Lipstick Traces (26 page)

Believe it or not: once a man became famous by reciting poetry that had no meaning. It’s easy to believe; on this show, nothing is strange. The viewer sees a bit of film, a reenactment: two men dance hunched over on a shallow stage, peeping and chirping, while a third plays piano. Their movements are cramped; it’s boring. A man in a stiff costume with a high, striped toque on his head is brought out (the costume overwhelms his whole body, he can’t move, he has to be carried onto the stage and plopped down like a big prop); he reads out disconnected syllables in a heavy, lugubrious voice. This is boring too. It doesn’t make sense when volleys of fruit hurled by the unseen audience splatter the poet; it’s not worth it. The dancers come back and tote the man off the stage.

Once, the viewer is told, this was a hit. You believe it. Chef Klinmahon throws food in the air to season it; he’s a hit. Freud used to hypnotize his patients; he’s still a hit. Hostess Marie Osmond lies on a red couch that has been trucked all over the U.S.A. to be photographed for an art book; it’s a hit, she’s not a hit, she’s divorced, and as an overpublicized exponent of traditional values she’s not supposed to be, but maybe some of the couch will rub off. The only problem is the space shuttle: no doubt when the program first aired, happy-go-lucky footage of astronauts floating strawberries in zero gravity and trying to catch them in their mouths was funny. Now, not too long after one space shuttle has blown up, blown up seven astronauts and whatever they had in their mouths along with them, it’s not
funny. This is hard to believe; this is the sort of tasteless juxtaposition TV exists to avoid.

The formal juxtaposition of the evening’s items—suggesting identifications between art and science, alchemy and housework, occultism and militarism, or a general vice versa—is a TV version of what, when the man in the costume was brought onto the stage, was called dada. Along with the attempt to reduce all forms to zero, the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated phenomena was the basic tactic of twentieth-century modernist art. The idea was that, to the degree aesthetic categories could be proven false, social barriers could be revealed as constructed illusions, and the world could be changed. Things are not as they seem: that was the message then, and that is the message now. The difference—so goes the legend of the 1910s and 1920s, when artists across Europe created new worlds on paper and canvas (worlds so violently new that, gazing at them today, one can
read the official history of the century as little more than a desperate retreat from these terrifyingly obvious utopias, from the new worlds implicit in any El Lissitzky construction, any Man Ray photograph, any De Stijl design)—is that then the message was shocking, and now it is not even a message.

“What good is thinking, writing or acting,” Henri Lefebvre wrote in 1973, “if one’s only achievement is to continue that long line of failures, self-destructions and fatal spells lasting from Jude the Obscure to Antonin Artaud?” What good indeed? “Are we to step out of history,” a college student named Steve Strauss wrote in 1967 in a paper I graded, “to join hands with eternal wastrels, fops, and dandies?” It’s easier said than done.

Leaving the road most taken we might step out and join Lefebvre’s long line almost anywhere: step into the champ libre, the freie strasse, most often the imaginary terrain of a parallel history—once the realm of heretics, alchemists, esoterics, since the French Revolution the domain of political conspiracies and aesthetic “avant-gardes,” perhaps little more than a place for naysayers to claim a position ahead of history while fighting a rear-guard action against it, against the Industrial Revolution, the middle class, the “bourgeoisie,” “mass man,” “mass society” (in a phrase, modern democracy)—a parallel history powered by the plain wish to break out of the story most told and most often condemned to travel with it like the bird on the rhinoceros, the naysayer’s wish circling back, finally, to meet no New Man, no new world, but only what little is left of the desire that set off the journey in the first place. “He could be found at the Livraria Catilina,” novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote of his character Gallileo Gall, revolutionary manqué of
The War of the End of the World
(he was a veteran of the Commune, washed up in Brazil at the end of the century),

in the shade of the palm tree of the Mirador of the Sorrowful, or in the sailors’ taverns of the lower town, explaining to anyone with whom he struck up a conversation that all virtues are compatible if reason rather than faith is the axis of life, that not God but Satan—the first rebel—is the true prince
of freedom, and that once the old order was destroyed through revolutionary action, the new society, free and just, would flower spontaneously. Although there were some who listened to him, in general people did not appear to pay much attention to him.

Born in 1901 in Hagetmau, southwest France, Lefebvre first joined the line he would later curse in Paris, in the 1920s—the heyday of surrealism.

We are certainly barbarians, since a certain form of civilization disgusts us . . . Categorically we need freedom, but a freedom based in our deepest spiritual needs, in the most severe and human desires of our flesh . . . The stereotyped gestures, acts, and lies of Europe have run their disgusting circle. Spinoza, Kant, Blake, Hegel, Schelling, Proudhon, Marx, Stirner, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Nietzsche—this list alone is the beginning of your downfall.

So read “Revolution, First and Forever!,” a surrealist manifesto Lefebvre signed in 1925. This was the line of fatal spells (no less an attempt to cast one); Lefebvre soon left it, following the surrealists into the French Communist Party, and embarked on his great career as a Marxist social theorist.

