Miloslav Topinka: The Dada movement in relation to the Czech inter-war avant-garde

When the world at the beginning of the fifties, and the Czechs about ten years later, started looking for the sources and roots of contemporary art, the poets, painters and theoreticians had to return to the first two decades of the twentieth century. They had to return to the Dada movement. For it was Dada, as Jindřich Chalupecký wrote, that "clearly and consistently expressed the need to cast aside the old view of art as creation and production and highlight instead its potential to open up an entirely different experience of life, an entirely different awareness of the world, an entirely different conception of human beings than that already familiar to our society."

The crisis of modern art, the crisis of the meaning of art in general, the gulf which rose up between "art and life", all these are phenomena which are fully present already at the end of the nineteenth century. Art becomes an ornament, a superfluous luxury, a beautiful artefact, separated from life by an increasingly impermeable barrier. Dada attempted a total thoroughgoing revolt against this. It was "a deliberate conscious effort to turn the tables upside down" (Henry Miller). Art for the Dadaists is not a beautiful artefact, separated from life, but a gesture, action, an act. An act that emphasizes immediate lived experience. "In 1913," remembers Marcel Duchamp, "I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn... It was around that time that the word readymade came to mind to designate this form of manifestation... the choice of these 'readymades' was never dictated by aesthetic delectation. They became works of art because I named them so."

Dada was always interested in the gesture of freedom, the creative process itself. The exhibited objects were often forgotten after the end of the exhibition, lost, destroyed or burned. This is recalled for example by Raoul Hausmann in the text "Dadaist montages and their relations to neo-Dadaism and neo-Realism." Pictorial and three-dimensional assemblages and photo-montages first appeared in Berlin at the First International Dada Fair in the year 1920. Hausmann stresses that the Cubist and Futurist newspaper cuttings, coloured papers and beards on pictures were not yet real assemblages. At the Fair there were displayed Hausmann's pictures, all pasted over with only posters, the sculpture-assemblages of Grosz, Heartfield, the photomontages of Hannah Hoech and Hausmann himself. Grosz and Heartfield "mounted" a boy mannequin, which had a metal strut instead of a left leg, on its right shoulder an electric bell, the head was replaced by two light-bulbs, on its chest the blade of a knife and around the genital area a set of teeth. Schlichter again hung on the ceiling the figure of a soldier in the field, who instead of a head had the mask of a pig with a military cap.

These objects gave rise to a case brought against Schlichter, Grosz, Heartfield and Baader in February 1921 for demeaning and insulting the German army and for pornography. At the fair there also appeared the first of Hausmann's "concretisation-sculpture-assemblages". This was a wooden board about one metre long, painted black, upon which was fixed a drawing board embellished with the rods of an umbrella stand. Above this Hausmann placed a blue glazed plate and the whole object was peppered with razor blades. The "chief Dada" Baader exhibited a huge scaffolding made of diverse material, wood, paper, bottles, metal etc., which he called a "Great plasto-dio-dada-drama", "the greatness of Germany and its fall through the teacher Hagendorf; the fantastic life stories of the Chief Dada; a monumental piece of Dadaist architecture with five floors, three foundations, one tunnel, two lifts and one cylindrical ending". "Assemblage is an existential identity in itself," says Raoul Hausmann. "Assemblage is creation antithetical to all pathos and mass-movements. Assemblage IS simple and it is HERE. This is the content and meaning of anti-art." (All these constructed object-assemblages were destroyed after the event. Only some were preserved in photographs.)

Dada was always against any certainties, against any forms of self-definition. When the danger of self-definition threatened, the danger of boredom and repetition, Dada dissolved itself, after six years of activity. Dada had an ambivalent character. It said yes and no in the same breath, it advanced in art the principle of change and anti-chance. "Dada is usable for everything, and yet is itself nothing, it is a point where yes and no and all the contradictions mutually come together - not ceremonially in the castles of human philosophers, but quite ordinarily on street corners like dogs and grasshoppers" (Tristan Tzara).

