and I found the discussion confusing and far less interesting than what preceded it. I'm still not sure what that movement represented, though I have no doubt that Rasula has told me. I just did not get it. Maybe it's my shortcoming...
Still, this is a terrific, important and enjoyable book. It was for the most part a great read.
While Dada was a hugely influential movement, it really lasted for only about ten years directly following World War I. It was never really organized. People who called themselves Dadaists lived the movement in divergent ways, and other people who denied being Dadaists were nevertheless very consistent with it.
So what was it? Basically, it was a state of mind which challenged the orthodoxies which the founders thought had caused World War I. It aimed to fight pretension, "was just something you were" as Rasula puts it. In a sense, anything which broke the mold in the arts was consistent with Dada. It was also genuinely international, involving individuals from many countries and having an impact in even more.
Almost every artist of consequence in the first half of the 20th Century seems to have had some connection with Dada, as a participant, or having been influenced by it. The list is too long to include here. Movements which were influenced by Dada include Surrealism, Futurism, Cubism, Constructivism and probably others. But Dada also influenced most other forms of artistic expression: dance (Isidora Duncan), Architecture (Bauhaus), theater (Jarry, Cocteau), Music (Schoenberg, Poulenc, Satie, Milhaud, Honegger), Poetry (Eliot, Pound, Apollinaire), even comedy (the Marx brothers, Monty Python, Firesign Theater).
Like most movements, there were many contradictions. The Dadists mostly came from middle class or wealthy families, but assailed the bourgeoisie which had spawned them. They hated pretension, but had a sense of moral superiority which bordered on arrogance. And, as Rasula points out, they "repudiated art by making it." They also only included women in their inner circle very rarely.
My goodness, did they live large. They were frequently sexually promiscuous, generally alcoholic, in some cases used opium heavily, and often had many wives (well, three, anyway for a few of them), many liaisons and even an occasional menage a trois. Rasula includes astonishing detail on all this.
This book is impressive that so much of the history of Dada has been recorded in other languages than English, especially French and German, and Rasula brings all that to the reader in English (thankfully). He also avoids the all too common scholarly practice of including phrases and long quotations in languages other than English.
So why not five stars? The last third of the book spends a lot of pages on Constructivism, and I found the discussion confusing and far less interesting than what preceded it. I'm still not sure what that movement represented, though I have no doubt that Rasula has told me. I just did not get it. Maybe it's my shortcoming...
Still, this is a terrific, important and enjoyable book. It was for the most part a great read.
February 18, 2025
For those not too familiar with Dadaism this is a good book to start. Unfortunately, being a big fan of Dada there wasn't too much I didn't already know, but it was still good to remember so many of the fundamental figures, though the author did kind of skim over the importance of the women involved. Dada wasn't really a movement as it was a catalyst for new artistic movements that were influenced by Dada. It was just anti-all and lots of fun nonsense trying to make no sense of the nonsensical world at the time of the Great War which seemed to have been it's own catalyst for the start of what I consider the true beginnings of the artistic boom of the first half of the 20th century. So many of my favorite writers, artists, painters, poets, etc.. were influenced by both Dada and WWI.
Where's Dada, Tristan Tzara?
3.7 stars.
Where's Dada, Tristan Tzara?
3.7 stars.
February 20, 2021
I will have a full review of this book coming soon to http://www.raintaxi.org.
12/20/15
12/20/15
November 19, 2019
Everything you wanted to know about Dada, and then some.
April 3, 2024
Makes the most possible sense of nonsense.
Hugo Ball is my hero.
Hugo Ball is my hero.
June 12, 2023
Nice comprehensive account of the Dada artistic movement originated in response to the developments surrounding WWI. They were creating nonsense to try to make sense of a world that made no sense. They used poetry, music, painting, collages dance and anything else you could imagine. Their absurd performances mirrored the absurdity they were witnessing with the growth of nationalism and fascism. A very good history lesson.
November 24, 2015
This art movement is hard to understand and so deep if you get a glimpse into the artists' minds. The Dadaists were reacting to WWI, propelled into post war Europe and then attacked by the Nazi regime. With destruction all around them, they looked toward a compassionate, meaningful universe - perhaps embodied by Dante's goddess, Beatrice. Or not.
