Second Dada Manifesto - 1918
Tristan Tzara
To launch a manifesto you have to want: A. B. & C., and fulminate against 1, 2, &3, work yourself up and sharpen your wings to conquer and circulate lower and upper case As, Bs, & Cs, sign, shout, swear, organize prose into a form that is absolutely irrefutably obvious, prove it's ne plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life in the same way as the latest apparition of a harlot proves the essence of God. His existence had allready been proved by the accordion, the landscape and soft words. To impose one's A. B. C. is only natural - and therefore regrettable. Everyone does it in the form of a crystalbluff-madonna, or a monetary system, or pharmaceutical preparations, a naked leg behind the invitation to an ardent and sterile spring. The love of novelty is a pleasant sort of cross, it's evidence of a naive don't-give-a-damn attitude, a passing, positive, sign without rhyme or reason. But this need is out of date, too. By giving art the impetus of supreme simplicity - novelty - we are being human and true in relation to innocent pleasures; impulsive and vibrant in order to crucify boredom. At the lighted crossroads, alert, attentive, lying in wait for years, in the forest. I am writing a manifesto and there's nothing I want, and yet I'm saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I against principles (quantifying measures of the moral value of every phrase - too easy; approximation was invented by the impressionists). I'm writing this manifesto to show that you can perform contrary actions at the same time, in one single, fresh breath; I am against action; as for continual contradiction, and affirmation too, I am neither for nor against them, and I won't explain myself because I hate common sense.
DADA - this is a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot down; every bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different subjects and who, instead of situating suitable characters on the level of his own intelligence, like chrysalises on chairs, tries to find causes or objects (according to whichever psychoanalytic method he practices) to give weight to his plot, a talking and self defining story.
Every spectator is a plotter, if he tries to explain a word (to know!) From his padded refuge of serpentine complications, he allows his instincts to be manipulated. Whence the sorrows of conjugal life.
To be plain: The amusement of redbellies in the mills of empty skulls.
If we consider it futile, and if we don't waste our time over a word that doesn't mean anything...The first thought that comes to these minds is of a bacteriological order: at least to discover its etymological, historical or psychological meaning. We read in the papers that the negroes of the Kroo race call the tail of a sacred cow: DADA. A cube, and a mother, in a certain region of Italy, are called: DADA. The word for a hobby-horse, a childrens nurse, a double affirmative in Russian and Rumanian, is also: DADA. Some learned journalists see it as an art for babies, other Jususcallingthelittlechildrenuntohim saints see it as a return to an unemotional and noisy primitivism - noisy and monotonous. A sensitivity cannot be built on the basis of a word; every sort of construction converges into a boring sort of perfection, a stagnant idea of a golden swamp, a relative human product. A work of art shouldn't be beauty per se, because it is dead; neither gay nor sad, neither light nor dark; it is to rejoice or amltreat the individualities to serve them up the cakes of sainted haloes or the sweat of a meandering chase through the atmosphere. A work of art is never beautiful, by decree, objectively, for everyone. Criticism is therefore useless; it only exists subjectively, for every individual, and without the slightest general characteristic. Do people imagine they have found the psychic basis common to all humanity? The attempt of Jesus, and the Bible, conceal, under their ample, benevolent wings: shit, animals and days. How can anyone hope to order the chaos that constitutes the infinite, formless variation: man? The principle: "Love thy neighbor" is hypocrisy. "know thyself" is utopian, but more acceptable because it includes malice. No pity. After the carnage we are left with the hope of a purified humanity. I always speak about myself becaus I don't want to convince, and I have no right to drag others in my wake, I'm not compelling anyone to follow me, because everyone makes his art in his own way, if he knows anything about the joy that rises like an arrow up to the astral strata, or that which descends into the mines strewn with flowers of corpses and fertile spasms. Stalactites: look everywhere for them, in creches magnified by pain, eyes as white as white as angels hares. Thus DADA was born, out of a need for independence, out of mistrust for community. People who join us to keep their freedom. We don't accept any theories. We've had enough of the cubist and futurist academies: labratories of formalideas. Do we make art in order to earn money and keep the dear bourgeoisie happy? Rhymes have the smack of money, and inflexion slides along the line of the stomach in profile. Every group of artists has ended up at this bank, straddling various comets. Leaving the door open to the possibility of wallowing in comfort and food.
Here we are dropping our anchor in fertile ground.
Here we really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the trembling and the awakening. Drunk with energy, we are revenants thrusting the trident into heedless flesh. We are streams of curses in the tropical abundance of vertiginous vegitation, resin and rain is our sweat, we bleed and burn with thirst, our blood is strength.
Cubism was born out of a simple manner of looking at objects: Cezanne painted a cup twenty centimeters lower than his eyes, the cubists look at it from above, others complicate its appearance by cutting a vertical section through it and soberly placing it to one side. (I'm not forgetting the creators, nor their seminal reasons of unformed matter that they rendered definitive.) The futurist sees the same cup in movement, a succession of objects side by side, mischievously embellished by a few guide-lines. This doesn't stop the canvas being either a good or a bad painting destined to form an investment for intellectual capital. The new painter creates a world whose elements are also its means, a sober, definitive, irrefutable work. The new artist protests: he no longer paints (symbollic and illusionistic reproduction) but creates directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, rocks or locomotive structures capable of being spun in all directions by the limpid wind of the momentary sensation. Every pictorial or plastic work is unnecessary, even if it is a monster which terrifies servile minds, and not too sickly-sweet object to adorn the refectories of animals in human garb, those illustrations of the sad fable of humanity. -A painting is the art of making two lines, which have been geometrically observed to be parallel, meet on a canvas, before our eyes, in the reality of a world that has been transposed according to new conditions and possibilities. This world is neither specified nor defined in the work, it belongs, in its innumerable variations, to the spectator. For its creator it has neither cause nor theory. Order=disorder; ego=non-ego; affirmation=negation: the supreme radiations of an absolute art. Absolute in the purity of its cosmic and regulated chaos, eternal in that globule that is second which has no duration, no breath, no light and no control. I appreciate an old work for its novelty. It is only contrast that links us to the past. Writers who like to moralize and discuss or ameliorate psychological bases have, apart from a
secret wish to win, a ridiculous knowledge of life, which they have classified, parsed out, canalized; they are determined to see its categories dance when they beat time. Their readers laugh derisively, but carry on: what's the use?
There is only one kind of literature which never reaches the voracious masses. The work of creative writers, written out of the author's read necessity, and for its own benefit. The awareness of a supreme egoism, wherin laws become insignificant. Every page should explode, either because of its profound gravity, or its vortex, vertigo, newness, eternity or because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography. On the one hane there is a world tottering in its flight, linked to the resounding tinkle of the infernal gamut; on the other hand, there are: the new men. Uncouth, galloping, riding astride on hiccups. And there is a mutilated world and literary mediacasters in desperate need of amelioration.
I assure you: there is no beginning, and we are not afraid; we aren't sentimental. We are like a raging wind that rips up the cloths of clouds and prayers, we are preparing the great spectacle of disaster, conflagaration and decomposition. Preparing to put an end to mourning, and to replace tears by sirens spreading from one continent to another. Clarions of intense joy, bereft of that poisonous sadness. DADA is the mark of abstraction; publicity and business are also poetic elements.
I destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organization: to sow demoralization everywhere, and throw heavan's hand into hell, hell's eyes into heavan, to reinstate the fertile wheel of a universal circus in the Powers of reality, and the fantasy of every individual.