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Original Articles

A “Living Magazine”: Hugo Ball's Cabaret Voltaire

Pages 395-414 | Published online: 02 Nov 2016
 

Abstract

By putting Hugo Ball's anthology Cabaret Voltaire (1916) into dialogue with the live performances at the Cabaret Voltaire, this essay offers a refreshed view of this seminal Dada document. It approaches Cabaret Voltaire as a “living magazine,” a phrase Ball used to describe the space at Spiegelgasse No. 1 in Zurich. The publication's cabaret-like characteristics, mobility, and constantly changing identity made it markedly animated and dynamic. Tristan Tzara reframed Cabaret Voltaire—conceived initially as an anthology that documented events—as a transportable, active magazine for promoting Dada and his own periodical, Dada. By defying conventional divisions between performance and print media, Cabaret Voltaire facilitated the Dadaists' notable debunking of privileging the live over the mediated. The importance of the magazine in negotiating this reconception continued half a century later, in the form of the 1970s zine, CabVolt, which again reinvented Ball's publication.

Notes

1 Hans Arp, “Dadaland,” in Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays, Memories, ed. Marcel Jean, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking Press, 1996), 234.

2 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 51–52.

3 Ibid., 50 (February 5, 1916). Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, ed. Hans J. Kleinschmidt, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 9. For a broader discussion of Dada in Zurich, see Leah Dickerman, “Zurich,” in Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, ed. Leah Dickerman, (Washington, DC and New York: National Gallery of Art/D.A.P., 2005), 16–83, and Michael Howard and Debbie Lewer, A New Order: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire (Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University, 1996).

4 Tristan Tzara, “Zurich Chronicle 1915–1919,” trans. Ralph Manheim, in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York: Wittenborn/Schultz, 1951), 235. Tzara's “Chronique Zurichoise” was published for the first time in French in Dada Almanach: Im Auftrag des Zentralamts der deutschen Dada-Bewegung herausgegeben von Richard Huelsenbeck (Berlin: Reiss, 1920), 10–28.

5 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), 188.

6 Ibid.

7 Annabelle Melzer, Latest Rage the Big Drum: Dada and Surrealist Performance (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), 36. Emphasis mine. In her dissertation, “Subversive Women: Female Performing Artists in Zurich Dada,” Katherine Weinstein concurs: “Like the avant-garde movements that came before and after, Dada made its impact in the immediacy of live performance.” Katherine Weinstein, “Subversive Women: Female Performing Artists in Zurich Dada” (PhD diss., Tufts University, 2001), 15.

8 The pervasiveness of this interpretive tendency is apparent in a New York Times review of the 2006 exhibition on the Dada movement at the Museum of Modern Art. After quoting Arp's colorful description of the Cabaret Voltaire, Michael Kimmelman remarks: “I'm sure you had to be there.” Michael Kimmelman, “‘Dada’ at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum,” New York Times (June 16, 2006), online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/16/arts/design/16dada.html?_r=0 (August 1, 2016).

9 Hugo Ball, Letter to Käthe Brodnitz, December 29, 1915, in Briefe 1904–1927, vol. 1, ed. Gerhard Schaub and Ernst Teubner (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 95. My thanks to Nicola Behrmann for pointing out this passage.

10 My analysis of multiple copies of Cabaret Voltaire in the United States and Europe indicate that today the German version is more common than the French one.

11 Wilhelm Julius Heuberger also printed the journals Der Revoluzzer, Der Mistral, and Sirius. For further information about Heuberger, see Emmy Hennings Dada, ed. Christa Baumberger and Nicola Behrmann (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2015), 218.

12 Ball wrote in his journal on April 11, 1916: “The proceeds of the soirees will go toward an anthology to be published soon.” Ball, Flight Out of Time, 60. The planned fifty deluxe copies, supposed to feature hand-colored prints, probably never materialized. See Debbie Lewer, “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile, 1914–1920,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III: Europe 1880–1940, part II, ed. Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1043–1044.

