Lot Essay
The present work was one of 174 Dada works shown at the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe in 1920 in Berlin. This fair represents the culmination of the Berlin Dada movement. It was held at the Gallery of Otto Burchard, Lützowufer 13 and had been organised by some of the movement's main figures; described in the catalogue as 'Marshal G. Grosz', 'Dadasoph Raoul Hausmann', and 'Monteurdada John Heartfield'.
The fair's organisers used the press to publicise their event. 'Generaldada' Otto Burchard wrote, "Eröffnung der grossen Dada-Ausstellung. Die Fäden des gesamten internationalen Dadaismus treffen sich in der Ausstellung Monstre-Dada...Auf medialem Wege haben alle Dadaisten der Welt ihre psychotechnische Elastizität auf die Berliner Vertreter des unsterblichen Dada übertragen. Jedermann muss die wunder dieser Psychometamorgie gesehen haben. Dada übertrumpft jeden Okkultismus. Dada ist die Hellsicht der Einsicht und die Aussicht jeder Ansicht über Politik und Wirtschaft, Kunst, Medizin, Saxualität, Erotik, Perversion und Anästhetik. Die Arbeiten von George Grosz, John Heartfield, Baargeld, Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, Baader, schlagen alles bisher dagewesene." (Frankfurter Oderzeitung, 1 Juli 1920, Lokalanzeiger Berlin, 26 Juni 1920, Berliner Börsenkurier 27 June 1920).
The present work was exhibited in Salle I. It can be seen on the wall behind Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch in a contemporary photograph taken at the Fair. It is shown hanging directly under the collage Tatlin lebt zu Hause which was listed as no. 28 in the catalogue/poster of the works exhibited. The present work was exhibited as no. 29 with the title Ein Burgerliches Präzisionsgehirn ruft eine Weltbewegung hervor. (A bourgeois precision-brain provokes a world movement). It was also marked with an asterisk to denote that it was one of the works to be shown at the Societé Anonyme First Exhibition of Modern Art held at 19 East 47 Street, New York. This was the first occasion on which German Dada works were exhibited in America.
Although bearing another title in the exhibition, the present work has generally become known as Dada-Messe or Festival Dada on account of the fact that at the 1920 Dada Messe it was exhibited mounted on a poster which was titled Festival Dada. This poster was previously used to advertise a Dada manifestation which was held at the Salle Gaveau, 45-47 rue le Boétie in Paris. Hausmann presumably removed the backing poster when he dedicated the work to Schwitters, placing the collage on the hand marbled japan paper on which it is still mounted. On the reverse are stuck two German diary pages for 17 and 18 November 1921.
The technique of photomontage was devised by the Berlin Dadaists, as a consequence of their experiments with collage. The Berlin Dadaists were further inspired to develop this new technique because of the changing political and social situation following the November Revolution, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm and the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919. In Hausmann's words they were producing, "Dem Chaos der Kriegs und Revolutionszeit ein optisches und Gedanklich neues Spiegelbild entreissen." (R. Hausmann, Am Aufang war Dada, Giessen, 1972, p. 50). For them, this was possible through the use of a 'new material' as Raoul Hausmann expressed it in his manifesto Das neue Material in der Malerei which he retitled Synthetisches Cino der Malerei. The manifesto was read at the first Dada evening held on the 12 April 1918 together with Huelsenbeck's manifesto Gegen den Expressionismus. "Wunderbare Konstellationen in wirklichen Material, Drahit, Glas, Pappe, Stoff, organisch entsprechend ihrer eigenen geradezu vollendeten Brüchigkeit,..." (R. Hausmann, "Synthetisches Cino der Malerei" in Am Anfang war Dada, published). The Dadaists thus began reusing authentic news material in words or pictures and images from advertisements that were then cut and reassembled to create those Klebebilder.
There is some dispute about who was the first to invent photomontage, Hausmann recalls: "In the summer of 1918 I began making pictures with coloured paper cutouts and newspaper and poster clippings. But it was during a stay at the seaside in the Baltic on the island of Usedom in the small village of Heidebrink that I got the idea of photomontage." (M. Sarchy, The Dada Movement 1915-23, Geneva, 1990, p. 97).