Dada was the first movement in the history of modern art to strive for totality, for a totalising attitude taken to its limits both in art and in life. In the Manifesto on Weak and Bitter Love in response to the question "What is the life of Dadaists?" there appears as the first answer "To sleep on a razor and on fleas in rut." Art and life are indistinguishably merged. Jacques Vaché in his life, which may be seen as one single authentic "work of art", went to the ultimate limits in his totalising outlook and total independence of awareness. His final "artistic manifestation" was his suicide at the age of twenty-three. "I shall die when I want to die," he wrote not long before his death, "but then I shall die together with someone. To die alone is tedious, I prefer death in the company of one of my best friends." Jacques Vaché was indeed found dead along with one of his close friends. They were lying next to one another. They had simultaneously drunk the same poison.

"Dada is the origin of all the arts, "wrote Hans Arp. "Dada is for art without meaning, which does not mean nonsense. Dada is without meaning just like nature." Dada means nothing, it does not wish to mean anything. Words and things are. Nothing more. Man Ray defines Dada: "Dada is." As Hugo Ball writes in his Dadaist Diary, "two thirds of the words used by Dada come from ancient spells." Dada tried to approach the roots of language. Hugo Ball is the first to write an "abstract" phonetic poem "O Gadji Beri Bimba", Raoul Hausmann a phonetic poem "fmsbw", Kurt Schwitters a little later "Ursonate" (Primordial Sonata). Hugo Ball states: "With acoustic poems we wanted to give up on speech, which was laid waste and made impossible." Richard Huelsenbeck according to Hans Richter's characterisation again spoke up for enhancing Negro rhythms in poetry ("Sokobauno, Sokobauno, Sokobauno").

Dada was capable of its own self irony: "Dada is the dictatorship of the mind, or / Dada is the dictatorship of language / or maybe / Dada is the death of the mind, which will please many of my friends. Friends." Pretty much most of their manifestations touched upon nothingness. "Dada is like your hopes: nothing / like your paradise: nothing" (Francis Picabia). In its revolt it did not mince its words. It was harsh and unbending. In the ninth paragraph of the "Manifesto on Weak Love and Bitter Love" there comes the refrain: "so then you will all croak it."

Dada wanted to demolish, to annihilate and negate, and so it did, it annihilated, it demolished and it negated. But insofar as we are speaking of the destruction of art, we must have in mind the old art, art in the classical sense of the word. This destruction and negation in itself also contained a profound faith in the meaning of the new art, corresponding to a new, different sensibility. Only thus could Marcel Duchamp say (even though the Dada movement was by then long gone): "I like the word 'believe'. In general, when we say 'I know' we know nothing, but we believe. I believe that art is the only form of activity in which a human being behaves as a true individual. Only by means of this can one transcend the state of the animals, because art is the gateway into realms where neither time nor space rules. To live means to believe, at least that is what I believe."

Thus, Hans Richter is wrong when he writes: "The Zurich group strove for that 'equilibrium between heaven and hell' of which Arp spoke, that is to say for the uniting of art and anti-art into part of the new experience. The New York group (Duchamp, Picabia and Man Ray) on the contrary radically rejected the whole idea of art." Such statements are in fact dependent upon what we understand by the concept of "art", on what we are able and willing to comprehend. Here there emerge the mutual differences within the Dada movement: it is suggested for example that Marcel Duchamp or on the other hand Kurt Schwitters in their outlook went still "further" than for example Hans Arp or Max Ernst, or else that their outlook and their conception of "art" was much "closer" to today's activities and attitudes.

