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Heidegger wrote that dasein is the being that takes issue with its own being. In other words, we humans recognize that we exist and that existence is something we care about. And because we care — about our lives, others, and the world — we have a special capacity for despair. A fish doesn’t feel melancholy. A rock doesn’t question the nature of evil. A rabbit never mulls over the prospect of mortality.
We, however, not only experience the physical pain of suffering, but we also experience the brokenness: emptied and shattered ideals; the downward spiral of doubt; the crisis of finding oneself unmoored from the world and others.
Such brokenness was a central theme in the work of early twentieth-century artists, many responding to the horrors of WWI. The war became a recognizable focal point in works such as Eliot’s The Wasteland, the paintings of C.W.R. Nevinson, and the wartime reflections crystalized in novels such as Hemingway’s A Farwell to Arms. In response to the tumult of the war and the turning century, a number of creative movements emerged: Futurism, Cubism, Vorticism, Imagism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Surrealism, among others. These movements are impossible to fully understand without the context of WWI. James Karman succinctly outlines the dark cloud — thick with ash — hanging over post-war Europe:
As people staggered out of the darkness and surveyed the damage around them, they were faced with numbers no one had ever seen: Approximately 9,000,000 soldiers and 13,000,000 civilians killed along with at least 30,000,000 wounded or missing; hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings destroyed; whole villages and towns leveled; cities bombed; thousands of square miles of land despoiled; roads, bridges, and railways gone; three empires— Russian, German, Austria-Hungarian —fallen, and a fourth, the Ottoman, crumbling away. Interior landscapes were equally devastated. For millions of demobilized soldiers, along with all the parents, fiancées, wives, and children who lost their loved ones, mental and spiritual scars were deep. Some of the shell-shocked, with minds as barren and beaten as a surface of the moon, never smiled or wept or spoke coherently again.”
Such brokenness prompted a variety of aesthetic responses. One group of artists in particular responded with a drastic upheaval. They called their work “Dada.” Established by Hugo Ball in Zürich, Dadaism decried the cultural practices and ideas of Europe. If WWI was the product of a rational and modern civilization, then they wanted nothing of it. They protested the world that birthed the machine gun.
In addition to Ball, Tristan Tzara was a central figure in the Dada movement. His 1918 manifesto is a bombastic, avant-garde description of their core ideas. In attacking European culture, Tzara and the Dadaists committed themselves to irrationality, producing such dizzying phrases as this one: “I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense.”
The Dadaists felt outraged at nineteenth-century narratives of progress. How could one speak of “progress” when juxtaposed with soldiers choking on mustard gas?
“If I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal, / Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, / Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,
I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books…”
Central to Tzara’s argument is the belief that society has been corrupted by lies. This critique is distinctly Nietzschean and Freudian, targeting moral belief: “Morality has determined charity and pity, two balls of fat that have grown like elephants, like planets, and are called good. There is nothing good about them…Morality is an injection of chocolate into the veins of all men.” In Tzara’s conception, morality is a sweet drug that sedates us, a thin mask that covers the darker chaos lying below social convention. This position is clarified in his attack on Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage:
“The attempt of Jesus and the Bible covers with their broad benevolent wings: shit, animals, days. How can one expect to put order into the chaos that constitutes that infinite and shapeless variation: man?”
Religion, philosophy, and morality are but deceptive coverings for the actual characteristics of human life: bodily function, carnal impulse, and mortality. Tzara points to Flanders Fields and concludes that the essential characteristic of humanity is chaos.
Adopting these presuppositions, human life is divested of purpose. It becomes, as Shakespeare writes in Macbeth, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Tzara —elsewhere — says as much: “Everything happens in a completely idiotic way.”
This bleak picture forced Dadaism to reevaluate the role of art and the artist. Because attempts at unity would be an artificial imposition on chaos, the Dada artist abandoned attempts at realism or rationality. Tzara writes, “And so Dada was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity.” The pursuit of this liberatory aesthetic produced a radical rupture with tradition:
“The new painter creates a world, the elements of which are also its implements, a sober, definite work without argument. The new artist protests: he no longer paints (symbolic and illusionist reproduction) but creates directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, boulders—locomotive organisms capable of being turned in all directions by the limpid wind of momentary sensation”
Because an argument (of any kind) would be incomplete and deceptive, Dada art must avoid adopting any stable position. The artist cannot appeal to a human constant, save the “limpid wind of momentary sensation.” The only remaining response is protest.
What does this protest consist of? In short, disgust.
If humanity is only chaotic stench, then Dada must put society’s nose into the heap. Beauty itself is a lie. Tzara writes that “beauty is dead.” In its place, he announces the new guiding light, “I proclaim bitter struggle with all the weapons of— / Dadaist Disgust.” His strange construction of this phrase is evocative. It latently implies the possibility of physical violence, an impulse that is later manifested in the ideology of Italian Futurism.
Tzara’s militant language praises revulsion and establishes negation as a central principle: “Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action.” The Dada project of disgust becomes indistinguishable from a campaign of destruction. Tzara explicitly states this: “Let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean.”
As the manifesto concludes, Tzara descends into a vision of chaotic abolition.1
Unsurprisingly, such an aesthetic vision created sardonic, ironic, and unintelligible works. Consider this pantheon of Dadaism.
