No Dada No Dada No Dada

How Contemporary Culture Institutionalized Dada

and Put Chaos Back to Sleep

Abstract conceptualism, the use of words, gestures and symbols of dissent and protest; or again the staging of human dramas, joys, and misunderstandings. These, broadly speaking, are the traits of the art of our time.

An art that draws its thrills and emotional charge from many movements, styles, and perspectives developed over the previous two centuries—Expressionism, Realism, Abstraction, and so on. One movement in particular, however, gave a decisive thrust not only to the styles and ways of interpreting contemporary art, but perhaps even to the very way we conceive forms, essences, meanings, and visions beyond art itself. That movement is Dada.

But first: what did Dada want to do with the era in which it was born? What intentions—and non-intentions—did it have?

Dada, lived mainly in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, wanted to desecrate, to mock, to de-symbolize, and to restore “the balance between heaven and hell”*.

Dada wanted to ridicule the habits and drowsiness of everyday life, and at the same time unleash the creative, revealing disorder of all those who were subjected to the sleepiness of bourgeois society: ordinary people, and art itself.

Dada was not entertainment. It struck with hammer blows—knocking things down and spreading the soot of the shattered simulacra. It scandalized in order to draw closer to the divine and the profane, and did so with the spirit of a jester, a mystic, a nullifier. They didn’t howl naked and aching like Artaud, nor did they shout “Enough!” at words and acts like Carmelo Bene; they didn’t massacre and they weren’t absent—but in their fleeting, twisted, derisive, and absolute persistence, they tore off flesh, teeth, and hands; they silenced mouths and plugged ears, for all those still bewitched by the phantom of Identity, raving in its place.

In short—more directly—Dada criticized everything it believed to be a stable point in existence: the superficiality and rigidity of society’s sensitivity and consciousness; and finally, the real chain-making madness of political and ideological regimes.

And because of this, Dada drew to itself the heterogeneity of distortions and visions from the subterranean sea of reality—also with some political reverberations. Though fundamentally non-ideological and against ideology itself, various Dadaists used it to criticize, politically as well, the regimes and realities of their time. This happened on the radical left, especially in Germany, as in the cases of Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and others; but also from within the world of Tradition, as with Julius Evola.

So Dada was, in everything, primordial destruction and the liberating creation of art, ideas, and customs. A pure consciousness of chaos.

But today—where are Dada’s frameless, blurred effigies? Where are its verses—not poetic, but by now cacophonic? Where, again, are things turned into objects of mockery and a challenge to common sense—and to Sense itself? More broadly: what has contemporary art done with Dada?

Perhaps pushed it away, perhaps kidnapped it… perhaps killed it. Certainly not desecrated it.

To answer these questions, let us first observe not so much the state of art in itself over these last decades, but rather what it seeks to satisfy in society, in “state culture,” and in the artists themselves.

What is generally defined as “contemporary art” is that set of movements, currents, and styles which, broadly speaking, revolve around themes such as: great freedom of expression (also in the form of heterogeneous styles, approaches, and perspectives); active politico-moral contestation linked in particular to liberation movements (colonial, sexual, gender, etc.); change and a kind of rupture not only social and existential, but even ontological (not to say metaphysical, in some cases) in the human being—and the contrast of all this with so-called “strong thought” (which, to simplify, we could say dominated until the mid-twentieth century), together with the crisis of human Identity as Subject, as Collective, and even as Man itself.

Just as the themes of this macro-group tend toward rebellion, so too do its styles and currents—again, generally—tend toward rebellion: the search for, and at the same time the deconstruction of, meanings and limits (of norms, language, the body, etc.); the detachment from form understood as a perfect canon to follow (artistically, but also ethically and philosophically); and thus the collapse of certainty about the existence and presence of a sense of things, of being, of acting—or at least of a rational, ordered sense.

Up to this point it seems Dada is not only fine, but in full force, still the bogeyman of identities and certainties.

