DADA AND IDEOLOGIZED PROTO-CYBORGS AS SYNCRETIC PERFORMERS
DADA and Ideologized Proto-cyborgs as Syncretic Performers

Summary/Abstract: Distinctions between/approaches to Dada and futurism, cubism and surrealism progress. The same happens to the cargo of (political) anarchy in Dada. My article addresses the experimental and performance side of the Dada phenomenon. Of course, there is a comprehensive spirit of avant-garde, as there is a Saeculum of modernity. Dada, however, functioned like a crucible that took over the experimental openings of the moment and pushed them to a level rarely overtaken until today. Any contemporary performance can invoke Dada as its origins. Cabaret Voltaire represents the start of a noble artistic lineage. What would be the typology of Dada performance, then? What was the role of the proto-cyborg in the Dadaist vision of the anti-art? In order to approximate the answer to these questions I took for study three photo-montages realized by Raoul Hausmann in the decade 1920-1930. Hausmann designed hybrid representations of proto-cyborgs in which what mattered was the ideological symbolism, not the functionality of these projects. Especially the Berlin-branch of Dada took a keen interest in technology, but in relation to war, propaganda, and politics. This old cyborgology had two intentions: one the one hand to highlight the possibilities offered by a hybrid self, which engulfed many “others”, on the other hand to signal the danger of losing identity and become prey to all sorts of ideological manipulations. Not all Dadaist anti-art was anti-art for anti-art’s sake; actually, by supporting cosmopolitanism and the abolition of national barriers, Dada anticipated some globalist tenets. Avant-garde itself, as a whole, de-structured the traditional conditioning of arts and heralded the composite and kitsch-oriented postmodern art. Still, despite the profuseness of details and facts, we cannot understand exactly what Dada was like, as we miss records of their performances, that is experiment in progress, improvisation.

• Details
• Contents