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Dadalenin IS DEAD - The New York Times Obituaries
Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. (Hegel, Aesthetics, 1: 11)
Hegel anchored the very character and definition of art in the past. And so did many artists including Dadaists who also declared that art is dead and has had its time. Even in Tristan Tzara's own The New York Times obituary from December 25, 1963 the writer quoted the artist and poet as having declared that "Dadaism as a movement was dead." So let's look at their obituaries !
My encounter with Dadalenin is due to an invitation for a project at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, birthplace of Dada during WWI when death was first industrialized and gas weaponized to eliminate millions of people. In the same street of Cabaret Voltaire - Spiegelgasse /Mirror lane - Lenin also spent over a year at the same time some of the most important activities of the Dadaists took place. As diary entries, interviews and common sense logic suggest, Lenin was part of that scene. He was an admirer of cabarets and colorful life and maintained a red haired mistress in Paris mentioned even by his official soviet biographers. Hugo Ball describes the first evening of Dada, Cabaret Voltaire, February 5, 1916 in Zurich: "... towards 6 pm ... an oriental looking group of four small men carrying folders and images with them entered; ... They introduced themselves: Marcel Janco, the painter, Tristan Tzara, George Janco and a fourth man, whose name I can't remember " (Translation: RG) This man was most likely Lenin who used different names and often was wearing a wig. Most Dadaists didn't simply recognize Lenin at that time in Zurich since he only later became famous as a revolutionary and founder of the Soviet Union - something nobody wanted to be associated with during the Cold War years in which the legacy of Dadaism was reconstructed and historicized.
Speaking about Lenin, the Soviet Union has built a big necrological universe around its founder. Though the Communist state he created evaporated, his remains are still made visible to the tens of thousands of people who visit his mausoleum at Red Square in Moscow yearly. But even before his demise Lenin became a practitioner of death and gave orders to have people killed en masse. Alfred Jarry and Tristan Tzara could only write about this kind of cruelty on paper and for the theater stage but were never able to compete with the atrocities committed under Lenin's rule. King Ubu by Alfred Jarry - performed at the Cabaret Voltaire - had the entire royal family assassinated, many people killed, expropriated and large parts of the population pushed into famine due to absurd politics. But also Tzara - somehow influenced by Marinetti whose manifestos were also read at the Cabaret Voltaire - acted out verbally: "Go on destroying what you have in you indiscriminately," "Dada is the abolition of memory," "Dada has abolished nuances" and "Dada is brutal." Lenin, down the street at Spiegelgasse, was not only writing revolutionary books, he amassed the power to remake history. Lenin and his allies and successors - Stalin in particular - were brutally implementing policies that seem to be taken from the pages of King Ubu. Dadalenin as a critical category tries to address these interstitial spaces where utopian "ifs" meet bloody and catastrophic facts. Dadalenin as an artistic and theoretical proposition revisits battle fields, mausoleums and museums of science, war and art fumbling with (art)history's tales and tails.
The New York Times's obituary of Tzara mentions that "a typical Dadaist foible was to read the names from a telephone book before an assembled audience." This inspired me to read the obituaries of my Dadaleninists. I already had researched these obituaries as printed by The New York Times for works on paper earlier for an exhibition in Stockholm. There I created a Dadalenin mausoleum with a little Swedish cottage serving as architecture containing these Dadalenin obituary works on paper, Dadalenin death objects and a video showing me biking recklessly against the traffic without holding the handlebars in Moscow. For this video, I had performed it in the middle of the street against traffic according my self-explanatory title: "From the Lenin Monument, October Square, to Lenin Mausoleum, Red Square - Bicycling Moscow," 2007. The objects in my Dadalenin mausoleum consisted of a rough do-it-yourself replica of the original Lenin mausoleum in Moscow but made of found red painted playwood; a quasi replica of Louis Bourgeois's abstract-animistic thin standing sculpture 'The Tomb of Young Man,' from 1947 on display at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, with the title "DadaleninmodernalouisebourgeoistombofyoungDadalenin 1947/2008", and a series of gas masks written over and marked as Dadalenin sculptures.