Hausmann produced a series of works around the theme of the mechanised head, beginning with Der Geist unserer Zeit (1919), Tatlin lebt zu Hause and the present work Festival Dada. In his work Der Geist unserer Zeit published in Limoges in 1967, he stated, "Schon lange hatte Ich entdeckt, dass die Leute keinen Charakter haben und dass ihr Gesicht nur ein vom Frisör gemachtes Bild ist...Ich wollte den Geist unserer Zeit enthüllen, den Geist eines Jeden im rudimentären zustand..."
The present work is thus an example of Hausmann's "ironical indifference" (the position of many of the Dadaists) towards mechanisation. "Man in our consciousness has changed entirely, not only because we have the telephone and airplane and electric piano or lathe, but rather because our entire psychophysique is transformed by our experience" (Presentist manifesto). Hausmann's ideal artist works purposefully like an engineer to establish "the convention of the psychology of cinema, which can be completely simple in its general validity" (Lob des konventionellen). Perhaps he signed the present work with the etiquette Direktion R. Hausmann to underline this cinematographic view in the same way that Grosz signed his works as f. ex. George Grosz 1922 construiert. "Hausmann's presentation of various kinds of rhythm alludes to his understanding of perception and thought as mechanical. This mechanised vision was increasingly being associated by Hausmann with film, the corresponding state of mind being the cinema de marpensée in the phrase borrowed from Albert Birot's poem emblazoned across the forehead of Gurk. At about the time that "Gurk" was made, Hausmann retitled his Das Neue Material im der Malerei manifesto Synthetisches Cino der Malerei...Film was becoming a central metaphor in Hausmann's theory of consciousness. Two years later, in his first presentist manifesto, he would declare: "Our art is already today film! At once event, sculpture and image." The film presented the mechanical consciousness of his transformed "new" man. As "static film" and "static poetry" Hausmann's works were intended as an instantaneous present with its relationships partially formed and subject to change. As such they are explorations not only of "the convention of the psychology of cinema", but of the inseperable process of articulation and sensation explored by Mach, Bergson and Einstein." (T. O. Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada, Michigan, 1987, p. 144)
"The inscription on the present work "Der Praesentist" refers to a position Hausmann was to adopt after the dissolvement of the Dada-Berlin movement. "The concept of "Presentism" as articulated by both Friedländer and Hausmann, had as a central tenet the abandonment of the prejudices [Vorurheile] of the past." (Benson, op.cit., p. 110).
"Hausmann's functionalist philosophy, his search for order in the material and elements of art and his continued hopes for a new "Gemeinschaft" were furthered in new associations with the members of the incipient constructivist movement. In 1921 he began publishing manifestos and articles in De Stijl. These included the first "Presentist" manifesto, entitled "Presentism: against the Puffkeism (Phillistinism) of the Teutonic Soul" and "call for Elementarist Art"...for while the two manifestoes are frequently similar, the presentist man extols fashion, the film, the engineer and technician." (Benson, op.cit., p. 199)
At the time he made the collage Dada siegt, Hausmann could have already been thinking of supplanting its metaphorical presentation of the world as a "Zwischenphase" with a more concrete "confusion of the senses", a pushing of perception into "materialism". In Hausmann's "Presentism" of 1921, physiology based in the "Feineren Naturkräfte" alluded to in the foreground of Dada siegt was approached in "the refinement of our most important bodily senses". By the summer of 1920, when the Dada-Messe brought Berlin-Dada to its climactic end, Hausmann's desire for a social criticism was beginning to yield to a physiologically based investigation of man's vision, what Hausmann referred to as new "optics". (Benson, op.cit., p. 182).
The ideas for this quest, which were the basis of the Berlin Dada had emerged already around 1915, "when Solomo Friedländer joined Hausmann and Baader in an ill-fated attempt to launch a journal Erde which reflected their desire to enact or facilitate through mythmaking the "Essence" of a newly defined man in a transforming world..." (Benson, op.cit., p. 10).
"...In a seminal essay for the Dada movement, "Präsentismus: Rede des Erdkaisers an die Menschheit" (Der Sturm 3, 1913, January: 144-45, 1-2). Friedländer presented man's identity in terms of the absolutes and absurdities identified by both Nietzsche and Bergson. His protagonist, the 'Erdkaiser' represented man embodied in the unfathomable concept of an "inner nothingness"," he writes: "Ich bin kein Mensch, Ich bin Niemand und Jedermann, Indifferentist...Ich bin die Indifferenz, der Mensch ist mein Spielzeug, die Zeit ist das Treibrad meiner Ewrigkeit, meiner eigenen Gegenwart. Ich bin präsent." "Ich bin keine Vernunft, aber deshalb alle: weil Ich das indifferente Zentrum aller Vernunft bin, das neutrum aller Logik, die logische null!...Ich bin" (Benson, op.cit., pp. 11-12).
