by Greil Marcus
From the beginning it was commonplace to hear punk described as dada. Here are the lines that got me interested, written by Isabelle Anscombe in 1978: “Punk must be willing to reject itself as it becomes established, to be open to change and to forgo the profits. It is a mode of anarchy as much as the Dadaist ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ at the end of the First World War, and how many people are particularly familiar with that?” A lot of people, it turned out: Andrew Czezowski, who ran the Roxy, told reporters it was “a sort of new Cabaret Voltaire.” Plenty of punks had done time in that traditional spawning ground of U.K. rock bands, the state-run art school. Punk made the dailies as “dole-queue rock”; it made the monthlies as “another art-school demo.”
Still, Anscombe was working on an idea, and opposed to literary references ideas about punk and dada were almost nonexistent as she wrote. In London or New York in the late 1970s dada meant what it meant in Paris and New York at the end of the First World War: a not-quite-naked prank, a jape clothed in the barest g-string of aesthetic authority, a Bronx cheer in three-part harmony, Tzara’s affirmation of the right “to piss and shit in different colors.” It meant Arthur Cravan getting up to deliver a lecture and dropping his pants, a young John Lennon urinating from a Hamburg balcony onto a passing line of nuns (“Let’s baptize ’em”), the Sex Pistols saying “fuck” on TV. Dada meant a charming gratuitous act amenable to some future art-historical homage—as opposed to the uncharming simplest-surrealist-act, Breton’s man shooting blindly into a crowd, which, since no surrealist ever did anything of the kind, devolves into this sort of dada, into a literary reference, where it meets Zed, a punk gang leader played by Bob Goldthwait in the 1985 film Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment.
In his mid-twenties, but seemingly superannuated—fat, balding, sweating, drooling—Zed heads thugs signed as punks by their multicolored hair and studded leather, by 1985 the diffused and floating signs of London 1976. They terrorize a neighborhood for lack of anything else to do with it. Zed is so full of rage he can barely talk: you can feel his vocal cords breaking up every time he opens his mouth.
He’s a cuddly anarchist, blithering but lovable. When he tells the mayor “I-VOTED-FOR-YOU!” while his gang trashes her community-outreach street fair, when he says “THANK-YOU-VERY-MUCH-YOU’VE-GOTTA-LOTTA-NICE-BARGAINS-HERE!” after they’ve unloaded a supermarket, there’s not a hint of sarcasm—on some level, he’s completely sincere. He wants the mayor to drop dead of shock; he also wants her to like him. “Be reasonable,” a cop begs him. “I-HATE-REASONABLE!” he screams; you feel for him. He’s just a boy who can’t say yes; any art critic could pin him as dada, just as in 1965 every art critic pinned Andy Warhol as “neo-dada.” “Dada is a tomato,” said one Paris dada manifesto. “To wear a tomato in your lapel is to be a dadaist,” said another. Textbook dada in a phrase: absurd negation that wants no consequences. Unless it’s the kind Zed’s antics produced: in Police Academy 3 he became a cop himself.
IN THE LATE
In the late 1970s punk-as-dada did not even mean this much. It meant the history-in-nutshell parallels always needed to explain something new, or explain it away: wasn’t there a British band that called itself “Cabaret Voltaire”? Didn’t Talking Heads set a Hugo Ball sound poem to music on their third lp? Every book on dada told the story of Kurt Schwitters combing his Hanover streets for cigarette butts and discarded concert tickets to stick into his collages; the formal dada theory that art could be made out of anything matched the formal punk theory that anyone could make art (“Here are three chords,” read the famous notes to a diagram in Sniffin’ Glue, the first U.K. punk fanzine—“now form a band”). “The Dadaist logic of sucking in all the trivia, the rubbish and the cast-offs of the world and then stamping a new meaning on the assemblage,” ran a typical gloss on Tzara’s recipe for dada poetry (cut words out of a newspaper, shake in a bag, paste at random on a page), “was there both in punk’s music and sartorial regime.” It was true: there were punk songs about cigarette butts, and a ’77 London punk jacket could look like a 1918 Berlin dada collage. Why, though? And so what? Why form a band?