Gas masks were the new face of the first big international catastrophe making war an industry between 1914 and 1918. The mustard gas used in WWI was created by Fritz Haber who weaponized it successfully for the Germans in spite of the protests of his wife Clara Immerwahr. She was an accomplished chemist who committed suicide with a revolver the day after the first gas deployment in Belgium in 1915. Three years later the Nobel Prize in chemistry went to Fritz Haber who went on to develop zyclon A and B for domestic purposes. Later, that same gas was used by the Nazis in gas chambers taking the lives of millions of Jews and others. With the tragic-comic logic of Dadalenin, Fritz Haber who defended the deployment of gas with the three-word formula 'Death is death' was expelled by Hitler because of his Jewish origin in 1933. The following year Haber himself committed suicide in Basel. But death didn't stop there. In 1946 their son Hermann committed suicide because he was troubled and ashamed by the chemical warfare program and its consequences created by his father. Members of Haber's extended family were also murdered in Nazi gas chambers, hence by a product he helped to invent and produce. (see on Wikipedia). The importance of Haber is expressed by a long obituary written by The New York Times upon his death in 1934 underscoring his achievement of "adding industrial organization to his technical scientific achievement."
Haber's obituary in The New York Times of 1934 had one main title and three subtitles which are all telling: "Fritz Haber Dead; Noted as Chemist; Chief Technical Adviser of Germany's Gas Service During World War. Nobel Prize Winner, 1918. Discovered Process for Making Synthetic Ammonia - Left Berlin as Nazi Protest." The article addresses right away "the national resurgence last year" which prompted him to resign from his numerous posts in Berlin. "As a discoverer of the process for the fixation of nitrogen, which immensely strengthened Germany's defensive power during the World War, and as the man who otherwise organized chemistry for war service, he occupied a privileged position. He resigned, however, directly as a protest against the Nazi demands for the dismissal of some non-Aryan coworkers and assistants at the chemistry institute... " The obituary is most interested in his war efforts inventing synthetic ammonia in the socalled Haber process and using gas as a weapon which for Haber wasn't deployed soon enough. " ... had the commanders launched a huge general gas attack in 1915, as he advocated, Germany would have won the war." He is quoted directly now saying: " ... Later they admitted that I was right." Haber is also lauded for his efforts to organize science in Germany after the war and in creating a Notgemeinschaft, an emergency committee for science. The obituary also addresses a series of experiments that could have made the performance list at the Cabaret Voltaire: extracting gold from sea water. Unfortunately, it failed. What the obituary didn't say was the fact that Haber intended to help Germany to repay the unrealistic reparation demands in gold imposed on her after the loss of the war which historians today attribute as a contributing factor that pushed Germany into Nazism.
The New York Times obituaries vary in length, style and placement in the paper. Whether somebody received an obituary or not depended on when they died and how well known they were at the time of their death. Lenin and Marcel Duchamp are the only members of my Dadalenin club who had the first part of their obituaries published on the front page of The New York Times. Lenin's very long obituary from 1924 starts with an unusual number of titles and subtitles in various sizes: 'Soviet Congress in Tears, Mass Hysteria Only Averted by a Leader's Brusque Intervention. Body will lie in state. Is to be Taken to Moscow Today From Village Where Premier Passed Away. Kremlin Wall his Tomb. Washington Expects No Immediate Change in the Policy of the Russian Government.' An unusual graphic sketch "made from life" in 1922 and autographed by Lenin accompanies the article and substitutes for the fact that Lenin's name is not mentioned in all these headlines. The very long article is a very peculiar account focusing mostly on the very detailed way Lenin's death was announced to the Soviet Congress and the public and offers medical descriptions. It's a very emotional account and speaks of tears and sobs and takes a lot of space before president Kalinin breaks the news: "'Yesterday,' faltered Kalinin, 'yesterday, he suffered a further stroke of paralysis and ---' There was a long pause as if the speaker were unable to nerve himself to pronounce the fatal word: then, with an effort which shook his whole body, it came - 'died.'" The obituary lets him die several times by several narrators from different perspectives and details medical accounts of his death. It is interesting that only a small last paragraph speculates on the political future of Russia and the political effect of his death thus showing us how little importance Russia played for the USA in 1924. But that of course changed dramatically due to the state apparatus Lenin and Stalin put into place.
