Destruction Was My Beatrice by Jed Rasula

Author:Jed Rasula [Rasula, Jed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465066940
Publisher: Basic Books

9

NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING

Dada’s inaugural year in Paris had both energized and enervated the participants. On one hand, Dada was the creative whirlwind they’d longed for; on the other, it threatened to become routine. A permanent rebellion wasn’t a dream come true after all. Later on, André Breton characterized Dada as a state of expectancy, preparation for something else. When the alternative finally appeared late in 1924, he named it Surrealism and spent his remaining forty years leading the movement. But as the Dada “seasons” rolled on, Surrealism was still in the future—and Dada still had more to accomplish in Paris.

As 1921 commenced, the Littérature group meeting regularly at Café Certa (already included in guidebooks as a place frequented by the infamous Dadaists) reconsidered how to proceed. The confrontational soirées of the previous year had, in retrospect, all too clearly followed the program pioneered by Tzara. It was time to try something different. Finally, on April 14, the first in a proposed series of Dada “visits” to sites of negligible interest was held. The announcement read: “The transient Dadaists in Paris, wishing to remedy the incompetence of suspect guides and cicerones, have decided to undertake a series of visits to chosen locations, in particular to those which really have no reason to exist.” On a rainy day the Dadaists led a small group of sodden spectators to the modest chapel of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, where Ribemont-Dessaignes provided commentary for various architectural features by reading entries at random from a Larousse dictionary.

A few weeks later the Dadaists presented an exhibit of art by Max Ernst at the Au Sans Pareil bookstore. (Sans Pareil, meaning “unparalleled,” would become a leading publisher of Dada titles.) This occasion reinforced the still controversial foreignness of the Dada movement, as Ernst was German. What’s more, he’d been denied a visa because of his Dada activities in Cologne, so he wasn’t on hand for his own show.

Advertised as “beyond painting,” the show featured works that, numbered with bus tickets, were described in the exhibit’s poster as “mechanoplastic plasto-plastic paintopainting anaplastic anatomic antizymic aerographic antiphonaries and sprayed republican drawings.” Certainly the pieces were unlike anything seen in Paris before. Instead of pictures, they seemed like laboratories in which you beheld a parallel universe being smelted before your eyes, or a hothouse where poisonous plants were bred, taking on humanoid characteristics. (Ernst would have been an ideal illustrator for those lugubrious tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, like “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”) To Picabia’s catalogue of mechanomorphic works, these by Ernst teased mechanism into organism. He was called “a scissors-painter.”

An alchemical garden in always the best man wins (title in lower-case English) sprouts an array of ambiguous interspecies shapes, combining flowers with firearms. The Bedroom of Max Ernst houses a bear and a sheep at the far end of a chamber long enough to be a bowling alley, while the foreground is populated with a bat, a snake, a fish, and a whale. But these creatures were not to scale, as if to suggest that the dimensions of animal life were susceptible to psychotropic adjustment.

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