Artificial Hells. Inauguration of the “1921 Dada Season”

Abstract

I do not know who had the idea of the first Dada “event.” This idea certainly did not spring forth spontaneously, and its beginning must be sought in the evenings of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Those performances were still wholly literary in character. To explain the turn toward its current formulation, one needs to keep in mind certain connections. It was 1917. Zurich gathered together all elements of resistance or indifference from the fighting nations, among whom were primarily a large number of artists. The state of tension caused by the various kinds of secret actions undertaken in the city helped not a little to cement several friendships. The “Dada movement,” properly speaking, dates from this time. A veritable pact started it off, with clauses that shall be divulged later. Let us note for now that the Dadaists, unafraid to pledge their future, agreed to convene in Madrid in March 1921. I believe that only material difficulties kept them from realizing that project. I am skipping the metamorphoses that Dada underwent prior to its arrival in France, as that history is destined to be well known. I will simply recall, briefly, the public standing of French poets in 1919: verses by Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and myself were recited daily in one hall or another to the same audience, who invariably applauded. The profound boredom that emanated from these recitals, the incomprehension that resulted from reading out loud (a kind of reading that does maximum disservice to most modern poems, banishing their