"Enigmatic Giant of Modern Art" was the headline of The New York Times by Alexander Keneas on October 3, 1968 with the short small subtitle "The Grand Dada" followed up with "Marcel Duchamp, Art Giant, dies,' inside the paper. He was hailed as "the quintessence of the Dada spirit." According to this writer Duchamp '"carried the vaudeville of esthetic nihilism to its logical conclusion. His exit was final, and the perfect complement to his output as an artist ... ." suggesting that from an esthetic point of view his art was a nihilistic one-way road to nowhere. The text walks us through some of Duchamp's highlights but also presents details and anecdotes that are not to be found in art history books. We learn that "women found wit in Duchamp's conversation, elegance in his manner and masculinity in his gray eyes, reddish blond hair, sharply defined features and trim build." The woman talk continues at the end of the long obituary by a macho quote of Duchamp himself concerning his longevity which the artist attributed to 'not much liquor but all the women you want." With a hint to his paintings by Mattisse, Miro and other "retinals" on the wall of the artist's brownstone on 10th street off Fifth Avenue, the author of his obituary also quoted Duchamp speaking about his financial situation that "he would not have to issue a check on the 'Teeth's Loan & Trust Co., Consolidated' to pay a $115 dental bill, as he did in 1919. His dentist, in true Dada spirit. Accepted the check and later sold it back to him for more than the amount owed." After all this "nihilism" the writer refers to Dada and Duchamp, their works weren't a worthless after all.
From the point of view of Dadalenin, it's interesting that the writer compares him to Alfred Jarry, "the playwright who, suffering from malnutrition, on his deathbed had asked for a toothpick... " When Alfred Jarry died decades earlier in 1907 The New York Times did not write an obituary though he, the writer of The Supermale and King UBU was already very famous in France and beloved by all avant-guard artists and writers. The inventor of Perpetual Motion Food, the conceptual avatar of Bike doping and Viagra, lived a symptomatic life killing himself with Absinth and dope at age 34. The obituary-less fate of Jarry was shared by many Dadaleninists who died early: Klara Immerwahr, Fritz Haber's wife who protested her husband's deployment of Mustardgas in Ypers in 1915 by committing suicide did not get a The New York Times obituary.
Neither did Hugo Ball get an obituary, the most important founding member of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich who passed away in a small Italian-Swiss village in 1927. He retired there from Dada already in 1920 after marrying Emmy Hennings, denouncing Dada and spending his life with Catholicism, Carl Schmitt, Jungian psychoanalysis, Hermann Hesse and poverty. Hugo Ball became infatuated with Carl Schmitt and wrote the essay "Carl Schmitt's Political Theology.' Schmitt, an influential theoretician of Hitler's fascist state who vehemently opposed liberal democracy declared in 1933 "One can say that 'Hegel died." Hegel might indeed have also died without Schmitt's obituary but in 1933 Schmitt became law professor in Berlin, entered the NSDAP, was named Prussian State Counselor by Herman Goering and became president of the "Union of National Socialist Jurists," all positions to keep Hegel in a brown grave.
Hugo Ball's wife Emmy Hennings known for saying "Ich bin so vielfach / I'm so multiple" deceased in 1948 also without any American media coverage though she was a published poet, an artist in her own right, an actress, a journalist and an incredible character. She was totally involved with Ball mounting the Cabaret Voltaire and being one of the main protagonists in the presentation of speeches and songs. The Zuricher Post called her at the time "The shining star of the Voltaire". The early Hennings left her first marriage with two kids, consumed drugs and lived temporarily with a pimp for whom she also did sex work. Hennings as a journalist and writer collaborated with the famous revolutionary satirical paper and cabaret Simplizisimus and wrote for Revolution, Pan and Die Aktion. She also faked passports, was caught stealing, and was even accused of murder of her previous husband. Even though Ball and Hennings as original founders of the Cabaret Voltaire didn't get mentioned by The New York Times before long after their deaths, the Zurich police has a nice archive of observations on them. After Balls' loss of life, Hennings had to work in a factory and died in abject poverty in Switzerland, something by the way, she was never really able to escape.
Talking about important women for Dada Zurich, Sophie Taeuber Arp also passed away in 1943 at age 54 without mention by The New York Times. And so did the writer Walter Serner in 1942 at the same age, and already Arthur Cravan in 1918 who at age 34 disappeared somewhere in Mexico at sea. Cravan's father's sister was married to Oscar Wilde which might explain why this boxer, poet, adventurist and "citizen of 20 countries" led such a colorful life. Cravan, born Fabian Lloyd changed his name as a declaration of love to his swiss fiancee who was born in Cravan and led a life full of inflated narratives provoking even a world champion boxer for a challenge which he of course lost badly but making at least some money. The absence of money later made him use a small sailing boat with which he wanted to sail from Mexico to Argentina without surviving the first big storm.
