Modernism/modernity

Whether radical or playful, Dada has a way of startling its viewers with unforgettable images of fragmentation: human bodies in pieces, snippets of incomprehensible language, aesthetic forms mauled and recomposed in collages, assemblages, and photomontages. Heinrich Hoerle's twelve lithographs of 1920 entitled Krüppelmappe (Cripple Portfolio) depict armless veterans who have returned home with mutilations and prostheses. In Das Ehepaar (The Married Couple), the woman fondles her husband's left-hand prosthesis, while his right-hand prosthesis is anchored in her waist like a fishing hook, hinting at a complex and restrictive relational and sexual tension. Otto Dix's 1923 Dirne und Kriegsverletzter (Prostitute and Disabled War Veteran) is likewise a powerful memorializing of the soldier by rendering the disfigurement visible. Dadaists did not just invent many of these novel forms and images; they fueled them with transformative energy and notoriety, with their own sense of social justice and protest, as illustrated in Elza Adamowicz's elegantly written and beautifully illustrated book Dada Bodies: Between Battlefield and Fairground. A sweeping and timely survey of Dada with a focus on Zurich, Paris, and Berlin, this book highlights the movement's serious political dimensions and its protest against the horror of the First World War, adding important new material to scholarship on Dada.

The titles of the book's eleven chapters succinctly set up the thematic foci and argument. "Introduction: spare parts" locates Dada's fractured iterations of the human body in Western art history, while "Zurich Dada: between gas mask and carnival dance" reveals the tensions wrought by Dada with its birth at the Cabaret Voltaire in war-neutral Zurich in 1916. "Shooting the classical body" discusses Dada's aesthetic violations of the normative—read, classically harmonious—body and its parodic remake of new forms. "Hybrid bodies (I): the impossible machine" centrally discusses mechanomorphic drawings, collages, and photomontages to present the body as "perverse, hybrid assemblages" and as a "site of contradiction" (89). Meanwhile [End Page 622] "Hybrid bodies (II): the grotesque" is concerned with how Dadaist art further unsettles, explodes, and splinters the body beyond its naturalist form as a means of revealing the "post-war reconstruction of mutilated Man" (112). In the second half of the book, "Performance spaces: fairground, cabaret, exhibition," the focus shifts to the body-in-motion through dance and other performative gestures, with process (as opposed to product) also serving as a key theme in "Fluid bodies, shifting identities." Between these chapters is "Death and rebirth: corpse or chrysalis," recalling Dada's fundamental duality which serves as a core argument of the book. This is followed by "Dada's Africa," discussing the use of non-Western elements in the construction of Dada, before the book ends with a punch in "Limit-bodies"—Dada's dissolution of boundaries in the works of Dada-inspired twenty-first century artists.

Underpinning these intersecting chapters, the book's concern is with Dada's political response to the loss of millions of soldiers and civilians during the First World War and the postwar reality of even more wounded veterans. Indeed, one of the strong points of this book is its situating of Dada in the liminal realm of the in-between, or the "limit-body," as Adamowicz writes: "Dada's bodies combine the corpse and the chrysalis. On the one hand, the Dadaists flatten, cut up, shoot or dismember the neoclassical body, or dismantle and recombine the very instruments of destruction in their critique of post-war society" (232–33). Within the context of postwar Europe, the Dadaists "recycle images in their systematic disparagement of the 'retour à l'ordre'" (233). Certainly, the shattered postwar society that forms the backdrop for Adamowicz's study is one in which governments promote their citizens' forgetting of the bloodshed, a state-imposed normalization opposed by the Dadaists, whose work nonetheless suggests possibilities of regeneration. These insights are key in highlighting Dada as a consequential critical and satirical force. Revolutionary and mischievous, Dada's cut-and-paste methods exploited commercial advertisements and political...