Dada Deception
Munich, Germany. – The scene would be disturbing to anyone familiar with modern history: Angry crowds protesting museums, galleries, and cultural institutions. For many, such demonstrations are undoubtedly reminiscent of the National Socialists’ efforts to eradicate what was labeled “degenerate” music and art. The most unbelievable aspect of the more recent campaign, coordinated by a group calling itself “Citizens-Warning-Citizens” (Bürger-warnen-Bürger), is the fact that the protests were occurring in Frankfurt and in Munich at the dawn of the twenty-first century, not in Nazi Germany. What had caused such outrage and indignation in a newly unified nation supposedly beyond the reaches of fascist politics?
On the surface at least, the display of offensive art led to the formation of protest groups and the outrage of concerned citizens. The exhibit that caused this animosity was titled Grotesk!: 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit (“Grotesque!: 130 Years of Witty Art”)[i], and appeared in Germany at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and the Haus der Kunst in Munich in the spring and summer months of 2003 before traveling to London and New York.[i] Curators billed the event as a history of a so-called other modernity, an alternative modernity that revealed seldom observed relationships between the emergence of cabaret and the further development of visual art in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.”[ii]
There was more than a superficial similarity between earlier campaigns in Germany to eliminate undesirable art and the protests against Grotesk! For one, curators chose a location with historical significance, the Haus der Kunst, for the exhibit during its run in Munich. The Haus der Kunst had been the initial site of the National Socialists’ traveling Entartete “Kunst” (“Degenerate ‘Art’”) exhibit in 1937. It was during its tenure at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, however, where Grotesk! motivated the demonstrations against supposedly monstrous, bizarre, and abnormal art. The exhibit, apparently like its Entartete “Kunst“ precursor, ignited public concern about aesthetic standards and artistic displays in national cultural centers. Individuals from Citizens-Warning-Citizens protested the opening of Grotesk! with posters that read “Nicht so SCHIRN” (“Not so Schirn”) and “Schirn führt irre!!” (“The Schirn misleads!!”). Such announcements played on the German homonyms “schön” (“beautiful”) and the name of the Frankfurt exhibition hall, the Schirn. An internet message board for the exhibit included commentaries from ”Anonymous Bosch,” a comic reference to the painter Hieronymus Bosch, and “G.W. Göte,” a phonetic play on the name of the famous German writer and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.[iii] On the message board, visitors could read postings from supposedly concerned citizens claiming that the art in Grotesk! was “ent-artet” (“de-generate”). While the National Socialists early-twentieth-century aesthetic campaigns and policies had murderous consequences however, curators of Grotesk! revealed several weeks after the protests and postings began that the public outrage had been faked; the demonstrations were staged performances.
The fake demonstrations, the supposed public outrage, and the use of language similar to that employed in the Nazi’s “degenerate art” campaign received surprisingly limited attention in the German media.[iv] Several journalists and critics suggested that the lack of interest was a result of the absence of a coherent definition of the grotesque, one that would support such antics. Scholars such as Geoffrey Galt Harpham describe the grotesque’s subversive function as a “final obstacle to a universal and internally consistent theory of aesthetics.”[v] The organizers of Grotesk!, however, claimed to celebrate the artistic style as indicative of an alternative modernity, one that responded simply with laughter to the threats posed by modern rationality and systematization. Despite this claim, the organizers did not explain the way in which this alternative modernity could function to produce critical responses. In other words, in fetishizing otherness, the curators failed to explain the critical function that this supposed otherness enabled.
Hanne Bergius’s contribution to the exhibition catalog, an essay titled “Dada Grotesk” (“Dada Grotesque”), is exemplary of the exhibit in its fetishization of difference without elaboration. As happens frequently in discussions of the grotesque, difference is itself mistaken for a strategy of critical engagement. Bergius takes as her example the Dadaists in pre-Nazi Berlin; she suggests artists affiliated with the group were trying to develop a new form of existence through the use of ironic play. As the actual exhibit demonstrated and Bergius’s essay unintentionally revealed, however, the use of irony as a critical device was a key but under-analyzed aspect of situating the artistic grotesque as “the other of modernity.” Bergius explains the use of the artistic grotesque by members of Berlin Dada as exemplifying a postmodern potential in modern art, implying that irony itself be understood as creativity enabled by difference: “Irony holds the multiple outbursts of ambivalent conflicts in abeyance and makes possible new grotesque mixed-forms and hybrid-processes of the arts.”[vi] While irony might be described as a certain form of artistic creativity, it also involves an element of critical and reflective engagement. Irony refers to an incongruity between expectations and reality, a rhetorical or aesthetic device in which an initial appeal to the acculturated expectations of the viewing or reading subject turns into a mockery of these expectations. Normally, these expectations function to make the unpredictable world appear predictable.[vii] Irony can reveal, however, the tenuousness of the expectations and the false promise of predictability. As a result, irony can be an important way in which to identify, parody, and subvert acculturated expectations. In her essay, Bergius suggests that irony enables the artistic grotesque, but fails to explain the grotesque’s critical function in significant detail.