Tristan Tzara died in 1963 at age 67 and received quite a long obituary entitled "Tristan Tzara, Dadaist, is Dead" with the stunningly false subtitle "Poet Founded the Movement in Zurich After War." Dada Zurich was founded during the war and dissolved in Zurich with the end of the war. World War I was tragic-comicly speaking – hence dadalenin – the very reason for all protagonists to stay in Zurich. The New York Times puts Tzara’s role as such: "In 1916 he founded his movement in a literary café in Zurich and brought it with him to Paris when he established himself here in 1919." Dada itself also is defined as a protest against conventions: "Dada was a protest against the principles and conventions adhered to by most people. As a literary movement, it denied to words the meanings that were usually given because it contented that these meanings were deceiving. Mr. Tzara was said to have chosen it because it was the first word he found while leafing through a French dictionary."
The writer defines Dada here mostly as an inherently self-destructive, self-depreciating literary movement in relationship to a shocked public that didn’t care about texts. "Mr. Tzara’s poetry and Dadaist poetry in general meant little to those he took pleasure in shocking. It often seemed to be a collection of letters with no relation among them. When there was an intelligible sentence the though conveyed little. Dada was against all systems. It sought to establish none of its own. It made fun of everything, and in so doing, it sowed the seeds of its own destruction, for Mr. Tzara and his followers also refused to take themselves seriously or at least said that they did not." The obituary mentions art, Dada Berlin and George Grosz and addresses specifically André Breton and surrealism and quotes Tzara about the demise of all movements leaving us a taste of competition: "Dada yielded to surrealism in 1924 and Mr. Tzara joined it. Only a few days ago, however, Mr. Tzara reproached its leader, André Breton, with not recognizing that it too had seen its day. In an interview published in the weekly L’Express, he said that one must know how to terminate a movement when it arrived at its end and added that Mr. Breton was artificially keeping up a movement that had become 'decadent.'"
The ignorance by The New York Times obituary department of three Russian members of my Dadalenin delegation can only be understood by the veracity of the Cold War: Alexander Rodchenko, who passed away at age 65 in 1956, met MOMA founder Alfred Barr already in 1928 in Moscow. Barr remarked in his diary that the artist "showed much satisfaction at having delivered the death blow to painting in 1922." Unfortunately, Rodchenko used his candid camera to cover up the murderous brutality of Stalin's death work machine in the 1930s. His work at the White Sea Russian Canal (Belomore Canal) - an important vicious test run for the Gulag - as photographer, editor and propaganda chief of the Belomor Canal edition of the 'USSR Under Construction' issue qualifies him as a cynical perpetuating member of my Dadaleninist. Alexei Gastev, revolutionary poet of machines and propagandist for social engineering and the scientific management of work - a Russian "James Taylor" responsible for the idea of the Five Year plan of the Soviet Union - was executed by his beloved Stalin in the 1940s to whom he dedicated his life and art. Dziga Vertov is my third Russian Dadaleninist who survived Stalin's brutal machine as a film theoretician, founder of "kino-pravda / film-truth" and maker of the incredibly influential quasi-encyclopedic film "Man with a Movie Camera." Once the most important man in Soviet film, he lost his job early enough to be of no interest to Stalin hence survived him as an ordinary Soviet man.
The New York Times named Picasso in its very long multi-column obituary of 1973 "a one-man history of modern art." Picasso who lived over 9 decades can barely be compared with someone who killed himself in his early thirties in 1907. Even though not present in Zurich during the Dada years, Hugo Ball hung some of Picasso's stuff at the Cabaret Voltaire. The Spaniard performed and acted as a Dadaist in Paris and elsewhere, a fact even highlighted in his obituary with a tacit reference to the maddening bicyclist Alfred Jarry: "A Bull From a Bicycle Seat." Unfortunately, it remains untold that Picasso purchased one of Alfred Jarry's "bulldogs," as he referred to his beloved guns which he used shooting at people and at monuments while riding the bicycle through Paris in his permanent state under influence. His obituary passes Picasso along many artistic movements, rendering him beyond any category, obliterating "distinctions between beauty and ugliness" before discussing his prizing, after having him already been introduced in the first paragraph as a "cunning financial man" and a "faithful and faithless lover".
