Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

artificial hells
divisions until August 1922 when the group dissolved. 91 The Dada Season
belongs to the second of these three phases, and denotes a period of fracture
within the group; specifi cally, it testifi es to increased tension between
Breton, Tzara and Francis Picabia. In the light of contemporary debates
around collectivity, it is worth noting that Dada saw itself as a collection of
individuals united by opposition to the same causes (war, nationalism, etc.)
but little else. As Breton explained,
Everyone insists on using words like group, leader of a group, discipline.
Some people even say that, under the pretence of stressing individuality,
Dada is really a danger to individuality. They do not understand for a
moment that it is our differences that unite us. Our common resistance to
artistic and moral laws gives us only momentary satisfaction. We are very
well aware that, beyond and above it, the individual imagination retains its
total liberty – and that this, even more than the movement itself, is Dada. 92
In this ongoing attachment to the ‘individual imagination’, Dada also
betrayed its Romantic roots, even while it attempted – without huge success
– to reach out to the working class. For example, in February 1920 the
group held discussions at the Club au Faubourg, where Dada was explained
to more than 3,000 workers and intellectuals, and at the Université Populaire
du Faubourg de Saint- Antoine, where they had been invited to give a
public presentation of their activities. 93 Hans Richter reports that
this event took place in a markedly civilised atmosphere. Tzara’s Dada
style may have been a little cramped by his respect for the working class;
provocations were avoided at the outset. Here, as in Berlin, Dada showed
itself to be an anti- bourgeois movement which had a certain feeling of
solidarity with the anti- bourgeois working class. 94
Even so, he adds, ‘the Dadaists failed to convince the workers’, since the
latter found it hard to stomach the way in which the artists ‘consigned
Napoleon, Kant, Cézanne, Marx and Lenin to the same scrap- heap’. 95
The Dada Season therefore tried to take a different tack. The fi rst part of
the Season involved ‘Excursions and Visits’, projecting Dada events into a
new type of public realm beyond that of the music halls. The fi rst of these
excursions was scheduled for 14 April 1921 at 3 p.m., meeting in the churchyard
of Saint Julien- le- Pauvre: ‘a deserted, almost unknown church in
totally uninteresting, positively doleful surroundings’. 96 The Surrealist
writer Georges Hugnet described the excursion as an ‘absurd rendez- vous,
mimicking instructive walks, guide à la clé’. 97 The fl iers advertising the
event, which were also published in several newspapers, stated that the
artists wished ‘to set right the incompetence of suspicious guides’ and lead a
series of ‘excursions and visits’ to places that have ‘no reason to exist’.
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