ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
For Breton it was crucial that Dada should enter the public realm, breaking
out of cabaret and theatre conventions to create situations where the public
would be confronted with a new type of artistic action and spectatorship: ‘We
imagined guiding our public to places in which we could hold their attention
better than in a theatre, because the very fact of going there entails a certain
goodwill on their part. The visits, of which Saint- Julien- le- Pauvre was the first
in the series, had absolutely no other pretext.’ 111 This desire for the audience’s
attention implies a serious shift in Dada’s mode of audience relations to that
point, which had been predicated on an antagonistic one- upmanship akin to
the Futurist serate. Rather than operating within the proscenium frame, with
all the connotations of escapism that this connoted, Breton implied that viewers
should find a continuity between the work of art and their lives: ‘taking to
the streets’ would thus be a way to forge a closer connection between art and
life. As such, Breton seemed keen to develop more subtle areas of social
investigation, and to refute the chaotic anarchism that had been the hallmark
of Dada to date. The new direction leaned instead towards more refined and
meaningful forms of participatory experience.
Not that this new direction was unilaterally welcomed by the group. It
was a source of anxiety for Picabia, who considered Dada to have nothing
to do with beliefs of any kind; the use of a churchyard, for example, seemed
to him to announce a ‘political clerical or non- clerical character’. 112 The
event’s press release had nevertheless emphasised a lack of targeted critique:
‘It’s not about a demonstration of anti- clericalism as one would be tempted
to believe, rather a new interpretation of nature applied this time not to art,
but to life.’ 113 This sentiment indicates the degree to which Breton was
moving towards a Surrealist stance: conventional tourism was taken as a
The Maurice Barrès Trial, 1921
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