Quantifying Picasso is a feature that runs through this obituary: the production of 6000 pictures altogether, over two hundred in just 1969 at age 88; 600 figures and vessels in one year alone; Gertrude Stein got Picasso for 30 $ in 1906, the Tate for 168 000 $ in 1965, whereas the average pirce range in 1973 was 20 000 to 35 000 $ - a number that appears today maddeningly low. "Income Grew With Fame," and there were many years in which the artist "garnered more than $1-million." According to the writer buying Picasso was equivalent of paying Modern culture even though an investor wouldn't understand it. He also states that the artist was "canny about money, driving hard bargains with his dealers and keeping the bulk of his work off the market" thus well controlling his market. The money apparently went to "a great deal of real estate in France and to .... some excellent stock investments." Picasso financially supported the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War and helped "a dozen indigent painters ... and some charities." He also helped his staying and passing mistresses generously but "his generosity, like his temperament, could be fitful." The account also talks about Picasso's falsifiers and his early beginnings when he had to burn "some of his paintings for heat." Picasso was an ardent collector of any junk he ever encountered filling homes and castles with it. In spite of his chaotic collections he is described as a methodological man who lived repeated patterns, even listed here by the hours. The middle part of the obituary is a carefully detailed quasi-voyeuristic walk-through of his working, dressing and living aspects with minutiae about his prominent love life that included a Diaghilev dancer to whom he was married between 1917 and 1935 and many others to be listed. Needless to say, the bigger the age difference, the more peculiar it makes him look but it was Picasso himself who fashioned his stardom and his muses, which the writer knows to address.
The article also focuses on Picasso's relationship to the Spanish Civil War, the communist party and his anti-war efforts as well as his general political thinking. He is cited as saying the artist is not an a-political being but "On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heart- rending, burning, or happy events in the world, molding himself in their likenes ... " Picasso is subsequently also quoted as saying: "No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war, for attack and defense against the enemy." Since 1974 is still in the midst of the Cold War, the obituary also addresses Moscow's oscillating reaction to Picasso. Talking about "La Guernica" a Soviet art critic is quoted as saying that "La Guernica" didn't portrait the Spanish Republic "but monsters. He treads the path of cosmopolitanism, of empty geometric forms. His every canvas deforms man - his body and his face." Making a small drawing of Stalin the day of his death didn't go over well with the French Communists - a reaction that seemed to have pleased the Soviets so that they allowed to show a number of precious early Picassos in their possession that had never been shown. The rest of the obituary consists of a more detailed walkthrough of all his working periods talking also about a little familiar play Picasso wrote while on a sickbed in 1941 which was cast including Simone de Beauveoir, Albert Camus, Raymond Queneau and Jean-Paul Sartre. "Desire Caught by the Tail" was scandalous and expected actors to urinate on stage. Picasso, then living in Paris had an offer to flee Nazi-occupation for New York but preferred to stay. The Nazis allowed him to work but not to expose his work and newspapers were forbidden to mention his name.
Already the longest of all Dadaleninist's obituary, Picasso's was followed up immediately by a second obituary with the telling title "Picasso - Symbol of a Conquest in Art," stating that "Matisse and Kandinsky might rival him as second leaders in the most violent revolution since the Renaissance. But neither of their revolutions was quite as drastic, as far reaching, as varied in manner of assault and foray against tradition as Picasso's." His departure was definitely not easy for a generation the artist dominated and best brought to the point by this sentence: "To think of Picasso as dead is next to impossible ... .(because)... for a generation Picasso has been the established symbol not only of the revolution of modern art but also of its conquest of the intellectuals, the collectors, the schools, and the last academic fortresses--the museums. The conquest is so complete that there are schoolchildren who know Picasso's name but have never heard of Giotto's. There are college students who can tell you more about the cubist revolution than the Russian Revolution. Picasso turned the avant-garde into a mass audience." Once that happened, of course, a viable avant-garde went already somewhere else and it is telling that Duchamp or Dada were never mentioned in either article. This encore to his obituary laments mostly the impossibility for Picasso and any artist of the 20th century to find a grand theme for a master piece "comparable to the great religious cycles and the glorification of rulers" not ignoring Picasso's late variations on masterpieces of the past, i.e. on Cranach, Velazquez, Delacroix and others. The text ends by pointing to a tragic flaw which is located "not in the protagonist, but in the relationship of this century to its artists."
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was definitely an artist who tried to embrace his century, to outperform it and adapt to it with no hesitations at all. He dreamed of speed, war and destruction and adored the Italian Fascist leader Mussolini, even moved with him to the short lived exile at Lake Garda, to create the Hitler backed Republic of Salo. Hugo Ball was happy and proud when he received Marinettti's manifestos for display at the Cabaret Voltaire. Marinetti did not receive an obituary in The New York Times when he died in the war year of 1944 even though he was written up several times as a Futurist and poet. But he was mentioned as a fascist who leaves for war in 1942 and got an article in October 1935 with the telling title: "Bizarre Artist Marinetti Sails to Join Italy's Army" in North Africa, Italy's colonial El Dorado where Italian Fascists committed crimes for which post-war Italy was never taken to account. Needless to say, the principle of Dadalenin as a tragic-comic category as a result of the overlapping of history's tragic force and artistic biographies finds here another telling example.