Once in a short note in the journal Sešity I wrote that Karel Teige did not properly understand Dada. This aroused not only a bit of a commotion, but also some polemics. I shall try here to "break the illusion" in somewhat greater detail. Karel Teige, as the foremost theoretician of the Czech Devětsil avant-garde, was exceptionally widely and well informed for his time. It is therefore interesting that in his studies, articles and comments he passed over without mention the Dadaist performances which took place in Prague or elsewhere in the country. These events are described by Raoul Hausmann in "Courrier DADA". Hausmann remembers how during his tours he inserted the sixty-one-step dance if the audience were too boisterous and caused too much uproar. After this dance the public usually quietened down and the "programme" carried on. So it was for example in 1920, at the Agricultural Exchange in Prague.

The first performance in Bohemia took place on the 26th February 1920, on stage in Teplice-Šanov. Baader, Huelsenbeck and Hausmann here on their way from Leipzig put on a performance in front of a "throng of imbeciles and the curious". From thence they travelled on to Prague. The performance in Prague was to take place on the 1st March at the Agricultural Exchange in Prague, which had space for 2,500 persons. They were threatened from all sides. Both by the Czechs and by the local Germans. "The Czechs wanted to beat us up, because unfortunately we were Germans," quotes Hausmann from Huelsenbeck's memoirs "En avant dada". "The newspapers had already stirred up some monstrous anti-Dada propaganda several weeks before our arrival in Prague. Despite this, crowds of people assembled in the streets, chanting in rhythm and shouting after us: dada, dada...

The performance was supposed to start at 8 pm. Thousands of people thronged in front of the entrance... Baader vanished... At 8.20 we received a note he sent us... We had to start without him... 'Hokus-pokus', says Huelsenbeck, using the Czech term. Finally it ended up with a great victory for Dada in Prague. On the 2nd March Huelsenbeck and Hausmann performed in Prague for the second time, this time in front of a more intimate circle in the Mozarteum. "Equally successful." On the 5th March in Karlovy Vary. The next year, in September 1921, Schwitters and Hausmann arranged two evenings, Antidada and Marz, in Prague as part of their tour. They recited Schwitters's "La grande Révolution a Revon" and a Schwitters poem consisting of only the word "Cigarren". Then Hausmann sang his phonetic text "Kp'erioum" and the text "fmsbw". Schwitters here also recited in front of the Prague audience his renowned "Anna Blume" along with the German alphabet read backwards. This time too the Dadaists' performance was a great success. They returned from Prague, with Hannah Hoech, via Lovosice, where they stayed three days. I mention this because it was in Lovosice that Schwitters began work on his "Ursonata".

Raoul Hausmann came to Prague on one further occasion. He had left Germany because of Hitler, and travelling via Paris, Spain and Zurich he arrived in Prague in February 1937. Here (for the second time) he exhibited his latest photographs, and became Secretary of the C.I.A.M. (Congres International d'Architecture Moderne), run by Le Corbusier. He left Prague for good in May 1938. It was in this context that I was interested in his relationship to Karel Teige. In a letter dated 20th November 1969, Raoul Hausmann replied to me, amongst other things: 'When I was in Prague in 1937 and 1938, Karel Teige, who knew all about me, not only ignored me, but because (at that time) he was a Surrealist, spoke up against me. That is all I can tell you about my relationship to Teige.' Sometimes similar was communicated by Hausmann in a letter of 7th April 1965 to Jindřich Chalupecký, from which I quote: 'I have to confirm to you that the Czech painters and sculptors in 1937-38 didn't want to know anything about me, especially Mr Teige. I would like to mention here, that Teige knew somewhat more about my person and my work, for he had collaborated on the revue "G", edited by Hans Richter in 1921 to 1924.'"

Let us suppose that in Raoul Hausmann's case this was some kind of personal version of a response. I read again however all Teige's texts published in the nineteen-twenties relating to Dada. How does Teige see Dada? As "mischievousness", as the "art of laughter", as a "fresh and refreshing elixir". In the text Hyperdada in the first issue of Red (p. 35) Teige writes: "Certainly, many of the Dadaist witticisms and jokes were only narrowly literary." (My own emphasis.) And that is in October 1927. For Teige Dada is only a big laugh: "the Sokol Congress is Dada; Emmy Destinn (Ema Destinnová) singing to the Sokol members on the rock of Vyšehrad is Dada... Czechoslovak Fascism is Dada..."

