Cabaret Voltaire’s 1916 Zürich nights launched Dada
Dada arose amid World War I, its aftermath, and Futurist energy, first in neutral Zürich before leaping to Berlin, Paris, New York, and beyond. Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings opened Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 for nightly protests in performance and print. The name’s origin is disputed; it appears in the Cabaret Voltaire editorial of 15 May 1916.
Émigré artists framed the cabaret as refusal of a war they blamed on bourgeois rational culture. Practices ranged across sound poetry, collage, photomontage—especially in Berlin—and found-object assemblage; Duchamp’s readymades became New York and Paris emblems of anti-art. Centres disagreed fiercely: Marcel Janco later spoke of “two speeds,” destructive negation versus clearing ground for new experience.
The techniques were deliberately low-tech. Borrowing Cubist pasting, Dadaists glued in tram tickets, maps and plastic wrappers, and in Berlin Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch repurposed a popular military keepsake, the lithographed soldier whose head was a pasted-on photograph of a real serviceman. Assemblages nailed or screwed together war debris and rubbish. Tristan Tzara’s 1920 manifesto offered a recipe for poetry: snip words out of a newspaper and draw them at random. Hugo Ball, for his part, invented sound poetry, while simultaneous poems set several voices talking over one another at once.
Affirmative talk of life, rhythm, and bodily intensity sat beside irrationalism—Huelsenbeck linked simultaneous poetry and bruitist noise to becoming. Spiritual and occult strands coexisted with atheism; Huelsenbeck’s 1920 Almanach even called Dada “the American aspect of Buddhism.” Suzanne Duchamp’s Broken and Restored Multiplication of 1918–19, with its upside-down Eiffel Tower in oil and silver paper, shows how word and image were fused on purpose.
No single programme unified the cities, which is the point: Dada treated consistency as suspect. Yet it seeded abstract art, performance art, pop art and Surrealism, and Robert Rauschenberg’s found-object collages carried its erasure of high and low culture into postwar America.
Source: Dada
