"works of art;" in Tableau dada he hints darkly at the logical extension of"live materiaIs" to the use ofhuman beings, playing with the French term for a "stilllife," nature morte, literally "dead nature," and giving a new and comically sinister turn to the notion ofthe "portrait bust." Dada's ambivalence to the avant-garde ofthe time can be too easily subsumed under a general idea of"anti-art." One of its central modes of opposition was parody: cultural cannibalism par excellence. So the claims of the avant-garde to newness and originality were mercilessly mimicked: the "simultaneist" poem, for example, (whether of the futurists or the French proponent Henri Barzun) was performed in Zurich in the form of three anodyne popular songs in English, French and German spoken or sung simultaneously, interspersed with bells and meaningless exclamations, to create a jumbled confusion of sound rather than the dynamic multilayered modern poem. The idea of abstraction itself has an ambivalent position in dada. Sceptical of the claims to a "new language" put out by the proponents of abstraction Kandinsky and Mondrian, the dadaists nonetheless played with abstraction in a more radical way than Huelsenbeck recognised. Marcel Janco, for example, in a now lost "Composition" gathered a strange amalgamation ofwires and, objects which may have been intended as parodic; Arp too, together with his partner Sophie Taueber, produced the first "soft" abstract sculpture. The practice of collage, various as it was in the hands of dada, cannibalising newspapers, photographs, prints, reproductions of all kinds, disassembling bodies and recombining their fragments in new forms, is also a kind of anthropophagy. That dada felt itself profoundly alien to the society responsible for the carnage of the First World War is undoubted; "this world of systems has gone to pieces,"4 as Hugo Ball, founder of the Cabaret Voltaire, dada's birthplace in Zurich, put it. Rejection of the social and politicaI, as well as cultural values ofEuropean civilisation presupposed a rejection too ofits colonial expansion-certainlya factor in the War. Although not yet the outspoken criticism of colonialisation found in surrealism, which was to organise an Antí-Coloníal exhibition in 1931 to oppose the huge Coloníal exhibition in Paris ofthat year, it's possible that Canníbale, for dada, had undertones of siding with the colonised "other." If so, it may have been in the spirit of one of dada's immediate predecessors, Alfred Jarry, whose black humour was a particular stimulus for Duchamp and for the surrealists. Jarry's short text of 1902, "Anthropophagy," is a sly critique ofthe intersection of anthropology and colonisation. Anthropophagy, a "neglected branch of anthropology,"S is practised, Jarry suggests, in two ways: eating human beings, or being eaten by them. A recent "anthropophagic mission" to New Guinea was wholly successful, Jarrywrites, according to the report in Patríe for 17 February 1902, in that not one of its members returned. Before the anthropophagic missions, the science of anthropophagy was in its infancy, because savages don't eat each other. But it would also be a mistake to see the new practice as of purely culinary interest; it relates to one of the oldest and noblest tendencies of the human spirit-assimilating what it finds good. (So, a heart would give Francis Picabia Brouette Carrinho de mão [Wheelbarrow] coleção Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madri
243 Dadá e surrealismo Dawn Ades