13 The copy in the Elaine Lustig Cohen Collection at the New York Public Library features a silver strip of foil, for instance, whereas copies at the Kunsthaus in Zurich and the International Dada Archive in Special Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries feature gold.

14 Hugo Ball, “Als ich das Cabaret Voltaire gründete…,” in Cabaret Voltaire, ed. Hugo Ball (Zurich 1916), 5, trans. Christina Mills, in The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Tate Publishing, 2006), 20.

15 Hugo Ball, Letter to August Hoffmann, June 2, 1916, quoted in Lewer, “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile,” 1038. “Heft” can also mean “magazine,” but given his discussion of the publication in these and other sources, it is most appropriately translated as a book or brochure.

16 Ball, Flight Out of Time, 65 (June 4, 1916). In his introductory essay for Cabaret Voltaire, Ball explains that he approached artists he knew and asked them for a picture, drawing, or engraving for the exhibition. He also acquired contributions with the help of Arp, who had contacts in Munich and Paris. Ball, “Als ich das Cabaret Voltaire gründete…,” 5, and Alastair Grieve, “Arp in Zurich,” in Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, ed. Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Madison: Coda Press/Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1979), 180.

17 [Hugo Ball], “Notes Redactionelles/Redactionelle Notizen,” in Cabaret Voltaire, 32.

18 For more on the cabaret tradition, see Lisa Appignanesi, The Cabaret (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), and Cabaret Performance, vol. I: Europe 1890–1920: Sketches, Songs, Monologues, Memoirs, ed. Laurence Senelick (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988).

19 Hugo Ball, Letter to Maria Hildebrand, April 13, 1916, in Emmy Hennings Dada, 155; Adrianus Baltus van Tienhoven, in De Nieuwe Amsterdammer, ibid., 161. In an article published April 26, 1916, the Züricher Post refers to the café appropriated by Ball and his cohorts as “Cabaret Voltaire.” Ibid., 156.

20 For more biographical information on Ball, see “Chronology” and Emmy Hennings, “Foreword to the 1946 Edition,” in Ball, Flight Out of Time, xlvii and xlix–lxiv.

21 For more on the Cabaret Voltaire, see Appignanesi, The Cabaret, 108–114.

22 Ball, Flight Out of Time, 56 (March 14, 1916). They performed Futurist poems at the Cabaret Voltaire beginning as early as February 1916. See Tristan Tzara, “Chronique Zurichoise 1915–1919,” in Œeuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Henri Béhar (Paris: Flammarion, 1975–1982), 561. With artworks on the wall and a variety of sound collages and play readings on stage, Ball's cabaret also manifested his enthusiasm for Wassily Kandinsky's notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. Kandinsky aimed for the corporeal experience of the synthesis of different art forms. Ball's essay “Kandinsky” which he read on April 7, 1917, at the Galerie Dada (but which was not published until 1961), lauds the Russian artist's seeking of “a counterpositioning of the individual arts,” and “a symphonic composition” of different arts. See Hugo Ball, “Kandinsky,” in Flight Out of Time, 222–234. Ball's reference to a musical performance bolsters the notion of the publication as being tied to a live event and as a “living magazine.”

23 Ball, “Als ich das Cabaret Voltaire gründete…,” 5.

24 In semiotics, modes of address can be defined as the way in which the relationship between addresser and addressee is constructed in a text, including the manner in which various characteristics of placement, formatting, degrees of directness and formality, point of view, tone, references, language, and content communicate with readers. For more on modes of address, see Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2002).

25 Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara, “Dada: Dialogue entre un cocher et un alouette,” in Cabaret Voltaire, 31, trans. Christina Mills, in Dada Reader, 28. The puppets are arranged in a bizarre tableau, in which one figure points to another, looming with her arms outstretched, while a third slouches below. Given their own page, they are presented as a work of art and, in fact, recall paintings of the crucifixion, in particular Matthias Grünewald's depiction of the scene in the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–1516).

