DADA - Art and Anti-Art [antikvár]

Foreword when I visited my old Dada colleague Tristan Tzara in Paris two years ago, he left me these parting words as food for thought on my journey: "Don't forget that polemics always played a big part in Dada." Hiis may be true, especially where the literary side of Dada is concerned. But Dada has too often been regarded as a style of literary polemic directed at the overthrow of existing forms. Alongside the noisy literary movement there existed another which was not polemical at all: a total revolution in visual art, more radical than that which took place in literature, although intimately linked with it. The life we led, our follies and our deeds of heroism, our provocations, however 'polemical' and aggressive they may have been, were all part of a tireless quest for an anti-art, a new way of thinking, feeling and knowing. New art in a new-found freedom! In setting out to describe this quest and this freedom, the people who made Dada, their day-to-day experiences, their life together, their enthusiasm, their independence of mind, their artistic discoveries, their joyous contempt for banality, the hostility, even the hatred evoked by this contempt I shall not be able to confine myself within the bounds of academic art-history. I shall depend above all on my own memories and those of my surviving friends. The dates and facts of those years, the pronouncements, denials and contradictions, the theories and the works of anti-art: these are the signs by whidi the living Dada movement is known for what it was, an artistic revolt against art. Having been involved in this revolt myself, I shall try to tell what I experienced, what I heard, and how I remember it. I hope to do justice to the age, to the history of art, and to my friends, dead and living.