"Hausmann's presentist works were often artifactual and diagrammatic portraits of consciousness. Using photographs, typography and other cultural artifacts, he presented a provisional schematization of a momentary psychological state of perception in his last photomontage ABCD. Included in the references surrounding the photograph of Hausmann's face are a Czech banknote evoking the 1921 Prague tournee where Hausmann and Schwitters collaborated to produce the first Anti-Dada-Merz performance." (Benson, op.cit., p. 205).
Thus Hausmann's "presentist" activities coincide with a closer friendship with Schwitters: "Despite his sharp differences with the spokesmen for the Berlin Dadaists, Schwitters was very close to two artists of this group, R. Hausmann and H. Höch." (R. Huelsenbeck disliked Schwitters for his involvement with Herwarth Walden's Expressionist periodical Der Sturm since 1918 and did not allow him to take part in the 1920 Berlin Dada fair). "In Sept. 1921 Schwitters undertook a lecture tour to Prague with Hausmann, Höch and his wife Helma. The trip was of great importance to his poetic development for in the course of it he became acquainted with Hausmann's phonetic poem fmsbw which was to inspire his own "Ursonate". The friends met very frequently both in Berlin and in Hannover and on various occasions gave joint Merz and Dada evenings." (Werner Schmalenbach, Kurt Schwitters, New York, 1967, p. 47).
"Having found with Schwitters a "wohl Mineralische Verwandschaft", Hausmann may well have been interested in the Merz works in the Schwitters Sturm exhibition of the spring of 1919. It is clear, nonetheless, that their deep friendship did not begin to develop until after December 1920 when they were still sufficiently distant from one another that "without knowing it" they could publish "almost the same statements" as "defenders of nonsense"." (Benson, op.cit, p. 116).
The present work, which was given to Kurt Schwitters, may have been given around the time of their collaboration in 1921, being playfully dedicated "Kartons Quittes" perhaps a reference to their common interest in sound poems. Hausmann's signature titling himself Der Praesentist is a reference to his shift of interest after having previously called himself Dadasoph.
The fair's organisers used the press to publicise their event. 'Generaldada' Otto Burchard wrote, "Eröffnung der grossen Dada-Ausstellung. Die Fäden des gesamten internationalen Dadaismus treffen sich in der Ausstellung Monstre-Dada...Auf medialem Wege haben alle Dadaisten der Welt ihre psychotechnische Elastizität auf die Berliner Vertreter des unsterblichen Dada übertragen. Jedermann muss die wunder dieser Psychometamorgie gesehen haben. Dada übertrumpft jeden Okkultismus. Dada ist die Hellsicht der Einsicht und die Aussicht jeder Ansicht über Politik und Wirtschaft, Kunst, Medizin, Saxualität, Erotik, Perversion und Anästhetik. Die Arbeiten von George Grosz, John Heartfield, Baargeld, Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, Baader, schlagen alles bisher dagewesene." (Frankfurter Oderzeitung, 1 Juli 1920, Lokalanzeiger Berlin, 26 Juni 1920, Berliner Börsenkurier 27 June 1920).
The present work was exhibited in Salle I. It can be seen on the wall behind Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch in a contemporary photograph taken at the Fair. It is shown hanging directly under the collage Tatlin lebt zu Hause which was listed as no. 28 in the catalogue/poster of the works exhibited. The present work was exhibited as no. 29 with the title Ein Burgerliches Präzisionsgehirn ruft eine Weltbewegung hervor. (A bourgeois precision-brain provokes a world movement). It was also marked with an asterisk to denote that it was one of the works to be shown at the Societé Anonyme First Exhibition of Modern Art held at 19 East 47 Street, New York. This was the first occasion on which German Dada works were exhibited in America.
Although bearing another title in the exhibition, the present work has generally become known as Dada-Messe or Festival Dada on account of the fact that at the 1920 Dada Messe it was exhibited mounted on a poster which was titled Festival Dada. This poster was previously used to advertise a Dada manifestation which was held at the Salle Gaveau, 45-47 rue le Boétie in Paris. Hausmann presumably removed the backing poster when he dedicated the work to Schwitters, placing the collage on the hand marbled japan paper on which it is still mounted. On the reverse are stuck two German diary pages for 17 and 18 November 1921.