Historical validation turns every no into a yes if the no can be footnoted, just as those who are always happier to announce the death of something than be present at its birth have mastered the knack of turning a casual aside into an embrace of the whole social order. Yes, the safety pin Jamie Reid put through H.R.H.’s lips in his “God Save the Queen” graphic harked back even more loudly to Duchamp’s defaced Mona Lisa than to the May ’68 Atelier populaire poster—but Johnny Rotten had not said the word “dada” since he was two.
Dadaism is a strategem by which the artist can impart to the citizen something of the inner unrest which prevents the artist himself from being lulled to sleep by custom and routine. By means of external stimuli, he can compensate for the citizen’s lack of inner urgency and vitality and shake him into new life.
—Udo Rukser, Dada Almanach, 1920
“My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant. Not something actively destructive, but someone who irritates, who disorientates. Someone who disrupts the daily drag of life just enough to leave the victim thinking there’s maybe more to it all than the mere humdrum quality of existence.”
—Elvis Costello, 1978
No one tried to use dada to find the limits of punk, or vice versa: to start a conversation between the past and the present, to wonder just how it is that an idea jumps a sixty-year gap, or burrows under it. Instead there was a setup. The dada aesthetic went into the books as “anti-art”; punk was “anti-rock.” The basic dada act was understood to be the performer’s attack on the audience; punks swore and spit from the stage. Like punk, except for a few favored saints dada refused all ancestors: “I’m not even interested in knowing if anyone existed before me,” Tzara announced, quoting Descartes. You could find the footnotes in the songs: “Anti-art was the start,” as Poly Styrene sang.
The parallel was obviously correct; as a fan, I didn’t know what to make of it. I had books by Ball and Huelsenbeck on my shelves, picked up on remainder years before, but I hadn’t read them. In art-history surveys one learned far more about the proto-surrealist Parisian dada spinoff than its putative Zurich progenitor, and surrealism was what the historians really wanted to talk about.
The parallel broke down when you put the art of the one against the other, if you weighed punk singles against dada paintings and poems. “I couldn’t believe it when I first heard it,” a friend said of X-ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” “It was so funny.” It was funny and scary: you heard Poly Styrene’s Shirley Temple voice (“Some people say that little girls should be seen and not heard / But I say—”) turn into a raw-meat social chugalug (“OH BONDAGE UP YOURS!”). The opening parodied anyone’s expectations, and the follow-up ruined them; Lora Logic kicked off her saxophone solo as if she were kicking down a door, which was exactly what she was doing. Irony was never so exciting as in the Buzzcocks’ “Boredom” (“Scene here pretty hum-drum,” Howard Devoto snapped, as if the notion had just occurred to him). Forget history: the sound of the record was so edgy it simply had to be new. The Adverts’ “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” was a pure punk notion—what if Gary Gilmore had donated his eyes to an eye bank and you got them?—too pure to be anything else.
Compared to this, Zurich art works were tame. I ran the single number of the May 1916 review Cabaret Voltaire on microfilm, and there was one explosion: “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer,” the transcript of a German-English-French/Huelsenbeck-Janco-Tzara simultaneous poem as performed in the cabaret (easy to imagine on stage, fabulous to read, dragged down by Tzara’s laborious “Note pour les bourgeois,” where he explained that the point was to translate cubism into verse). But the layout was sober, the New Man dressed up in the old man’s best suit. The result was pious, a sort of avant-garde mass.
Whatever happened in Zurich in the spring of 1916—no tape recordings, no videos, no live lps on the Ephriam labe
l equivalent to The Roxy London WC 2—it wasn’t in the archives, and whatever happened, most ran from it. With the cabaret a dead letter, in 1917 Ball, Janco, Tzara, and followers like Hans Richter set up the Galerie Dada, offering poetry readings, lectures, and revivals of last year’s hits to women’s clubs and package tours. “We have surmounted the barbarisms of the cabaret,” Ball wrote. Simon Frith visited an Australian punk club in 1979, and all he saw were rules and manners; he measured it against 1976, so long before, when people “didn’t know what would happen next.” In the Galerie Dada, Ball and the rest knew what would happen: nothing. They restaged the number with the big costume; if TV had existed they would have been on it.
