Artists’ Corner-In The
Aftermath Of World War I- Dada Takes A Stab At Visually Understanding A Broken World
After the Bloodbath Which Mowed Down The Flower Of The European Youth
By Lenny Lynch
I don’t know that much
about the Dada movement that swept through Europe in the early part of the 20th
century in response to the creation of modern industrial society that was going
full steam and the modern industrial scale death and destruction such mass
scale techniques brought upon this good green earth by World War I. (Foreshadowed
it is agreed by the industrial carnage at places like Cold Harbor in the
American Civil War, the butchery of the Franco-Prussian War and subsequent
river of blood by its own rulers of the Paris Commune and the Boer War.) The
war to end all wars which came up quite short of that goal but did decimate the
flower of the European youth, including vast swaths of the working class. Such
massive blood-lettings for a precious few inches of soil like at the Battle of
the Somme took humankind back more than a few steps when the nightmare
ended-for a while with the Armistice on November 11, 1918. An event which in
observing its centennial every serious artist should consider putting to the
paint. And every military veteran to take heart including the descendants of
those artists who laid down their heads in those muddy wretched trenches.
Should reclaim the idea behind Armistice Day from the militarists who could
learn no lessons except up the kill and fields of fire ratios.
I don’t know much but
this space over this centennial year of the last year of the bloody war, the
armistice year 1918 which stopped the bloodletting will explore that
interesting art movement which reflected the times, the bloody times. First up
to step up George Groz, step up and show your stuff, show how you see the
blood-lusted world after four years of burning up the fields of sweet earth
Europe making acres of white-crossed places where the sullen, jaded, mocked,
buried youth of Europe caught shells and breezes. Take one look Republican Automatons. Look at the urban
environment, look at those tall buildings dwarfing mere mortal man and woman,
taking the measure of all, making them think, the thinking ones about having to
run, run hard away from what they had built, about fear fretting that to
continue would bury men and women without names, without honor either.
Look too at honor
denied, look at the handless hand, the legless leg, the good German flag, the
Kaiser’s bloody medal, hard against the urban sky. The shaky republic, the
republic without honor, shades of the murders of the honest revolutionary Liebknecht
walking across Potsdam Plaza to go say no, no to the war budget and grab a
hallowed cell the only place for a man of the people in those hard times and
gallant Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, mixed in with thoughts of
renegade burned out soldiers ready for anything. Those former were forever your brethren and breathe. Weimar, weak-kneed and
bleeding, would shake and one George
Groz would know that, would draw this picture that would tell the real story of
why there was a Dada-da-da-da-da movement to chronicle the times if not to fight
on the barricades against that beast from which we had to run.
Step up Max Ernst and
show us your stuff, show us what four fucking years of war did to the brain. Ernst was drafted and served both on the Western and
the Eastern front. Such was the devastating effect of the war on the artist
that in his autobiography he referred to his time in the army thus: "On
the first of August 1914 M[ax].E[rnst]. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of
November 1918." How could one any longer draw bowls of fruits or natty portraits
of high society fashion or even peaceful fishing villages like their forbears. The
times were out of joint, connected only by the most tenuous thin reed bonds.
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