ABSTRACT
In the 1920s, Lefebvre was associated with the Surrealists and influenced by Tristan Tzara’s Dadaism. From his first encounter, Lefebvre was taken with the radical potential of Dadaist poets’ refusal to make sense and satisfy the expectations of their audience. Dada came to Paris from Zurich, where it had flourished briefly, having originated as a nonsense word to describe the absurd performances at the legendary Cabaret Voltaire. Along with Hugo Ball and Richard Hülsenbeck, Tristan Tzara was to emerge as one of the key figures of Dada, drawing on experiments in poetry and music. Hülsenbeck, Tzara and others performed pieces intended to shock the audience with their outrageousness and anti-rationalism. But before it became a well-known movement, Dada was simply one of many nihilistic art-for-arts-sake acts that fancied themselves the heirs of Nietzsche. Dada has been described as ‘nonsense with a straight face’, or an ‘absurd negation that wants no consequences’ (Marcus 1989:193, 199). Dadaists placed disintegration in the midst of their works. By stringing vowels together into meaningless sound poetry, or by attempting to shock, frighten or disgust its audience, Dada’s moral disorder pioneered the series of twentieth-century avant-garde movements that led to the Situationists, May 1968, punk and anarchism. In November 1915, Hugo Ball had predicted:
In an age like ours, when people are assaulted daily by the most monstrous things without being able to keep account of their impressions, aesthetic production becomes a prescribed course. But all living art will be irrational, primitive and complex; it will speak a secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox.
