Dada: Art and Anti-Art (World of Art)
by Hans Richter
It Is Not Only Possible To Achieve Something Beautiful, But Very Easy
Where and how Dada began is almost as difficult to determine as Homers
birthplace, writes Hans Richter, who was associated with the movement
from its early days. Here, through selections from key manifestos and
other documents of the time, he records Dadas history, from its beginnings
in wartime Zurich to its collapse in the Paris of the 1920s. Dada led on
from Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, and in turn prepared the way
for Surrealism. It was enlivened by bizarre and extravagant personalities,
notably Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel
Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, whose contributions are fully
discussed. The spirit of Dada reappeared in the 1960s in movements such
as Pop Art, which are surveyed in the final section.
Personal Review: Dada: Art and Anti-Art (World of Art) by Hans
Richter
This is one of the most important books of my life, and I know for a fact
that I am far from alone in this. Richter taught me that it is not only possible

to achieve something beautiful, but very easy; you simply have to actually
want to. It is the first book I recommend, lend, or give to a friend; Bradley
Chriss keeps extra copies on hand for those who need to read it; Warren
Fry and David Beris Edwards have both been deeply inspired by it. What I
was officially `taught' concerning Dada, and what I took for accurate for
many years, was essentially that it was the cheeky use of the Readymade,
and was basically synonymous with Marcel Duchamp. When I finally
realised that there may have been something to it that I had missed, a
particular image recurred to me, one that had been flipped past for not
more than five seconds in a slideshow several years earlier, a man inside
a large awkward cardboard costume, looking like a cross between the Tin
Man, a stovepipe, and a lobster, with a very earnest, very direct, and at the
same time very lost look on his face. It was most certainly not Marcel
Duchamp. And I decided that there must be something else, and that I
needed to track it down. Going to the bookstore, Chance--which that day
vouchsafed to me its devious kind of (Anti-)trustworthiness--led me to
Hans Richter. Richter was, in many ways, the most grounded of the core
Dada group; among the least `absurd', the least polemic, and most
importantly in his later role as scribe of the movement, the least histrionic
and least given to post-mortem internecine strife. He was also, and
perhaps for these very reasons, perhaps the nicest. The result is that
Dada: Art and Anti-Art is not, like Ball's history, one of otherworldly
mysticism; like Huelsenbeck's, one of political upheaval and ideological
combat; like Tzara's version, one of impersonal destruction of all personal
and social guarantors of subjective comfort; like Duchamp's, one of formal
innovation or `artistic' concerns. Richter's history is the history of a group of
friends, some of whom had never personally met, who galvanized that
friendship into a force that profoundly transformed hundreds of lives, made
all of those other histories thinkable and achievable, and in the process
established the groundwork for a programme of joyous, deep-seated social
revolt upon which we are still attempting build new ways of living; and, as
Richter shows, they did this simply by actually caring. The most essential
thing to be gleaned from Art and Anti-Art is not anything unique to Dada, it
is the realisation that the Institution has somehow managed to dupe us all
into thinking that we need it; Richter, in his generous, humble, unassuming
way, taught me that a `movement' is not something that one assembles
like an army of ready-made Heroes to launch on the grand battleground of
Art History; it is the experience of a few dedicated friends who love nothing
more than what they are doing, finding other dedicated friends who all
make each other into something none could have imagined on their own,
until one day they all look around, realise with astonishment what has
come into existence through them, and get back to what they love to do
together, as that intangible thing that has evoked itself between them
continues to grow.
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