The critical potential of the grotesque as used by several figures in Grotesk!, as well as other artists and intellectuals not discussed in the exhibit, lies in understanding the use of irony contextually and historically. While the grotesque may assume the appearance of detached playfulness, such detachment remains, as the early twentieth century artist Salomo Freidländer suggests, “only a sharp means by which to scare us out of the ugliness that we already hold for beautiful, true, holy, and pure because we have become used to it.”[viii] By ignoring the constitutive conditions of its production, dissemination, and distribution, critics and theorists fail to appreciate the efficacy and the reflective power of the artistic grotesque. Irony too easily spills over into the offensive rather than a demand that the viewer or reader critically examine the constitutive conditions of the grotesque, as well as her or his acculturated expectations, of her or his own judgments.
Like early-twentieth-century critical theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer, the Dada philosopher Salomo Friedländer, also known by the name Mynona (an inversion of the German word for “anonymous”: Anonym), too saw in the grotesque a humorous style as well as a critical artistic practice. In a story titled “Kant und die sieben Narren” (“Kant and the Seven Fools”), Friedländer subtly reveals his critical use of the grotesque as well as his devotion to Kantian philosophy. In the tale, Friedländer takes to task numerous intellectuals: Arthur Schopenhauer, Wilhelm Wundt, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and others. These individuals are not referenced strictly for the content of their scholarship. Rather, these figures are symbols of what Friedländer saw as the errors of philosophy and empirical science.
In a particularly telling excerpt from the story, Kant, a quasi-detective on a mission to find and to reveal incorrect metaphysical theories, challenges Nietzsche’s understanding of a nature supposedly free of reason. In order to ask Nietzsche for an explanation, however, Kant requires the physical intervention of nearby guards for reasons described in a passage from the text worth quoting at length:
“I would like a word,” Kant interrupted [Nietzsche’s] grandiose soliloquy [?]. But the guards had to obtain Nietszche’s silence quite arduously by force; they removed large pieces of fat from Nietzsche’s ears, which he had stopped up in order not to hear any opposing claims. Kant was now able to cross-examine Nietzsche, who finally was silenced and could listen, in the following manner: . . . “You employ nature neither as vulgar as the materialists and the naturalists from Democritus to Feuerbach; nor as theologically-aesthetic as do Spinoza and Goethe, whose Dionysism, to use your vocabulary, was mixed with reason; but on the contrary naked as the devil, the anti-Christ, correct, and whom you honor as your god—have I understood?” “Perfectly,” Nietzsche mumbled, seeming to admire [Kant’s intelligence]. “Unfortunately,” pitied Kant, “you have, colleague, you have not understood me. I, my dearest, take that which you call the ascetic ideal, reason, the truth, by the scruff of the neck and stick it, the lofty [?] Platonic nose, into the middle of sensorial experience. And it is not only something in theory, but on the contrary also practically-morally by which I force the heavenly ethic to become earthly science and not least to force it into intelligibility until for the first time the sensorial quota would be fulfilled. Reason exists completely empty without nature, as you supposedly experience it, but nature remains fully blind without reason. Without reason you could not make your Dionysus out of nature. Devalue the rational ideas in naturale, then you must accentuate [nature] rationally, if you take away the accent from reason. If one uses Christian-rational and hyper-rational powers in order to assume [those] of nature, of life, and of the body instead of the soul and of God, then one is as a result coerced, by the existing devil if Dionysus should come from him, to bring reason as well. Or else you make an error in your own field. If only you had understood me!”[ix]
Replicating a strategy described in the Greek myth of Odysseus, Nietzsche stuffs his ears in order not to hear. For Odysseus’s oarsmen, the lure of the music of the Sirens is a mortal threat, an aural seduction so strong that it would compel them to heed their bodies instead of their minds, to be unable to overcome through reason the sensorial temptation to row toward the Sirens and into deadly rocks. To prevent such a catastrophe, Odysseus commands the oarsmen to stuff their ears with wax.[x] For the character of Nietzsche in Friedländer’s tale, however, the relation of corporeal seduction and rational mastery of nature is inverted. Nietzsche has stuffed his ears to avoid hearing a rational explanation that would force him to recognize the errors in his own understanding of the cognitive foundations of sense perception, to avoid hearing Kant’s claim that Nietzsche too easily conflates subjective experience and objective nature.
