Review by Choice Review
The Dada movement thrived on its ability to shock and to stand as a negation of accepted artistic norms. Born partly of the dejection spawned by WW I, it reached fruition in the 1920s with the work of such figures as Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Georg Grosz, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Francis Picabia. The art of improvisation, photomontage, collage, stage productions that insulted the audience, simultaneous poetry readings, assembly-line art, "ready-mades," Duchamp's signed urinal, and disdain for juries and dealers all contributed to its scandalous reputation. Rasula (English, Univ. of Georgia), a scholar of modernist literature, deftly advances a comprehensive picture of Dada's colorful personalities and their ambitious projects. While the chronicling of countless "provocations" and shenanigans can occasionally prove wearisome, and more could have been said about related movements like surrealism and constructivism (as well as Dada's pre-1914 antecedents), Rasula succeeds admirably in capturing that sense of creative "irreverence" that would resonate far into the 20th century with performers like The Beatles and urban graffiti "artists." Overall, a lively introduction to Dada that will appeal to a wide readership. Limited number of illustrations. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. --William S. Rodner, Tidewater Community College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
JED RASULA'S HISTORY of Dada, "Destruction Was My Beatrice," dispenses with a few old chestnuts of art history, chief among them the chronological fixation on Dada as a precursor to Surrealism, or a younger sibling of Futurism. The ordering by art critics of 20th-century avant-garde movements has required that they be both recognizable and dead. This has made them convenient and marketable, while draining away their revolutionary content. The art market embraced the products of every "ism" as soon as it recognized its distinct style. The only avant-garde that escaped the zombie line is Dada. What is Dada? "The true dadas are against DADA," Tristan Tzara wrote in the "Dada Manifesto." "In principle I am against manifestoes, as I am against principles." Dada was a big no, a radical negation of art and reason, the partisan of a resolute Nothing. "Da" means "yes" in Tzara's native Romanian. Its reiteration, the skeptical "da-da," intended to end the dialectical march of war-bound European thought and recover the human scale from the grand syntheses of philosophy and propaganda. Maintaining the clarity of this paradox meant that anyone could join in with his own definition of Dada and, most important, with novel forms of art. Historians, including Rasula, agree that the putative source of Dada was a soiree of mayhem at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, in February 1916, a month or two before the magical word "Dada" - which is also French for "hobbyhorse" and "nursemaid" - was found. The performers included Hugo Ball, a German mystic, philosopher and cabaret producer, along with the diminutive Tzara, who recited Romanian verses printed on scraps of paper he fished from his pockets. The hubbub of Cabaret Voltaire lasted only a few months, but it was sufficient for incubating a variety of novel artistic forms that were, at first, indistinguishable from earlier modern art rebellions like Cubism and Futurism. From this modest beginning came Dada. A professor of English at the University of Georgia, Rasula uncovers why Dada didn't expire along with the isms it either spawned or incorporated. The fertility of Dada found rich ground in America, where its spirit was active before it had a name. The French artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, restless and tired of Europe, made New York their playground. They found the New World de facto Dadaist, and New York the perfect place to deploy their subversive imaginations. The Armory Show of 1913 brought the excitement of new ways of painting, sculpturing and making art to an American public that acted like crowds at a circus: Outraged and shocked grown-ups booed and hissed, while thrilled and rowdy children cheered. (Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" drew "more than its share of lampoons" at the Armory Show, Rasula writes, but it would be "The Fountain," a urinal Duchamp purchased in 1917 and signed "R. Mutt," that would persist as "Dada's most recognizable product.") Rasula notes that "the visual assault" of the Armory Show "was what the genteel public - with its belief that art was a hothouse flower far removed from the rough and tumble of the street - held most objectionable. A setting more ripe for the assault of Dada could not be imagined." From its birth Dada did not stand apart from cinema, vaudeville or popular culture: Dadaists were at home with Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, the comic-book pleasures of the masses and American-style publicity. One of Rasula's insights is to reveal Dada's kinship to jazz, and thus to the specifically American "modernist" outlook that blossomed throughout the century but was more acceptable in Europe than in its birthplace: "For a while, many took jazz and Dada to be two faces of the same thing The early course of jazz was dominated by novelty and humor, and if the musicians heard about Dada, they probably would've agreed with Hoagy Carmichael that jazz was Dada's twin." Rasula makes visible and obvious (though oddly obscured in previous accounts) the threads connecting Dada with the New World, and overthrows with nearly imperceptible flair the misconceptions separating the European avant-garde from modernism. Rasula, himself a scholar of modernism, shows it to be both an umbrella term for the use of academic services to the art market, and a worldwide continuum of the necessarily contradictory human spirit in art. At today's crossroads between "reality" and "virtuality," this reassessment is of great use: It provides both a sense of the necessity for "the unmaking of the 20th century," as the subtitle has it, and a reason for younger artists to go on, using the technologies of the 21st. This may be a magnificent moment of treason in conventional scholarship, which rarely departs from a careful reading of primary sources. The academic decorum is breached only occasionally by Rasula, as in the passages of obvious delight in one of his characters, the fabled and sexually adventurous Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who may be the original body artist, a creator of weird and elaborate costumes that included decorations of her hair and skin. Still, a missed opportunity of "Destruction Was My Beatrice" is Beatrice herself. The Dadaists, Rasula writes, "acknowledged female emancipation but did not welcome women artists in their ranks," and he makes mostly brief mention of the extraordinary women artists and collaborators who received little attention until recently: Hannah Hoch, a first-rate photomontagist; the great poet Mina Loy; Jane Heap, a co-editor of The Little Review; her companion and co-editor Margaret Anderson. Both male and female Dantes were led through the heaven, purgatory and hell of the 20th