26 David O'Connell, Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 5–6, 69. For more on audience interaction in Dada performance, see Dickerman, “Zurich,” 23–25.

27 Tristan Tzara, “La Revue Dada 2,” 19, trans. Michelle Owoo, in Dada Reader, 24. This rather jolting contrast differs from the pages of publications such as later issues of Tzara's magazine, Dada, in which provocative content sprawls across pages in a variety of font types and sizes and intersects with images in ways that warn readers to suspect off-kilter content.

28 Guilbeaux calls Cabaret Voltaire a collection (“recueil”) but, as mentioned earlier, says that it is the first issue, suggesting that he understands it to be a serial.

29 He writes, “la disposition typographique et la variabilité du corps des caractères sont les éléments constitutifs de cet art.” Later in the review he adds, “la persévérance des efforts représentant la décadence et la putréfaction. Cet ‘art’ est la négation de l'art véritable—il est la négation de l'art robuste, humain, dynamique et zimmerwaldien dont auront besoin les multitudes; cet art est un blasphème, une profanation de la vie.” Guilbeaux also writes that the publication is “a symptom […] of artistic and literary disintegration—parallel to the disorganization of contemporary society” (“un symptôme […] de la désorganisation artistique et littéraire—parallèle à la désorganisation de la société actuelle”). Henri Guilbeaux, “L'art de demain,” La Guerre Mondiale 6, no. 580 (July 18, 1916), 4634. Ball, notably, affirmed Guilbeaux's harsh critique in a letter to Tzara in fall 1916: “He is quite right. The Cabaret Voltaire is useless, bad, decadent, militarist. […] No more ‘blasphemy,’ no more ‘irony’ (that is filthy, vulgar), no more satire (who has the right to do so?), no more ‘intelligentsia.’ […] Enough of it! Écrasez!” (“Er hat sehr recht. Das ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ ist nichtsnutzig, schlecht, dekadent, militaristisch […]. Keine ‘Blasphemie’ mehr, keine ‘Ironie’ [das ist schmutzig, gemein], keine Satire mehr (wer hat das Recht dazu?) keine ‘Intelligenz’ mehr. Nur nicht! Genug davon! Ecrasez!”) Hugo Ball, Letter to Tristan Tzara, September 27, 1916, in Ball, Briefe, vol. 1, 128–129, trans. Trevor Stark, “Complexio Oppositorum: Hugo Ball and Carl Schmitt,” October 146 (Fall 2013), 47. The expression “Zimmerwaldian” refers to the socialist antiwar conference in Zimmerwald, Switzerland.

30 Ball, “Als ich das Cabaret Voltaire gründete…,” 5. Emphasis mine.

31 Tristan Tzara, Letter to Luciano Raimondi, March 17, 1917, quoted in Dickerman, “Zurich,” 32.

32 Richard Huelsenbeck, “En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism” [1920], in The Dada Painters and Poets, 26. Ball writes, “H. [Huelsenbeck] speaks against ‘organization’: people have had enough of it, he says. I think so too. One should not turn a whim into an artistic school.” Ball, Flight Out of Time, 60 (April 11, 1916).

33 Ball, “Als ich das Cabaret Voltaire gründete…,” 5. In the French version, the very end of the text, “Dada Dada Dada,” stands out because it takes up an entire line just beneath the drawing of Ball.

34 Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara, “Dada: Dialogue entre un cocher et un alouette,” in Cabaret Voltaire, 31, trans. Christina Mills, in Dada Reader, 27–28. My translation is based on that of Mills with two changes: I interpret “Zeitschrift” (line one) to mean magazine, not newspaper, and “numéro” (line six) as issue, not “edition.”

35 Tristan Tzara, “Texte sur Dada,” Dossiers Tzara, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Inv.-No. TZR 534. Although the manuscript is undated, it was most likely composed after this time, as Tzara writes about the dissemination of the Dada movement into the 1920s.

