The Low Countries. Jaargang 12

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The Aftermath and the Aftermath's Aftermath of Dada in the Low Countries

The Import of Nothing. How Dada Came, Saw and Vanished in the Low Countries (1915-1929) is the seventh volume in the series ‘Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada’. The author, Hubert van den Berg, points out in its first chapter that the denomination ‘Dada in the Low Countries’ has to be treated with caution, not as a ‘new fixed denomination’ but as ‘only a temporary focus for the duration of the following narrative’. There are two reasons for this caveat. Firstly, such terms as Dada Belgium and Dada the Netherlands might incorrectly imply that Dada in these countries was a comparable phenomenon to Dada Zurich, Dada Berlin or Dada Hanover, while Van den Berg's aim in this book is precisely to demonstrate that in the Low Countries Dada was only a marginal phenomenon. Secondly, the geographical organisation of the series might tend to encourage the reader to see the Dada movement in the Low Countries as a homogeneous whole. But Van den Berg points out that the backgrounds in the Netherlands and Belgium/Flanders were so different that histories of their respective Dada movements produce different narratives. The book draws attention to both the parallels and the differences between Dutch and Belgian followers of Dada. Strangely enough, the first periodical to launch Dada in the Netherlands, Revue du feu, was a Belgian-Dutch project led by Arthur Pétronio, who lived in Brussels.

Although the attraction of Dada was for the most part a highly individual matter, Van den Berg distinguishes two periods. The first was around 1919-1920, the time when Dadaism branched out from Zurich and Berlin to Paris, New York and Cologne. The Belgian figures of this initial period are the writers Clément Pansaers, Paul van Ostaijen and the Antwerp periodical Ça Ira, while the first Dutch Dadaists are the photographer Erwin Blumenfeld, the artist Paul Citroen and, particularly, Theo van Doesburg, head of the periodical De Stijl. Dadaism did not meet with any real response, however, until early in 1923, when Kurt Schwitters and Van Doesburg went on a two-month tour of the Netherlands. But their Dada Tour also marked the last international manifestation of Dada, which at the same time indicates that the activities in the Low Countries have to be seen as an ‘aftermath’ of the historical Dada movement. In the mid 1920s it is possible to distinguish a second wave of Dadaism - ‘The aftermath of the aftermath’ - although it is less pronounced. The avant-garde group De Ploeg from Groningen, of which Hendrik Werkman was the most important member, then displayed a ‘certain reference to Dadaism’, as did the Antwerp periodical Het Overzicht, run by Michel Seuphor (alias Ferdinand Berckelaers). Each of the four most important tenors of Dadaism from the Low Countries: Clément Pansaers, Theo van Doesburg, Paul van Ostaijen and Kurt Schwitters - is given a whole chapter to himself; they also form the principal part of the book.

Unlike the Dada movement in Germany, Switzerland, France etc., what typifies the Netherlands and Belgium is that it is impossible to speak of a movement or group. There, unlike in Zurich or Berlin - and subsequently Geneva, Cologne and New York - there was no sign of any organisational framework, and consequently fewer appearances and events. When an artist did seek a closer approach, it was usually a question of ‘individual appropriations and incidental recuperations’. A direct result of this was that - with the exception of the Dada campaign of Van Doesburg and Schwitters - in practice the movement expressed itself mainly in written form - in manifestoes, periodicals and Dadaist articles and collages.

Those who sought closer relations with Dadaism did not do so unconditionally and unrestrictedly, as the example of Theo van Doesburg clearly illustrates. Under the pseudonym I.K. Bonset he manifested himself as a Dadaist of the first water; under his own name he revealed himself more frequently as a constructivist than a Dadaist. The ambivalent attitude of Van Ostaijen, who did not call himself a Dadaist but did use Dadaist techniques and elements (especially in his collection Occupied City - Bezette Stad, 1921) also illustrates the distanced attitude adopted by the avant-garde scene.

