CHAPTER FAU—THEME 18

November 10th, 1984

Chicago Filmmakers

“Zätt üpsiilon iks, Wee fau Uu, Tee äss ärr kuu,” moans performance-artist Lynn Book—Time Arts instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Percussionist Johnse Holt thumbs his mbira; trumpet-player Jeff Beer squeezes a muted sigh. “Pee Oo änn ämm, Ell kaa Ii haa,” Lynn urges. “Gee äff Ee dee zee beee?”

Cellist Philip Hart Helzer has been bowing a drone. Now he leans to his mic, wondering if, “Zätt üpsiilon iks, Wee fau Uu, Tee äss ärr kuu.” Johnse is shaking a rattle; Jeff’s trumpet punctuates the letters. Phil plucks a dramatic cello chord, operatically adding, “Pee Oo änn ämm, Ell kaa Ii haa.” Johnse strikes a conga, Jeff hums a buzz through his horn. Phil fears, “Gee äff Ee dee zee beee?”

Now it's my turn to sing the alphabet in reverse—and I end triumphantly on “Aaaaa.”

Finally, Lynn, Phil and I conclude Ur Sonata with a fourth, simultaneous alphabetic recitation. But we get—painfully—only as far as “beeee?”

A hundred-odd audience members applaud. A robust elderly gentleman bursts forward to shake our hands. “I am Doctor Hansjuergen Kienast. My friend in New York for many years was Richard Huelsenbeck.”

How amazing to meet a living connection to dada!

Doctor Kienast has much to say. He’d loved our show. Huelsenbeck would have been so pleased that dada has a home in Chicago. How had we come to perform a German poem?

I am thrilled to be talking to this delightful man. But—something nags me. I do not bring it up, never in my subsequent letters to Doctor Kienast. Still—is he unaware of Richard Huelsenbeck’s frequently critical attitude toward Kurt Schwitters?

Huelsenbeck was a communist participant in the 1918 German Revolution at the end of World War I, and he called Schwitters petty bourgeois. Schwitters responded in writing, positing two kinds of dada: “husk” and “core”. Political dadas were husk—huelse—but pure dadas like Raoul Hausmann, Hans Arp, and Tristan Tzara, were core.

Kurt Schwitters declared allegiance to neither husk nor core dada. Instead, he was Merz, a one-man apolitical art movement. But for Schwitters, art and politics simply occupied different dimensions, and in a decade when the right-wing nationalist “stab-in-the-back” theory blamed Germany’s World War I loss on Social Democrats and international Jewish conspiracy, Schwitters’ internationalist practice of border-transcending artistic collaboration showed clearly which side he was on.

Schwitters may not have set out, in the nineteen-twenties, to inject politics into art, but his art did have political impact. As Stefan Themerson explained to friends in the Gaberbocchus Common Room, in 1958,

To us, today, it may perhaps seem that the act of putting two innocent words together, the act of saying:

“Blue is the colour of thy yellow hair,” 

is an innocent aesthetic affair—that the act of putting together two or three innocent objects, such as a railway ticket, and a flower, and a bit of wood—is an innocent aesthetic affair. Well, it is not so at all. Tickets belong to railway companies; flowers to gardeners; bits of wood to timber merchants. If you mix these things together you are making havoc of the classification system on which the regime is established, you are carrying people’s minds away from the customary modes of thought, and people’s customary modes of thought are the very foundation of Order, whether it is the Old Order or the New Order, and, therefore, if you meddle with the customary modes of thought then, whether you are Galileo or Giordano Bruno with their funny ideas about motion, or Einstein with his funny ideas about space and time, or Russell with his funny ideas about syllogisms, or Schönberg with his funny ideas about the black and white keys of the keyboard, or the Cubists with their funny ideas about shapes, or Dadaists or Merzists with their funny ideas about introducing “symmetries and rhythms instead of principles”—you are, whether you want it or not, in the very bowels of political changes. Hitler knew it. And that is why Kurt Schwitters was kicked out of Germany. “Nothing is resisted with such savagery as a new form in art,” writes Kandinsky, quoting a historian of the Russian theatre, Nelidoff.

In the nineteen-thirties, Kurt’s teen son Ernst joined the Socialist Workers’ Youth, smuggling information about the Nazis for publication abroad. Shortly afterward, Kurt and Helma Schwitters formally took a stand, becoming supporters of the left-liberal Social Democratic Party.