NARRATOR: Throughout
history, food
has served as subject
matter, inspiration,
and of course,
sustenance for artists.
Food has also been the art
on a number of occasions.
Today, we're delving into
an early 20th century
movement known for
its radicality,
irreverence, incoherence,
and not at all for its food.
I hope you're not hungry.
We're working from the 1961
"Artist and Writers Cookbook,"
whose dedication
speaks to me deeply.
Alice B. Toklas
wrote the foreword.
And the recipes that
follow were offered
by a broad range of
artists, and poets,
and novelists, like Harper
Lee's Crackling Bread,
Helen Frankenthaler's
Hamburger Helene,
made for her husband, Robert
Motherwell, and Marcel
Duchamp's Steak Tartare, a
recipe he says originated
with the Cossacks in
Siberia, which can be quote,
"prepared on horseback
at a swift gallop,
if conditions make
this a necessity."
While Duchamp was
associated with Dada
and preparing Steak
Tartare on horseback
would no doubt make
for good TV, it's
actually a recipe on page
five we're going to follow.
And it's Man Ray's "A
Menu for a Dadaist Day."
Fittingly, it does not
relate to any event that
actually took place
during the late 19 teens,
when Dada unfolded.
But the Dada spirit
was nonetheless alive,
when Man Ray offered
the recipe for this book
several decades later.
We start with le petit
dejeuner, or breakfast.
And we're asked to take
a wooden panel of an inch
or less thickness, 16
to 20 inches in size.
OK.
That's not going to work.
Let's try this one.
OK.
We're good.
Now, we gather the brightly
colored wooden blocks
left by children on the
floors of playrooms,
not a difficult
task in my house.
And paste, or screw,
them on the panel.
Now, he doesn't actually
say how the blocks should
be arranged on the panel.
But that's very much
in the Dada spirit.
So I'm going to
take a cue from one
of the founders of the
Zurich based Dada group, Jean
Arp, and his collage
series, "According
to the Laws of Chance."
Supposedly, the
series began when
Arp was frustrated
with a drawing,
tore it up, and threw
it on the ground.
And later realized the
chance arrangement of forms
on the floor had
more expressive power
than what he had been trying to
achieve through deliberation.
So let's just take our blocks,
let them spill out of a bowl,
and see where they fall.
All right.
That'll work.
Then, let's take some wood glue
and fix them into place roughly
where they fell.
You see, Arp was among a
number of artists and writers
from around Europe who sought
refuge in neutral Switzerland
to escape the ravages
of World War I.
Arp was French and German
and had grown up in Alsace.
And in Zurich, he joined up
with Germans Hugo Ball, Emmy
Hennings, Richard Huelsenbeck,
and Hans Richter, Romanians,
Tristan Tzara and
Marcel Janco, Swede,
Vyking Egerling, and Swiss,
Sophie Tauber, who married Arp.
Their headquarters
founded in February 1916,
was the Cabaret Voltaire,
named after the French satirist
whose skewering of his
own time the Dadaists took
as inspiration.
There they staged wild and often
unintelligible performances,
collaborations combining
gibberish incantations by Ball,
props by Tauber, and
costumes and masks by Janco.
It didn't make sense and
it wasn't supposed to.
The mass carnage of
World War I, which
would ultimately claim
more than 18 million lives,
was unrepresentable.
The pandemonium Dada
created was a way
of acting out this crisis,
attacking all norms
and traditions.
In Hugo Ball's words,
"To draw attention,
across the barriers of
war and nationalism,
to the few independent spirits
who live for other ideals."
Randomness for Arp undermined
conventional notions
of authorship.
And it was both a
denial of human egotism
and a principle of
dissolution and anarchy.
It was a way to dismantle the
supposed order and rationality
that had led to
the horrors of war.
Dejeuner, or lunch.
We are instructed
to take the olives
and juice from one large jar of
prepared green or black olives
and throw them away.
In the empty jar place
several steel ball bearings.
Fill the jar with machine oil
to prevent rusting, naturally.
With this delicacy
serve a loaf of French
bread 30 inches in
length, eh, close enough.
Paint it a pale blue.
I found some edible
food paint that I'm
going to use here to achieve
our blue, which some may not
define as pale.
By this point, you're
probably wondering
about the man behind our menu.
