The ringmaster arrives
The last great Dada chapter, and the one that ended it, was Paris. In 1920 Tristan Tzara moved there and was welcomed like a prophet by a group of young French writers gathered around a journal called Littérature: André Breton, the most serious-minded and imperious of them, a born organizer who wanted a cause to lead; Louis Aragon; Philippe Soupault; and the poet Paul Éluard. For a couple of years Paris Dada was the loudest avant-garde act in the city, almost pure provocation, much of it staged as theater meant to detonate the audience. Man Ray, over from New York, fit right in. On the afternoon of his first Paris show he built an object he called Gift: he glued a single neat row of fourteen pointed tacks down the smooth sole of a clothes-iron. The one surface whose entire job is to be flat and harmless now shreds whatever it touches, a domestic tool turned useless and faintly menacing, and the title twists the knife: he made it as a gift.
The trial of a living man
The strangest event of Paris Dada was a mock trial. In May 1921 the group put a real, living, famous French writer, the nationalist Maurice Barrès, on trial in absentia for “crimes against the security of the spirit,” with Breton presiding as a black-robed judge, other Dadaists as prosecution and defense, and a dummy standing in for the accused. But look at who was running it. A solemn judge, a structured trial, a real political target, a verdict to be reached: this was Dada being organized, serious, even moralistic, and that was Breton’s instinct, not Tzara’s. The trial that was supposed to mock authority had quietly built a little authority of its own, and that small crack would split the movement open.
Two men who could not share a room
The split was, at bottom, a disagreement about what Dada was for. Breton wanted to turn it into a serious instrument pointed at remaking art and the mind. Tzara wanted it to stay pure negation, pure nonsense, an attack with no program and no future, because a program and a future were precisely the bourgeois things Dada existed to refuse. To Tzara, a Dada with goals was a contradiction in terms. To Breton, a Dada with no goals was a machine that could only smash, never build, and he was tired of smashing. In 1922 Breton tried to organize a grand “Congress of Paris” to federate the whole modern spirit and decide, in an orderly way, where art should go next, a thoroughly un-Dada idea, and Tzara refused to take part. Breton attacked him in print, reviving the old Zurich feud over whether Tzara had even invented Dada. It came to blows the next year: in July 1923, at a soirée built around Tzara’s play The Gas Heart, Breton and his allies stormed the stage mid-show, a brawl broke out that reportedly left one performer with a broken arm, and Tzara called the police on his former comrades. You cannot run a movement that ends in its leaders calling the police on each other. Dada in Paris, and effectively everywhere, was finished by 1923, killed less by the bourgeois world it had attacked than by its own argument about whether nonsense could be put to serious use.