Ball, Hugo

Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (Documents of Twentieth Century Art)

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Difficult. beautiful, underappreciated genius

Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (Documents of Twentieth Century Art)
Hugo Ball
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0520204409

Book Description

Hugo Ball--poet, philosopher, novelist, cabaret performer, journalist, mystic--was a man extremely sensitive to the currents of his time and carried in their wake. In February 1916 he founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The sound poems and performance art by Ball and the other artists who gathered there were the beginnings of Dada. Ball's extraordinary diaries, one of the most significant products of the Dada movement, are here available in English in paperback for the first time, along with the original Dada manifesto and John Elderfield's critical introduction, revised and updated for the paperback edition, and a supplementary bibliography of Dada texts that have appeared since the 1974 hardcover edition of this book.

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Difficult. beautiful, underappreciated genius.......1999-02-03

Long before the beat movement or the hippies comes such a beautiful work from one of the most honest and daring individuals to ever live and then be forgotten in this world. The title says it best. Hugo Ball is probably the most important guide (in my life). You should read this and see if any of it rubs off on you.

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Hermann Hesse
Hugo Ball
Manufacturer: Suhrkamp Verlag
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 3518368850

Blago Bung, Blago Bung, Bosso Fatakal: First Texts of German Dada (Anti-Classics of Dada)

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Burn Your Poems and Ride the Hobby-Horse

Blago Bung, Blago Bung, Bosso Fatakal: First Texts of German Dada (Anti-Classics of Dada)
Walter Sterner
Manufacturer: Serpent's Tail
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

German | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (The Documents of Twentieth Century Art)
Approximate Man and Other Writings: Approximate Man and Other Writings
Dada: Art and Anti-Art (World of Art)
The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Second Edition (Paperbacks in Art History)
Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (Documents of Twentieth Century Art)

ASIN: 0947757864

Book Description

The German contribution to the Dada movement ("DADA MEANS NOTHING!" proclaimed Tristan Tzara) as it unfolded in Zurich during the first World War is not widely known.This collection brings together three texts translated into English for the first time, which were essential for the very creation of the movement, and which influenced all its future developments in France, Germany, the USA and many other countries.

Included is the only Dada novel, Tenderenda the Fantast, written by the movement's founder Hugo Ball. sections of which he performed at the celebrated Cabaret Voltaire. It is partially a roman à clef recounting the birth of Dada and the author's subsequent love-hate relationship with his monstrous creation, and yet is much more besides. Richard Huelsenbeck's Fantastic Prayers was the first Dada poetry collection, and these precocious "Bruitist" poems clearly illustrate how the absurd elements in early Expressionism evolved into the bizarre eloquence of Dada. Finally, Walter Serner's Last Loosening manifesto, the first major German manifesto written in Zurich, which provoked numerous brawls at its various performances and yet is hardly known. In fact it was the source for many of Tzara's future literary provocations and seems to have been deliberately suppressed for this reason.

Three vital texts from one of the most extraordinary manifestations of the avant-garde of this century.

Customer Reviews:

Burn Your Poems and Ride the Hobby-Horse.......2000-11-19

In a recent review of two books from the Subtext collective (some sort of Seattle based poetry commune), Stephen Thomas, wrote, "Wallace Steven remarked somewhere that every successful poem expresses a theory of poetry... Every serious poet has had to come to terms with the power of language to express its own meanings apart from, or even in opposition, to the poet's own intention. The Language poets seem to start with this experience. It is not too much to say that they cultivate a distrust of language and that their poems often frustrate the `basic' function of language to narrate, to explain, to describe and to import knowledge or wisdom."

I should point out that every serious poet should be burned with a Buick Regal's cigarette lighter and thrown into the Duwamish until they learn that the basic function of the human throat is to howl. The `basic' function of language is to frustrate this impulse.

Eighty years ago, in Zurich among a population of international outcasts and deserters from the Great War, a group of artists exploded what had been German Expressionism. They protested Western Civilization (the whole ball of wax), a society whose devotion to a coldly analytical and rational language had wrought Verdun and the Somme. Remembered largely now as the foundation for Surrealism and trivialized for their jokes, such as Marcel Duchamp's urinal, La Fonatine (1917), The First Texts of Dada revels in the serious anarchy and the subversive antics that gave birth to Dada.

Hugo Ball -- one of the principal perpetrators of Dada and the author of the only Dada novel, Tenderenda the Fantast, included in this book and which of course bears absolutely no resemblance to what then passed for a novel and often doesn't bare clear resemblence to any known language -- believed that under the "influence of Kant and German idealism, as well as Lutheran sobriety, that language had been made abstract and thus had been debased into a utilitarianism that allowed it to be plundered by jingoism, literary professionalism, journalism, and intellectual vacuity. It had become a tool for upholding the ruling value system." Ball made it his mission to purify the word. He saw Dada, which was initially performed at the Cabaret Voltaire as a fusion of sound, drama, and painting; a cacophony of contradiction, music played on found objects (known as Merz performance, the philosophy that any sound or text can be incorporated as material into a performance), monologues of gibberish, that is an art free from any concrete constraints.

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