The technique of photomontage was devised by the Berlin Dadaists, as a consequence of their experiments with collage. The Berlin Dadaists were further inspired to develop this new technique because of the changing political and social situation following the November Revolution, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm and the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919. In Hausmann's words they were producing, "Dem Chaos der Kriegs und Revolutionszeit ein optisches und Gedanklich neues Spiegelbild entreissen." (R. Hausmann, Am Aufang war Dada, Giessen, 1972, p. 50). For them, this was possible through the use of a 'new material' as Raoul Hausmann expressed it in his manifesto Das neue Material in der Malerei which he retitled Synthetisches Cino der Malerei. The manifesto was read at the first Dada evening held on the 12 April 1918 together with Huelsenbeck's manifesto Gegen den Expressionismus. "Wunderbare Konstellationen in wirklichen Material, Drahit, Glas, Pappe, Stoff, organisch entsprechend ihrer eigenen geradezu vollendeten Brüchigkeit,..." (R. Hausmann, "Synthetisches Cino der Malerei" in Am Anfang war Dada, published). The Dadaists thus began reusing authentic news material in words or pictures and images from advertisements that were then cut and reassembled to create those Klebebilder.
There is some dispute about who was the first to invent photomontage, Hausmann recalls: "In the summer of 1918 I began making pictures with coloured paper cutouts and newspaper and poster clippings. But it was during a stay at the seaside in the Baltic on the island of Usedom in the small village of Heidebrink that I got the idea of photomontage." (M. Sarchy, The Dada Movement 1915-23, Geneva, 1990, p. 97).
Hausmann produced a series of works around the theme of the mechanised head, beginning with Der Geist unserer Zeit (1919), Tatlin lebt zu Hause and the present work Festival Dada. In his work Der Geist unserer Zeit published in Limoges in 1967, he stated, "Schon lange hatte Ich entdeckt, dass die Leute keinen Charakter haben und dass ihr Gesicht nur ein vom Frisör gemachtes Bild ist...Ich wollte den Geist unserer Zeit enthüllen, den Geist eines Jeden im rudimentären zustand..."
The present work is thus an example of Hausmann's "ironical indifference" (the position of many of the Dadaists) towards mechanisation. "Man in our consciousness has changed entirely, not only because we have the telephone and airplane and electric piano or lathe, but rather because our entire psychophysique is transformed by our experience" (Presentist manifesto). Hausmann's ideal artist works purposefully like an engineer to establish "the convention of the psychology of cinema, which can be completely simple in its general validity" (Lob des konventionellen). Perhaps he signed the present work with the etiquette Direktion R. Hausmann to underline this cinematographic view in the same way that Grosz signed his works as f. ex. George Grosz 1922 construiert. "Hausmann's presentation of various kinds of rhythm alludes to his understanding of perception and thought as mechanical. This mechanised vision was increasingly being associated by Hausmann with film, the corresponding state of mind being the cinema de marpensée in the phrase borrowed from Albert Birot's poem emblazoned across the forehead of Gurk. At about the time that "Gurk" was made, Hausmann retitled his Das Neue Material im der Malerei manifesto Synthetisches Cino der Malerei...Film was becoming a central metaphor in Hausmann's theory of consciousness. Two years later, in his first presentist manifesto, he would declare: "Our art is already today film! At once event, sculpture and image." The film presented the mechanical consciousness of his transformed "new" man. As "static film" and "static poetry" Hausmann's works were intended as an instantaneous present with its relationships partially formed and subject to change. As such they are explorations not only of "the convention of the psychology of cinema", but of the inseperable process of articulation and sensation explored by Mach, Bergson and Einstein." (T. O. Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada, Michigan, 1987, p. 144)
"The inscription on the present work "Der Praesentist" refers to a position Hausmann was to adopt after the dissolvement of the Dada-Berlin movement. "The concept of "Presentism" as articulated by both Friedländer and Hausmann, had as a central tenet the abandonment of the prejudices [Vorurheile] of the past." (Benson, op.cit., p. 110).
