Destructive Agitation Against Everything
When he was in exile in Zurich in 1916, the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin would visit the DADAist club Cabaret Voltaire. Lenin was writing his revolutionary plans for a future socialist Russia, and he was living in an apartment nearby the club.
The Cabaret Voltaire had been founded by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, with the intention of making it a cabaret for radical artistic and political purposes. It was also a focal point for refugees and conscientious objectors, who had fled to Switzerland to avoid fighting in the First World War.
Lenin considered himself quite revolutionary, but when confronted with the nonsense poems, the shouting and verbal abuse, the noise poems, and the endless drumming, the future Russian leader was left confused, and wondered whether this was perhaps how real revolution began?
Were these performers more revolutionary than Lenin himself? Or, were they just privileged bourgeoisie play-acting at being revolutionaries? Lenin approached one of the performers and said:
”I don’t know how radical you are, or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough; that is, one must always be as radical as reality itself.”
DADA was like Punk, but without the Rock. It was subversive, dangerous and revolutionary. European DADA was originally created as a protest movement against war. It was formed by a small group of immigrants from Germany (Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Richard Hülsenbeck), Romania (Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara), and Austria (Walter Serner). These individuals were politically motivated, and wanted to express a new kind of mentality, a “destructive agitation against everything,"
DADA may have been a small movement, responding to the “moral bankruptcy” of the day, but its influence has touched upon almost all major artistic and cultural movements of the twentieth century
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Note: Click DM Title Link for Complete Post by Paul Gallagher plus 1968 Documentary
by Helmut Herbst
When he was in exile in Zurich in 1916, the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin would visit the DADAist club Cabaret Voltaire. Lenin was writing his revolutionary plans for a future socialist Russia, and he was living in an apartment nearby the club.
The Cabaret Voltaire had been founded by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, with the intention of making it a cabaret for radical artistic and political purposes. It was also a focal point for refugees and conscientious objectors, who had fled to Switzerland to avoid fighting in the First World War.
Lenin considered himself quite revolutionary, but when confronted with the nonsense poems, the shouting and verbal abuse, the noise poems, and the endless drumming, the future Russian leader was left confused, and wondered whether this was perhaps how real revolution began?
Were these performers more revolutionary than Lenin himself? Or, were they just privileged bourgeoisie play-acting at being revolutionaries? Lenin approached one of the performers and said:
”I don’t know how radical you are, or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough; that is, one must always be as radical as reality itself.”
DADA was like Punk, but without the Rock. It was subversive, dangerous and revolutionary. European DADA was originally created as a protest movement against war. It was formed by a small group of immigrants from Germany (Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Richard Hülsenbeck), Romania (Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara), and Austria (Walter Serner). These individuals were politically motivated, and wanted to express a new kind of mentality, a “destructive agitation against everything,"
DADA may have been a small movement, responding to the “moral bankruptcy” of the day, but its influence has touched upon almost all major artistic and cultural movements of the twentieth century
.................................................................................................................................
Note: Click DM Title Link for Complete Post by Paul Gallagher plus 1968 Documentary
by Helmut Herbst