The Dada Movement
Paris 1
The study of Parisian Dada is of limited interest to the art historian, for the French capital was predominantly the scene of an ideological or literary battleground. Actually, Dada produced only two French artists of major importance -- Duchamp and Picabia.
Out of the junction between on the one hand, Picabia and Tzara, who had arrived in Paris from Zurich respectively in 1919 and 1920, and on the other hand the group (André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Paul Éluard) formed around the little periodical Littérature, was born the French branch of the movement, the most notorious because it was to serve somewhat as a sounding board to Zurich dadaism. Its brilliant Parisian career, opened with a flourish in January 1920, was to end in a slump four years later. Meanwhile it had sponsored a great number of manifestations, exhibitions, shows, public provocations, a burst of manifestos, pamphlets, magazines and books, sometimes extremely varied, but always bearing Dada's iconclastic and irreverential hallmark. However, the united face the dadaists showed the public was already cracked. Only a few weeks after its formation, the group split up into two factions: a Zurich radical wing, led by Tzara; and a Parisian tendency, represented by Breton and his friends who, more open to the literary tradition, was to resurface in 1924 under the new name of surrealism.
This hyperactive current surged on, from one country to another, all the way to the antipodes. About a hundred artists claimed to be inspired by Dada and produced highly varied works under its influence.
At the beginning, Dada borrowed elements from various pre-war "modernist" schools (futurism, cubism, expressionnism, etc.). But it exploited its predecessors' techniques to diametrically opposite purposes through a subtle process of "denaturation". In this way, for example, the typographical dismembering brought into fashion by the futurists in their Parole in Libertà would reappear systematically in the Dada tracts and pamphlets of Zurich, Paris and Berlin so as to become the undisputable trademark of the movement. It was no longer any question of pulling a new kind of beauty out of a jumble of type fonts, but rather of showing the vanity of all esthetic effort. Along the same lines, always following in the futurists' lead, Dada would make much of the machine. But where Severini and Balla were its high priests, Ernst, Duchamp and Picabia aspired only to desacralize it by replacing it in a perfectly unlyrical context (Duchamp's Broyeuse de chocolat). No more than man himself, the machine, his "daughter born without a mother," finds no favour in Dada's eyes: it is happily torn apart, raped, mocked, parodied. We find countless examples in Picabia's work of disparate mechanical elements distributed in haphazard order, as in Petite solitude au milieu des soleils, a machine that could never function and was therefore condemned to sterility.
1. Salon Dada. Poster, Paris, Montaigne Gallery, June 3-6-30 1921. The international exhibition organized by Tzara under the name of "Salon Dada" in the hall of the Montaigne Gallery, just above the Champs-Élysées theatre, assembled a medley of a hundred incongruous works submitted by about twenty French and foreign artists.
Satie, the Dada-Dandy: Public-Private Partnership
Erik Satie emerged every morning from his tiny rented room in Arcueil, on the outskirts of Paris, dressed exquisitely in a velvet suit of which he owned an identical dozen, bought in the early 1890s with an inheritance. His dapper appearance was matched in his correspondence, –even the most trivial note written in flawless copperplate, and in his painstaking music notation.
When, after his death, Satie's room was entered by his brother and small group of friends, including the composer Darius Milhaud, no-one but Satie had entered the room for more than twenty years – not even the 'large and splendid concierge'. Milhaud recalled "what a shock we had on opening the door!" The room inside was horrific: "an unbelievable slum, an unforgettable rubbish heap". There was hoarded newspaper, unopened parcels, dust, grease and – according to Robert Caby "numerous lumps of excrement, hardened and blackened with age, which I hastily stuffed into newspapers so that Satie's brother shouldn't see them."
This is where biographical information becomes troublesome. The velvet suit, the exquisite handwriting - these seem to fit with the music. The filthy room, unopened piano, dust and excrement - does not. But that is the room, whether we like it or not, in which Satie wrote Parade, Relâche, Socrate, and from which he emerged every day looking 'rather like a model civil servant'.
Satie's gift was more modest than he was, particularly when compared with contemporaries like Fauré and Debussy. Jane Austen described her talent as "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour", and could apply equally to Satie. He had a restricted range, but one uniquely his. And amongst the ivory-polishers are many important composers: Chopin, Webern, Reich, Nancarrow. Even Stravinsky, the towering genius of twentieth century music, overcame his deficiencies as melodist by stealing tunes and bringing rhythm to the forefront.
Satie's music has the same aloof exterior and unknown interior as Satie the man. Who can say what led him into the lifestyle he adopted, or what his state of mind was. But I see Satie as a heroic, not a tragic, figure. Like Oscar Wilde, his genius was in his life as much as his art. He would don character of the boastful, irascible composer as he donned his velvet suit in the morning, before spending his days touring the bars of Paris. The poverty of his bedroom was irrelevant to his public life as the view of the unpainted back of a stage set from the wings is to the theatre-goer.
Those who entered Satie's room after his death felt as if they had 'penetrated his brain', but if you dissect a dead brain it does not give many clues to the character of the person when alive. Did Satie's lifestyle shape his music, or the other way round? Who knows. Certainly both are obsessive, eccentric, perplexing, but looking for meaning is probably the surest way not to find it.
Satie died at the age of 59 in a nursing home, of cirrhosis of the liver, having spent his last few days drinking champaqne and rejecting visitors as his strength gradually diminished. His last words were 'Ah! The cows...' (Ah ! les vaches... = Ah ! les salauds...)
by "The Earwig"
Sound and Music