Schwitters and Merz
Dada had no headquarters and no membership card, and nowhere is that clearer than in the smaller German cities, where it splintered into private versions that barely resembled each other. Not everyone even got to be a Dadaist. Kurt Schwitters, working in Hannover, wanted into Berlin Dada and was blackballed: the Berliners thought his art was too pretty, too crafted, too bourgeois to count. So he did the most Dada thing imaginable. Rejected for caring about beauty, he founded his own one-man movement, made it out of garbage, and called it Merz. The name is pure Dada accident: a meaningless fragment, the middle of the words “Commerz und Privatbank” (a German bank), which had turned up on a scrap of paper in one of his collages. He liked the sound and named his entire life’s work after a piece of a bank’s signage.
Merz meant art made from literal garbage. Where Berlin Dada cut up the glossy printed press, Schwitters worked from the street and the gutter: tram tickets, candy wrappers, bits of wood and wire, broken junk, glued and nailed into collages and assemblages (an assemblage being a collage that comes off the wall into three dimensions). His most ambitious work no longer exists. Starting in the mid-1920s he built the Merzbau inside his own house, an architectural sculpture of white plaster grottoes and niches that he never stopped adding to, until it broke through walls and the ceiling and ate through the building, a single sculpture you could walk inside. It was destroyed in an Allied air raid on Hannover in October 1943, and only photographs survive. The most extraordinary Dada object became, fittingly for a movement born out of the First World War, a casualty of the Second.
Enter past the urinal
A short train ride away, in Cologne, another cell ran the rawest Dada show of all. Max Ernst, Hans Arp and Johannes Baargeld staged an exhibition in April 1920 in the courtyard of a pub. Visitors had to enter past the men’s urinal, where a girl in a child’s communion dress recited lewd verse. One of Ernst’s sculptures was displayed with a hatchet attached, an open invitation for the public to smash it. The police shut the show for obscenity, then dropped the charges when the supposedly obscene image turned out to be a four-hundred-year-old print of Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve. The show reopened in triumph. Ernst’s own work here pointed somewhere new. His 1920 collage The Hat Makes the Man stacks rows of catalogue-cut hats into wobbly, faintly human, faintly absurd columns. It is funny, but it is also dreamlike in a way the cooler Dada objects were not, an early sign of where Ernst was heading.
Letting the scraps fall where they may
Running through Zurich and Cologne both was Hans Arp, and his great contribution was the third durable Dada idea after the readymade and photomontage: chance. The story is that Arp, frustrated with a drawing, tore it up and let the pieces drop to the floor, then noticed that the way they fell pleased him more than anything he had arranged on purpose, so he glued them down where they had landed. His Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance(1916–17) is a field of pale torn-paper squares scattered with no pattern you can name, a snapshot of where gravity left the scraps. Handing the picture to accident sounds like the least effort possible, and that is half the point: if the artist’s skilled judgment was the thing that made art, then deliberately removing it was the perfect Dada sabotage. (One honest caveat: the actual collage looks rather tidy and balanced, which strongly suggests Arp kept a hand in. Even Dada’s purest surrender to randomness had a human thumb on the scale.) Chance as a working method was now loose in art, and it would run straight into Surrealist automatism, John Cage’s music and Fluxus decades later.
So by 1921 Dada had no single style and barely a single city. It was a readymade in New York, a political photomontage in Berlin, a cathedral of trash in Hannover, an axe in a Cologne courtyard, and a pile of dropped paper in Zurich. It was less a movement than a shared refusal, wearing a different costume in every town, which made it very hard to kill and, as it turned out, very hard to hold together.