Dada 2.pdf

The Work of Art and the Problem

of Politics in Berlin Dada*

BRIGID DOHERTY

“Der Kunstlump” (The Art Scoundrel) is a diatribe by Berlin Dadaists George

Grosz and John Heart Ž eld that appeared in the journal Der Gegner (The Opponent)

in April 1920. Notorious for its “ant i-art” stance, “Der Kunstlump” was written in

response to an appeal by Oskar Kokoschka in which the Expressionist painter and

playwright had beseeched the German public to take measures to ensure the

preservation of the cultural heritage under conditions of civic unrest. In a state-

ment that ran in more than forty German newspapers in March 1920, Kokoschka

implored those involved in violent political con � ict to avoid damaging works of art.

He was responding to the events of March 15, 1920, in Dresden, where, in the wake

of the counterrevolutionary Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch that had overthrown the const i-

tut ional government in Berlin on March 12, fighting had erupted bet ween

Reichswehr troops loyal to the “national dictatorship” of the putschists and work-

ers demonstrating in connection with the general strike that would bring about

the demise of the Kapp government on March 17. 59 persons were killed and 150

wounded during that day’s clash on Dresden’s Postplatz; the battle also sent a stray

bullet into Peter Paul Rubens’s Bathsheba in the nearby Zwinger picture gallery. In

his statement, Kokoschka, who had been appointed professor at the Dresden

academy of art in 1919, pleads with people of all political persuasions to do their

street Ž ghting at a safe distance from any place in which “human culture might

come into danger.” 1

* What follows is a revised version of material prepared for a colloquium on Dada that took place

at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., on

November 2, 2001. The argument sketched here will appear in its complete form in my book, Montage:

The Body and the Work of Art in Dada, Brecht, and Benjamin (Berkeley: University of California Press, forth-

coming). I am grateful to Elizabeth Cropper and Leah Dickerman for the invitation to participate in the

recent series of Dada colloquia at CASVA, and for their insights offered on those occasions and others;

thanks also to my fellow colloquia participants. This essay is for Tim Clark.

1. Oskar Kokoschka, cited in George Grosz and John Heart Ž eld, “Der Kunstlump,” Der Gegner

10–12 (n.d. [Apr il 1920]; reprint, Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1979), p. 52. On the subject of what came to be

called the “Kunstlump-Debatte,” see Walter Fähnders and Martin Rector, eds., Literatur im Klassenkampf.

Zur prolet arisch-revolutionären Literaturtheorie 1919–1923: Eine Dokumentation (Munich: Carl Hanser

Verlag, 1971), pp. 43–50; Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in

Crisis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 65–69; Beth Irwin Lewis, George Grosz: Art

OCTOBER

“Der Kunst lump” dismisses Kokoschka’s plea and urges “vigorous resistance”

to the Expressionist’s position on the part of all those “who, knowing that bullets

tear human beings to pieces, feel it a tr iv ial matter when bullet s damage

paintings.” 2 Indeed “Der Kunst lump” takes its disagreement with Kokoschka a

step further, as Grosz and Heart Ž eld announce: “ We greet with pleasure the fact that

bullets whiz into the galleries and palaces, into the masterpieces of Rubens, instead of into the

homes of the poor in the workers’ districts. ” 3 A 1920 montage-painting by the Dresden-

based artist and close associate of the Berlin Dadaists, Otto Dix, shows an actual

copy of Kokoschka’s published plea lying in a gutter not far from a blind and limbless

World War I veteran attempting to sell matches on a Dresden sidewalk as the legs

of indifferent middle-class citizens wearing seamed stockings and spotless button-

up spats hurry past . With its paper torn and its text truncated, Kokoschka’s appeal

as pasted into the painting echoes the damaged condition of the match- selling

veteran’s body, and vice versa: a dachshund raises his leg before the mutilated

matchseller, sprinkling him with piss as the gutter’s Ž lthy puddles soak the paper

of Kokoschka’s st atement. Dix’s display of contempt for Kokoschka’s appeal

responds to the Expressionist’s plea for the protection of works of art as if that

plea implied a corollary disregard for the situation of human beings. Understood

in the terms of Dix’s crude and vivid critique, it is as though Kokoschka was asking

to see works of art treated as if they were persons, and was doing so, moreover, in a

context in which human beings—for example, the workers who had demonstrated

on Dresden’s Postplatz—felt compelled to risk their lives in demanding recognition

of their own personhood and the rights it was said to entail in the representational

democracy of a federal republic. Confronted with a situation in which the collective

and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 93–95; Roland

März, ed., John Heart Ž eld: Der Schnitt entlang der Zeit: Selbstzeugnisse, Erinnerungen, Interpretationen. Eine

Dokumentation (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1981), pp. 102–28; Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism:

Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918–19 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp.

240–41; and Hubert van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus: Dada in Zurich und Berlin (Heidelberg:

Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999), pp. 390–98.

