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Given the tumult of the war, it was indefensible if not impossible
to make art which did not proffer some kind of response to its widespread
destruction and human error. What resulted was an explosive cross-fertilisation
of creativity. Overshadowed by the collapse of any semblance of order or reason
on the world stage, the Dadaists mirrored the chaos and confusion, refracting
back the collision of absurd events by framing their actions through the anti-logic
of chance.
Adopting a methodology of chance was a choice born out of accident rather
than design. Dadaist Hans Arp, fed up with a drawing, tore it up in frustration;
suddenly, the composition he had been looking for appeared to him from torn
scraps of the sketch lying neglected on the floor. Out of doubt and failure
emerged chance, and chance essentially signalled good fortune, possibility,
success and the black humour by which a new art could be sought and made.
Sand paintings, photomontage, collage, automatic writing and Exquisite Corpse - all governed by the unconscious will - stirred up fresh ways of thinking and looking. In Berlin, Dadaists juxtaposed unlikely and bizarre elements from an eclectic range of found material, including images from advertisements, newspapers and local posters, mimicking the frenzied announcements of broadsheets and fly-posted propaganda. Perverting mass media with irreverent, biting social satire and the free association of concepts and images, Dadaist media wrestled out of the straitjacket of received taste and judgement, chancing its luck as part of an enterprise they doubted would last.
Meanwhile, in New York, Man Ray had ‘accidentally’ discovered solarization and Rayograms. Marcel Duchamp co-authored a magazine entitled Rongwrong with Man Ray which played on the fundaments of Dadaist negation and nihilism. The cover depicted ‘the photograph of a matchbox with a vignette of two dogs sniffing each others’ ass’; two wrongs here somehow making a right in Duchamp’s particular vision of the universe…
M. J-E Blanche had predicted that “Dada will survive only by ceasing to be”. By May 1921, Dada’s ‘funeral’ had indeed come to pass: inevitably. For the Parisian André Breton, Dada had become wayward in its aims. Re-writing the rule of the wrong-turn, he stated ‘there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as error: at the most one might speak of a bad bet’. After a fake trial by jury, judge Breton led the formation of the Surrealists, throwing a few old Dada cards on the table for another game by way of his opening gambit.
Robert Desnos’ exclamation that he had ‘developed the habit of laughing uproariously at funerals which serve as my landscape’ still resounded very much with the only psychological response available to Dada during the war. Yet the Surrealists were determined to approach failure, error and chance in different ways. Oddly perhaps, Breton and the poet Paul Eluard started their investigation into the notion of chance precisely as that – as an inquiry. Oddly, because they aimed to quantitatively measure the significance of chance to people’s lives and so find out what chance in fact means to people. As if a word connoting random coincidence and fortune could reveal itself in such a way as to be limited or measured. They sent out around 300 questionnaires with two simple questions: “What do you consider the essential encounter of your life? To what extent did this encounter seem to you…to be fortuitous or foreordained?”
What struck the artist Claude Cahun when thinking of such moments was that ‘however irrelevant, disproportionate, and imponderable they appear, I see the necessity of the most fortuitous encounter. And whatever still escapes me is just ignorance.’ The poet Louis Aragon agreed with Breton that chance gives way to the marvellous, the moment of astonishment and epiphany which for the Surrealists replaced the horror and nihilism expressed by Dada. Suzanne Césaire described the marvellous as ‘the freed image, dazzling and beautiful…chance mastered and recognised, the mystery now a friend and helpful’.
Yet Aragon came to realise that ‘for a time I was at the mercy of these surprises, like a tourist at the mercy of sites and monuments. But one fine day the surprise element itself became idiotic….Do you realise I know the secret of the greatest adventures? The intoxication, the feeling of being out of one’s depth in a fairy-tale atmosphere…’. For him, the secret did not reside in formulaic strategies obtainable by social-science style questionnaires. Happy accidents, or the mechanics of chance, could not be socially engineered, for this would obviously make them anything but accidental. As soon as you make a methodological habit out of predetermining chance then the margin of error becomes very slight indeed. ‘The inner meaning…of a surrealist text is of the greatest importance, since it is that inner meaning that gives the text a precious revelatory quality. If you write dreary idiocies following a surrealist method they will remain dreary idiocies… And especially if you belong to that lamentable category of individuals which is ignorant of the meaning of words, it is probable that the practice of surrealism will bring to light nothing more than this crass ignorance’. Ignorance was captured by Breton as method, whilst for Aragon method had been made redundant by the chaos of war, irrecoverably.
Aragon felt that ‘the face of error and the face of
truth… have identical features’, features to be found and erased
in the everyday moments of existence on the streets. Error is the echo of
his footsteps, the silhouette of his walking figure, the force that drives
him forwards (‘the lost footing never recovers itself’) through
the city. Error is landscape made by the mark and erasure of each individual
footprint erring on its way through what Baudelaire called ‘fugitive
reality’.
Making wrong turns, as Dada witnessed, is inevitable. Human error, oddly enough,
is also necessary as Breton discovered, in order for creative renewal to occur.
Echoes of the flaneur, of Dadaist and Surrealist thought and practice reverberate
through current psychogeographical games and walks.
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