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FEBRUARY 4 — FEBRUARY 10

Tristan Tzara invents the term “Dada” (maybe).

The anarchic artistic and literary movement known as Dada—characterized by randomness, nihilism, and a sort of destructive playfulness—was founded in 1916, in Zurich, as a direct response to World War I. “We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell,” wrote the German sculptor Hans Arp. “We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men’s mind.” (Good thing that never happened, right? Right?)  “These days, the Dadaists usually get clumped together with the Surrealists, if they come up at all,” writes Benjamin Aleshire. “Though often reduced to nothing more than oddly dressed absurdists, Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists were bent on waging an insurgent cultural campaign of anti-art. . . . Their bizarre poems and art were part of an explicitly anti-colonialist attempt to provoke the bourgeoise into destroying Capitalism, beginning with the false rationalism it depends upon. If the bodies stacking up in heaps in WWI could be rational, well, the Dadaists would stop making sense.” So perhaps it’s appropriate that no one really knows how the movement got its name. German playwright Hugo Ball has some claim to it—he founded a magazine with the name in 1916. But the most widely repeated story is that it was Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, who opened a dictionary at random and blindly stabbed at a word (with either a finger or a knife, depending on the storyteller), and that word was Dada, French for “hobby horse.” The poet Richard Huelsenbeck recalled the dictionary, but not Tzara, nor the randomness, writing “the word Dada was accidentally discovered by Ball and myself in a German-French dictionary when we were looking for a stage-name for Madame Le Roy, the singer in our cabaret.” It’s also, of course, Russian and Romanian for “yes yes,” and others have written that they assumed this was the origin of the phrase—after all, it would be fitting for a movement so allergic to boundaries. Tzara himself claimed not to know how the name was settled on. He also, famously, declared that Dada ne signifie rien (“Dada means nothing”), so interpret that as you will.   But how about this: “I hereby declare that Tzara invented the word Dada on 6th February 1916, at 6 p.m.,” wrote Hans Arp in 1921. There, that’s clear enough! Except this is how he continues: “I was there with my 12 children when Tzara uttered the word . . . it happened in the Café de la Terrasse in Zurich, and I was wearing a brioche in my left nostril.” How very Dada.

The life and works of visionary dancer and choreographer Martha Graham take center stage in this “piercingly insightful” (Alastair Macaulay, former chief dance critic at The New York Times) biography from legendary dance critic Deborah Jowitt.Buy Now

MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM

Big Data vs. Big Dada: Writing Poetry on Demand at a New Orleans Tech Convention

How the Mother of Dada Made History of Her Life

Permanent Newness: Surrealism at 100

WE HOPE NOT:“Dada was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity. Those who are with us preserve their freedom. We recognize no theory. We have enough cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas. Is the aim of art to make money and cajole the nice nice bourgeois?”–TRISTAN TZARA, 1918

In other (old)news this weekJames Fenimore Cooper publishes The Last of the Mohicans, which will form “an indelible imprint on the American imagination” (February 4, 1826) • A six-year-old Elizabeth Bishop visits the dentist (and will later write a poem about it) (February 5, 1918) • John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is published, despite a certain canine’s efforts to the contrary (February 6, 1937) • William Shakespeare’s Richard II is performed at the Globe Theater (February 7, 1601) • Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is acquitted in its obscenity trial (February 7, 1857).

“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way.”

–BETTY FRIEDAN

Born this week in 1921 “To write a good book you have to have certain qualities. Great art is connected with courage and truthfulness. There is a conception of truth, a lack of illusion, an ability to overcome selfish obsessions, which goes with good art, and the artist has got to have that particular sort of moral stamina. Good art, whatever its style, has qualities of hardness, firmness, realism, clarity, detachment, justice, truth. It is the work of a free, unfettered, uncorrupted imagination.”–IRIS MURDOCH  Died this week in 1999

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