Let us compare these quotations with the first manifesto of Dada in 1918: "Like a furious wind we are ripping up the bedlinen of clouds and prayers and preparing a great spectacle of disaster, conflagration and disruption." Only then there follows: "We are preparing the liquidation of sorrow." It is as if Teige overlooked the fact that Dada was above all a "protest with the fists of the whole being ready for the act of destruction." "We here have the right to proclaim something, for we have known the tremors of horror and awakening." This aspect of Dada not longer fits into Teige's conception, Teige interprets Dada in his own way: "The word Dada describes and denotes that comic nonsensicality, craziness, unseemliness, impropriety, ridiculousness, which comes from incongruity." And elsewhere again: "Humour and the character of our age is Dada." (Teige uses spaced lettering here.) "The spirit of Dada is the spirit of the comic and circus clown." And he concludes his summarising and "exhaustive" text on Dada: "Dada ushers us into a magnificent circus, into the magic Theatre of the Diversities of our world."

Perhaps from the first pages of this text, it follows that Dada was something fundamentally different from that which is presented here by Teige. If this revolt, one of the most important in the history of modern art, is not understood by the foremost Czech theoretician of the avant-garde, then we can scarcely expect understanding from those who were not considered members of the avant-garde. Or one of our illusions about the avant-garde concentrated around Devětsil, and presented theoretically by Teige, starts to collapse. The idea of avant-garde here loses its actual meaning. For Teige in 1928, "Poetism liquidates the disharmony of body and spirit." Art is still for him that "mental hygiene" of 1922, even though somewhat modified. It is enough to juxtapose that which Teige considers to be modern art in 1928 with that which is actually going on in modern art at that time to make evident the discrepancy about which we say very little today. Citing today Teige's texts from Pásmo or from Disk, we see that we have to look for the real inter-war "avant-garde" elsewhere.

Teige in 1923, Disk 1: "Compositions devoid of subject-matter, studying pure forms and their mutual relationships, are a misdirected consequence of Cubism: Mondrian, Doesburg, Suprematism and so on are in danger of decorativism."

In Pásmo 7/8, in the text "Towards the Aesthetics of Film", Teige again polemicises with the lack of subject-matter in the films of V. Eggelling and Hans Richter. "Furthest down this line went the Dadaist Picabia, whose "Entreacte" is only a play of poetic witticisms of cinematographic beauty." (My emphasis on "only".)

Mentions of Dada appear in Pásmo, published in 1924-25 by Černík, Halas and Václavek. In Pásmo 4 Kurt Schwitters's short German text Merz is printed without commentary. Probably this was due to Černík, who translated Schwitters's "National Art" in Pásmo 12. In Pásmo 6 there is a study on film by Teige; despite Teige's rare wealth of information the passage devoted to Marcel Duchamp is surprisingly curt. Marcel Duchamp is here remembered as a one-time Cubist painter (something which Teige emphasises of someone wherever he can), who applied himself to photographic, mechanical painting; "he now occupies himself almost entirely with film... here he has attained some interesting results."

The second year of Pásmo, beginning in October 1925, opens its first issue (p. 7) with Teige's study "On Humour, Clowns and Dadaists". "The character of modern humour is DADA." There follows Teige's "noteworthy" definition: "Dadaism is an entertaining and in no way uninfluential literary movement." "... Dada is against art and produces a jokey and merry art." (Again I have emphasised Teige's two attributes here.) ... "Mysticism and humour are symptomatic of the artistic work of madmen: but in Dadaism there is very little of the mystical. They are scallywags." (!)

