How to Have a Dada Birthday

The problem is that the whole idea of writing a “Happy birthday” blog about Dada is that it is against Dada.

Dadas did not want pretty birthdays. They preferred spontaneity, sweeping out of the old, downright ugliness (especially if it shocked the bourgeosis) and simultaneous happenings.

Still, if “the spirit of Dada is always in man,” any day can be a birthday of Dada.

So the guests to the Dada party, birthday or not, might look like this:

http://www.marcelduchamp.net/L.H.O.O.Q.php

or this:

http://www.english.emory.edu/DRAMA/HugoBall.gif

or this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HansArp-CloudShepher1953.JPG

There would be sound poems, performed simultaneously by different artists (you’re not supposed to “get it,” by the way)

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2006/dada/techniques/sound.shtm

And perhaps music by John Cage (a kindred spirit)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJagb7hL0E

Then something would have to be destroyed. http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=81209

And someone would be pelted with a steak.

Guest blog by Elsa M. Bell, author of Dada and Surrealism For Beginners, in honor of the beginning of Dadaism, believe to have taken root at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916.