Except for Huelsenbeck, who frothed at the mouth, no one liked to talk about this very much. Soon enough, Ball and Hennings went back to the church. Tzara and Arp attached themselves to Breton and became famous. Janco too came to Paris; disgusted by what he saw as the surrealists’ attempt to put the dada spirit “in their pockets,” he went back to Romania and slipped into obscurity. Ultimately Huelsenbeck became a distinguished New York psychoanalyst, changing his name to Charles R. Hulbeck both to Americanize it and to kill his dada past. In the Cabaret Voltaire Arp was twenty-eight, Huelsenbeck twenty-four, Tzara turned twenty, Janco twenty-one: as old men they had every right to dismiss their Spiegelgasse hijinks as juvenilia, but they didn’t. They tried to—with dada gone in the 1920s they disavowed it almost with the fervor of 1930s Communists damning the god that failed. But it didn’t work.
THE CABARET
The Cabaret Voltaire crept back and trivialized all their works and days. It dissolved them, just as on stage in the Meierei they had dissolved the past. As the dadaists got older, faced death, thought about their legacies, the syndrome worsened. They were humble in their megalomania. They spoke of dada in terms so abstract and contradictory no one could really understand them. If punk was like dada then there was something in punk no one had glimpsed—even though the old dadaists were now like pop stars condemned to roll their greatest hit up the hill of the crowd for all eternity, carrying the curse of having been in the right place at the right time, a blessing that comes to no one more than once.
Describing the scene on stage, Arp wasn’t reporting—I said he was just to give the scene more punch. In truth he was writing in 1948, past sixty, working from a reproduction of Janco’s lost 1916 painting Cabaret Voltaire, using it as flesh for memory: Janco’s Emmy Hennings was not doing the splits. At the same time, Huelsenbeck and Tzara were entering the thirty-second year of their fight over the authorship of the word “dada”: I was the “young man” Henri Lefebvre will speak of after I am dead!, Tzara might have said. No, I was, Huelsenbeck might have replied, and I won’t be! Top that! In early 1984 Janco was eighty-eight. On 5 February 1916 he and his brother Jules had appeared along with Tzara in response to an announcement Ball placed in the papers; along with the rest on the first night he hung paintings and tacked posters on the walls of Jan Ephriam’s bar. Now, sixty-eight years later, in Ein Hod, Israel, the artists’ colony he had founded in 1953, he was trying to recreate the Cabaret Voltaire, under the same name: new versions of discoveries he’d faked in the Galerie Dada when at twenty-one he had already gone as far as he would ever go.
“Poems read simultaneously in different languages,” said the Jerusalem Post; of course it was pathetic. At the crest the stone always rolls to the bottom, and only one tied to it by curse can move it up an inch. Janco sat square in his chair with a bouquet in his hands and a beret on his head. Everyone else who had been there was dead. “How would the dadaists respond to the reconstruction of their acts?” a reporter asked Steve Solomons, director of the Ein Hod Cabaret Voltaire. “They’d say it was absolutely ridiculous,” he said—but as a dadaist everything he said was a lie. Janco didn’t think it was ridiculous—or, if he did, he had nothing more or less ridiculous to offer. In the midst of the permanent Arab-Israeli war, with inflation rising by the day and Orthodox rabbis marshaling the full power of the state for the enforcement of rules so arbitrary they read like the stipulations of one of the fanatical dada manifestos Huelsenbeck offered to Berlin in 1918, Janco’s message was “Back to chaos.” “Artists can communicate better than politicians,” he said. He was talking about communication between certain Israelis and certain Palestinians, or Syrians, Lebanese, whoever might notice—weren’t there some who had more in common with him, or what he stood for, than he or they had in common with the official cultures supposedly their own?
Janco was working against the clock. A new time, a new place, who knew what might happen? He died on 21 April 1984, before he could explain, but if he had lived another lifetime he would not have been able to explain, which is not to say that some who heard him might not have understood.
IN ZURICH
In Zurich the Cabaret Voltaire was an immediate hit. Fifty was full; it was full every night. First there were students, who drank and smoked and tore up the room; then burghers, the reviled “bourgeoisie,” the curious; then finally, as with the Roxy in 1977, Japanese tourists. There were so many regulars almost nobody paid, a version of the old punk joke: how many punks does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One to hold the ladder, one to turn the bulb, and fifty on the guest list.
