ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
started to scatter and as a parting token they were offered surprise envelopes
containing phrases, portraits, visiting cards, bits of fabric, landscapes,
obscene drawings, even five franc notes defaced with erotic symbols. The
Dada group then decamped to a nearby café to appraise the event. According
to Michel Sanouillet, at this point collective depression set in: Breton
had wanted the event to be threatening and subversive, but it had fallen
into a rut – through a lack of preparation, because certain people hadn’t
turned up (notably a porcelain repairer called Joliboit and a peanut seller
who were supposed to comprise an ‘orchestra’), and in part because the
public ‘never ceased to play the Dada game’. 104
The latter point is crucial, along with Breton’s numerous observations
in ‘Artificial Hells’, his post- mortem of the event written on 20 May (one
month after the excursion), that the public had ‘acquired a taste for our
performances’ and that ‘a successful man, or simply one who is no longer
attacked, is a dead man’. 105 Breton seems to imply that the group’s search
for a new relationship between performer and audience was difficult to
attain due to the latter’s entrenched expectation of (and desire for) provocation.
As Richter reported, ‘it was obvious that the public was now ready
to accept “a thousand repeat performances” of the evening at the Salle
Gaveau . . . At all costs, they must be prevented from accepting shock as a
work of art.’ 106 The extent to which audience enthusiasm for Dada performance
had become ossified can be seen in Tzara’s recollection of the Salle
Gaveau on 26 May 1920: ‘For the first time in our experience we were
assaulted, not only with eggs, cabbages and pennies, but even with beef
steaks. It was a very great success. The public was extremely Dadaist. We
had already said that the true Dadaists are against Dada.’ 107 He goes on to
note that at another event at Théâtre de l’Oeuvre the same month, ‘enthusiastic
members of the audience had brought musical instruments to
interrupt us’. For Breton, by contrast, this mode of event had exhausted its
potential and did not need to keep being repeated; the tactic of audience
provocation was rapidly becoming ‘stereotyped’ and ‘fossilised’. 108 The
Parisian public, Breton noted, had ‘made itself increasingly our accomplice’,
goading them into more scandal, to the point where ‘we ended up
gauging our appeal by the cries made against us’. 109
Henceforth, Breton became more interested in rethinking Dada events
as less driven towards the production of scandal:
Dada events certainly involve a desire other than to scandalize. Scandal,
for all its force (one may easily trace it from Baudelaire to the present),
would be insufficient to elicit the delight that one might expect from an
artificial hell. One should also keep in mind the odd pleasure obtained in
‘taking to the street’ or ‘keeping one’s footing,’ so to speak . . . By
conjoining thought with gesture, Dada has left the realm of shadows to
venture onto solid grounds. 110
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