Jill Fell

Zurich Dada Dance Performance and the Role of Sophie Taeuber

Book synopsis: International, iconoclastic, inventive, born out of the institutionalised madness of the First World War, Dada erupted in cities throughout Europe and the USA, creating shock waves that offended polite society and destabilised the cultural and political status quo. In spite of its sporadic and ephemeral character, its rich and diverse legacy is still powerfully felt nearly a century later. Following on from Dada and Beyond Volume 1: Dada Discourses, the sixteen essays in this collection provide critical examinations of Dada, placing particular emphasis on the ongoing impact of its creative output. The chapters examine its pivotal figures as well as its more peripheral protagonists, their different geographic locations, and the extraordinary diversity of their practices that included poetry, painting, printmaking, dance, performance, theatre, textiles, readymades, photomontage and cinema. As the book’s authors reveal, Dada not only anticipates Surrealism but also foreshadows an extraordinary array of more recent tendencies including action painting, conceptual art, outsider art, performance art, environmental and land art. In its privileging of chance and automatism, its rejection of formal artistic institutions, its subversive exploitation of mass media and its constant self-reconstitution and self-redefinition, Dada deserves to be seen as a cultural phenomenon that is still powerfully relevant in the twenty-first century.

The deceptive images of Alfred Jarry: lost, found and invented portraits by Beardsley, Rousseau and Rippl-Ronaï

Abstract To capture the likeness of the pince-sans-rire French writer, Alfred Jarry, creator of Pere Ubu, posed a challenge to the marginal artists in whose circle he moved. The image of himself that Jarry propagated was carefully crafted and calculated to confuse. Outside the Ubu cycle, his literary texts nevertheless betray signs that he suppressed characteristics in his personality that might have detracted from the outrageous image that he wanted to project. This article will address both his subterfuge and his own internal struggle between the moi obscur and the autre moi, for it is Jarrys cynical autre moi that he allowed to fuse with the appalling persona of Ubu. I shall be discussing a recently surfaced portrait of Jarry by the Hungarian Nabi, Jozsef Rippl-Ronai, which, if genuine, is perhaps the most successful in capturing his moi obscur. I shall also examine the evidence for two supposedly missing portraits, a Rousseau and a Beardsley, reconstructions of which have already been catalogued as t...

Dancing under Their Own Gaze: Mallarme, Jarry and Valery

in French literature. It is the purpose of this essay to situate his contribution, which challenges the cult of the female dancer and provides an important counterpoise to the two other writers.’ Jarry counted himself among Oscar Wilde’s supporters and friends in a group which centred around Rachilde and Marcel Schwob at the Mercure de France publishing house. Presented as fiction, his challenge to the prevailing image of dancer as ’sylph’ came in the

Alfred Jarry's alternative cubists

The emergence of the artistic movement of Cubism is officially put at about 1907-8.~ Given that its origins have been the subject of fierce debate, however,’ and that neither Apollinaire, who set himself up as the Cubists’ theoretician, nor Picasso, ever accepted that Cubism was only a matter of translating the visual image into cubic form, it may be worth investigating an alternative usage of the word cubiste, coined in 1894 and in limited circulation in French avant-garde circles well before Cubist painting was defined and named. Given also that this early use of cubiste was a mischievous neologism based on the Greek words kubistitire (KvPUT[1]!rlpe) and kubistontes (Kvf3Z(J!wv7:eç), both used to refer to acrobatic tumblers (Fig. 1) and that Picasso’s work of 1904-5 focused intently on acrobats, the apparent fluke takes its place in a mysterious cluster of flukes, if not a meaningful pattern. The word cubiste in its Greek sense of ’acrobatic tumbler’ was coined by a writer who was venerated and courted by four of the leading figures of the avant-garde around 1901-5. The writer was Alfred Jarry, whose uncompromising ’Umour’ fitted well with the aims of Apollinaire’s