On stage there was—on the first night—a reading from the works of patron saint Voltaire. There followed a balalaika orchestra, cover versions of Mallarmé, Nostradamus, Kandinsky, Apollinaire, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Christian Morgenstern’s ten-year-old sound-poem hits, evergreens like “Under the Bridges of Paris,” the Parisian cabaret ballads of Aristide Bruant as sung by Hennings (in “St. Lazare” she was a whore dying of syphilis contracted in prison), readings by Arp from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, plays actually staged, bits of Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, futurist manifestos, exhibitions of paintings by Arp, Janco, and cabaret habitué Giacometti, plus mime, rants, crude jokes, shaggy dog stories.
The program notes don’t suggest the building sense of possibility Ball recorded. February 26: “Everyone has been seized by an indefinable intoxication. The little cabaret is about to come apart at the seams and is getting to be a playground for crazy emotions.” March 2: “It is a race with the expectations of the audience.” March 14: “As long as the whole city is not enchanted, the cabaret has failed.” A race with the expectations of the audience is a definition of punk at its best: did anyone in the Roxy feel the same? Uncertain about what to do next, Ball and the others held a meeting and decided on an evening of Russian folk songs. Why was it so hard to get over?
This play has not been staged for the theatergoers at all, but for others who unfortunately can’t make it. And besides, what else is there to put on?
—Peter Schneider, The Wall Jumper, 1983
From Tzara’s 1920 “Zurich Chronicle” to Ball’s diary, published in 1927 as Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Flight Out of Time), from Arp’s 1948 “Dadaland” to Huelsenbeck’s 1957 Mit Witz, Licht und Grütze (With Wit, Light, and Brains), published in English in 1974 as Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, from Hennings’ hagiographies of Ball to Janco’s last interview, the dadaists set down the story. Historians have been trying to pull good dates out of them ever since. The dadaists played out the reggae aphorism that there are no truths, only versions; each claimed to have been in the right place at the right time and refused in every instance to say exactly where or when it was. “The libraries should be burned, and only the things that everyone knows by heart would survive,” Ball wrote after the cabaret closed. “A great era of the legend would begin.” “We have forgotten minor things,” Huelsenbeck said. He more than any of them truly didn’t care about history, that the cabaret was running concurrently with the Battle of Verdun—or he didn’t care about the kind of history Verdun could make. Rationalism, the Enlightenment, had produced a charnel house; the classicist heritage that Huelsenbeck and the rest were born to pass on had turned on them, and so on stage they performed an ancient myth of destruction and creation. As they looked bac
k, they realized it had been no protest against the times but an odd acceptance: wiping the slate clean brought them to life but they expected nothing from the future. The surrealists expected everything: that is why every surrealist document is extant, why every surrealist occasion can be dated with perfect precision; if the dadaists were fools the surrealists were accountants.
When the surrealists looked back, they looked back with certainty, whether it was the certainty of the Stalinism some of them once embraced, or of the textbook citations all of them had won. The dadaists looked back with puzzlement—except for Huelsenbeck, who looked back as if it had all been obvious, inadequate, a rehearsal for a day that never came. Everywhere in the memoirs of the dadaists there is special pleading, legend tending, feuding, threats of legal action over trademark violation or misappropriation of funds, but nowhere is there a fixed point, a line, an ideology of what it was all for. Instead they asked what happened—queerly, they fell back before their own memories. We stood on the stage and recited a simultaneous poem, Tzara, Janco, and I, in French, English, and German. (Of course I speak English today—a German accent pulls them in, but the check had better be in dollars!—but not about dada, when I speak about dada I only speak in German, that was the dada language, perhaps I mean the pre-language, it’s the best I can do to keep the story straight.) “Every body is doing it, doing it, doing it,” Janco recited, and the world turned upside down. In 1954 Elvis Presley sang “Everybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it” (well, you know he sang “That’s all right, mama, that’s all right with me,” but what’s the difference, it was all in the rhythm), and the same thing happened again. (Or 1948, the Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon to Know,” I have the original It’s-a-Natural 78 right here, I play it for my patients when they ask me how long this is going to take, same thing again, I mean before, as Arp said, “Only imbeciles and Spanish professors care about dates,” time is a bourgeois construction, to turn an hour into fifty minutes is to be a dadaist.) All it was was my “umbah-umbah,” it was just Negergedichte, the big beat—“Jes’ grew,” Ishmael Reed called it in Mumbo Jumbo, that wonderful book about ragtime he published just before I died, every body is doing it, doing it, doing it—do you understand? If you do, write Dr. Charles R. Hulbeck, 88 Central Park West, New York, New York. Thank you very much.