torben Jelsbak
current research on dadaism as an international movement or net- work does not account for any dada enclave or any dadaist activities in the nordic countries (cf. forster ed. 1996-2002). the absence of any explicit nordic dada group or dadaist magazine should not, however, lead to the conclusion that the dadaist rupture passed con- temporary nordic artists and activists unnoticed. this essay shows, on the contrary, that dadaist practices and tactics did play an impor- tant, though neglected, role in the emergence of danish avant-garde culture in the years around 1920. during World War i, copenhagen enjoyed a brief status as a scandinavian cultural metropolis – a “nordic Paris”. not unlike Zürich, the capital of neutral switzerland and the birthplace of in- ternational dada, copenhagen served as a meeting point for nordic artists and foreign artists in exile and as a melting pot for the latest trends in european avant-garde art. isolated from the events of war and revolution occurring elsewhere in europe, copenhagen became the centre of a vivid modernist rupture in the arts, made manifest in a series of controversial exhibitions, publications, and the emergence of a local avant-garde group affiliated with the magazine Klingen (the Blade) (1917-1920). Labelled “expressionism”, an already am- biguous term, the activities of these artists incorporated elements and impulses from french fauvism and cubism, italian futurism, and international dadaism. an initial problem, therefore, when approaching the danish his- tory of dada concerns terminology. the danish artists and activists who may be associated with the dada movement or who were in- volved in dadaist activities did not (or only rarely) designate them- 402 Torben Jelsbak selves as dadaists. instead, “expressionism” was used as the over- arching and non-discriminative umbrella term for any modernist or avant-garde activity, “dadaism” being generally regarded as a degen- erate and rather insane offshoot of the new art. the Berlin expres- sionist impresario and editor of Der Sturm, herwarth Walden, explained to one of his danish correspondents in 1919: “dadaism is basically expressionism misunderstood” (“dadaismus ist einfach missverstandener expression ismus”).1 the editor and leading theo- rist of the Klingen-circle, otto Gelsted (1888-1968), also felt the need to draw this distinction in his pamphlet Ekspressionisme (Expres- sionism) from 1919. in Gelsted’s formalist interpretation of the ex- pressionist rupture in the arts, cubism was praised as the ‘rational’ and permanent part, whereas dada was mentioned so as to indicate the pitfalls and dangers of the new poetics:
allegedly, a new artistic movement, dadaism, has emerged in switzer- land, for the time being le dernier cri in art proclaiming all previous movements to be meaningless because of their search for meaning. existence is surely meaningless; in any case no one until now has been able to show much meaning in it. therefore it is humbug when artists induce people to believe that there is a point when there is none. art must also be meaningless – when the world is a chaos, art shall not be a microcosmos. in this there is a bitter truth the argu- ment is insane but consistent. (Gelsted 1977: 75) danish avant-gardists were, however, more familiar with the activi- ties of the international dada movement(s) than this statement sug- gests. even in the context of Klingen, we find examples of more experimental and genre-breaking activities (performance, simultane- ous poetry, montage) that clearly transcend Gelsted’s formalist or cubist conception of expressionism and, instead, point to the influ- ence of both Zürich and Berlin dadaism. in the second wave of dan- ish expressionism, which was linked to the communist dnss (new student society) (1922-24), this dada element became even more ex- plicit, indicating the group’s close contacts to the Berlin dada move- ment and herwarth Walden’s der sturm-organisation. another problem of narrating this history – which is a general problem and paradox in any dadaist historiography – lies in the per- ishable character of its empirical objects and sources. the danish