February 21, 2024
《Dadá es un estado de ánimo. Por esta razón se transforma según las razas y los acontecimientos. Dadá se aplica a todo, y, sin embargo, no es nada, es el punto donde el sí y el no y todos los opuestos se encuentran, no solemnemente, en los castillos de las filosofías humanas, sino simplemente en las esquinas, como los perros y los saltamontes.》
August 9, 2015
I ended up skimming much of the end of this book. It became numbing minutia after a while chronicling every area it which there was a hint of DaDa. When it was dealing with the larger areas where the movement blossomed but overall too dry.
September 11, 2015
This book was a defining moment for me. I read this book at 19-20 years of age and I was mesmerized. Performance art is an amazing, misunderstood, and underfunded modality. It was wonderful seeing the history of this type of performance along side of visual arts.
May 23, 2021
Meticulously researched. Wide-ranging and packed with atmosphere and insight. Just the right balance. An excellent reference source, but highly enjoyable as a narrative history.
February 3, 2022
A nice review of everything that is and was Dada art (and anti-art) between the World Wars. Rasula does a good job including just about everyone and everything, and covering not just their art (poetry, literature, painting, etc.) but their rivalries, jealousies, romances, and interactions around the world.
I came away with a pretty good understanding of the era and the movement, despite not being all that well versed in art (I'm a Pop art guy, basically). It boils down to a few stars/heroes (Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Tauber, Hannah Hoch, Kurt Schwitters, Emmy Hennings, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp), in a few select cities (Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Cologne, New York City). It's nice to note women were a substantial part of Dada, at least in this telling.
Obviously the real stars are the works of art, a few of which Rasula includes in photos (I found myself wanting many more, I'll have to find a Dada coffee table book), and which can't help but inspire ideas in anyone artistically minded.
Especially inspiring to me is the number of literary and art journals these folks churned out, breaking the mold with dynamic graphic design, layout, content, art, humor, satire, etc. These folks loved to think, talk, and live about art. It clearly meant a lot to them (even as many pretended it didn't, and couldn't).
I was surprised to learn Dada's main (IMHO) contribution to the world was photo collage, which was not really a thing before they started doing it. George Grosz and Huelsenbeck would probably be aghast at modern bourgeois career "dream boards" and such, but hey, that's where the world took their big idea.
Rasula does an excellent job overall. Yes, it's a history book and a bit academic by design, but he keeps it lively and jumps from locale to locale smoothly and ably without losing your interest in the topics at hand. And he's not afraid to throw in some sex, drugs, and jazz to keep it lively.
My only gripe is his penchant for mixing in other, seemingly random cultural touchstones, which pulls the reader out of the era and mindset of the Dadaists (Samuel Beckett? Keats? The Beatles? Nathaniel Hawthorne? Social media?). The connections (again, IMHO) are tenuous at best and don't really add to an education of Dada. These references come off more as "other stuff Rasula knows about" and quotes he's memorized than anything to do with Dada.
But I'll give that a pass (not that he needs it) because his book sure as heck makes me want to go back to the Cabaret Voltaire or join Club Dada or something, or find a group of wacky but inspired artists to hang out and make a crazy poetry journal with. That'd be cool. Or at the very least, cut up some magazines.
I came away with a pretty good understanding of the era and the movement, despite not being all that well versed in art (I'm a Pop art guy, basically). It boils down to a few stars/heroes (Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Tauber, Hannah Hoch, Kurt Schwitters, Emmy Hennings, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp), in a few select cities (Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Cologne, New York City). It's nice to note women were a substantial part of Dada, at least in this telling.
Obviously the real stars are the works of art, a few of which Rasula includes in photos (I found myself wanting many more, I'll have to find a Dada coffee table book), and which can't help but inspire ideas in anyone artistically minded.
Especially inspiring to me is the number of literary and art journals these folks churned out, breaking the mold with dynamic graphic design, layout, content, art, humor, satire, etc. These folks loved to think, talk, and live about art. It clearly meant a lot to them (even as many pretended it didn't, and couldn't).
I was surprised to learn Dada's main (IMHO) contribution to the world was photo collage, which was not really a thing before they started doing it. George Grosz and Huelsenbeck would probably be aghast at modern bourgeois career "dream boards" and such, but hey, that's where the world took their big idea.
Rasula does an excellent job overall. Yes, it's a history book and a bit academic by design, but he keeps it lively and jumps from locale to locale smoothly and ably without losing your interest in the topics at hand. And he's not afraid to throw in some sex, drugs, and jazz to keep it lively.
