In a recent piece for Red Wedge Adam Turl discusses the origin, development, and subsequent art historical significance of Dada, calling it “one of the most historically important art movements of the 20th century.” Turl is surely right in characterizing Dada this way, as the provocative hijinks and derisive works of leading Dadaists such as George Grosz, Hugo Ball, Hannah Höch and Marcel Duchamp remain influential to this day. But I do not think that Turl’s approach tells us very much about the movement, given its lack of detail and woolly terminology. How, for example, are we to apprehend what Turl refers to as art’s “social-spiritual function”? What does this even mean?
“Art wants to be liberated,” Turl argues, “and that is why so many of the artists of the 20th century aligned themselves — at some level — with radical political ideas.” Art, strictly speaking, does not want anything of course, because ideas and objects are inanimate; Turl’s suggestion that 20th century artists aligned themselves with radical political ideas and movements in order to secure the “liberation” of art is in my view similarly misleading, for it assumes that artists’ goal is to win autonomy for their art. While most artists doubtless wish to live their lives as artists unencumbered by the constraints of market forces, it does not follow that these artists would also prefer their art to be dissociated from particular contexts or freed from institutional frameworks. This was certainly the case for the Berlin Dadaists, whose opposition to the notion that art belonged to a separate experiential realm distinct from the cacophony of everyday life was directly tied to their attempt to garner a working class audience.
German soldiers and workers marching in Berlin, November 1918
Winning an audience for Dada among Berlin’s working classes had potential material benefits. Tectonic changes following Germany’s industrialization in the 1860s/1870s increased access to education and allowed more young people (mostly men, a few women) to become skilled artists around the turn of the century — in the 1907 national census over 8500 people characterized themselves as “artists,” a significant jump from prior years. [1] However the power of conservative academies, limited number of commercial galleries, and general lack of exposure reduced most artists to living hand-to-mouth, particularly if they chose to work in a “modern” style. Rare were the artists like George Grosz who could depend on an adroit dealer. [2] Moreover, as Robin Lenman argues in his study of the early 20th century German art world, inflationary pressures that developed during the war and continued through the early 1920s inordinately affected the Bildungsbürgertum (cultured middle classes), whose financial support had propped up the pre-war market for visual art. [3] To obtain the acclaim and financial backing of the German working classes — or else a state-enterprise they controlled—would have been a great boon to artists and gone some distance toward overcoming these concerns. Such a solution was not outside the realm of possibility in the revolutionary years following World War I. In Russia, for instance, the victorious Bolsheviks abolished the private dealer system in 1918, making the young workers’ state the sole patron of contemporary art. That same year the state spent twenty-six million rubles on art, a considerable sum at that time. [4]
Addressing a working class audience necessitated the use of materials and points of view that registered with workers’ everyday experience, which typically excluded the rarefied world of art exhibitions. Visual culture for lower class Berliners comprised such unremarkable items as the illustrated newspaper read with friends during a lunch break, the advertisements littering the city, and the melodrama film shown in the back of a loud, smoky neighborhood bar. The Dadaists’ incorporation of photographs, newspaper clippings, and random text, in combination with their focus on crippled soldiers, anarchic cityscapes, broken homes, twisted men, women, and machines, was a conscious attempt to present a critical realism that spoke to the visual reality workers witnessed on a day to day basis. Such techniques likewise sought to present workers with a cultural alternative to the labor movement.
