dada does not mean anything
reading about dadaism pains me. the anguished, disgusted flight from the barbarity of an incomprehensible war, into the clutches of unreason ... but dadaism was not rendered listless by despair. it took up the banner of senselessness with a battlecry, injected with hopes of building something out of the ashes of the old aesthetic order. in this way, in the face of such catastrophe, absurdity became a guiding principle in a world nearly bereft of them -- a wretched, tragicomic bastion. concoct your absurdities, dadaism says, and wield cynicism and ridicule like triumphant shields. there is even a manifesto; in spirit it reads almost like a defiant call to arms. "I'm writing this manifesto to show that you can perform contrary actions at the same time, in one single, fresh breath," Tristan Tzara -- the pseudonym means "sad country" -- proclaimed. "I am against action; as for continual contradiction, and affirmation too, I am neither for nor against them, and I won't explain myself because I hate common sense."
but then there is tragedy acknowledged, reeled from, borne --
God is dead. A world disintegrated. I am dynamite. World history splits into two parts. There is an epoch before me and an epoch after me. Religion, science, morality—phenomena that originated in the states of dread known to primitive peoples. An epoch disintegrates. A thousand-year-old culture disintegrates. There are no columns and supports, no foundations any more—they have all been blown up. Churches have become castles in the clouds. Convictions have become prejudices. There are no more perspectives in the moral world. Above is below, below is above. The transvaluation of values came to pass. Christianity was struck down. The principles of logic, of centrality, unity and reason were unmasked as postulates of a power-craving theology. The meaning of the world disappeared. The purpose of the world—its reference to a supreme being who keeps the world together—disappeared. Chaos erupted. Tumult erupted. The world showed itself to be a blind juxtapositioning and opposing of uncontrolled forces. Man lost his divine countenance, became matter, chance, an aggregate animal, the lunatic product of thoughts quivering abruptly and ineffectually. Man lost the special position that reason had guaranteed him...
Hugo Ball, Lecture at the Galerie Dada (1917)
when one reads such things, is it any wonder? does it not make you pause, lean back in your chair, tremble at humanity?
George Grosz, Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Inventor (1919)