The reaction of those whom Dada was aimed against was double-sided: either they were infuriated and insulted, or they retreated into a shell of condescension and cheeriness. After the said evaluation ("scallywags") Teige continues: "The word  d a d a  here describes that comic nonsensicality, craziness, modern comicality which stems from incongruity." Or elsewhere: "Dada is at the core of merry folk." For Teige, Dada is provincial. Czech small-mindedness! "Dada counsels us to practise stupidities which please us." "Dada wants people crushed by war to attain a bit of merriment and thinks one should continue in achieving it. It takes a certain natural delight in poeticising, probably out of a sense of fun, and there is no reason to get cross about this hygienic sense of fun." (!) Thus Teige pacifies his Czech readers, suggesting it is nothing very much, that a bit of fun, a pinch of hygienic fun, harms nobody. They are getting annoyed and cross about nothing. Indeed, for the "humour and character of age, is Dada"!

In December 1925 Teige published in Pásmo 3 (its second year) a piece called "Roll-call Dada". It is a list of various names, almost without commentary. Only names, sometimes with a "fully exhaustive characterisation". Francis Picabia is characterised here, for example, as a "witty (!) painter and poet." "With K. Schwitters we actually come to Dadaist artistic work," we read in the text. Teige's knowledge of the subject is borne out by his mentions of Merz-bild and of I-Kunst. But Teige is seeking for the "healthy core" (!) in Schwitters's work - behold this expression anticipating the critical vocabulary of the nineteen-fifties. Schwitters's artistic activity is here at the end of 1925 characterised by its striving to "seek for beauty and poetry in the fruits of the every-day." Teige does not understand this "art". He interprets it in his own way, so that step by step he gets all the way to the man on the flying trapeze. An interesting interpretation. On Schwitters's poetry Teige adds: Schwitters "composes poems out of letters... in this way he arrived at interesting experiments in the field of typography."

Teige as a theoretician of art remained stuck in Cubism. The Dadaist artists according to Teige "are not concerned with art, and not with formal artistry either. They are quite unlike Cubism, which freed painting from imitation and literary anecdotes, and took it onto the path of absolute formal artistry." Thus, not only Mondrian and Doesburg are a misdirected consequence of Cubism, but also Duchamp, Schwitters, Picabia and others. "But the Dadaists do not try for a new form of image. They remain caricaturists, illustrators, and hence literati. Their works contain just as little formal power as there was in the works of the Symbolist painters and today in the works of the psychoanalytical Surrealist painters... and so the Dadaist pictures can interest us only as documents." The eye of the critic looks down from a divine height upon some Duchamp, Schwitters, Picabia, Hausmann, Arp, Ernst or Man Ray, because it "can" interest him as a document about a strange time. But straight away there comes the crushing verdict: "But to mock the dead body of painting and not to strive for a new optical art to replace it is really hyena-ism."

On page forty, there is wonderful evidence of the avant-garde theoretician Karel Teige's views on collage: "To stick together cuttings without rhyme or order and attach coloured squiggles and photographs, to stick a beard on the Mona Lisa, to stick other faces on historical pictures, this is jokery, which, if it is to amuse, must not continue... Ephemera of fashion, seasonal attractions." To leave us in no doubt, Teige names those he has in mind: Schwitters, Arp, Hausmann, Picabia, Ernst, Hoech, Taeuber... He exempts from this list only Man Ray, in whom he sees an "optical art of poetic strikingness" and, this time because of film, Hans Richter. Dada is for Teige a fashion, an expression of the day, which we must recognise, take full cognisance of, but rather just for its merry, cheery entertainment value and one or two jokes on top. And if we would like to take something more from Dada, Teige offers us Poetist associations: "And so Dada makes us think of the burnt-out cigarette, which leaves a pleasant scent around it."

None of these quotations are aimed at denying the importance of Karel Teige in the artistic and theoretical activity of the so-called inter-war avant-garde in Czechoslovakia. They only indicate how Karel Teige failed to understand Dada and indeed could not have understood it. His criterion in the visual arts of the nineteen-twenties was Cubism, in poetry he orientated himself towards Apollinairean Cubofuturism. Amongst other things it may have been precisely this orientation towards Apollinaire which took the Poetist-orientated poetry up a blind alley in the end. A purely subjective remark by Marcel Duchamp may be given a wider validity from today's viewpoint. Asked what he thought about Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp replied: "He didn't care what he wrote. (He wrote anything.) ... With Apollinaire I mistrust a certain literary bombast..."