Grosz and Heart Ž eld, “Der Kunstlump,” p. 53. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

Ibid., p. 55. Italics in original.

Otto Dix. The Matchseller I . 1920.

New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Photo courtesy Erich Lessing/Art

Resource, NY.

The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada

demands of human beings for self-determination faced military suppression and

in turn themselves sometimes took the form of violent resistance, Kokoschka calls for

the protection of works of art as objects of a shared heritage at risk of destruction in

a dangerous public sphere. The Dadaists, by contrast, demand the transformation of

the social and political conditions against which the workers were or iginally

demonstrating and of which they take Kokoschka’s text itself to be symptomatic, not

because Kokoschka lends his support to the radical, antidemocratic right (he does

nothing of the kind), but because instead of standing on the side of demonstrating

workers, he speaks up on behalf of masterpieces. That the realization of demands

such as t hose voiced by the worker s on Dresden’s Postplat z might happe n

occasionally to involve the destruction of works of art does not concern the Dadaists,

except insofar as they are pleased to see bullets Ž red in the midst of monuments and

museums rather than in neighborhoods where workers make their homes.

Many contemporary readers of “Der Kunst lump” understood the text as a

call to cultural vandalism, and it was widely condemned on those grounds, including

in the communist press. In a reply to Grosz and Heartfield published in the

German Communist party organ, Die rote Fahne , in early June 1920, the newspaper’s

cultural editor, Gertrud Alexander, character ized Kokoschka’s original plea as

typical of the cynicism of modern artists, agreeing with the Dadaists that it was in

principle preferable that a precious painting rather than a human life should be

damaged or destroyed by a bullet, stray or otherwise. But to greet the destruction of

art with pleasure was another matter, and the bulk of Alexander’s response was taken

up with refuting the Dadaists’ declaration to that effect. Culture, for Alexander, was

made up of things of eternal value, things that in a revolutionary society would

represent nothing less than the cultural patrimony of the proletariat as it came to

power, a “past beauty” that would have to be (and deserved to be) maintained to

serve as a source of pleasure and edi Ž cation for the “new human being” in advance

of the production of a postrevolutionary and properly proletarian culture. 4

Grosz and Heart Ž eld do not value “past beauty.” Instead they write derisively of

how “sculptures preach the � ight of feelings and thoughts, away from the unbearable

circumstances of life on earth, to the moon and the stars, to the sky.” The work of art

that provides an occasion for such � ight is, to the Dadaists, a tendentious work,

grounded in a theory of art that they link to their present historical moment, which

they believe to be ruled by a cynical and violent politics: “The machine guns of social

democracy have their way as they aim to transport the disenfranchised to a better

afterlife.” 5 In other words, the way the work of art transports its viewer to a place

apart from the everyday world (to the moon and the stars, to the sky) provides an

aesthetic counterpart to the way the � edgling Social Democracy of the early Weimar

Republic suppresses left-wing political activity with military power and thereby, as if

4. G. G. L. [Gertrud Alexander], “Herrn John Heart Ž eld und George Grosz,” Die Rote Fahne 99

( June 9, 1920). Reprinted in Manfred Brauneck, ed., Die Rote Fahne: Kritik, Theorie, Feuilleton, 1918–1933

(Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1973), p. 65.

Grosz and Heart Ž eld, “Der Kunstlump,” p. 51.

OCTOBER

bene Ž cently, delivers its victims to a better world beyond ( ein reineres Jenseits ). (The

Dadaists have in mind the various and prolonged states of emergency enacted by

the Social Democratic administration of President Friedrich Ebert in response to

perceived threats of uprisings on the left, along with the deployment against the left

of troops including not only the Reichswehr but also right-wing paramilitary out Ž ts

and the infamous Free Corps.) It is almost as though the Dadaists’ scenario of

political violence as salvation should itself be seen as an aesthetic experiment, a

travesty of the aestheticization of social problems elsewhere in modernism. Indeed

the next line of “Der Kunst lump” asserts the tendentiousness at work when “a

weakling like Rainer Maria Rilke, himself propped up by the perfumed leisure class,

writes: ‘Poverty is a great glow from within’ ( The Book of Hours ) ( “ Armut ist ein

großer Glanz von innen” [ Stundenbuch ]).” 6

“What did the Dadaists do?” ask Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde in their 1925

pamphlet “Die Kunst ist in Gefahr!” (Art is in Danger!). “They said, it does not matter

whet her one let s out some huffing and puffing— or a sonne t by Petr arch,

Shakespeare, or Rilke, whether one gilds boot heels or carves madonnas: there

will still be shoot ing, there will still be pro Ž teering, there will still be starvation,

there will still be lying; to what end the entire enterprise of art?” The Dadaists’

only mistake, they say, “was involving ourselves seriously with so-called art in the

Ž rst place. Dadaism, carried out with caterwauling and derisive laughter, was a

breakout from a narrow, arrogant, overrated milieu that , hovering in the air

between the classes, did not recognize any shared responsibility for the life of the

collective.” 7 Five years earlier, in “Der Kunstlump,” Grosz and Heart Ž eld had repu-

diated works of art that “preach the � ight of feelings and thoughts, away from the

unbearable circumstances of life on earth, to the moon and the stars, to the sky.”