“My first article in the review
Philosophies,”
Lefebvre said in 1975, looking back to 1924, “[was a] portrait of Dada. It brought me a lasting friendship with Tristan Tzara . . . I had written, ‘Dada smashes the world, but the pieces are fine’ . . . Each time I ran into Tristan Tzara, he’d say to me: ‘So? You’re picking up the pieces! Do you plan to put them back together?’ I always answered: ‘No—I’m going to finish smashing them.’ ”

Lefebvre had written a review of Tzara’s 7
manifestes dada;
the tone was snotty. Yes, Lefebvre had said, he preferred dada to surrealism, which “only bets small change”—literary reputations. Against the careerist pretensions of André Breton and his group, easily satisfied by scandal for scandal’s sake, by the applause or catcalls of tout le monde, dada at least reached for an absolute: “the end of the world.” But it was a puerile absolute, “solely the spirit-that-says-no,” “vainly proclaiming the sovereignty of the instant,” a
“pseudo-sorcery”: “As Dada moves to escape all definitions, its negation defines itself all too powerfully as its own negation.” As philosophy dada was a slipknot, your basic Sophistry 1-A: everything I say is a lie.

Only twenty-three in 1924, Lefebvre already had one foot in history to balance the other in the long line of fatal spells. Fast on his feet, he wrote like an old man, smiling over the enthusiasms of his yet-to-vanish youth, ready for serious business: what is to be done? But in 1975, half a century on from
Philosophies,
looking back at his long-gone callow self, he sounded like a twenty-three-year-old: “No, I’m going to finish smashing them.” In 1967 he had written even odder lines, leaping out of a sober argument on technics and domination: “Modern art, literature, culture, were they not, one wartime day, blown up—simply because in the right place, at the right time, a young man set down a paradoxically potent little explosion, two redundant syllables, ‘Da-da’?” Those syllables were the pieces Lefebvre once promised to finish smashing. Now he held them in his mouth as if they were pieces of the philosopher’s stone. What was the old man talking about?

He was talking about the Cabaret Voltaire, launched in Zurich on 5 February 1916, in the midst of the First World War, abandoned five months after that. Its founders were Hugo Ball, twenty-nine, obscure German dramaturgist, poet, lapsed-Catholic mystic, Nietzsche acolyte, and future TV personality, and Emmy Hennings, thirty-one, German chanteuse. They were joined by an Alsatian artist named Hans (Jean) Arp; Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet; his countryman Marcel Janco, a painter; and Richard Huelsenbeck, a German poet and, when he got around to it, medical student. Formerly the cabaret had been a bar called the Holländische Meierei, run by one Jan Ephriam, in his younger days a sailor; today it is the Teen ’n’ Twenty disco. At the foot of the Spiegelgasse, in the old quarter, the city of Zurich has put up a plaque: under the chiseled word “
DADAISMUS
” someone has scratched “Ne passera pas”—“Dada will stand.”

It was a precious nightclub in which the artist’s promise to reveal the meaning of life was turned into a vaudeville show where all the acts appeared
at the same time. “Dada has been mixed up with an art movement,” Huelsenbeck said a few wars later in 1971, “though it has nothing to present as an art movement if you think of Cubism, of Impressionism or whatever, these are all problems of form, of color, of something that is shown or devised or has the aim of being a work of art; now this we didn’t have at all. We had practically nothing except what we were.”

“The Cabaret Voltaire was a six-piece band,” Hans Richter wrote in 1964. “Each played his instrument, i.e., himself.” A young German painter, Richter arrived in Zurich in August 1916 after being wounded at the front; the Cabaret Voltaire was already there-were-giants-in-the-earth. Richter had missed it. Arp reports from the scene:

On the stage of a gaudy, motley, overcrowded tavern are several weird and peculiar figures representing Tzara, Janco, Ball, Huelsenbeck, Madame Hennings, and your humble servant. Total pandemonium. The people around us are shouting, laughing, and gesticulating. Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups, poems, moos, and the miaowing of medieval
Bruitists.
Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop at the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost.

A year later all this was allegory, naming imitations and analogues all over the West. In New York, Arthur Cravan, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp took the tag; in Paris, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Francis Picabia, and a dozen more. A urinal was exhibited as the embodiment of the beautiful, the true, and the good, as art; a moustache and an obscene anagram were drawn on a postcard of the
Mona Lisa.
Such acts had effects; some people paid attention, some were irritated, and some were thrilled. Dada was received as nonsense with a straight face, or maybe vice versa, well-dressed young men in good cafes placing “
KICK ME
” stickers on the rumps of their working-class waiters, a privileged retort to the moral dilemmas posed by the world war (“Let’s party”), a joke finally settling into encyclopedias: “A complex international movement, Dada was essentially an attack on both artistic and political traditions. Its early performances
were designed to outrage the conventional, but all manifestations had in common anti-social behavior, nihilism and a desire to shock . . .”

Thanks mostly to Tzara, a tireless promoter, the papers were full of it. “Up to October 15,” he wrote in 1919, “8590 articles on dadaism.” No one has ever checked the figure, which he probably made up, but he was probably right. Still, this had nothing to do with what happened in the Cabaret Voltaire, and it was not what Lefebvre was talking about. The entry in
The Timetables of History
isn’t far off, though: “1916. Visual Arts. Dadaist cult in Zurich.”