ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
point of quasi- anthropological investigation, appropriating a social form
and subverting its conventional associations. (This principle was repeated
three years later in the Bureau of Surrealist Research [1924] – an office for
meetings, discussions, interviews and the collection of information about
dreams from the public – and in the Surrealist group’s nocturnal strolls
around the city.) In ‘Artificial Hells’, Breton defended his position against
Picabia, and stated a reorientation of Dada towards moral and political
goals. What he meant by this reorientation was made more evident in the
second major event of the Dada Season, the Barrès Trial.
Held on Friday 13 May 1921, the Barrès Trial was advertised as a hearing
of the author Maurice Barrès (1862– 1923), whose book Un Homme Libre
(1889), had been a great influence on Breton and Aragon in their youth.
Barrès had advocated anarchism, freedom and total individualism, but
more recently had changed his colours and turned right- wing, nationalist
and bourgeois. The aim of the trial was, in Breton’s words, ‘to determine
the extent to which a man could be held accountable if his will to power led
him to champion conformist values that diametrically opposed the ideas of
his youth’. 114 Like the excursion to Saint Julien- le- Pauvre, the event
annexed and détourned a social form (the trial), and involved the participation
of the public, now with a more active role, since the fliers advertising
the event invited twelve people to apply to sit on the jury. 115
The tribunal took place in the Salle des Sociétés Savantes, with the Dada
group dressed up in the ceremonial outfits of the Palais de Justice (white
robes with clerical caps – red for the defence and black for the prosecution).
Each member of the group had a specific role – defence, public prosecution,
president, a stream of witnesses, and so on. Barrès himself was invited to
attend, but declined, claiming that he had a prior engagement; the group
produced a surrogate of him in the form of a tailor’s dummy. The photograph
documenting the event doesn’t record the twelve jurors (who
apparently sentenced Barrès to twenty years of hard labour), nor does it
give any impression of the space and the audience. Even so, the event’s
appropriation of the social form of a trial and its non- confrontational collaboration
with the public point to a distinct break with cabaret- based
performances such as the Salle Gaveau. The transcription of the proceedings
indicates a degree of self- searching on Breton’s part: he seems to be
attempting to understand Dada’s own position, politically and aesthetically,
through the case of Barrès, the radical young thinker turned President of the
League of Patriots. The resulting discussion was notably less absurdist than
Dada performances to that point, including the visit to Saint Julien- le-
Pauvre. As is made clear by the first line of the Acte d’accusation du Procès
Barrès, the time had come for Dada to adopt values other than that of nihilism,
which had characterised Zurich Dada’s embrace of nonsense as a refusal
of the nationalist rhetoric of the First World War: ‘Dada, deciding that it’s
time to give its spirit of negation an executive power, and determined above
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