36 For more on this magazine, see Lewer, “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile,” 1053–1055.

37 He writes, “le premier numéro porte comme titre cabaret [sic] Voltaire et qui s'intitulera dorénavant Dada.” Guilbeaux, “L'art de demain,” 4634.

38 Paul Guillaume, Letter to Tzara, June 28, 1916, quoted in Michel Sanouillet, revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet, in Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 485.

39 Ibid. This folio-sized periodical, funded in part by Alfred Stieglitz, whose gallery gave it its name, took after Apollinaire's magazine, Les Soirées de Paris (1912–1914, Paris), and was filled with calligrammes (picture poems) and caricatures. For more on 291, see Jeanne Brun, “291,” in Dada, ed. Laurent Le Bon (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2005), 62–63.

40 Paul Guillaume, Letter to Tristan Tzara, August 10, 1916, quoted in Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 486. Apollinaire wrote to Tzara in December 1916, complimenting Tzara on his poetry and his efforts in Zurich and promised to send poems and possibly some prose, although in the end Tzara received nothing, either because of censors or because Apollinaire's political concerns overcame his desire to support Tzara. Guillaume Apollinaire to Tristan Tzara, December 6, 1916, quoted in Adriana M. Paliyenko, “Apollinaire and Dada: Influence Matters,” in Paris Dada: The Barbarians Storm the Gates, ed. Elmer Peterson (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, 2001), 73–74, trans. 88, note 33 and trans. 89, note 35. In his December 28, 1916, letter to de Zayas, Tzara writes that he will send Cabaret Voltaire, suggesting that he had not yet sent it. Tristan Tzara, Letter to Marius de Zayas, December 28, 1916, quoted in Dada in Paris, 503.

41 Dada 4/5 includes de Zayas's gallery on its list of distributors on the back cover.

42 References to Dada are the title, two mentions of “Anthologie Dada,” which eventually came out as Dada 4–5, and mention of an event at the Galerie Dada. “Notes,” Dada no. 1 (July 1917): 16–17.

43 Ibid., 18.

44 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 149.

45 Ibid., 148.

46 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 57.

47 Philip Auslander, “Liveness, Performance and the Anxiety of Simulation,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), 198.

48 David Pattie, Rock Music in Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 22.

49 Ibid., 30.

50 See also Dickerman, “Zurich,” 23.

51 Hitchcock's cover bears the same marks as the reproduction in Motherwell's publication, where the image is a grainy, black-and-white one printed so that the words appear in white against a black background, the opposite of how they look on Hitchcock's cover. See The Dada Painters and Poets, 25. I examined number 80 of the first issue, part of the Jean Brown Papers at the Getty Research Institute.

52 For a discussion of what defines a zine, see Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (Bloomington, IN: Microcosm, 2008), 6–21.

53 For more on this group and their zines, see The Bay Area Dadaists, ed. John Held Jr. (San Francisco and New York: Snowman Publications, 1998), np; Stephen Perkins, “Mail Art and Networking Magazines (1970–1980),” and “Punk Zines,” in The Zine and E-zine Resource Guide, http://www.zinebook.com/resource/perkins.html; Stephen Perkins, “Assembling Magazines and Alternative Artists' Networks,” in At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, ed. Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 392–406.

54 For listings of their performances, see Suzanne Foley, Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 173, 175, 179, 183.

55 Anna Banana, quoted in CabVolt, 4.

56 Klaus Groh's “Project for a Dadaday Voltaire,” Cabaret Voltaire no. 1, ed. Steve Hitchcock (San Diego, 1977), n.p.

57 For more on the relationship between punk zines and Dadazines in 1970s San Francisco, see Emily Hage, “Live on the Page: Bay Area Dadazines and Punk Zines,” in The Territories of Artists' Periodicals, ed. Marie Boivent and Stephen Perkins (Green Bay, WI/Rennes: Plagiarist Press and Éditions Provisoires, 2015), 80–87.

58 Nico Ordway, “History of Zines,” in Zines, vol. I, ed. V. Vale (San Francisco: V/Search, 1996), 157.

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