My only gripe is his penchant for mixing in other, seemingly random cultural touchstones, which pulls the reader out of the era and mindset of the Dadaists (Samuel Beckett? Keats? The Beatles? Nathaniel Hawthorne? Social media?). The connections (again, IMHO) are tenuous at best and don't really add to an education of Dada. These references come off more as "other stuff Rasula knows about" and quotes he's memorized than anything to do with Dada.
But I'll give that a pass (not that he needs it) because his book sure as heck makes me want to go back to the Cabaret Voltaire or join Club Dada or something, or find a group of wacky but inspired artists to hang out and make a crazy poetry journal with. That'd be cool. Or at the very least, cut up some magazines.
March 23, 2025
Part of my ongoing program to clear out or read books that have been hanging fire for years, I really enjoyed this exercise in teasing out the personal connections and conflicts in the creative outburst that was Dada. In particular, though Dada often gets turned into Proto-Surrealism, it could just as easily be linked to artistic trends associated with Constructivism and allied movements.
Perhaps the one salient point that I come away with is that, for all the descriptions of Dada as an exercise in nihilism, Rasula notes that the real nihilists in the Great War were the politicians and military leaders seeking victory in a potlach of cultural destruction. The enthusiasts of Dada, on the other hand, were seeking to sweep the table clean and start building anew from the found materials that could be salvaged, which sounds allied to the sense of Zen negation of personal mental illusions (that the author does allude to).
I also take to heart those reviews who note that Rasula doesn't deal as much as he might with the women involved in the movement, particularly since their involvement in performance is not easy to recover from the historical record. Rasula is as much interested in the literary impact of Dada as anything else, when he might easily have written a work about Dada as one of the precursors of performance art.
Anyway, I do regret not getting to this book sooner.
Perhaps the one salient point that I come away with is that, for all the descriptions of Dada as an exercise in nihilism, Rasula notes that the real nihilists in the Great War were the politicians and military leaders seeking victory in a potlach of cultural destruction. The enthusiasts of Dada, on the other hand, were seeking to sweep the table clean and start building anew from the found materials that could be salvaged, which sounds allied to the sense of Zen negation of personal mental illusions (that the author does allude to).
I also take to heart those reviews who note that Rasula doesn't deal as much as he might with the women involved in the movement, particularly since their involvement in performance is not easy to recover from the historical record. Rasula is as much interested in the literary impact of Dada as anything else, when he might easily have written a work about Dada as one of the precursors of performance art.
Anyway, I do regret not getting to this book sooner.
June 18, 2025
As someone who came to modernism through its wreckage—through Eliot’s dry thunder and Woolf’s shimmering introspection—I’ve always seen Dada as the feral cousin at the literary dinner table: wild-eyed, ink-stained, and gleefully nihilistic. Destruction Was My Beatrice doesn’t just document the chaos of Dada—it honors its refusal to be documented.
Jed Rasula has written a book that’s both dizzying and deeply researched, alive with the mad energy of the Cabaret Voltaire and the broken syntax of war-haunted Europe. He doesn’t try to tame Dada; instead, he lets it froth, spin, and contradict itself. The result is less a neat history and more a kaleidoscope of cultural aftershocks: sound poetry, nonsense manifestos, performance as provocation.
If you love modernism but feel like its polished canon sometimes leaves out the gutter-thrash of revolution, this is essential reading. Dada wasn’t just a movement. It was a scream. A joke. A wound. Rasula gets that—and shows how, in many ways, it’s still echoing.
Jed Rasula has written a book that’s both dizzying and deeply researched, alive with the mad energy of the Cabaret Voltaire and the broken syntax of war-haunted Europe. He doesn’t try to tame Dada; instead, he lets it froth, spin, and contradict itself. The result is less a neat history and more a kaleidoscope of cultural aftershocks: sound poetry, nonsense manifestos, performance as provocation.
If you love modernism but feel like its polished canon sometimes leaves out the gutter-thrash of revolution, this is essential reading. Dada wasn’t just a movement. It was a scream. A joke. A wound. Rasula gets that—and shows how, in many ways, it’s still echoing.
January 11, 2018
I hate to say that this was kind of a boring read. I don't know if that has to do with Jed Rasula's writing, or my overestimation of how exciting reading about Dada's history would be, but I found myself putting this book down much faster than most. Needed more pictures. Felt like the linkage to WWI was interesting, a period of particular historic interest, but I felt myself wanting much more.
March 11, 2026
Your opinion of this book will be directly correlated with your appreciation for a somewhat breezy compilation of gossipy stories about the hijinks of various Dada-ists over the life of the movement.