century, only to emerge in this retelling (and the continuing practice of many contemporary artists) uncompromised, ready for the 21st, when Dada can claim both fidelity to its original defiance and serve as a still-living collection of usable techniques. THE TWO MOST closely observed characters in Rasula's study are Picabia and Kurt Schwitters, a Frenchman and a German. These are not arbitrary choices: Dada was emphatically internationalist, yet German and French Dada seemed, at times, two different creatures. German Dada was more aggressive, more receptive to radical politics, readier to brawl and to take to the streets, while French Dada was more self-mocking, theatrical and humorous. Both Picabia and Schwitters are exceptions: They are entirely Dadaist avant la lettre and providers of the essential rebellious spirit, partly American in Picabia's case, and close to self-taught folk art in the case of Schwitters. Some of Dada's splinter artistic movements hardened in architecture - Marcel Janco's buildings in Bucharest, for instance - while near kin like Futurism and Constructivism ended up either embraced or annihilated by Fascism and Communism. These became instantly historical, compromised moments, in contrast with Dada, which remains a movement, too quick to stand still long enough to be captured by its products or by histories, including those of some of its founders. In its effort not to acquire a signature style of its own, Dada pioneered nonetheless a specific typography. Jed Rasula ends his meticulous investigation of his subject on an ambiguous, nostalgic note - not quite nostalgia for his protagonists, but a touching regret that he has to leave them behind. "Destruction Was My Beatrice" pursues its subjects narrowly, abstracting them from the (mostly hostile) history and politics in which they made art. It's uncanny that Rasula has succeeded, on such a small canvas, in writing a history of the 20th century that picks up where Peter Gay's 19th century ends in "The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud." Oddly enough, in a ghostly and Dadaist manner, Rasula's gaze also resembles Barbara Tuchman's in "A Distant Mirror," an eerie look into the "calamitous 14th century." Maybe Time itself is Dada. ANDREI CODRESCU is the author of "The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 28, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The Dada movement began in Zurich in 1916 and essentially collapsed in Paris in 1923, but its lasting worldwide influence was profound. Rasula examines the events leading up to the initial 1916 collaborative performance at Cabaret Voltaire, the seven years in which Dada flourished, and the movement's persistent afterlife. The story of Dada is dizzying: it encompasses an enormous cast of characters, locales, and competing philosophies (and anti-philosophies). Rasula shows how the movement arose in the prewar atmosphere of Zurich when young artists including Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Hans Arp, and Richard Hulsenbeck attended the cabaret and found they shared an avant-garde spirit. Rasula's focus on Francis Picabia and Kurt Schwitters covers new ground in addition to illustrating how well-known artists such as Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp fit into the collective movement. The book is also a fascinating history of place, as it traces the spread of Dada from the cabarets of Switzerland to the cafes of Paris, art fairs of Berlin, and galleries of New York. Perhaps befitting the Dada style, Rasula's narrative jumps around a lot, and the shifts in time and story lines can be somewhat difficult to follow. This accessible yet rigorous and comprehensive study outlines the history of a movement whose irreverence and inventiveness still influence our world today. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
As Europe entered World War I and began an era of change and transition, the art world followed with the emergence of the Dada movement. Academic (Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English, Univ. of Georgia) and poet (Tabula Rasula) Rasula follows the lives of the founders of Dada starting with their innovative performances at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire in the 1910s. Although dense at times, the volume truly covers all aspects of Dada culture from its birth to its bitter end. We follow writer and "Dada Manifesto" author Hugo Ball; his wife, poet and performer Emmy -Jennings; performance artist and essayist Tristan Tzara; and German poet and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck; as well as many other prominent Dadaists. This comprehensive study covers everything from the irreverence of the art and performances to fights among key players. Dada was a global phenomenon that revolutionized art history and the emergence of early modern art. -VERDICT Readers interested in the history of modern art will enjoy this detailed look into the rise and fall of Dada.-Rebecca Kluberdanz, GB65 Lib., New York © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Rasula (English/Univ. of Georgia; Modernism and Poetic Inspiration, 2009, etc.) follows an uprising of disaffected artists who burned through Europe during and after World War I, incinerating old ideas of art and literature and making way for new forms. Dada was born in 1916, when Hugo Ball, fleeing the war in Germany, opened Cabaret Voltaire, where he and a cadre of creative thinkers, performers, and artists staged avant-garde poetry read by three speakers simultaneously, dancers in primitive masks, nonsensical songs, and recitations in deconstructed language. The core group of performersBall, singer Emmy Hennings, Rumanian poet Tristan Tzara, German poet Richard Huelsenbeck, and French artist Hans Arpderided conventionality and complacency. They named this "anti-art" movement that wasn't a movement Dada. The word has many different meanings; the one that seemed to please them most was "the tail of a sacred cow for an African tribe." Attracting other artists along the way, Dada moved through Zurich, Berlin, Munich, and Paris, also touching down in New York City. Participants embraced the irrational, absurd, satirical, primitive, and provocative in performances, exhibits, and publications. Rasula gives a sense of the fluidity and magnitude of the art that passed through Dada's portalse.g., Marcel Duchamp's urinal, Fountain; Otto Dix's searing Forty-Five Percent Able-Bodied, which was later included in the 1937 Nazi "degenerate art" exhibition; Francis Picabia's "mechanomorphic" drawings and paintings, and Kurt Schwitters' collages from trash and found objects. This comprehensive study of artists, exhibits, writings, and events is a heady trip, but the cataloging fails to fully capture the audacity and energetic force of Dada. With its photomontages, aggressive graphics, performance art, and use of text and objects in art, Dada left a mark on surrealism, modern art, and pop culture. When factions tried to give Dada more structure, it began to fade. As Tzara said, "The true dadas are against DADA." A well-researched survey that shows the scope of Dada and its influence on the art world. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