Dada was an
international movement
with other bases of operation
in Paris, Berlin, Cologne,
Hanover, and New York.
They were connected by the
journals they published
and the fact that
they all moved around
during and after the war.
Man Ray, born
Emmanuel Radnitzky,
grew up in New York
and befriended Duchamp.
Whose influence you can
see in his early sculptural
constructions that combined
unlikely everyday materials
into a curious and
foreboding objects;
an army blanket wrapped
around a sewing machine
and tied up with string,
a metronome with a cut out
photograph of an eye
attached with a paper clip,
that he would set to a tempo
and paint till it stopped.
We see this kind of
incongruous intermingling
of familiar things
throughout this meal.
Ready made materials
easy to find
made strange
through combination,
upsetting the conventions of
bourgeois life in the 19 teens,
in the 1960s, and today.
Let's try it out with one of
these luscious ball bearings,
not forgetting to spoon over
some of that flavorful machine
oil.
Mm, as delicious as it looks.
And now for our final course,
diner, which I don't think I
need to translate.
Gather wooden darning
eggs, one per person.
If the variety without
handles cannot be found,
remove the handles.
We then pierce lengthwise
so that skewers can be
inserted into each darning egg.
I'm putting a clamp
around my eggs
so I can stabilize them
and hopefully not drill
a hole through my hand today.
This might be painful to watch.
So let's return to our story,
while I butcher these things.
Dada was not just one
style, but a confluence
of many mediums and
approaches, often
contradictory but
brought together
by the shared aims of
meaninglessness, provocation,
and refusal.
They were against
everything, even themselves.
Dada is anti-Dada was
a favorite saying.
And it was short
lived, petering out
in the early '20s, as
many of its members
were folded into surrealism,
or went their own ways.
OK.
So we've pierced our eggs
and no one was injured.
And we're asked to lay the
skewered eggs in an oblong,
or oval, pan and cover with
transparent cellophane.
And there's our dinner.
Magnificent isn't it?
It will keep really well
at room temperature.
So this is something you could
totally make ahead for a party.
I bet it freezes
beautifully too.
Man Ray doesn't
include a dessert.
But I'm not quite full yet.
So let's tack one on.
To cap off our meal we're going
to make Tristan Tzara's 1920
recipe "To Make a Dadaist
Poem" from his manifesto
on feeble love and bitter love.
It goes like this.
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
I'm using a kitchen
knife here, in homage
to Berlin based
Dadaist, Hannah Hoch's,
famous photo montage "Cut
With the Kitchen Knife Dada
Through the Last Weimar
Beer Belly Cultural
Epoch of Germany."
Choose from this
paper an article,
the length you want
to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
I'm taking some liberties
here, so that you can actually
see the words.
I really don't think he'd mind.
Next, carefully cut out
each of the words that
make up this article and
put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Collage was a favorite medium
of the Dadaists for good reason,
as it allowed them to take the
raw material of their culture
and their time, information
and images intended
to illustrate and elucidate.
But under their
knives, the language
was made absurd, emptied
of its logic and power.
The name Dada was
allegedly chosen randomly
from a German French dictionary.
In French it meant
a hobby horse.
In German, a kind of
stupidity or naivete.
And in Romanian
it meant yes yes.
It worked because
it had resonance
across languages and cultures,
but also meant nothing at all.
Next, take out each cutting
one after the other.
This way seems more expedient.
Copy conscientiously
in the order
in which they left the bag.
I'm going to lay them
out roughly in the order
that I turn them over.
A true anarchist, I know.
As our poem is unfolding,
I'm remembering
something Hugo Ball wrote,
"That a line of
poetry is a chance
to get rid of all
the filth that clings
to this accursed language.
Every word that is
spoken and sung here
says at least this one thing,
that this humiliated age
has not succeeded in
winning our respect."
Tzara's recipe concludes,
"The poem will resemble you.
And there you are - an
infinitely original author
of charming sensibility,
even though unappreciated
by the vulgar herd."
While the Dadaist
spirit was destructive,
it was also
exhilarating, freeing,
and affirming in its way.
It continued and
continues to live on
in its influence on other
artists and resurgences
in contemporary culture.
MAN SINGING: Hello.
I'm a piece of garbage.
NARRATOR: Dada may
be officially over,
but it's revolt
against certainty
is perhaps as relevant as ever.
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