The parallels and interrelationships between Marinetti's Futurism and Czech Poetism have so far only been fleetingly indicated. From Teige's criteria and views on poetry in the twenties it is clear that Marinetti's Futurism was still attracting and influencing him. "In the manifestos there is a healthy and revolutionary core," writes Teige on Marinetti's manifestos. Teige however picks out of Futurism only that which most attracts. Marinetti "sings the beauty of the modern, industrial, technical, urban and capitalist world, he proclaims civilism." Teige, as he admits himself, leans on Marinetti even in his "Poetist Manifesto" of 1924 (albeit with the necessary, for Teige essential ideological "revision and reservation"). He considers Marinetti a predecessor of Tzara, but Marinetti is much closer to him than Tzara. (Marinetti's inconsistent stance is shown for example by his 1910 novel Mafarka il futurista, in which a year after the publication of the first Futurist manifesto numerous conventions and worn-out clichés are deployed. "Parole in liberta" ("Words in Liberty") thus appeared four years after the first Futurist manifesto and three years after Mafarka il futurista!)

Teige however in his orientation towards Marinetti's futurism finds himself in an awkward situation. On the one hand Futurism is close to him in its artistic activity, its views on "life and art", on the other he is unacceptable by his active adherence to Italian Fascism. This discrepancy explains why Teige never openly proclaims an allegiance to Marinetti. The ideological grid which Teige habitually attaches to art and artistic activity is inconvenient on this occasion (the close linking of art and revolution, which, as it turned out later in the case of Surrealism also, was not sustainable and led to the demise of the so-called inter-war avant-garde). He tries to get round this discrepancy by stressing Russian Futurism, which he knows less well, and which is alien to him both where it crosses over into Dadaism and where it experiments with Zaum language. He is merely interested in its political orientation: "Marinetti has published a book in which he studies the interrelationships of Futurism and Fascism. But it seems to us that these relationships are external and accidental. An article in Secolo once drew attention to the much more organic relationships between Russian Futurism and Bolshevism: here the tomorrow is being created, a new world, whereas Fascist patriotism is basically historical and traditionalist." (Pásmo 10, "Futurism and the Italian Moderna".) Teige returns to this discrepancy again, as if defending his leanings towards Marinetti, in the second volume of Red (p. 202): "The relationship between Futurism and Fascism is ambivalent, illogical, it is an entirely chance meeting."

Karel Teige and the "Poetists" of Devětsil, as I have tried to show, did not understand the Dada movement very well. Dada was not a piece of fun, playing-up and mischievousness. Dada in its consistent revolt attempted something new, something different, which changed to the very limits the approach to art and attitude to life. It tried to bridge the growing gap between life and art. It brought a new sensibility, which required of the artist a totality which brooked no compromises and expressed an entirely different experience of life. In the nineteen-twenties, but also later on, our so-called inter-war avant-garde was not willing to accept this total outlook. There exists however a test which shows that Dada was understood by at least some of the poets in the twenties. It is paradoxical that these were seen rather as "diversionists of the avant-garde", standing outside the main centre of the "official" Czech avant-garde of the day. This text is a hitherto unpublished lecture on Dadaism given by František Halas in December 1925. Although the lecture was organised by the Brno branch of Devětsil, it differs substantially in its view of Dada from Devětsil theory and practice, formulated principally by Teige.

"Look at me well.

I am an idiot, a joker, a smoker.

Look at me well.

I am ugly, little, I am boring.

I am just like all of you.