Francis Picabia was another artist who did get a long obituary by The New York Times upon his death in 1953. Already the first sentences mention that he helped to introduce Dada followed by a paragraph that makes him even the originator: "The Dadaist cult flourished particularly in France between 1917 and 1920, and took its name from the French word for a hobby-horse. Picabia was generally conceded to have been its originator," ignoring Zurich, Berlin, Cologne and all the other places and protagonists. The paragraph continuous with a peculiar description of what Dada is: "Roughly speaking, it represented extremism - extreme negation of beauty, extreme obscurity, extreme opposition to expressionism." This obituary is an interesting art history lesson in "esthetic anarchy" by the Cuban born Picabia who went to "invent 'Geometrism,' supposed to be a step beyond Dadaism." In the USA, the article went on, his success stemmed from his "pre-World War I days, when he exhibited at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory. He was then known by the comparatively conservative title of 'the Cuban who outcubed the Cubists." The esthetic anarchy of Picabia originated in his childhood, when "his career (began) as an artist by copying his father's Old Masters, substituting the copies in the family gallery and selling the originals." The obituary gave the reader the impression as if Picabia's art had to either extremely amuse or scandalize the world.
Richard Huelsenbeck died at age 84 in Locarno in 1974. At that time Dada had already become canonized, omnipresent and its history had been well written, which explains why he obtained a very brief obituary in The New York Times with the title: "Richard Huelsenbeck, Helped to Start Dadaist Movement." This 12 line write up mentions that he was a German-born physician, writer and psychoanalyst who helped start the "Dadaist literary and artistic movement" and "changed his name to Hulbeck after emigration to the United States in 1936."
In 1976, The New York Times publishes: "Hans Richter, 87, Is Dead; Dadaist and Film Director." This short public reminder is intrinsically comical since it contradicts itself: "The funeral will be private and no announcement will be made until after it has taken place, his widow said today. However, she said that her husband had requested that his ashes be taken to the United States." It also reminds us of the importance the United States played in the life of Richter and others who emigrated to the States in 1940. Given the enormous importance of Hans Richter's abstract films and his Dada-woodcuts, his participation in Dada and his connectedness to the most important artists of his time - Duchamp, Ernst, Cocteau, Leger, Calder, Arp, Hulsenbeck and Schwitters - the obituary is by far too reduced omitting many of his artistic accomplishments.
When Marcel Janco died in Israel in 1984, at age 89 The New York Times wrote a two columns obituary that starts with yet another definition of Dada that "... fostered an abandonment of traditional artistic methods and forms and used an approach to art without preconceived ideas." It continues with a Tzara quote: "We want works, straightforward, strong, accurate and forever not understood, logic is always wrong." We learn about his set design work at Cabaret Voltaire, that he was one of the most energetic members and that his "best known Dadaist works were abstract, architectonic plaster reliefs" without mentioning his masks. After 1919 Marcel Janco went for a few years to Paris, then moved back to Romania and finally emigrated to Palestine in 1940 where he became "a modern painter and teacher" founding the artist's cooperative village Ein Hod built "over the ruins of an Arab village abandoned during the war of 1948." On Wikipedia, I came across this telling sentence: The Ein Hod "village mosque was converted into a restaurant-bar modeled after Cafe Voltaire in Zurich." Wikipedia also informs us that the very few remaining Arabs who settled nearby in a village with the name Ein Houd was fully recognized as a village only in 2005, when they finally were allowed to be part of Israeli's electricity grid.
"Jean Arp, Sculptor and a Founder of Dada, Is Dead." Thus ran the title of a very long obituary by The New York Times printed in 1966 for the 78 year old artist." As with other obituaries we can see the time it was written between the lines: the cold war, nascent consumerism, and abstract art that not only ruled American art but was looked at as an ideological front in the fight against communism and their forms of artistic expressions. Hence the obituary sees things through the category of abstraction and doesn't want to remind us of chaos, war and (even artistic) revolt. Dada is defined as "synonymous with calculated nonsense or a revolt against rigidities of expression." His involvement in Dada is described aseptically through the lenses of heightened formalism: "In World War I Arp lived in neutral Switzerland, and it was there in 1915 the he exhibited wall tapestries and drawings that were completely rectangular, geometric forms. Two years later, however, he began to devise the curvilinear, biomorphic forms that characterized so much of his later sculptures. He drew his initial inspiration for these fluid forms from the roots, broken branches and stones he saw on the shores of Lake Maggiore."