"Hausmann's functionalist philosophy, his search for order in the material and elements of art and his continued hopes for a new "Gemeinschaft" were furthered in new associations with the members of the incipient constructivist movement. In 1921 he began publishing manifestos and articles in De Stijl. These included the first "Presentist" manifesto, entitled "Presentism: against the Puffkeism (Phillistinism) of the Teutonic Soul" and "call for Elementarist Art"...for while the two manifestoes are frequently similar, the presentist man extols fashion, the film, the engineer and technician." (Benson, op.cit., p. 199)
At the time he made the collage Dada siegt, Hausmann could have already been thinking of supplanting its metaphorical presentation of the world as a "Zwischenphase" with a more concrete "confusion of the senses", a pushing of perception into "materialism". In Hausmann's "Presentism" of 1921, physiology based in the "Feineren Naturkräfte" alluded to in the foreground of Dada siegt was approached in "the refinement of our most important bodily senses". By the summer of 1920, when the Dada-Messe brought Berlin-Dada to its climactic end, Hausmann's desire for a social criticism was beginning to yield to a physiologically based investigation of man's vision, what Hausmann referred to as new "optics". (Benson, op.cit., p. 182).
The ideas for this quest, which were the basis of the Berlin Dada had emerged already around 1915, "when Solomo Friedländer joined Hausmann and Baader in an ill-fated attempt to launch a journal Erde which reflected their desire to enact or facilitate through mythmaking the "Essence" of a newly defined man in a transforming world..." (Benson, op.cit., p. 10).
"...In a seminal essay for the Dada movement, "Präsentismus: Rede des Erdkaisers an die Menschheit" (Der Sturm 3, 1913, January: 144-45, 1-2). Friedländer presented man's identity in terms of the absolutes and absurdities identified by both Nietzsche and Bergson. His protagonist, the 'Erdkaiser' represented man embodied in the unfathomable concept of an "inner nothingness"," he writes: "Ich bin kein Mensch, Ich bin Niemand und Jedermann, Indifferentist...Ich bin die Indifferenz, der Mensch ist mein Spielzeug, die Zeit ist das Treibrad meiner Ewrigkeit, meiner eigenen Gegenwart. Ich bin präsent." "Ich bin keine Vernunft, aber deshalb alle: weil Ich das indifferente Zentrum aller Vernunft bin, das neutrum aller Logik, die logische null!...Ich bin" (Benson, op.cit., pp. 11-12).
"Hausmann's presentist works were often artifactual and diagrammatic portraits of consciousness. Using photographs, typography and other cultural artifacts, he presented a provisional schematization of a momentary psychological state of perception in his last photomontage ABCD. Included in the references surrounding the photograph of Hausmann's face are a Czech banknote evoking the 1921 Prague tournee where Hausmann and Schwitters collaborated to produce the first Anti-Dada-Merz performance." (Benson, op.cit., p. 205).
Thus Hausmann's "presentist" activities coincide with a closer friendship with Schwitters: "Despite his sharp differences with the spokesmen for the Berlin Dadaists, Schwitters was very close to two artists of this group, R. Hausmann and H. Höch." (R. Huelsenbeck disliked Schwitters for his involvement with Herwarth Walden's Expressionist periodical Der Sturm since 1918 and did not allow him to take part in the 1920 Berlin Dada fair). "In Sept. 1921 Schwitters undertook a lecture tour to Prague with Hausmann, Höch and his wife Helma. The trip was of great importance to his poetic development for in the course of it he became acquainted with Hausmann's phonetic poem fmsbw which was to inspire his own "Ursonate". The friends met very frequently both in Berlin and in Hannover and on various occasions gave joint Merz and Dada evenings." (Werner Schmalenbach, Kurt Schwitters, New York, 1967, p. 47).
"Having found with Schwitters a "wohl Mineralische Verwandschaft", Hausmann may well have been interested in the Merz works in the Schwitters Sturm exhibition of the spring of 1919. It is clear, nonetheless, that their deep friendship did not begin to develop until after December 1920 when they were still sufficiently distant from one another that "without knowing it" they could publish "almost the same statements" as "defenders of nonsense"." (Benson, op.cit, p. 116).
The present work, which was given to Kurt Schwitters, may have been given around the time of their collaboration in 1921, being playfully dedicated "Kartons Quittes" perhaps a reference to their common interest in sound poems. Hausmann's signature titling himself Der Praesentist is a reference to his shift of interest after having previously called himself Dadasoph.