dAdaIstiC ManIfestO!

Art, in its execution and direction, is dependent upon the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be the one that presents in its contens of consciousness the thousand-fold problems of the time; to which one may note that this art allows itself to be tossed by the explosions of the last week, that it pieces together its parts again and again while being shoved by the day before. The best and most original artists will be those who hour by hour tear the tatters of their body out of the tumult of life's cataract, commited to the intellect of the age, bleeding from hands and hearts.

Did expressionism ever fulfill our expectations of this kind of art that is a confirmation of our most vital concerns?

No!No!No!

Did the expressionists fulfill our expectations of an art that burns the essence of life into our flesh?

No!No!No!

Under the pretense of interiorization the expressionists in literature and painting have made of themselves a generation that is still waiting today for literary- and art-historical veneration and that puts itself forward as a candidate for an honorable bourgeois recognition. Under the pretense of propagating soul, they have found their way back--using a battle against naturalism--to the abstract-pathetic gestures that are the presupposition of a vapid, comfortable, and stolid life. The stages are filled with kings, poets, and faustian natures of every sort, while the theory of a melioristic conception of the world, whose childish, psychologically naive manner is significant only as a critical supplementation of expressionism, haunts actionless heads. Hatred of the press, hatred of the advertisement, hatred of sensation--all this speaks for people for whom a chair is more important than the noise of the street and who think of it as an advantage to be tricked by every con man. That sentimental resistance to an age that is no better and no worse, no more reactionary and no more revolutionary than any other age, that faded opposition that yearns for prayer and incense whenever it does not prefer to make its cardboard gun out of attic iambs--these are characteristics of a youth that never understood how to be young. Expressionism, discovered abroad, has become in Germany--as always happens--a fat idyll and the expectation of a good pension; it has nothing more to do with the struggles of active people. The signers of this manifesto have gathered under the battlecry

DADA!!!

for the propaganda of an art from which they expect the realization of new ideals. What exactly is DADAISM?

The word Dada symbolizes the primitive relationship to ambient reality; with dadaism a new reality achieves its majority. Life appears as a simultaneous confusion of noises, colors, and mental rhythms that is absorbed cold-eyed into a dadaistic art with all the sensational screams and feverishness of its deviant everyday psyche and in its total, brutal reality. Here is the sharply marked parting of the ways that separates dada from all previous artistic directions and above all from FUTURISM, that some addlebrains have recently taken for a new edition of impressionist achievement. Dadaism, for one thing, no longer stands aside from life an an aesthetic manner, in that it shreds into its component parts all the jargon of ethics, culture, and an interiority that is only a jacket for weak muscles.

The BRUITISTIC poem

shows a streetcar just as it is, the essence of the streetcar with the yawning of the pensioner Schulze and the scream of the brakes.

The SIMULTANEOUS poem

teaches the meaning of the jumbledness of all things, whil Herr Schulze reads, the Balkan express crosses a bridge near Nisch, a pig bawls in the cellar at Nuttke the butcher's.

The STATIC poem

makes individuals of words, the woods with its treetops, foresters' liverys, and wild boars spets out of the three letters "woods," maybe a small hotel even steps out, with the name Bellevue or Bella Vista. Dadaism leads to unheard of new possibilities and forms of expression in all the arts. It has made cubism into a dance on the stage, it has propagated the BRUITISTIC music of the futurists (whose purely Italian concerns it however doesn't wish to generalize) in all the countries of Europe. The word Dada points at the same time to the internationalism of the movement, which is bound to no borders, religions or professions. Dada is the international expression of all these offensives, peace congresses, ruckus at the vegetable market, suppers on the Esplenade, etc. etc. Dada seeks the use of

new materials in painting.

Dada is a CLUB founded in Berlin that one can enter without taking on any responsibilities. Here everyone is chairman, and everyone can express an opinion on artistic matters. Dada is not a pretense for the ambition of a few belletrists (as out enemies would like to have you believe), Dada is a type of intellect that can reveal itself in every conversation so that one has to say: that one is a dadaist, this one is not; the Dada Club has members in every part of the world, in Honolulu as much as in New Orleans or Meseritz. To be a dadaist can mean, under certain circumstances, to be more of a businessman or politician than an artist--or to be an artist only by accident; to be a dadaist is to be thrown by all things, to be against all accretion of sediment, to sit down for a moment on a chair means that one has brought life in danger (Mr. Wengs has already drawn the revolver out of his pocket). A fabric is torn when touched, one says yes to a life that wants to move higher through negation. To say yes -- to say no; the mighty hocus pocus of existence gives winds to the nerves of the true dadaist -- he lies like this, he hunts like this, he cycles like this -- half Pantagruel, half Franziskus and laughs and laughs. Down with the aesthetic-ethical attitude! Down with the bloodless abstraction of expressionism! Down with holier than-thou theories of the literary fools! We are for dadaism in word and image, for the dadaistic happening in the world. To be against this manifesto is to be a dadaist!

Tristan Tzara. Franz Jung. George Grosz. Marcel Janco. Richard Hulsenbeck. Gerhard Preiss. Raoul Hausmann.

Others.

What is Dada?

Dadaistic Manifesto
(this page)

Dada Links

Dada Toys
(or fun for the
feeble minded)

Sign our
Guestbook!

All copyrighted material, images, words, or sounds are owned by their respective copyright holders and we really don't care who you are.  Any resemblance to Dada living or dead is purely coincidental.

This page has been
broken down into its
component electrons

times since the
dawn of time.