John D. Erickson, Dada: performance, poetry and art. Boston, Twayne (Twayne World Authors Series, nr. 703), 1984, 180 pages. Dada: performance, poetry and art is a sociological study on dada as a cultural phenomena. The most interesting chapter is the chapter on the city Zürich as societal environment in which dada flourished. Some citations: 14: "At the heart of Arp's work, as well as that of the other Dadas, is the eternal search of the poet-artist-creator for the Word-Sign, the ambitious attempt to return to the fundamental, to nature at the moment of its creation through the word of God-Jehovah-Jahweh. To achieve such a return would be to commune with the primal forces of spiritual-artistic creation - a desire shared by alchemists, necromancers, and saints. We can no more easily understand much less explain rationally the poet-artist's search for salvation through the re-creation of the Word than that of the saint who aspires to spiritual redemption. Poiesis is the explanation of itself." 6: About the closing of Cabaret Voltaire. "Huelsenbeck attributes its closing to the fact that it went bankrupt because the Dadas were to impractical-minded to collect admissions and because carousing students had destroyed nearly every stick of furniture in the place. It seems more likely, however, that Herr Ephraim forced the Cabaret Voltaire to close because of public protest over the wild orgiastic proceedings. Too much intoxicating art combined with too much inebriated rowdiness." 7: On the opening of Galerie Dada on march the 17th of 1917. It "produced three large exhibitions, and staged several smaller events such as a series of soirées, lecture evenings, and public tours of the gallery. The Galerie Dada existed only three months, until mid-1917." 7: On the departure of Hugo Ball: "In the first eighteen months of its existence Zurich Dada eluded definition, but after Ball's final departure it began increasingly to develop characteristics that identified it as a distinct literary animovement wiht a deliberate antiprogram and antigoals, under an acknowledged leader, Tzara. As if to inaugurate this tendency, the first public event of Dada after Ball's departure was an evening devoted to tristan Tzara at Meise Hall on 23 July 1918." 8: 22 january 1919: Picabia visits Zürich for more than two weeks. "With Picabia's arrival, the domination of Zurich Dada by the iconoclasts had become more and more evident." 10-11: After trying to explain dada via the existentialism of Albert Camus: "So Dada might be said to be intent upon destroying the disorder of unreason parading under the banner of Aristotelian logic and establishing in its place the fundamental order of simultaneity and paradox, at the heart of which dwell an awareness and valorization of human existence and a condemnation of that which is iniquitous to it." 102: "Dada-art, in refuting the premises upon which Western art has built, inveighs against more than art as reflection and expression of ruling-class ideology; it inveighs against the exteriorization of art, the circumscription of the object within a teleological system such that it becomes the ëidos-spector-agent of death-immobility through its fixation of the artist-spectator." 102: According to Erickson the visual art works of dadaists "reacted against fundamental characteristics of traditional and modern reproductive art. In general, the Dada antiart (or new art) work called into question (1) the ethical determination and anthropomorphization of art which exteriorize it in order, through referentiality, through world as human representation, to privilege a legitimizing social-political ideology; (2) the exclusivity of art reserved for the needs and uses of predesignated groups; (3) the dissemination of art as commodity; (5) the aggrandizement of artis-ego consiousness through the actualization of the artist's intention of saying/painting something meaningfull (his 'vouloir-dire' or his 'itention-de-signification' as Derrida terms it)." 103: "In short, the Dada work refused to admit of the reduction of the work of art by either artist or beholder equipped with attitudes preformed by society, in accord with a set of beliefs or concepts anchored primarily in the outer world (i.e., neither in the world of the work of art nor in the particular inner world of the individual beholder)." 103: "... the persistent use of the term 'antiart' ... is unfortunate, for it is cast solely in negative, reactive terms, whereas the Dada concpet of art also laid down exacting strategies the worked toward positive ends." Erickson vindt 'nieuwe kunst' beter. "Undeniably, Dada work, particularly in its early phases, exhibited nihilistic and destructive strategies designed to negat the absolutistic, anthropomorphic, referential, and utilitarian art serving ruling-class ideology. The latter art was debased, vain, and destructive of the artist and the individual."

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