That is how T. Tzara would have begun his lecture and that is how every lecture really ought to begin. Flowers are murdered by their Latin names and the coloured cockatoo which is called Dada must be plucked, so that, beyond the merry escapades and surprises that it brings us, there may be found that fundamental something that compelled it to shouting, to laughter, to that whole circus of words, insults, the lyricism it boasts." Thus begins Halas's lecture. Already from its first words it is clear that Halas seeks for the origins of Dada and follows them entirely elsewhere than Teige. Halas understandably reacts to the prevailing notion of Dada as merriment and laughter, he does not refute it, does not argue with Teige. But he tries to reach that "fundamental something". He selects and stresses aspects of Dada which are indeed fundamental. He grasps the ambivalent quality of Dada: "Everything is truth and everything is a lie." "They (the Dadaists) were bolstered by their hatred of the bourgeois," continues Halas.

"... A new form of expression of certain age-old experiences is disturbing for educated people. They feel a kind of horror and, in order to regain their certainty, resort to negation, to mockery. The time brought several of these, the absurdity of war, the ephemeralising of hitherto stable values, the idiocy of nationalism and so on. Pleasurable doubts and scepticism, which were a luxury, were unfitting here. It was necessary to raise this scepticism to the second power. To discredit all deeds and concepts, to mock was more fitting than pacifist leaflets and mawkish cursing... Dada was an idea that touched upon the most vital emotions that horrified them, that shamed them, but also taught them. On the edge of history, in the collapse of the bourgeois order, it was time to liquidate also the art, morality, philosophy of this world, for in these sectors the bourgeois felt himself at his most certain, these were the sacred fires of which he was the guardian. Dada by its absurdity, naivety, undifferentiatedness became a part of modernity and so it remains."

I cite here somewhat more generously from Halas's lecture, as its text has not yet been printed. Apart from other Dadaists Halas in a passage on Dada and philosophy cites above all Walter Serner. "The Dadaist is one who has understood that only then can we have ideas when we are able to carry them out in the world, says Serner." Walter Serner, born in Karlovy Vary, was one of the founders of Dada. Hans Richter characterises him: he was an Archimedes, who wanted to raise up the world, in order that, having been raised up, it might be left hanging. "The tragedy of modern man," continues Halas, "is that his instincts and vitality have remained. Man in the past ate, drank, hunted, copulated, ate, copulated, drank, hunted, ate, copulated, and today out of twenty-four hours only ten are left which we can use for these enormously good things. The Dadaists understood that trains of thought are crossroads by which we can wander off in all directions into infinity... Truths, said Klíma, are being seated comfortably on the lavatory. It is shamelessness if someone asks to be believed... The absolute absurdity of truth is proven. Truth is ice and death. Tendency: sticking infinity in a trunk (Klíma). Spit on humanity, on Christ, on everything... In this age there is still too much waiting for books, and that is its disease... We must not be surprised by the Dadaists' frequent contradictions. They are fertile at their expense... We analyse the sorrow of Niobe down to its bottom and burst with laughter (Klíma)." Halas thus understood Dada.

The name of Ladislav Klíma has now come up several times here. Were we to try to try the predecessors and initiators of that revolt which was fundamental for Dada, some kind of pre-Dada, then for the Czechs it is above all the personalities of Jaroslav Hašek and Ladislav Klíma. Jaroslav Hašek with his permanent "manifestations", in which to this day it is impossible to separate "Wahrheit" from "Dichtung", and with his Good Soldier Švejk. And Ladislav Klíma, his totalising attitude, the mutual permeation of thoughts and writing with his way of life, is in its way an isolated Czech phenomenon. The paradoxes, in which "all" and "nothing" mutually permeate, are in close interrelation with his actual way of life, taken to its ultimate consequences. (Whether it is driving a steam-roller, sleeping in the icy frost on snow or anything else, only seemingly absurd.) The strong pre-Dadaist elements, which anticipate the Dadaist texts, are quite evident in his novel The Peregrinations of the Blind Snake. Ladislav Klíma wrote it in the year 1917 (!) with František Böhler. It was written in German, but unfortunately only the first part has been preserved. It is thus entirely logical that Halas at so many points cites Ladislav Klíma. This Klíma, who was entirely unacceptable for the Czech avant-garde as formulated by Karel Teige, and so a matter of taboo.

