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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