85 FIG. 3 (left): Photographer unknown, Sophie Taeuber- Arp: Dance in “cubist” costume. Zurich, 1916/17? Copy photo. © Stiftung Arp E.V. Berlin/ Rolandswerth. The archival material and the quotes that punctuate the exhibition supply historical context for the experience with the “Other” which the Dada artists experienced at the beginning of the twentieth century. The sources for this included literary, visual, audio, and plastic sources, such as postcards, colonial journals, and ethnological museums, to give but a few concrete examples. Dada Afrika exhibits this varied documentation in a four-part presentation. FIG. 4 (left): Marcel Janco, draft for a poster announcing the Dada event Le Chant Nègre on March 21, 1916. Charcoal on paper fi xed on card. Kunsthaus Zürich, Vereinigung Zürcher Kunstfreunde, inv. 1980/42. © Kunsthaus Zurich 2016, ProLitteris, Zurich. FIG. 5 (below): Male fi gure, lefem. Bangwa, Grassfi elds, Cameroon. Early 20th century. Wood. Ex Han Coray. Völkerkundemuseum der Universität Zurich, inv. 10084. © Museum Rietberg, Zurich. Photo: Rainer Wolfsberger. DADA PERFORMANCE The exhibition opens with an examination of the attempts made to experiment with and to immerse themselves in non-Western cultures by Dadaists in their performances. Music, literature, and the arts of Africa and Oceania were the stuff of the “Soirées Nègres” they produced at the Cabaret Voltaire and Galerie Dada in Zurich. Dada artists used sound-poems, drums, and pseudo-African dances as a form of provocation and innovation (fi g. 3). These tumultuous spectacles were intended to shock and alienate their audiences. They were also meant to test the artists’ physical and mental limits and to liberate the emotional and irrational forces within them through that contact with the cultures of “Others.” The Dadaists used those cultures to invoke what they saw as an “authentic” state of consciousness in which man and the cosmos would be one, and art and reality operated as a whole. The primitivist drawing by Marcel Janco that would become the poster for the fi rst “Chant Nègre” presentation at the Cabaret Voltaire has become recognized as a major work (fi g. 4). Janco, a Romanian-born Dada artist, was manifestly inspired by African wooden statuary such as that of the Bangwa of the Cameroonian Grasslands (fi g. 5). The gestural dynamic and the aggressive expressivity of those works unleash an untethered vitality—a state of mind and being that was much sought after at the Dada soirées. DADA AFRIKA
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