In four long columns the writer revisited many of Arp's formal and abstract developments and showed his success that landed him not only in the best museums of the world - quite some were listed - but also in popular culture: "His forms were also widely copied in the decorative and commercial arts, and they can be recognized today in such things as swimming pools, books designs and advertising layouts." Zurich or the Cabaret Voltaire which he indeed helped to found are not even mentioned. After having reduced Arp's involvement in Switzerland to only formal adjustments of his art, Dada and Surrealism are brought back a second time: "Much of Arp's significance came from his leadership in the Dada and surrealist movements in modern art." Under the sub-title "Wit, Nuance and Elegance" we read: "For a half century Arp, in a copious outflowing of sculpture, collages, constructions, poems and critical ruminations, remained loyal to the passions generated by the Dada ideology, yet his work was not doctrinaire. Indeed, his immaculate white marble carvings embodied wit, nuance and elegance." This language reminds us clearly of the Cold war where "ideology" and "doctrine" were reserved for denouncing " the others." The text continues with what is really at the heart of the writers interest - mirroring Arp's art market - without any elaboration of his collages, constructions, poems or even better "critical ruminations": "The female torso was Arp's dominant sculptural theme, but in his hands its abstract rigor took on an almost erotic delicacy and fantasy," a sentence we could find today only in the fashion section of the Times.
It is mentioned that Arp was born in Strassbourg in 1887 under German flag, his original name was Hans which he still used when writing and speaking in German. His obituary speaks also of the death of his wife "Sophie Henriette Gertrude Taeuber", in 1943 which rendered him so pious that he considered entering Roman Catholic Church service out of grief. As mentioned above Taeubler-Arp "who was also an artist" - calling herself just Sophie Taeuber-Arp - did not get a The New York Times obituary though she was a very active founding member of the Cabaret Voltaire, something this text as well as the majority of art history ignored the same way as they do with the second important woman in Zurich, Emmy Hennings. The obituary ends with a beautiful quote of Arp reflecting again his time very well: "Machines, sputniks, I find them horrible, ridiculous. The human being has become presumptuous"
Walter Serner, an Austrian writer and bohemian would have been an unlikely member for a The New York Times obituary, for any obituary indeed, since he and his wife Dorothea Herz were first deported to Theresienstadt and later perished near Minsk in 1941 while sent to "the East". His conversion to Catholicism in 1913 didn't protect him from Hitlers anti-Semitism. Serner was an active participant at the Cabaret Voltaire with his writings. His Dada manifest "Letzte Lockerung /Last Easing," was very influential for the proliferation of Dada. In this text where he asks "Wer moechte einen Sonntag lang 'Kanalgitterbestandteil' heissen / Who wants to be named 'part of a canal grid' for an entire Sunday long ?" you find a remarkable sentence which Serner might not have written had he anticipated his tragic ending: "Weltanschauungen sind Vokabelmischungen / Ideologies are mixtures of vocabularies." Mixed up words in themselves don't kill - people who believe in them and follow them closed-mindedly might to so. For his Nazi perpetuators, his life didn't even possess the value of a canal grid. Was that something Serner anticipated as a harbinger of a catastrophe to come while reacting to one that just was passing when he wrote it ?
Christian Schad did not get an obituary in The New York Times even though he died in 1982 at age 88. Best friend of Walter Serner who he painted in 1916 as "Jesus descending from the cross." While in Zurich during World War I Schad was a presence at the Cabaret Voltraire where he anticipated abstract photograms of Man Ray and Maholy-Nagy. Tzara and Serner labeled his photographic works of found object rendered into abstractions on photo paper without camera Schadographs. This happened before he became a major painter of Neue Sachlichkeit and Verismus in the 1920 with bloodless portraits as if painted with a scalpel that seem to bathe in erotic narcissism. One of his most impressive paintings consists of two masturbating girls both isolated on the same canvas. While Serner was killed by the Nazis a careful selection of works of Schad appealed to Hitler and his censors and were featured by them. Of these two best friends, it was once again definitely Serner who got crossed. Before his late death in 1982, The New York Times mentions him only twice, in relationship with Dada and with the art of the Weimar Republic, something that remarkably changed since the 1990s.