The German Social Democratic Party, along with its trade union affiliates, had long held mass media to be a threat to class consciousness, viewing workers as susceptible to potentially enfeebling and immoral influences, particularly women. In an article entitled “Against the Stupefying of Women in the Cinema,” published before the war, a party member writes:
For Social Democrats, the cinema’s most harmful effect has to be that it turns the proletariat away from the political and economic efforts of its class, that it lames the will never to rest in the struggle for freedom, that it steals time from men and women, distracting them from their continuing education, that it lays waste to the minds of our growing youth. For this reason, we must turn decidedly against the cinema as it stands today, and not merely against individual films. [5]
Efforts to democratize art and literature, so as to provide workers access to a cultural heritage that had previously been denied them, was paired with the party’s disdain for cultural fare outside the bounds of the labor movement. According to Heinrich Schulz, who along with Clara Zetkin formulated the party’s educational programme in 1906, “[a]rt should help in the class struggle by giving the worker a respite from the noise of battle — but neither too much, nor too often to weaken his political resolve.” [6]
Given the Social Democrats’ hostility toward mass media and narrow conception of art (the Communists were not much better at this time), it seems to me that the Berlin Dadaists hoped to position themselves as representatives and defenders of the workers’ desire for an art that spoke to them as equals. Wieland Herzfelde calls Dada the “Champion of dilettantism” in a text that accompanied the First International Dada Fair, explaining:
Throughout the centuries, the unequal distribution of opportunities for living and developing has produced in the realm of art, as in all other spheres, scandalous circumstances: On the one side a clique of so-called experts and talents that, in part through decades of training, in part through patronage and doggedness, in part through inherited specialized abilities, has monopolized all matters of valuation in art; while on the other side, the mass of human beings with their modest and naïve need to represent, communicate, and constructively transform the idea within themselves and the goings-on in the world around them, has been suppressed by the clique of trendsetters. [7]
Channeling widespread anger towards the German bourgeoisie was another potential means of securing working class support, or so they believed. Various events that preceded the Fair were intentionally provocative so as to elicit the wrath of bourgeois audiences and the authorities, the better to establish the Dadaists’ radical credentials and gain notoriety. In his 1946 autobiography George Grosz recalls yelling “You old heap of shit down there, yes, you with the umbrella, you dumb twit!” at a well-dressed audience member during an early Dada event and nearly all subsequent performances were forcibly terminated by the municipal police or the owners of the venue where they were held to prevent rioting. [8]
In the end the Dadaists failed in their efforts to garner support from the Berlin working classes. Though it was publicized widely, only three hundred or so tickets were sold to the International Dada Fair and there is no way of knowing with any precision how many (if any) of these tickets were purchased by workers—it did not help that the exhibition was located in the fashionable Tiergarten district of the city and that the admission price of 3.3o Marks was rather steep for lower class Berliners. In a review published five days after the Fair opened, Gerturd Alexander, the main cultural critic for the German Communist Party’s daily newspaper Die Rote Fahne, explicitly advised workers not to go, writing:
One could dismiss Dada as being merely deluded or pathological if their works were not so ridiculously small, petty and pathetically irrelevant in comparison with the grand liberation struggle of the proletariat, who alone is serious about taking down bourgeois society. The proletariat will lead and win this struggle without the independent crusade against art and culture undertaken by a bourgeois literary clique. The proletariat has no understanding for such perversities, for which the sensation-seeking bourgeoisie of the west [half of Berlin] will pay. [9]
There are a number of reasons, all open to dispute, as to why Berlin Dada did not succeed in finding an audience among the radicalized working classes. Was it that their provocative works had lost their edge, as a review of the Dada Fair by the prominent satirist Kurt Tucholsky insinuates?[10] Did increasing political differences between members lead to an increasingly incoherent modus operandi? Did the Dadaists fail to reckon with the workers’ near total ambivalence toward modern visual art? Could it be that, like the fate of most every avant-garde movement of the 20th century, we are confronted here with a case of missed connection, an incongruence between support for radical politics and an interest in radical art?
Pursuing such questions necessitates further historical inquiry attuned to the vicissitudes of artistic production and reception. Visual art, in my opinion, is not a spiritual enterprise or somehow “magical,” but is instead a form of communication. As a form of communication it is highly variable, both in terms of what it conveys and what it constitutes, but visual art always puts forward a message of some kind, even if it remains imperceptible. (Barnett Newman and many fellow Abstract Expressionist painters were adamant that their works retained subject matter, in spite of being abstract; Newman went to so as to claim that, if his work were understood properly, “it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism.”[11]) For this reason I would argue that visual art is ultimately a mundane activity. In saying so I in no way intend to belittle the work of individual artists or imply that no works excel beyond their humble origins; rather I am suggesting that, when discussing artworks past or present, we not lose sight of the all too human reality in which art operates, the messy drama of manipulative patrons, supercilious instructors, malicious critics, reactionary connoisseurs, overrated hacks, brown-nosing acolytes, liars, cheats, and buffoons who have always existed alongside those who, day in, day out, struggle to make their artistic labor pay. The Berlin Dadaists may indeed have perceived the revolutionary events that arose in Germany after World War I as a chance to liberate themselves from the influence and decisions of external arbiters, but the autonomy they practiced was not only illusory, it was barren. Without the support of a working class audience (or any substantial audience for that matter), what difference did it make if Dada stood “on the side of the revolutionary proletariat”?
