Chapter 7

“Pour faire un livre dadaïste”: Dada Experimentation with Book Form

Nina Parish

As Europe and any hope for progress engendered by modernity were shaken to the core by the atrocities of World War I, the spontaneous irruption of Dada went about destroying the very foundations of logic and reason on which bourgeois society was established. Through the interdisciplinary media of performances, manifestoes and reviews, no- one and nothing could escape Dada’s abrasive, scandalous critiques. Revolt and protestation are obviously key words in situating Dada, but as is evident from the early Dada manifestations at the Cabaret Voltaire, collaboration, exchange and a shattering of hierarchy between different creative forms are also essential to understanding a Dada conception of art/non-art. Much research on Dada focuses either on the collective, performative character of these happenings before their time or on the iconoclasm of individual creators. The aim of this study, however, is not to analyse these aspects of Dada nor to dwell on the Dada outlook more generally, but rather to concentrate on a more specific collaborative element of their production, their use of the book form. In this article, I would like to determine whether the Dadaists’ radical experimentation with many different artistic and literary means of expression had any notable effect on their use of this form and accordingly on the genre of the livre d’artiste. In so doing, the question of whether these books produced collaboratively by poets and artists linked to Dada can be considered as Dadaist or as in fact more traditional in their aims and results will be explored. With this in

94 Parish mind, two separate collaborations will be examined: firstly between Paul Eluard and Max Ernst on book projects such as Répétitions (1922); and secondly between Tristan Tzara and Hans Jean Arp on books such as Vingt-cinq poèmes (Tzara 1918). Through the analysis of the crossover between text and image in these books, I hope to establish to what extent the Dada collaborations entail a seamless dovetailing of textual and visual elements, as the very choice of the livre d’artiste format suggests a degree of convention, even if the end product departs from tradition in certain respects. Before attempting to establish what constitutes a livre d’artiste at the beginning of the twentieth century, the question of whether these books are Dada or surrealist should be considered, albeit briefly. This is far from a simple task: indeed, Renée Riese Hubert includes analyses of Eluard and Ernst’s Répétitions and Les Malheurs des immortels as surrealist books in her influential work, Surrealism and the Book (1988: 54 –5): Chronologically Les Malheurs des immortels and Répétitions belong to Dadaism. Although the uncompromising satire contained in their pages fits with the aggressive practices of that movement, however, the highly constructive and even systematic nature of these joint ventures departs from the improvisational, even slapdash Dadaism and points to the mainstream of surrealism. It can be argued that Dada experimentation with book form is more than, as Riese Hubert puts it (p.6), “slapdash” or “impish subversion”, and that the ‘highly constructive and even systematic nature’ of these publications can be analysed as an implicit part of the book form itself. There are obviously many crossovers between Dada and Surrealism, and it is generally accepted that the publication of André Breton’s manifesto in 1924 actually follows much surrealist experimentation. Furthermore, Eluard, Ernst, Tzara and Arp all went on to embrace surrealist tenets, although undoubtedly not always in the way that Breton would have hoped for. I would, however, like to return to a chronological approach whereby the dates on which these books were published mean that they all come under the Dada umbrella (that is, before the Surrealists borrowed it from Lautréamont). This also fits with the perspective taken by the curators of the 2005 Dada exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, which included books by these creators in manuscript and published form. The catalogue for this exhibition also contains texts by livre d’artiste