Looking at life from the perspective of death is always a powerful endeavor. Looking at the lives of my Dadaleninists through the eyes of these obituaries is quite telling and somehow tragic comic as well. It is interesting also to see how life is unjust and how some artists became fortunate with their connections to Dada and others not at all. Ball and Henning who had to even resort to prostitution to survive while together in Zurich and even Kurt Schwitters all died relatively unrecognized and poor. My The New York Times obituary candidates include mostly people who were directly associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich including those members of the Dadalenin club which I linked myself to Dadaism. Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeubler-Arp, Walter Serner, Schad, Hans Richter, Richard Hulsenbeck, Picabia, Lenin and Krupskaja were present themselves. Alfred Jarry, Picasso, Marinetti and Arthur Cravan had their works present and are associated with Dada. Rodchenko, Alexej Gastev and Dziga Vertov as well as Fritz Haber and Clara Immerwahr didn't have any direct relationship to the Cabaret Voltraire though they are central to my Dadalenin saga and the tragic-comic logic it expresses. Finally, Duchamp who was never a member of Zurich Dada was a catalyst for many and assumed the role of an Ueber-Dada, hence I included him in this necrology. It is also him who ordered the best hope bringing, self-deceptive, feel good sentence for his gravestone thus reserving the last and most memorable sentence for himself. "D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurents / Besides, it's always other people who die."
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Fritz Haber, 1934, 2008
ink jet print on paper, 64 x 48.5 cm / 25 1/4" x 19 1/8 inches
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Klara Immerwahr, 1915, 2008
ink jet print on paper, 64 x 48.5 cm / 25 1/4" x 19 1/8 inches
Klara Immerwahr (June 21, 1870 - May 2. 1915)
No obituary published by The New York Times
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, LENIN, 1924, 2008
ink jet print on paper, 64 x 48.5 cm / 25 1/4" x 19 1/8 inches
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Marcel Duchamp, 1968, 2008
ink jet print on paper, 64 x 48.5 cm / 25 1/4" x 19 1/8 inches
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Hugo Ball, 1927, 2008
ink jet print on paper, 64 x 48.5 cm / 25 1/4" x 19 1/8 inches
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Emmy Hennings, 1915, 2008
ink jet print on paper, 64 x 48.5 cm / 25 1/4" x 19 1/8 inches
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Arthur Cravan, 1915
Arthur Cravan (May 22, 1887 - November 1915)
No obituary published by The New York Times
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Tristan Tzara, 1963, 2008
ink jet print on paper, 64 x 48.5 cm / 25 1/4" x 19 1/8 inches
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Alexander Rodchenko, 1956
Alexander Rodchenko (November 23, 1891 - December 3, 1956)
No obituary published by The New York Times
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Alexei Gastev, 1939
Alexei Gastev (1882 - 1939)
No obituary published by The New York Times
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Dziga Vertov, 1954
Dziga Vertov (January 2, 1896 - February 12. 1954)
No obituary published by The New York Times
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Pablo Picasso, 1973
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Tommaso Marinetti, 1915, 2008
Tommaso Marinetti (December 22, 1876 - December 2. 1944)
No obituary published by The New York Times
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Francis Picabia, 19, 2008
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Richard Huelsenbeck, 1974, 2008
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Hans Richter, 1874, 2008
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Marcel Janco, 1984, 2008
ink jet print on paper, 64 x 48.5 cm / 25 1/4" x 19 1/8 inches
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Jean Arp, 1968, 2008
ink jet print on paper, 64 x 48.5 cm / 25 1/4" x 19 1/8 inches
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Sophie Taeuber Arp, 1943
Sophie Taeuber Arp (January 1889 - January 2. 1943)
No obituary published by The New York Times
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Walter Serner, 1942
Walter Serner (January 15 - August. 1942)
No obituary published by The New York Times
DADALENIN NY TIMES DADADEATH, Christian Schad, 1982
Christian Schad (August 21 - February 25)
No obituary published by The New York Times
dadaleninmodernalouisebourgeoistombofyoungdadalenin, 1947/2008
V. I. Lenin, Collected Works,
(Russian Edition) 1962, 2007
5 min. video
see DADALENIN THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUAIRES
see Mausoleum - @ Tensta Kunsthall, Stockholm
see MAK - Vienna Show
see Tensta Show -
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