But look closer, feel more deeply and radically into all these performances… and you sense only a slightly shrill, slightly narcissistic, egocentric, insecure imitation of Dada’s laughter and dissolutions.

Because that is what it is: performance.

From Marina Abramović to Banksy, Yayoi Kusama, Kaws, Olafur Eliasson and others, performance no longer has centrality—or will—or the mechanical necessity in the act of decomposition, annulment (even of the self), depravity, digression, or the search for something lost. Performance has only a manufactured and illusory self—masked—and it moves only to announce, from different angles, the same narratives: narratives not so much produced by contemporaneity itself, but required by the ontological, epistemic, speculative—and thus cultural and political—knots that emerged from our crisis of Sense and Identity. Narratives needed to keep the system self-feeding, injected into desire, sensitivity, and consciousness in recycling loops—under the form of ever-different micro-stories that, in the end, are never truly different from one another.

In other words: performance possesses neither Being, nor Nothingness, nor even the mechanical nature of the artist’s body and feeling. Everything appears in the moment only to leave behind an impression of what happened—and of what lies inwardly, beyond it. Everything is image, endlessly interpretable; or it represents, through rhetorical games, human realities—yet at the same time all meanings, and even their absence, are almost automatically traced back to those knots mentioned above: codes of signifiers and meanings which, operating in the individual and collective unconscious, and acting like viruses inside the brain-machine, end up making the human being an object aware of himself and of the world around him—yet perceived and thought only through the canons and feedback inserted and regenerated by those viruses.

Viruses which are not, of course, material entities, but rational and unconscious archetypes that, upon contact with the organic mass and the remote origins of man (instincts, automatic drives, mechanical logic, abstract structures of thought—subjective and social), begin—like infections—to fight against all the organism’s external antibodies in order to seize the central nervous system, and thus its being.

What remains of contemporary art, then, is only the act of recognizing (or not) the “right” feedback and representing it in the most efficient form: subjective abstractionism—namely, the annulment of the artist, the work, and the public as organic, distinct, present parts, and the consequent homogenization of all three components into what we could call a “closed-circuit aesthetic system”: a showing and exchange of sensibilities that neither come from an elsewhere (external, internal, high or low) nor move outward toward an elsewhere.

Within this circuit we can also identify “standard inputs”: the consumption of goods and emotions as the basis of individual and social life, and thus the necessary, consequent simplification of desiring and conscious processes both in individuals and in the social body; the transformation of what remains of social and individual Identity from the “real” to the “speculative.” Society and the individual are no longer identified and divided according to needs and ideals arising from experiencing and thinking contingency, but rather by desiring and acting toward representations of realities not yet existent—realities that thought and its need already begin to produce (hyperstitions).

None of these components are the product of our time alone, because they are inherent in—and always active within—the man-machine. What is being argued is that we have reached a point in this process (existential and historical) where this continuous self-desiring and speculative self-feeding/self-consumption has gained such force, and freed itself so completely from the restraints of more rational and ordered speculation (for instance, precisely the so-called “strong thought”), that now this very process actively substitutes itself for humanity—and thus for all its productions.

To conclude, we can pose two opposing questions—different in intent and in purpose, yet sharing the same spirit of active tragedy, still feeling the need to plunge into the mystery of things. What if this drift could carry us toward futures never seen before—toward lives under the sign of the complete and absolute unleashing of all human forces and beyond, perhaps even at the cost of renouncing humanity itself and art as it has been conceived until now? Or else: to save art—and even more, to save the spirit that wanders among the mysteries of existence—what paths should we take?

In the first case, what we can say with certainty is that contemporary art, more than a muse of hyperstitions, is a parody of cosmic emptiness and of the all-too-human crisis of the present. In the second case, perhaps we must resort to a gesture not desperate, but lucid and radical (a gesture that Dada itself might have liked): stop making art—stop, altogether, with art.

*Quotation from Hans Arp, German Dadaist.

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