What does Friedländer’s inversion of the oft-repeated myth of Odysseus reveal today? Any attempt to abandon reason under the auspices of embracing “real nature” fails to recognize the perceptual acculturation that influences such engagements. Today, when advances in biotechnology, genetics, and computer technology appear as attempts to master nature or warning signs to return to it, it seems human nature itself reveals the problems of that very distinction. Perceptions are acculturated, according to Friedländer’s ideas about and use of the grotesque, but they are also enabled by human biology and physiology; neither artworks nor scientific observations can ignore the roles that each of these elements play. Far from being merely amusing or ridiculously fantastic then, the grotesque enables a type of laughter simultaneously corporeal and critical.
The Dada deception that induces laughter is a powerful weapon. Friedländer and his fellow avant garde artists employed this dangerous aesthetic device to rethink acculturated expectations, to challenge human perception as well as empirical science through a free-play of the imagination—to show that laughing, indeed, still matters.
[i] Pamela Kort, ed., Grotesk! 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit (Munich: Prestel, 2003).
[ii] Max Hollein and Chris Dercon, “Vorwort,“ Grotesk! 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit, ed. Pamela Kort (Munich: Prestel, 2003) 7.
[iii] “Gaestebuch,“ Buerger-Warnen-Buerger, 10 April 2003 <http://www.buerger-warnen-buerger.de/gaestebuch/>. The initial comment on “de-generate art“ (“ent-artete Kunst“) was posted by “Theobold Tiger“ on 4 April 2003 and read: “Endlich finden Menschen in Deutschland wieder den Mut vor solcher, ich möchte schon sagen, ENT-ARTETER Kunst zu warnen. Ich unterstütze diese Mutigen!!! Bleibt nur zu hoffen, dass möglichst viele mündige Bürger dadurch angesprochen werden . . . . . (und sich dann selbst überzeugen, was alles so als KUNST bezeichnet wird.“
[iv] Examples of the media coverage of the protests include: Benedikt Erenz, “Anna Blume forever: Brav! Frankfurts Kunsthalle Schirn versucht sich an der ’Kunst der Frechheit,’” Die Zeit 3 April 2003: 38; Ralf Chistofori, “Es ist der Preußen schönstes Ziel, den Russenbär zu lausen,“ Der Tagesspiegel 6 April 2003 <http://archiv-taggesspiegel.de/archiv/06.04.2003/5414720.asp>; Gottfried Knapp, “Von Bock zu Böcklin: Die Austellung ,Grotesk’ in Frankfurt sucht nach der ‚Kunst der Frechheit,“ Süddeutsche Zeitung n.d. April 2003: 13; Sandra Trauner, “Frankfurter Schirn zeigt Ausstellung über Groteskes in der Kunst,“ Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger 26 March 2003 <http://www.ksta.da/artikel.jsp?id=1047646260791> 10 April 2003.
[v] Geoffrey G. Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1982) 35.
[vi] The German reads as follows: “Ironie hält vielfach die aufbrechenden Ambivalenzkonflikte in der Schwebe und ermöglicht neue groteske Mischformen und Hybridverfahren der Künste” (Bergius 2003: 147). See also Bergius, “Dada Grotesk” 72.
[vii] “Irony,” Collins English Dictionary (Glasgow : Harper Collins, 1991) 771-772. Irony is defined as follows: “1. the humorous or mildly sarcastic use of words to imply the opposite of what they normally mean. 2. an instance of this, used to draw attention to some incongruity or irrationality. 3. incongruity between what is expected to be and what actually is, or a situation or result showing such incongruity. . . . ” Emphases added.
[viii] Mynona [a.k.a. Salomo Friedländer], “Grotesk. Beitrag zur Mappe ’Köpfe’ von Werner Heuser,” Der Querschnitt (1921): 55. The German reads as follows: “. . . es ist ihm nur ein scharfes Mittel, um uns auch noch aus dem Hässlichen aufzuschrecken, das wir deswegen schon für schön, wahr, heilig und rein halten, weil wir uns daran gewöhnt haben.”
[ix] Salomo Friedländer, “Kant und die Sieben Narren,” Unpublished essay, DLM (69.867), 13-14. Emphasis added.
[x] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “Excurses I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1994) 43-80. Horkheimer and Adorno formulate Odysseus’s strategy in the context of a “deception in sacrifice”: “The self rescues itself from dissolution into blind nature, whose claim is constantly proclaimed in sacrifice. But it is still imprisoned in the natural context as an organism that tries to assert itself against the organic” (54).
[i] Editor’s note: The German word “frech” can mean cheeky, witty, and insolent, and thus falls into the category of hard-to-translate terms.
Images:
1) Hannah Hoech, Photomontage. (1963)
2) Catalog cover for Grotesk!
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