Dali House

Police are on the lookout for this man, seen wandering around by the River Limmat wearing a cardboard tube and a dunce cap and gesticulating like a madman. He’s wanted for disturbing the peace and trying to destroy Art As We Know It.

The year was 1916. The man was Hugo Ball, a German poet and theatrical producer who’d been tagged a traitor for quitting the army because “men have been confused with machines”. His anarchist streak was a mile wide, but it wasn’t militant, merely revolutionary.

The costume was something he’d dreamed up with the Romanian painter Marcel Janco, his legs and torso swallowed by bright blue cardboard cylinders so that he’d “look like an obelisk”, a cape of gold cardboard lined with scarlet paper that he could flap, along with his grotesque mittens, like a pair of wings, and a tall, blue-and-white striped magician’s hat.

The place was the Spiegelgasse, a little street in Zurich where Lenin, ensconsed at No 14, was among the neighbours complaining about the din coming from No 1, the Cabaret Voltaire, at all hours of the night. He could barely hear himself think about killing the Tsar, and that was some noisy thinking! (James Joyce was also in Zurich at the time, writing “Ulysses”, though he appears to have been unharassed by the commotion, and may even have found additional inspiration in it.)

Below, Google Earth images of the scene of the crime. in the lower shot, the cabaret is in the centre with what looks like a rainbow carpet outside — just light through a prism, I’m sure, but fitting enough.

Lenin and Joyce had their own plans. Hugo Ball’s destructive scheme was dada.

Ball (1886-1927) had founded the Cabaret Voltaire with fellow poets — his future wife Emily Hennings (1885-1948), Tristan Tzara from Romania and Richard Huelsenbeck from Germany — the painters Janco and Arthur Segal from Romania, the Germans Hans Richter and Christian Schad, Dutchmen Otto and Adya van Rees, Alsatian Hans Arp and the Swiss painter and dancer Sophie Taeuber.

Most of them were expressionists for whom expressionism was no longer expressive enough. Some would soon follow Kandinsky toward pure abstraction. All had come to neutral Switzerland to stay clear of a blood-soaked world war.

Something had to be done about man’s habit of fighting, they felt. It was getting out of hand. But the only answer, they decided, was to shred the whole of civilisation and start all over again. They would issue a declaration, said Ball, “to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals”.

Since they were artists, society’s demolition would begin with art, and the wrecking ball would be “anti-art”. They would pull pomp from its pedestal and level the Louvre. Art would return to the innocence of its youth. It would grow anew in random acts of creation, straight from the subconscious, rid of self-consciousness. In a fever, Ball embraced the “total work of art” — gesamtkunstwerk: “A fusion, not merely of all art, but of all regenerative ideas. The background of colours, words and sounds must be brought out from the subconcious and given life, so that it engulfs everyday life and all its misery.”

The movement needed a name, and anti-intellectually, Tzara poked a paper knife into a French-German dictionary, so one story goes, and it came to rest on dada, the French word for “hobby horse”, the German for “goodbye” or “get off my back”, the Romanian for “absolutely right”. On this vehicle of affirmative farewells they would ride into man’s better future.

On May 15 Ball let loose a pamphlet called Cabaret Voltaire and Arp did the cover. Inside were poems by Marinetti and Apollinaire and pictures of the latest works by Picasso and Modigliani and their own crowd.

“How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada,” Ball declared in the movement’s manifesto, read aloud at the first “Dada Soirée”, at Zurich’s Waage Hall on July 14, 1916, to “honoured poets who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself”.

“How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap.”

Tzara published “The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr Febrifuge”, illustrated by Janco, and Huelsenbeck’s “Fantastic Prayers” and Tzara’s “25 Poems” quickly followed, with drawings by Arp. The word was breaking free of the page.

The Cabaret Voltaire itself was the nursery for all of this.

The impressionists had given birth to their revolution at the Cafe Guerbois in Paris in the 1860s. Dada was conceived in 1915 over drinks in the rear hall of the Meierei — the Dairy Inn — at Spiegelgasse 1, at a literary cabaret called the Pantagruel. The following year Ball and Hennings asked the former Dutch sailor in charge, Ephraim Jan, if he’d let them start a full-time nightclub in his Holländische room.