George Grosz (left) and Bertolt Brecht (right)
The Berlin Dadaists never could shake off the taint of being middle class artists, despite their political commitments and embrace of dilettantism (which was only a pretense, for these were trained and highly skilled artists; their works prove it). Much as they tried to downplay and lampoon their own social position, they were never taken seriously as working class equals. “You hate the bourgeoisie not because you are a proletarian, but because you are an artist,” Brecht once told Grosz.[12] Ironically, it was as illustrators, graphic designers, and caricaturists for the German Communist Party and Willi Münzenberg’s numerous cultural ventures that Heartfield, Grosz, Schlichter, and other sometime Dadaists were able to prove their political reliability, gain some financial stability, and reach the working class audience they had sought. Until the party established a centralized agitprop studio in 1926 these artists had considerable leeway regarding the content and form of their work; in fact, the satirical aesthetic employed by these artists during their Dada years more or less became the reigning style for the party for several years in the mid-1920s (much to Gertrud Alexander’s chagrin one imagines). Grosz drifted away from the party after a time, but Heartfield continued to produce posters, book jackets, and newspaper layouts for the party notwithstanding the imbecilic policies and outright falsehoods it propagated into the 1930s. Heartfield seems not to have been particularly bothered or restrained by his art’s lack of autonomy, as he was quite willing to construct images condemning fascism as well as images celebrating the (completely bogus) achievements of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan (both of which are now well-regarded artworks I might add). We may object to Heartfield’s politics, but we would be hard pressed to deny that, for an artist, sacrificing autonomy for popularity and renown, not to mention the stability of guaranteed pay, makes sense.
This raises a series of further questions. If it is not autonomy per se that artists seek, but instead the means for sustaining their practice and reaching an audience, how might this impact our conception of 20th century avant-garde movements? How might it affect our conception of cultural politics and the political significance of art? Finally, as activists committed to the renewal of a viable socialist project we ought to consider how artists might or might not seek to relate to such a project. Do socialist politics resonate with artists’ lives? Do artists radicalize differently than others?
Footnotes
- These changes are discussed by historian Peter Paret in his study of the Wilhemine-era artworld, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1980).
- Grosz’s dealer during the early years of the Weimar Republic was Hans Goltz, who owned a gallery in Munich and published the art magazine Der Ararat. Goltz represented Grosz as far back as 1916, when the artist’s other regular patron was, surprising for an anti-militarist, a wholesaler to the Germany army. Beth Irwin Lewis’ study of Grosz, George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), remains one of the best on this artist during the interwar period, second only to Barbara McCloskey’s, George Grosz and the Commuist Party. Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
- Robin Lenman, Artists and Society in Germany, 1850-1919 (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1997).
- For further details regarding this history see Maria Gogh, “Futurist Museology,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 2 (2003).
- Roland, “Against the Stupefying of Women in the Cinema,” from an unpublished collection of writings on early German cinema edited by Anton Kaes.
- W. L. Guttsman, Workers’ Culture in Weimar Germany. Between Tradition and Commitment. (Oxford; New York: Berg, 1990), 31.
- Wieland Herzfelde, “Introduction to the First International Dada Fair,” trans. Brigid Doherty, October 105 (Summer 2003), 101.
- Quoted in Hanne Bergius, “Dada Triumphs!” Dada Berlin, 1917-1923: Artistry of Polarities, Montages-Metamechanics-Manifestations, trans. Brigitte Pichon (New Haven, Connecticut: G. K. Hall & Co., 2003), 52. This book is the translation of Bergius’s earlier Montage und Metamechanik. Dada Berlin — Artistik von Polaritäten(Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2000).
- Gertrud Alexander, “Dada (Austellung am Lützowufer 13, Kunstsalon Buchard,” Die Rote Fahne, July 25, 1920, reprinted in Die Rote Fahne: Kritik, Theorie, Feuilleton. 1918-1933., ed. Manfred Brauneck (München: Fink, 1973), 77.
- “The exhibition itself looks like a messy junkshop. A fat stuffed sailor hangs on the ceiling and looks down blessedly from upon the turmoil/mob of old hatboxes, cardboard, rusted nails, very improperly placed dentures and speckled paintings below. It is somewhat quiet in the small exhibition, and no one is outraged anymore. Dada — big deal.” Kurt Tucholsky, “Dada,” Berliner Tageblatt, July, 20, 1920, reprinted in Dada Berlin. Texte, Manifeste, Aktionen., ed. Karl Riha (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH & Co., 1977), 125-136.
- Newman’s varied statements on art and society can be found in Barnett Newman. Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York: Knopf, 1990).
- Quoted in David Clay Large, Berlin (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 200.
Grant Mandarino is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at the University of Michigan.