Van den Berg tries to explain in various ways why the avant-garde, and especially Dadaism, did not get off the ground in the Netherlands and Belgium, but

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in the end all his explanations are unsatisfactory. For instance, war-time conditions would have made international contacts more difficult, but then one would have had different situations in the Netherlands and in Belgium, since the former was neutral and the latter occupied by the Germans. Just as unsatisfactory is the explanation that Dadaism did not make any great impact because it represented ‘a recurring stigma in contemporary criticism’. In the other international centres, the exploits of the Dadaists received just as little general approbation. The most plausible hypothesis seems to be that the aesthetic function of Dada, especially the ‘synthesizing cross section of features previously developed in the pre-war avant-garde’ in the Low Countries, had already been taken over by constructivism. In many cases, indeed, it is clear to see that Dadaism linked up with constructivist tendencies that were already present.

The positive thing for the English-speaking reader who wishes to find out about Dadaism in Flanders and the Netherlands is that this story - much of the material for which is in Dutch, German and French - has now been made accessible in English, although the final result is a rather ‘messy’ book. The impression of ‘a rather arbitrary and chaotic arrangement’ may very well accord with the ‘anything-but-structured history of Dadaism in the Low Countries’, as the author almost apologetically remarks, but this does not help the reader all that much. The introduction tells us that the book will be ‘a history of the way Dada was received in Belgium and the Netherlands as a conceptual proposition’, in other words ‘the appropriation and adaptation of Dada as a programmatic framework’. The content of the various chapters is far more diverse. Here it is just as much a question of the selfpresentation of the authors via appearances and meta-texts, the taking-over of the idea of a ‘Dadaist spirit’, the artistic utterances themselves, the reception and reaction, as of the historical picture provided in recent literary histories.

Concerning the last-mentioned, the author is mainly concerned with relativising both the status of the avant-garde in literary historiography and the importance the pacemakers of the inter-war avantgarde ascribed to their work. In doing so, he (rightly) devotes much attention to the strategic intentions of the Dadaists: their networking, their attempts

Michel Seuphor, with behind him three cover designs for his periodical Het Overzicht. 1924-1925.

at self-profiling and the exclusion of competing groups. The weakest sections have to do with the situation in Flanders, where the Flemish political and social context (The Flemish Movement and nationalism) are presented in an oversimplified and sometime erroneous way. It is not true, for example, that the situation of the dutchified University of Ghent was ‘not reversed’ after the war (‘Yet some achievements from the wartime occupation, such as the Flemish University of Ghent, were not reversed’). Van den Berg also assumes rather too readily that the Flemish Movement was dominated by conservatives and traditionalists. And the relationship between the movement and activism on the one hand, and Dadaism and the international avant-garde on

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the other was far more complex than the version Van den Berg provides here. And Paul van Ostaijen would turn in his grave were he to read that the nineteenth-century poet Guido Gezelle, whom he so admired as a renewer of the language, is classified by Van den Berg under Heimat literature: ‘The Flemish Heimat literature of Guido Gazelle [sic], Cyrile Buyssche [sic], and Stijn Streuvels. [...] This literature glorified the Flemish landscape and the simple “natural” laborious life of the ordinary rural population.’ This quotation immediately also illustrates that the reader will have to display a considerable degree of ingenuity to find the names of the authors in the index, where one still finds Gazelle and Buyssche instead of Gezelle and Buysse, and the names of the French authors, titles of texts, collections and periodicals also teem with errors. The first chapter in particular suffers woefully from computer conversion problems, sloppy spelling and spelling errors - shortcomings which are incomprehensible in a volume of an international series.

Lut Missinne

Translated by John Irons

Hubert F. van den Berg, The Import of Nothing. How Dada Came, Saw and Vanished in the Low Countries (1915-1929). (Crisis and the Arts. The History of Dada. Volume VII). Farmington Hills: G.K. Hall & Co, 2002. 450 pp.
isbn 0-8161-7386-9.