"The Dadaists saw the world the way it is," says Halas in his lecture. "... If it is nihil, that it is nihil. Positive to life. Dada won its duel with philosophy. It is superhuman in a leap. Of course amongst modern people maybe our children still just like ourselves will be spelling out (deception of education) on the school wall the one greatest Dada: Love the truth, defend the truth, speak the truth! Unto death! Jan Hus." "Art became a fetish, a drawing-room affair, an amusement for tea-sipping ladies; 99% of people have as much feeling for it as a cow for Easter Sunday... Art is something as natural as walking... The Dadaist Baader says: I write, because it is as natural as when I urinate... Idiots are always well fed and so is the art made by them. Let us consider its varieties." Halas then discredits one "art" after another: the plastic arts, painting, the novel, drama, poetry. "Poetry has become a good means of communicating that which it would be inadvisable to state honestly... We have: social poets. Yes, society is a dung heap, but it is not necessary for these [illegible word] to sit on it, scratching their own and other people's sores... The social poet sees a woman giving birth in a cellar or reads about it, gets a flux of sympathy and thirty crowns fee. Ethical tuberculars lean over the worker, assuring him of their sympathy. The only means would be, for the workers to stop being sentimental and give each singer of the proletariat at least a good drubbing. The social poet glorifies poverty and suffering, in order to have something to write about, and maybe silently prays for it not to disappear. His poetical wet dreams - "pollutions" - end revolutions. The philosophical poet: eternity yawns - the poet yawns, sings and sings - the reader spits and spits. And says: [all] stuffing-stuffing... The erotic poet: is an eternal masturbator... the Platonic sniffing a bitch. He sings of princesses and goes after the first whore..."

"In the beginning was nonsense, nonsense was in the word and the word was nonsense. Who understands that, understands Dadaism. Dadaism is chaotic like everyone who knows a lot. If it contradicts itself, only language is guilty of that. People like not only plump girls but also plump ideas. The Dadaists not so. Dada is malicious, who is not malicious has no spirit, has no imagination... Dada is unbridled, in that is its beauty, every measurelessness is beautiful and woe unto the art that measures itself by some measure... Already Hašek says somewhere that if Homer hadn't been an old fool, he could hardly have recited his verses standing up."

After reading this text it is perhaps entirely evident which of the Czechs in the period between the two World Wars (but also later on) represented the true avant-garde, in the most proper sense of the word. At the same time it is not a matter of history, of mere documentation. That which we read in Halas's lecture from 1925, is after all in many respects alive and relevant even today. If we read that art has become a fetish, a commodity, a drawing-room affair, an ornament and a piece of décor, we are in the present day right up to our ears. Even though the concept of "art" has been modified and differentiated over those past forty-five years.

The final part of Halas's lecture has the heading "Dada plus Love and Morality". "Pleasure is the only swindle I wish to persist. Calves are our capital. The Platonic is the one who cannot, or the clumsy one who hasn't the courage. Both are embarrassing. Morality is a weakness of the brain (Rimbaud). Morality is trade... Dada spits on morality... Who has nothing to be proud of is proud of his morality (Klíma)... Virtue is frequently impotence. Talking about ethics is a fraud... Allow me a paradox. Art cannot be forgiven for being art, but to forgive that which is unforgivable is love, and we do love it." How entirely regularly Halas's paradox is bound up with and coincides with Duchamp's already cited remark (as when Swift described accurately, down to the last detail, both moons of Mars long before their discovery): "I believe that art is the only form of activity in which a human being behaves as a true individual. Art is the gateway into realms where neither time nor space rules." Both have in mind a new art, corresponding to a new, different human sensibility. That art which is an essential and indissoluble part of life.

Translated from the Czech by James Naughton

Orientace, 1970