WEARILY, WE COME UNWOUND [490]

Detail from "Cut with the Kitchen Knife by Hannah Höch (1920) 

This is either the beginning of a discussion, or the opening of Pandora’s box.

 

At the time of writing, in March 2025, it doesn’t feel like things are going very well, in a redrawing-of-world-order, not-knowing-what-tomorrow-brings kind of way. Moments like this are usually met with reason, but old certainties are not what they were, and something must take that place. 

 

Writing about how things work, or how they don’t work, is not working for me right now, so having my mind turn to the history of art for answers from a hundred years ago was what happened.

 

Dada and Surrealism are two movements linked by their European conceptual base, their rejection of realist form, the former movement having led to the latter, and by my having liked work from both. Tapping into a different source of energy, and tapping out of the usual ways of thinking, is what I feel I need to remain vital right now, in the marketplace of ideas.

 

I previously used Dada to assess the apparent performance artistry in politics in 2017, an irony in comparison with Dada’s emergence as a rejection of the reason that brought the First World War - its formation by displaced foreigners in politically-neutral Switzerland, at the first Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, underlines the serious strength under which the sound poetry, photo-montage and satirical publications arose. If a deranged world demands sense, it should not have it.

 

I have also discussed a Surrealist painting, Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory”, although its use of imagery and signifiers was secondary to commenting on how its endless reproduction belies how small the roughly A4 paper-sized painting really is. Surrealism, mostly because of the proliferation of Dali’s work – although Rene Magritte, he of “ceci n’est pas un pipe”, runs him close – is more easily accessible than Dada, contradicting reality rather than combatively challenging it. 

 

Why am I doing this? Objective truth has taken a back seat to truthiness, and people don’t need one more person to point out what they can already see – besides that, I have already trodden that route many times. I need subjectivity and abstraction for myself, almost as a prism to make things look normal again. I also need to have fun, and if the world wants to have its fun with you, you should be free to reciprocate – fortunately for me, I want to do that artistically.

 

The reason I feel I must choose between Dada and Surrealism, rather than just picking what works best for me, was having listened to what I thought was a good point made by the art critic Louisa Buck in “Lobster Telephone”, a 2024 episode of BBC Radio 4’s “Archive on 4” strand that marked the hundredth anniversary of Surrealism:

 

“But the true Dadaist is against Dada, because Dada was against everything, it was against rationality, it was against this mechanised war that would cause all this bloodshed and destruction. How could you like civilisation? How could you like authority? How could you like society? So the Dadaists were against everything, they were nihilistic, so Dada sort of had to die, because a real anti-movement couldn’t be a movement, so it became systematised into Surrealism.”

 

With the show’s presenter Matthew Sweet, Buck agreed that Surrealism is what you do if you are a Dadaist who wants a work structure with rules and a manifesto. Dada had its own manifestoes, including Tristan Tzara’s 1918 manifesto that couldn’t reconcile its own being: “I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles...”

 

I am not sure I want a rigid structure. I want spontaneity, the ability to change the form in which I am working. When I have made videos, the subject dictates the format: I may present to camera, I may not appear, or I may not say anything. The need is to express without impediment, as Jonathan Meades said in his 2001 television film, “suRREAL FILM”, after attempting to define the word “surrealism”:

 

“It does mean bizarre, but the tame end of bizarre. The Surrealists of the Twenties and Thirties took the bizarre out of the wild and incarcerated it in a zoo. They domesticated feral instinct, expunged the savagery, and sought to keep it for themselves and their precious movement. When of course the irrational really belongs to all of us, to all ages, but not all cultures.”

 

So, what I need is just to express myself, and see where it leads me. To be honest, Dada has direction, and Surrealism is oddly more prescriptive, but my actively thinking about either of these means I have arrived at the need for a new approach, just as Meades said that Surrealism “merely connotes a twenty year or so span of the eternal human urge to replicate the reality that is achieved in dreams and in cerebral afflictions where reason absents itself.”

 

THAT’S A BEAUTIFUL SPEECH, BUT NOBODY’S LISTENING [74]

One hundred and one years ago, the Swiss writer Hugo Ball, with artists Hans Richter, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Taeuber and others, inaugurated the art movement known as “Dada,” at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Some Dada exponents found their way to Switzerland due to the upheaval of the First World War, and it was the horror of this conflict that fomented a rejection of the logic and values that led to it. Dada, purportedly taking its name from the word reached when a knife was plunged into a dictionary, aimed to effectively start again, making new connections with language, context and understanding, using collage, cut-up writing, poetry, sculpture, theatre – anything can be Dada-fied, right down to Marcel Duchamp putting a urinal on its side, putting it on a plinth, signing it, and calling it “Fountain.”

Now, it is a little bit of a stretch to extrapolate this extreme version of rejecting one form of looking at the world in favour of another, and try and compare it to the current trend over fake news, alternative facts, left versus right, Marxism versus neo-liberalism, or common sense versus nonsense, but that never stopped anyone before. Therefore, I will say that the rejection of the perceived status quo in British and American politics, and the ideologies and acts that have followed it, feel like a kind of anti-Dada, or “jackanape,” to take another random word from my nearest dictionary. It does feel like, instead of reacting to the logic of those at the top, we are instead reacting to the strange and unpredictable sounds coming from the bottom.

The immediate problem with this kind of definition is that politicians, activists and conspiracy theorists are not groups that can have their title replaced with “artist,” or “jackanape artist,” because the artistic imperative is not there, unless they then comment on their own activities in an artistic way. However, either side can accuse the other of being a “stand-up comedian” if they think they are hearing rubbish. Even worse, you can call yourself a “performance artist playing a character” as a way of excusing outlandish thoughts and actions, as done by the lawyer representing arch jackanape artist and “Infowars” presenter Alex Jones. This description came about during a custody battle with his ex-wife, but yelling down a camera cannot be explained away later as a performance, if that is not how it has been presented.

So, the “jackanapes” is not something we have seen – yet. If we do, I have “soapberry” ready, another random word, for any possible anti-anti-Dada uprising. Artistic responses to politics will always come, but when politics feels like it sometimes defies interpretation, the question could then become whether it is easiest to oppose it, or bypass it, or ignore it, instead of interpreting it – if a single answer does arrive, I hope it can pick a better word at random than “soapberries.”