“Herr Ephraim agreed and gave me the room,” said Ball. He called the place Cabaret Voltaire — it sounded “suspicious” enough, someone has commented. The old French philosopher had been quite a scrapper in his day. “And I went to some people I knew and said, ‘Please give me a picture, or a drawing, or an engraving. I should like to put on an exhibition in my nightclub.’ I went to the friendly Zurich press and said, ‘Put in some announcements. There is going to be an international cabaret. We shall do great things.”

Opening night was February 5, 1916.

On Dada Evenings at the Voltaire people recited poems and did a little dancing and emoting, but there was nothing demure about any of it. It was deliberately scandalous, and the atmosphere — almost night after night for five months — was mayhem. “Total pandemonium”, Arp recalled. “Shouting, laughing” and “volleys of hiccups”.

A balalaika orchestra might be playing (if pure noise wasn’t immediately available), poems would be recited by half a dozen people all at once, and a decent fistfight to round out the evening was not unknown. Outside, just beyond the border, the world was at war, and its refugees pusued their own brutality. The audience even laid siege to the Voltaire’s stage at least once.

One night Janco showed up with a box full of masks he’d made, Japanese and Greek in influence but “resolutely modern”, as Ball put it.

“Designed to be seen from a distance, they produced an incredible effect in the relatively small cabaret. The minute we saw them we couldn’t wait to try them on. When we did, something quite strange happened. Each mask dictated not only what costume should be worn with it, but also certain precise, pathetic gestures, which approached madness. We were soon moving in a bizzare ballet, draped and adorned with incredible objects, trying to outdo each other as we danced around the room.”

Impromptu song-and-dance numbers were composed. “Flycatcher” involved much stamping of feet and rapid arm movement and “shrill, nervous music”. “Nightmare” had them lurching out of a squat and hurling themselves forward with arms extended by tubes. “Suddenly,” Ball said, “the horror of our age, against the paralysing backdrop of the war, was clearly perceptible.”

Ball’s now legendary performance, on June 23, in his crazy tuxedo of tubes, involved a reading of several phonetic poems — lautgedichte. Music stands surrounded him on three sides, each holding a manuscript. He couldn’t walk in his outfit, actually, so he was carried to the podium while the lights were extinguished, and then the lights came back on and he began to read, slowly and solemnly:

gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori
gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini
gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala bim
gadjama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligla wowolimai bin beri ban
o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo
gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen
bluku terullala blaulala loooo

zimzim urullala zimzim urullala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam
elifantolim brussala bulomen brussala bulomen tromtata
velo da bang band affalo purzamai affalo purzamai lengado tor
gadjama bimbalo glandridi glassala zingtata pimpalo ögrögöööö
viola laxato viola zimbrabim viola uli paluji malooo

tuffm im zimbrabim negramai bumbalo negramai bumbalo tuffm i zim
gadjama bimbala oo beri gadjama gaga di gadjama affalo pinx
gaga di bumbalo bumbalo gadjamen
gaga di bling blong
gaga blung

One day in the future, the poem would be reincarnated as the Talking Heads song “I Zimbra”. Its decidedly African tone appealed to many ears along with David Byrne’s.

The audience, made up mostly of ordinary citizens out to have some fun among the crazy dadaists, listened gap-mouthed for awhile, then went wild with laughter and applause. Ball struggled to maintain his own composure as he moved from “Song to the Clouds of Labadas” at stage left to “Caravan of Elephants” at stage right.

“I started vigorously flapping my wings and turned to the centre. The heavy series of vowels and trailing rhythm of the elephants had just provided a last gradation. But how was I to end? I suddenly realised that my voice, for want of any other alternative, was taking on the ancestral cadence of a sacerdotal lamentation, the wailing style of the hymns that fill Catholic churches in East and West: zimzim urallala …

“I cannot say what this music suggested to me. All I know is that I began to sing my series of vowels like a kind of liturgical chant; and as I did so, I tried not only to stay serious myself, but also to impose my seriousness on the audience. For one fleeting moment, I thought I glimpsed, beneath my cubist mask, an adolescent’s pallid, distressed face, the half-scared, half-curious face of a trembling 10-year-old eagerly hanging upon a priest’s each and every word during the mass for the dead. Just at that moment, the electric light was switched off, as I had requested beforehand, and, dripping with sweat, I was carried off the podium to the exit.”