In “Die Kunst ist in Gefahr!,” Grosz and Heart Ž eld’s younger brother Herzfelde,

poet, founder of the Malik-Verlag, and author of the “Introduct ion to the First

International Dada Fair” (1920), explain that what Berlin Dada accomplished

amounted to an assertion of the effective equivalence—in the face of violence,

exploitation, hunger, and hypocrisy— of lyric poetry and the mere breath that

const itutes the bodily medium of its speaking. Which is to say that , as far as

engagement in the contemporar y world was concerned, giving voice to a sonnet

by Rilke was no different from letting one’s pant ing respiration be heard. (The

em-dash that separates the huf Ž ng and puf Ž ng from the sonnets dramatizes typo-

graphically the Dadaist s’ claim of equivalence between those t wo effects of

breath.) “Die Kunst ist in Gefahr!” goes on to acknowledge that the Dadaists’

repudiations and assertions, and their breaking out of a milieu that Herzfelde in

his “Introduction to the First International Dada Fair” called “the clique of trend-

setters,” 8

were part of an earnest involvement with art—or, rather, “so-called art.”

6. Ibid.

7. George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde, Die Kunst ist in Gefahr! (Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1925),

pp. 23–24.

See Wieland Herzfelde, “Introduction to the First International Dada Fair,” on pp. 100–04.

The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada

Made to the accompaniment of the Dadaist s’ own howling and sneering, the

“products” 9 of Berlin Dada body forth that involvement by enacting allegorically,

in works that often include reproductions of masterpieces, the destruction of

objects of “so-called art,” things belonging to a category whose meaningfulness

and actuality the Dadaists believed had been vitiated under the particular con-

dit ions of t heir histor ical moment . As Grosz and Herzfelde make clear, the

Dadaists’ dissatisfaction with works of “so-called art”—with sculptures, for example,

that “preach the � ight of feelings and thoughts, away from the unbearable circum-

stances of life on earth, to the moon and the st ar s, to the sky”— is ethical in

origin: it represents their abhorrence, Ž rst, of the indifference of artists to the situ-

at ion of human beings in the surrounding social world and, second, of the

hypocrisy of those artists who depict aspects of that social world with a pathos that

for the Dadaists could not fail to be empty, indeed ethically fraudulent, despite, or

rather as a consequence of, its potential aesthetic effects, which for the Dadaists

are predicated on, and serve further to reproduce, an abdication of shared social

responsibility. In each case, artists are described as lacking a stable place among the

social classes: in “Der Kunstlump,” the Dadaists’ repudiation of Rilke’s mysti Ž cation

of poverty is made vivid in their description of the poet as himself “propped up by

the perfumed leisure classes,” while in “Die Kunst ist in Gefahr!,” contemporary

artists are described as “hovering in the air between the classes.”

Alexander’s cr itique of “Der Kunst lump” in Die Rote Fahne provoked a

defense of Grosz and Heart Ž eld from Julian Gumperz, coeditor (with Herzfelde)

of Der Gegner and future member of the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung.

Alexander responded in turn with an article published in two installments on

June 23 and 24, 1920, just days before the opening of the First International Dada

Fair in Berlin. 10 In this second round of criticism, Alexander describes bourgeois

so ciet y a s f o rev er sub jec t to an im puls e t ow a rd “ f lig ht f r om r ealit y”

( Wirklichkeits � ucht ), a phenomenon exempli Ž ed by bourgeois responses to works

of art. 11 In Alexander’s estimation, the proletariat, unlike the bourgeoisie, does

not readily give itself over to Wirklichkeits � ucht , above all because proletar ians

lack the leisure to devote themselves to fanciful contemplation. Nonetheless, she

writes that “it is our responsibility [that is, the responsibility of the vanguard

Communist intelligentsia] to ensure that the proletarian does not become cap-

tive to � ights from reality,” and to do so not by destroying the works of art that

so often play a part in scenarios of Wirklichkeits � ucht , but by “eradicating bourgeois

society,” that is, by radically transforming social relations and thereby (necessar-

ily) alter ing relat ions bet ween hu man being s an d works of art . 12

“ When

9. On the Dadaists’ use of the term “products,” see my introduction to Herzfelde, p. 93.

10. Ibid., pp. 93–99.

11. Alexander, “Kunst, Vandalismus und Proletariat,” Die Rote Fahne 112 ( June 24, 1920). Reprinted

in Brauneck, ed., Die Rote Fahne , p. 73.

12.

Ibid.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: