VOICES OF DADA
hans arp
marcel duchamp
raoul hausmann
richard huelsenbeck
kurt schwitters
tristan tzara

Voices of Dada features rare interviews and poetry readings by six key Dada artists recorded between 1932 and 1967. All material on this 74 minutes audio CD has been carefully digitally remastered. The booklet includes relevant images and the following artist biographies by James Hayward. The CD is intended as a companion volume to Futurism & Dada Reviewed 1912-1959 and Surrealism Reviewed, and there is very little content overlap between the three titles.


TRISTAN TZARA (1896-1963)
Born Samuel Rosenstock in Moinesti, Romania, Tzara moved to Zurich in 1916 and founded the original Dada group together with Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco, Hans Richter, Richard Huelsenbeck and other emigres. The anarchic and anti-art Zurich Dadaists were concerned chiefly with literary activity, much of it presented on the stage of the celebrated Cabaret Voltaire. Unlike the warlike Italian Futurists, the exponents of Dada reacted to the First World War with disgust, and chose to remain in neutral Switzerland: "Its not Dada that is nonsense - but the essence of our age that is nonsense."

Primarily a writer and poet, Tzara claimed to have coined the term Dada (French for hobby-horse), and became the group's chief propagandist through the pages of the review Dada, which he mailed to a large number of contemporary artists, Apollinaire and Marinetti included. Dada quickly spread abroad, notably to New York and Berlin, and in January 1920 Tzara relocated to Paris, where he planned to continue artistic provocation in company with the proto-Surrealist group centred around Louis Aragon, Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault.

By 1923 the alliance was in tatters, and factional scuffles broke out at the premiere of Tzara's play Le coeur a gaz in July. During the 1930s Tzara was reunited with his former Surrealist Colleagues under the common banner of Marxism, in order to combat the rise of Fascism in Europe. An eager connoisseur and collector of African art, Tzara died of lung cancer in Paris in December 1963, having published 37 volumes of poetry, five plays, six collections of criticism and one volume of manifestoes.

On this recording (made in Paris in 1948) Tristan Tzara reads his poem Pour compte (from Phrases, 1949). An interview with Tzara can be heard on the CD Futurism & Dada Reviewed (LTMCD 2301).


RICHARD HUELSENBECK (1892-1986)
Born in Frankenau, Germany, Richard Huelsenbeck studied medicine in Berlin and Munich and there met Hugo Ball, the founding father of Dada. In 1916 he followed Ball to Zurich, and began performing at the anarchic literary nightclub Cabaret Voltaire. Zurich Dadaist Hans Richter described him thus: "He is regarded as arrogant, and that's also how he looks. His nostrils vibrate, his eyebrows are arched." Together with Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, in 1916 Huelsenbeck co-created the celebrated 'poeme simultan' L'amiral cherche une maison a louer.

Huelsenbeck returned to Germany the following year, and in April 1918 founded a Club Dada in Berlin with Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, Johannes Baader, Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield and others. More aggressive and directly political than its Zurich forebear ("there is a difference between sitting quietly in Switzerland and bedding down on a volcano"), Berlin Dada issued numerous proclamations and manifestoes, and embraced visual art techniques such as photomontage, assemblage objects and typography. Huelsenbeck's own works include Dada Almanac and En Avant Dada, both published in 1920, the same year in which the German faction organised the First International Dada Fair.

Berlin was outraged: "These individuals spend their time making pathetic trivia from rags, debris and rubbish. Rarely has such a decadent group, so totally void of ability or serious intention, so audaciously dared to step before the public as the Dadaists have done here." After Berlin Dada petered out, Huelsenbeck fell back on his medical training and became a ship's doctor, before fleeing Nazi Germany and practising as a psycho-analyst in New York under the name Charles R. Hulbeck. In 1974 he published an autobiography, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer.

On this interview recording Richard Huelsenbeck speaks on 'Inventing Dada' with Basil Richardson in 1959. It appears courtesy of Mariele B. Richardson. This poem from the verse collection Phantastiche Gebete (Fantastic Prayers) (1916) was recorded by Huelsenbeck in New York in November 1967 (Aspen Magazine).


MARCEL DUCHAMP (1887-1968)
Born near Blainville, France, Marcel Duchamp ranks as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. In 1915 he all-but abandoned painting and relocated to New York, where he worked on radical 'ready-made' artworks such as Fountain, in fact a porcelain urinal. Other leading lights of Dada in New York included Francis Picabia and the photographer Man Ray.

Ready-mades may be defined as utilitarian objects (bottle driers, bicycle wheels) which achieve the status of art through the process of selection and presentation, and Duchamp's pioneering achievement was to identify the important of context and 'appointment' for the evaluation of a work of art.

Duchamp produced relatively few real paintings, the best known being Nude Descending a Staircase (1911), and the large stained glass window, La mariée mise a nu par ses célibataires, meme (The bride stripped bare by her batchelors, even, aka The Large Glass), which evolved between 1915 and 1923. Much more of his work, and his influence as a theorist, is in the sphere of the abstract and conceptual.

The shorter Duchamp interview on this CD was recorded by George Heard Hamilton in London in 1959. The longer interview was recorded by Richard Hamilton in London in 1959. The text from A l'infinitif (In the Infinitive) (1912-1920) was recorded in New York in 1967.


KURT SCHWITTERS (1887-1948)
Born in Hanover, Germany, Kurt Schwitters came to Dada relatively late, meeting Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hoch and Hans Arp in Berlin in 1918. Abandoning his previous Expressionist style, Schwitters adapted certain of Arp's collage and assemblage techniques to style his own unique variant, Merz, which survived the end of Dada essentially unchanged.

Denounced as imitative and apolitical by Huelsenbeck, Schwitters was excluded from the Club Dada in Berlin, not least because his comparatively orthodox verse collection An Anna Blume proved to be a surprise commercial success. Although independent and a Dada 'outsider' Schwitters remained close to Hausmann, and on hearing his sound poem fmsbw in 1921 recognised the potential of this radical form of expression. The resulting phonetic poem Die Sonata in Urlauten (or Ursonate) grew in size and scope over the years, and was eventually published in 1932 (in Merz 24)with typography by Jan Tischold.

"No one could perform poetry as Schwitters could. What Schwitters made of the poem, and the way he spoke it, were totally unlike Hausmann. Hausmann always gave the impression that he harboured a dark menacing hostility to the world. His extremely interesting phonetic poems resembled, as he spoke them, imprecations distorted by rage, cries of anguish, bathed in the cold sweat of tormented demons. However Schwitters was a total free spirit. He was ruled by nature. No stored-up grudges, no repressed impulses. Everything came straight from the depths, without hesitation… Everything he said was colored by his Hanover dialect, one notoriously ill-suited to poetical and gnomic utterences. But everything he said was so new that one ended up being ready to accept Hanoverian as the new world language. People laughed at him. They were right to laugh, but only if they understood why." (Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 1965)

These abridged recordings of the Ursonate and An Anna Blume were made by Kurt Schwitters for Sud-deutschen Rundfunk on 5 May 1932 and appear courtesy of Ernst Schwitters/Cosmopress Geneva. However it is possible that both recordings were made as early as 1927.


RAOUL HAUSMANN (1886-1971)
Born in Vienna, Austria, Raoul Hausmann was a founder member of the Berlin Dada movement in 1917, along with Richard Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, Johannes Baader and John Heartfield. His visiting card identified him as "President of the Sun, the Moon and the little Earth (inner surface), Dadasopher, Dadaroul, Ringmaster of the Dada Circus." The First International Dada Fair would be held in Berlin in June/July 1920.

His 1918 manifesto "Synthetic Cino of Painting" attacked Expressionism and proposed the use of new materials in art. Hausmann claimed to have discovered the technique of photomontage while on holiday in the Baltic in 1918, although, as with the name Dada itself, this paternity is disputed. Whatever the truth, the (anti) art of combining photographic images, printed text and other found visual material became a hallmark of Dada, and Hausmann's best known photomontages include Tatlin Lives at Home (1920), The Art Critic (1919/20) and Dada Conquers (1920). Other physical works include the found-object assemblage Mechanical Head (c. 1920) and linocuts, although Hausmann abandoned graphic art after 1923 to concentrate on experimental photographic techniques.

From 1918 onwards Hausmann also experimented with poetry, apparently inspired more by the Futurists (eg Marinetti) than by his Dada counterparts in Zurich such as Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball. In Hausmann's poems syllables were isolated, language deconstructed, and sounds took on a life of their own. Hausmann also linked his montage and verse in "optophonetic" poster poems, using woodblock letters printed on large sheets of wrapping paper and intended to be pasted onto walls across Berlin. Sound poems such as fmsbw predate Schwitters' comparable Die Sonate in Urlauten by three years, and although the pair remained on friendly terms (unlike Schwitters and Huelsenbeck), Hausmann nevertheless considered Schwitters a plagiarist.

"The great step by which total irrationality was introduced into literature took place with the introduction of the phonetic poem… In order to express these elements typographically, I used letters of varying sizes and thicknesses which thus took on the character of musical notation. Thus the optophonetic poem was born. The optophonetic and the phonetic poem are the first step towards totally non-representational, abstract poetry" (Raoul Hausmann, Courrier Dada, 1958)

bbb, fmsbw and kp'erioum were taped by Hausmann in 1946.


HANS ARP (1887-1966)
Born in Strasburg, the capital of Alsace, in France Jean (Hans) Arp was classified as an enemy alien when war broke out in 1914, and the following year took refuge in Switzerland. Arp was involved in Zurich Dada from the very outset, and like many of his fellow Dadaists was an acknowledged talent in both literature and the visual arts. When Hugo Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire on 5 February 1916 Arp designed décor, and later performed his eccentric, humorous poems on the stage.

Arp supported Tzara in his claim to have christened the Dada movement, rather than Huelsenbeck: "I hereby declare that Tzara invented the word Dada on 6th February 1916, at 6pm. I was there with my 12 children when Tzara first uttered the word… it Happened in the Café de la Terrasse in Zurich, and I was wearing a brioche in my left nostril." (Hans Arp, Dada au grand air, 1921)

Two features dominate Arp's Dadaist work: collaboration with other artists, and the principle of chance. These themes are illustrated by key works such as the wooden Relief Dada (1916), Collage With Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance (1916-17) and i-picture (circa 1920), the latter inspired by the i-drawings of Kurt Schwitters.

This recording of Dada-spruche was made by Arp in 1961, and is taken from a longer album held by the Fondation Arp at Meudon, France.


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