The Dada Movement
Dada movement letterhead
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.
Paris
Man Ray - The Dadaists
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.
Louis Aragon and André Breton in 1924
Opening of the Max Ernst exhibition at the Sans-Pareil in 1920.
From left to right: René Hilsum, Benjamin Péret, Serge Charchoune, Philippe Soupault on a ladder with a bicycle under his arm, Jacques Rigaut (upside down), André Breton and Simone Kahn.
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.
Dada Soirée, Salle Gaveau, Paris, May 26, 1920 (from: Hans Richter, Dada - Kunst und Antikunst, Dumont, 1964)
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.
Man Ray - Dada groups in 1921
Paul Éluard
Éluard, who was a close friend of André Breton, took part in all the dada manifestations. He published Proverbe in which he appeared to be obsessed by the problems of language, like Jean Paulhan.
Portrait de Paul Éluard by Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989)
Oil on board
33 x 25 cm. - 13 x 9 7/8 in.
Painted in 1929
Estimated Price: 3,500,000-5,000,000 pounds
Selling Price: 13,481,250 pounds
Proverbe
(Sorry, there is no biography of Satie in English.)
Erik 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
Erik Satie's "Vexations" (1893), 2010
Played during Nuit Blanche by Martin Arnold - and Micah Lexier - Toronto, Canada
Two Pianos, Table, 840 sheets of paper (folded)
This year Nuit Blanche began in Toronto at sunset on 2 October 2010 and continued through the night to dawn on 3 October. There were art exhibits, installations, and events open all over downtown.
Written in 1893, Erik Satie's "Vexations" was never published nor publicly heard during his lifetime. He left 39 beats of hand scrawled, insidiously vexing music—hard to read and hard to remember—and the following cryptic instruction: "to repeat 840 times this motif, it is advisable to prepare oneself in the most absolute silence, by some serious immobilities." A number of performers (most notably John Cage) have ventured to take him at his word and successively play the piece 840 times, taking between 15 and 27 hours to do so. We only have 12 hours so we're dividing it: two pianos playing simultaneously, 420 passes per piano. Our "Vexations" is staged in the majestic arched expanse of a cathedral of commerce, perhaps therefore taking part in a highly irregular sort of exchange. We'll be counting; tonight, by playing 840 scores—each a vexation—once. After each score is played it is transformed into a folded paper sculpture—840 scores creating 840 objects—giving shape to the sound and echoing the team of pianists weaving the composition's unmonumental but resolutely vexing notes. Satie said: "Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself." We invite you to walk around Vexations, hopefully several times as it accumulates through the night.
Martin Arnold and Micah Lexier are both based in Toronto. Arnold's compositions are performed nationally and internationally. Lexier is a visual artist, a collector, and (sometimes) a curator. Arnold is active in Toronto's improvisation and experimental jazz/roots/rock communities performing on live electronics, banjo, melodica, and hurdy-gurdy. Lexier has a deep interest in measurement, numbers and the kinds of marks we make in our day-to-day lives. Arnold teaches at Trent University. Together their ages equal 99 years.
Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes
In Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes's machine pictures, painted gears, shafts, and wires create obscure contraptions suggesting that the forces of production have run amok. The words included compound the enigma: the phrases "liquid love" and "surface of soluble hopes" appear on Oceanic Spirit. The name of a Hungarian city, "Szegedin" appears on Silence. Ribemont-Dessaignes's sensational performances at a number of Paris Dada events revealed his combative side: he hurled insults at the audience, promising to "rip out your spoiled teeth, your pummeled ears, your tongue full of sores."
Ribemont-Dessaignes - Silence. c. 1915. Oil on canvas