I enjoyed the hell out of it.
I enjoyed the hell out of it.
December 31, 2017
Okay, I didn't really finish this so much as gave up. The subject matter is fascinating. The writing? Not so much.
February 2, 2016
Deeply researched and with an excellent command of art's inner language, this book was often fascinating and brightly illuminating, though admittedly at times it was also a bit frustrating.... all but the well initiated will risk getting lost in the dense forest of sometimes maddening detail, replete with innumerable digressions and side stories, some perhaps better left in the Schwitters-bin.... yet one exits with an "impressionistic" sense of Dada and its various hotbeds and purveyors... one complication is a surprising paucity of illustrations/examples of the works... for full effect it calls for a companion book, in my case a coffee table tome from the National Gallery called "Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris" by Dietrich and that nicely follows a similar formula, clustering the cities and the artists (though there was considerable movement between)... I plan to read Hans Richter's personal account called "Dada: Art and Anti-Art", written many years after the period, because Dada is one of those simple yet elusive concepts that probably is best approached from several angles... and I will surely re-read parts of this book (now heavily underlined!)... art history it seems can be demystified by exploring a specific movement such as Dada as an entree, followed by the bidirectional study of its precursors (cubism, Fauvism) and successors (Surrealism), recognizing a degree of no-linearity in all art forms.... and a further attention to the general historical context (WW I, Weimar Republic), as well as investigating other art forms of the period looking for parallels (German Expressionistic cinema).... the author does a fine job overall in this capacity... it's not an easy/quick read, but one certainly well worthwhile....
August 13, 2017
Author Jed Rasula here should be commended for taking on the no means small feat of trying to put together a history of Dada - for multiple reasons. For one, it is difficult to define Dada at all, which quickly becomes clear within this book. It was a movement of art and literature and poetry and performance on one hand, but is simultaneously an anti movement, featuring anti art and anti poetry, and also seems to be greater than any one aesthetic sensibility of trend - is it a philosophy too? A lifestyle? A political ideology, or a slap in the face to political ideologies? Even its main players - Tristan Traza, Hugo Ball, Hannah Hoch, the Hertzfeldes, Kurt Schwitters, and many others - seem to have never agreed exactly, and that aspect also hampers the ability of a historian to define it and document it. It was international, with many spurtings in and out of life, and had iterations in many languages. Lastly the absurdism and internal squabbling that defined the group further impairs: it it simply hard to separate myth from fact and hyperbole from straight performance, etc. Jed Rasula overcomes many of these challenges in this book, and I honestly wish I liked it more because he is a clearly a very good researcher of difficult content and an excellent writer. Still I felt it dragged in portions, probably because it sometimes got a little repetitive, or featured a rather large cadre of personalities, some of whose relevancy for inclusion here was more tenuous then others. So ultimately I felt I had to force myself to finish this book, but it is a competent history of a fascinating time and movement, so that wasn't the worst. Rasula clearly has a very good sense of how to define Dada's meanings and moods and that is where he shines best.
November 21, 2015
I think I'd rate this higher if I were coming fresh to the subject—I know a fair amount about Dada, and a lot of the added detail was more than I turned out to be interested in (which isn't Rasula's fault.This is a good study of the quirky events, eccentric arts and personalities that made up Dada in its brief life (as Rasula notes, most of the creators moved on to Surrealism, Constructivism or an individual path), but I think I found Matthew Gale's Dada ans Surrealism a stronger work (and also better illustrated—seriously, would it have killed Rasula not to provide more examples of Dada art?)
June 9, 2016
An engaging look at one of the last century's genre bursting art movements. Banksy might not exist if there had not been Dada first. The many unique characters involved in this avant-garde revolution are just as interesting as the art they produced. As Tristan Tzara wrote of Kurt Schwitters: "He is among those who have decapitated the haloed capital A from the word art and have placed this word again on the level of human manifestations".
October 1, 2015
Sadly, there is nothing absurd about this book. Guess I wasn't in the mood for an academic treatise on the topic.
May 6, 2016
Did I like it yes no mostly yes hurray for reference to Firesign Theatre
August 31, 2015
Readable narrative history of the Dada movement, but not much here that hasn't been covered elsewhere & no fresh interpretation of the familiar anecdotes.
March 20, 2016
A lovely read about a chaotic anti-movement. Some familiar stories, some new connections. Well researched and documented. A nice companion to Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces.
October 30, 2016
I loved this book.
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