INVENTION: NEWSPAPERS, ADVERTISING, AND THE ORIGINS OF COLLAGE

Abstract

newspaper is sea; literature flows into it at will.-Stephane Mallarme, The Book: A Spiritual Instrument, 1895If resplendent posters betrayed their secret, we would be forever lost to ourselves ...-Andre Breton, Soluble Fish, 1924On morning of January 23rd, 1920, Tristan Tzara brought dada to Paris. Louis Aragon took stage at Palais des Fetes, read Tzara's poem Le Geant blanc lepreux du paysage and then made a surprise announcement: Dadaism in flesh will now interpret one of his works for you.1 Tzara walked on stage, picked up a newspaper, and commenced reading an article while, in wings, Andre Breton and Aragon rang electric bells to drown out his voice. mixed crowd of artists, journalists, and civilians, bemused and slightly bored until that moment, reacted violently. In Memoirs of Dadaism, Tzara recalls: This was very badly received by public, who became exasperated and shouted: 'Enough! Enough!'An attempt was made to give a futuristic interpretation to this act, but all that I wanted to convey was simply that my presence on stage, sight of my face and my movements, ought to satisfy people's curiosity and that anything I might have said really had no importance.2Tzara's stunt was part of first of Literature Fridays organized by poets Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and Philippe Soupault. These events were conceived very much in dada spirit of confrontation and shock pioneered so successfully by Tzara and others at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich during World War I, but by 1920 it was becoming more and more difficult to antagonize audiences. crowd at this event had sat quite calmly through a lecture on modem painting by Andre Salmon, Jean Cocteau reading poems of Guillaume Apollinaire, and Max Jacob and Francis Picabia creating and then erasing a drawing in chalk. Indeed, it was not until Tzara produced his newspaper that crowd reacted with violence and anger that signifies avant-garde success. Perhaps Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes captures most vividly what was at stake in this spectacle: the resultant indignation of public which had come to beg for an artistic pittance, no matter what, as long as it was art, effect produced by presentation of pictures and particularly of manifesto, showed them how useless it was, by comparison, to have Max Jacob's poems read by Jean Cocteau.3 Curiously, memoirs of participants and analyses of later critics often cite this as a key moment in development of dada, but they do so almost exclusively from point of view of audience. Ribemont-Dessaignes maintains that the crowd is willing to accept anything in an art which is translated into works. But it does not tolerate attacks on reasons for living (110). By reading newspaper instead of producing an original work of art or manifesto, Tzara had pulled mg out from under artist and essentially called into question all of humanist values associated with artistic production. Drowning out his voice with those intolerable bells, performance is explicitly anti-humanist and certainly anti-lyric. No doubt whole spectacle was an assault on audience, but what of Tzara himself and other participants? did newspaper mean to them? Why would Tzara make his debut in Paris by reading a newspaper? I believe answer to this question is, quite simply, that newspaper is ur-form of historical avant-garde and of modernism itself.Benedict Anderson argues that modem nations are always communities, fictions produced more by media than faceto-face experiences.4 For an individual to link his or her interests to millions of others that he or she has never met and, indeed, to people whose interests might well be antithetical to his or her own, requires a mediating force. daily newspaper provides just such a link, for while every reader is isolated and individual, there is overwhelming consciousness of mass ritual: What more vivid figure for secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned? …