Scissors against a world gone mad

In the winter of 1916, Europe was two years into a war that seemed to have no bottom. Switzerland stayed neutral, and Zurich filled with people who had fled it: painters, poets, dancers, students, and young men who refused to fight.

On the fifth of February, the German poet Hugo Ball and the performer Emmy Hennings opened a little cabaret in the back room of a tavern on the Spiegelgasse. They named it the Cabaret Voltaire. Within days it was full every night.

Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco came from Romania, Hans Arp from Alsace, and the dancer and designer Sophie Taeuber from eastern Switzerland. With Ball and Hennings they read poems in three languages at the same time, danced in masks of painted cardboard, and made music on anything that would make a sound.

One evening Hugo Ball was carried onto the stage in a costume of stiff, shining cardboard, blue and scarlet and gold, like a bishop made of paper, and recited a poem built of words that did not exist. The audience did not know whether to laugh or to leave. That was the point.

They needed a name. The story they liked best is that it was found by slipping a paper knife into a French and German dictionary at random. The blade landed on dada, the French word for a child's hobby horse. In Romanian, it also sounds like yes, yes.

It meant everything and nothing, which was exactly right. The reason and order of their elders had marched a continent into the trenches. Dada would answer with nonsense, chance and play.

In Russian, as in the Romanian of Tzara and Janco, “da, da” means “yes, yes”, and some say that is where the name really came from: a cheerful yes shouted into a world at war. Across the same narrow street in Zurich lived an exiled Russian named Lenin, who would soon leave to make a revolution of a very different kind.

Back in Russia, artists such as Ilia Zdanevich, Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov were cutting up the world in their own way, so much so that a museum in Madrid later called it Russian Dada.

Hans Arp tore paper into squares, let them fall onto a sheet, and glued them where they landed. He called the results collages made according to the laws of chance. Sophie Taeuber, later Taeuber-Arp, carried the same freedom into puppets, weavings and paintings of pure color and shape.

Scissors, paste and a little luck had become the tools of art.

When the war ended, Dada traveled, and in Berlin it grew sharper. Artists there took the photographs of newspapers and magazines and cut them apart, pasting generals, politicians and film stars into new and ridiculous company. They called it photomontage.

The finest scissors in Berlin belonged to Hannah Höch. Her great collage, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, made in 1919 and 1920, sends the powerful men of her day tumbling among dancers, machines and crowds. She was often the only woman in the room, and she outlasted almost all of them.

In New York in 1917, Marcel Duchamp bought a porcelain urinal, laid it on its back, signed it R. Mutt and sent it to an art exhibition. It was hidden from view, and it changed art anyway.

In Paris, Tzara, André Breton and their friends staged Dada evenings that ended in shouting and thrown fruit, until the movement quietly came apart around 1923 and much of its spirit flowed into Surrealism.

Dada lasted only a few years, but it left us a way of looking. It taught that the true history of the world is often stranger than anything we could invent, and that the best answer to the absurd is sometimes a pair of scissors and a raised eyebrow.

That is our work. We look for the stories history misplaced, the emus that won a war, the rabbits that charged an emperor, cut them from old photographs, and paste them back together with one spot of red. Each becomes a Plate, printed on a white T-shirt and numbered by hand: a small tribute to the women and men of the Cabaret Voltaire.