ABSTRACT

Paris had been beckoning to Tristan Tzara even before the last Zurich Dada soiree made it clear that Dada as he knew it could no longer feel comfortable in Switzerland. True, the poet he admired most in Paris, Guillaume Apollinaire, had died in November 1918. This chapter presents a straightforward distinction between Dada music and Dada anti-music. Their anti-art frequently called itself art, in order to call into question the very category of art as defined in language. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes is, along with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, one of the three key figures in the creation of Paris Dada anti-music. The role of chance as a compositional principle in Dada is, then, at least on one level, that of a defence mechanism. In saying that chance rules art, the Dadaists, Tzara as well as Duchamp, refuse the right to analyse their compositions as if they were determined by any kind of rational analysable process.