Hugo Ball
Dada à Zurich - Le mot et l'image (1915-1916)
This excerpt (1916-1917) from Ball's journal La Fuite hors du temps recounts the birth of Dada in Zurich, and constitutes a counterpoint to Tzara's very (too) famous chronicle (published in 1920 in the Almanach Dada), the fairly exclusive purveyor of Dada from 1918 to 1922.
Beyond ideologies, Dada is a transcendence and a transformation (a transfiguration?). In "a phantasmagorical age" and mechanistic, how to envision "a solid reconstruction"? "What we call Dada is a buffoonery born from nothingness (...), a game with miserable residues; an execution of morality and abundance which are but pauses." Ball was its thinker and not the iconoclast or the propagandist, and he withdrew at the end of 1917.
Far from contemporary illusions, Ball seeks a spiritual renewal that originates in the Byzantine Church (Denys l'Aréopagite), the saints and the mystics, through German romanticism, Franz von Baader, anarchy, Kandinsky, Klee and Léon Blois.
As an introduction, Ball's inaugural Dada manifesto (July 14, 1916) is published for the first time in French.
Hugo Ball (February 22, 1886, Pirmasens, Germany – September 14, 1927, San Abbondio, Switzerland) is the founder of the Cabaret Voltaire and the Dada movement in Zurich.
Preface by Michel Giroud.
Translated from German by Sabine Wolf.
published in 2006
French edition
11 x 17 cm (softcover)
160 pages
9.00 €
ISBN : 978-2-84066-152-8
EAN : 9782840661528