Hugo Ball’s nonsense poem, Karawane. This poem exhibits Dada’s rebellion against concepts of any kind. Since words are involved in broader systems of unifying thought (thereby deceitful), we must abandon words. Ball reduces language to sound. He takes refuge in a smattering of nothingness.
Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and L.H.O.O.Q. The former was a joke that quickly became banal. The title of his mustachioed Mona Lisa, when said aloud, mirrors the lewd French phrase, politely translated, “She’s hot in the butt.” Both are indicative of Dada’s mood: biting, sarcastic, and profane.
Raul Hausman, The Art Critic. The collage was a major genre of Dada. It manifests the rupture of continuity, arguing that nothing exists outside our mere artificial construction. Hausman’s critic is disfigured, inhuman, and ugly. The pencil in his hand appears like a sword, invoking the violence that was inherent in the movement’s philosophy.
Another way forward?
While Dadaism is one response to brokenness, I want to show the possibility of another. I offer the Pre-Raphaelites as a foil and alternative to the Dadaists.
Although the Pre-Raphealite movement occurred well before WWI, it recognized the dangerous momentum of the nineteenth century. When the PR Brotherhood was established in 1848, the world was embroiled in war, colonial uprising, and the groans of dying empires. The list of conflicts includes the Greater Poland Uprising, revolutions in the Italian state, the French Revolution of 1848, revolutions in the German state, the Baden Revolution, the Wallachian Revolution, the Matale rebellion, the Second Anglo-Sikh War, the Hungarian War for Independence, and the Serb Uprising of 1848.
In addition to these violent convulsions, Europe was rapidly industrializing. The heart of this industrialization beat at the expense of horrendous labor conditions. Although poverty was beginning to decline in Western Europe, millions and millions of people still lacked proper food, shelter, and warmth. The world that the Pre-Raphaelites confronted was anything but idyllic. It was, in short, broken.
In the face of a grim historical moment, the Pre-Raphaelites also protested. Yet, their protests emerged from a radically alternative metaphysical outlook. Their conception of the world’s brokenness was underpinned by their belief in beauty, goodness, and truth. The fact that society dishonestly and malevolently leveraged such ideals spoke to their abiding presence.
The ugly did not testify to an underlying ugliness but to a perverted beauty. This philosophical position was embodied, most sharply, in the work of John Ruskin, the legendary critic and ardent supporter of the Pre-Raphaelites. (See my series on Ruskin: The Seven Lamps of Prose).
Their aestheticism, which was so vehemently attacked during the era of Dada and Modernism, was not a denial of life’s brutality or chaos. Rather, it was a response despite these realities. It was an insistence that the beautiful could face the ghoulish darkness as Dürer’s knight faces death and the devil. Their commitment to the beautiful required bravery to deny cynicism and ego-centered indulgence.
The group’s pursuit of uncorrupted aesthetics (conceived as the Renaissance painting before Raphael) was a reformation, not an obliteration. The response to bad architecture was, as Ruskin wrote, to build good architecture. Such work would renew, alter, and build upon the traditions of the past. The response to ugly, machine-made textiles was to make beautiful textiles, to which William Morris and the resultant Arts and Crafts Movement testify.
The principles of the Pre-Raphaelites were outlined by William Michael Rossetti:
“The bond of union among the Members of the Brotherhood was really and simply this: 1, To have genuine ideas to express; 2, to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; 3, to sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote; and 4, and most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues”
Instead of abandoning all ideas en masse, the Brotherhood searched for the genuine. Instead of fixating on nature’s pain to the exclusion of all else, they sought an attentiveness that recognized a chiaroscuro of beauty and ugliness. While Dadaism rejected all tradition as deceitful bile, the Brotherhood innovated while keeping an eye on the past. They understood that we can abandon the rote and conventional without forsaking the direct, serious, and heartfelt. Finally, the Pre-Raphaelites committed themselves to the craft.
They would make good things, not things designed to disgust.
Although such aims might seem archaic and conservative to the post-modern perspective, this pursuit was shocking during its historical moment. Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais all disrupted the conventions of nineteenth-century painting. They were— no doubt — protesting. Yet, their disruptions could not stand in greater contrast to Dada.
Today, we still find ourselves participants in the universal human condition: we are alive; we care; we face brokenness. Yet, as artists, we are not compelled to follow the Dada roadmap.
We can, instead, pursue the beautiful, accepting the resultant accusations of sentimentality and naivety. We can set a firm jaw against the critics who would berate our work’s deficit of political import and modern convention. We can do all this while pursuing the very thing that beckons us forward. We can remind ourselves and others that beauty has not died. The sepulcher is empty. Where shall we find her?
“Dada; abolition o/ logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada: every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future:”
What an insightful comparison! Loved this part in particular:
"In the face of a grim historical moment, the Pre-Raphaelites also protested. Yet, their protests emerged from a radically alternative metaphysical outlook. Their conception of the world’s brokenness was underpinned by their belief in beauty, goodness, and truth. The fact that society dishonestly and malevolently leveraged such ideals spoke to their abiding presence. The ugly did not testify to an underlying ugliness but to a perverted beauty."
Fascinating—I had heard of dadaism, but not the pre-raphaelites! Thanks for exposing me to something new to explore.