Ball’s recitation of his new poem “Karawane” was one of the last events held at the Voltaire. In the early 1980s it was still bizarre enough to be a treat for people watching a popular television show: Marie Osmond (in a high point of her career?) recited “Karawane” on “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”. Of course YouTube has the clip, though she doesn’t actually appear in it. Much more aurally entertaining is Dutch poet Jaap Blonk’s version, though again, no visuals. Loris has done a nice graphic rendition, though.

“Karawane” goes a little something like this … and a one, and a two …

Jolifanto bambla o falli bambla
grossiga m’pfa habla horem
egiga goramen
higo bloiko russula huju
hollaka hollala
anlogo bung
blago bung
bosso fataka …

You get the idea.

Man Ray wrote a sound poem in 1924 called “Sound Poem”, or at least he grabbed somebody else’s poem, crossed out the words one by one and said, “Here you go.” How did it work? Jaap Blonk gave it a reading by honking the lines from his throat according to the lengths of Ray’s scratches.

Like all trendy places in the history of the world, the Cabaret Voltaire lost its edge, and by 1917 the crowd had sidled elsewhere, including to the new Galerie Dada at 19 Bahnhofstrasse. The Voltaire’s old premises were forgotten until 2001, when the city said it wanted to knock the building down, at which point a group of artists calling themselves neo-dadaists rode to the rescue.

On February 5, 2002 — the anniversary of the Voltaire’s founding — Mark Divo and his posse occupied the venerable shrine, and a three-month party commenced, with film nights and more performances and poetry evenings. The cops finally made their move on April 2, but the real cavalry was ready with some cash: Just in time, as it were, Swatch CEO Nicholas Hayek Jr tossed a few million dollars into a restoration fund.

In September 2004 the building was “rededicated” as the Cabaret Voltaire Museum, for the edification of “scientists, schoolchildren, art lovers, exhausted shoppers, business people, tourists, socialites and localites alike”, the owners said, and as “an emotionally intense tourist memorial to the historical dadaism”. The ideas remain half-baked on the official website.

At the grand opening of the museum — a coffee bar-gallery-dada repository — 10,000 Swiss francs was offered to any couple who named their baby Dada. A Swiss woman and her Nigerian husband happily did so, since dada means “prince” in a certain Nigerian dialect.

Swatch sells its wristwatches at the cabaret to recoup costs, so to hell with Hayek, but Mark Divo deserves a second glance. Past 40 now and still not behaving himself, Divo was born in Luxemburg, grew up in Switzerland and had his way with New York and Berlin before becoming a serial troublemaker in the name of conceptual art.

In 1994 he’d had enough of stoic Berlin and returned to Zurich to organise a roving gang of muralists that channelled Swiss tax money into “post-industrial baroque” subway art. Next came a dada festival in Zurich’s public toilets, and he’s since organised squattings in other abandoned buildings to salvage them as studios and residences. When last heard from, he was giving Prague its own “cultural zone”, whether it liked it or not.

Hugo Ball had always been a deeply spiritual man, so when the bolshevist in his group, Tristan Tzara, gained sway with his call for a more militant dada to destabilise “the universal installation of the idiot”, he quietly withdrew from the fray.

For a while, Hennings and Ball remained close to the limelight, performing Leonid Andreev’s play “The Life of a Man”, as they’d done at the Voltaire, and then taking the show on tour, mostly among hotels. Hennings sang, did puppetry, danced to music composed by Ball and recited her poetry, and they even had a troupe called Arabella.

Then they settled in Berne and Hugo joined the profession he had only just denigrated for ruining words, journalism. His retirement years were spent in Ticino, where he had little money but the succour of religion.

Out of deliberate irrationality, dada gave us not just an ugly Mona Lisa and a beautiful urinal, but collage, assemblage, abstract film, performance art and audience interaction, an admiration for native art and, eventually, pop art, yippies, Merry Pranksters and even punk rock. More importantly by far, the man dressed as an obelisk — or was that really, I can’t help wondering, a lobster? — pointed the way for modern art.

Having broken life into shards with cubism, art needed a new muse. Henceforth, for a long time, the inspiration would come from the subconscious mind, and painters would awaken into dreams.