86 In addition to the sound-poems, music, and dances, masks and costumes were also vital components of the Dada soirées in Zurich (fi g. 6). In 1927 Hugo Ball reminisced about the mask’s fi rst appearance: “It had a pathetic expression, a nearly insane look to it.” The near-magical performative powers that Dada artists conferred on the mask were similar to those that the practices of non-European societies bestowed on their equivalents. Although Dada masks are often described as “African,” the materials and techniques used to make them related them more closely to Oceanic masks. Popular art was also very much in demand, and some of Janco’s creations are reminiscent of Swiss carnival masks or of those worn at masked parades in his native Romania. Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp was primarily inspired by the Hopi kachina dolls of Arizona, which she saw for the fi rst time thanks to her sister, Erika Schlegel, who worked as a librarian for C. G. Jung. The internationally famous psychoanalyst had brought a number of them back with him when he returned from his travels in America. In creating the costume seen in fi gure 8, she fi rst created a detailed sketch on paper. The result was a vividly colored outfi t with abstract and geometric designs, representative of this versatile artist’s work, which, infl uenced as it was by that of other cultures, was exemplary of the Dada aspiration of non-elitist art that is without borders. FIG. 6 (left): Installation view showing the dialog between a Dada mask by Marcel Janco and a Lötschental mask. © Museum Rietberg, Zurich. Photo: Rainer Wolfsberger. FIG. 7 (right): Marcel Janco, poster for the fi rst exhibition Dada: Cubistes, Art Nègre at Galerie Corray, 1917. Paper. Kunsthaus Zürich, Dada Collection, inv. V:48 / B 51 B 1. © Kunsthaus Zurich, 2016, ProLitteris, Zurich. FIG. 8 (below): Installation view of a costume by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and two kachina fi gures. © Museum Rietberg, Zurich. Photo: Rainer Wolfsberger.
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