WHAT IS DADA?
Hans Arp:
I hereby declare that Tzara invented the word Dada on 6 February 1916, at 6 p.m. I was there with my 12 children when Tzara first uttered the word. ... It happened in the Cafe de la Terrasse in Zurich, and I was wearing a brioche in my left nostril....
Dada is the ground from which all art springs. Dada stands for art without sense. This does not mean nonsense. Dada is without meaning, as Nature is.
...
The Dadaist thought up tricks to rob the bourgeois of his sleep. The Dadaist gave the bourgeois a whiff of chaos, a sensation like that of a powerful but distant earth tremor, so that his bells begin to buzz, his safe-deposits wrinkled their brows and his honor developed spots of mold.
| "The Eggboard," a sport and social pastime for the top ten thousand, in which
the players, covered from head to foot with egg-yolk, leave the field of play:
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"The Umbilical Flask," a monstrous consumer durable which is a cross between a
bicycle, a whale, a brassiere and an absinthe spoon:
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"The Glove," designed to be worn in place of the traditional head:
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---all these were designed to bring home to the bourgeois the unreality of his world and the emptiness of all his endeavors, even including his profitable nationalism. This was, of course, a naive enterprise on our part, as the normally constituted bourgeois possesses rather less imagination than a worm, and has, in place of a heart, a larger-than-life-sized corn which only troubles him when there is a change in the weather--the stock-exchange weather.