The Magazine as Strategy: Tristan Tzara's Dada and the Seminal Role of Dada Art Journals in the Dada Movement

Focusing on Tristan Tzara's Dada (Zurich, Paris, 1917-1921), this essay argues that the Dadaists' subversive engagement with the journal medium was seminal to their relations with contemporaneous art groups and instrumental in Dada's radical model of what it means to be an avant-garde art movement. By adopting the role of editor, Tzara, like other Dadaists, broke from past practices of simply generating literary and visual works of art. Rather than treating this mass produced, collaborative medium as a mere record of past events, and thus supplemental to Dada's creative practice, he placed it at its core. In so doing he called attention to the magazine as an institutional framework while interrogating its conventions and those of other such structures, like museums, galleries, and academic establishments, in which works are categorized and prioritized. Examining the pages of Dada as primary sites of Dada activity, this essay sets out to explicate the dynamic ways in which Tzara employed the magazine to negotiate the movement's relationships with cubism, expressionism, and futurism, which preceded and overlapped Dadaism in the early twentieth century. ¹ I argue that through the selection of contributions, format, and graphic design of his journal Tzara realized his ambitious, changing vision of this unorthodox group. Closely analyzing all seven issues, I trace how these publications functioned strategically—from forging an inclusive meta-movement of sorts to offering an auto-historical account of Dada. Thus I offer insight into how the production and circulation of Dada destabilized conventional artistic categories while creating an international artistic community.

By using a relatively humble yet clearly powerful medium, Tzara challenged traditional hierarchical perceptions of artistic media while reinforcing the centrality of print culture in the early twentieth century. Analyzing Dada, and by extension other Dada titles, as more than mere manifestations of the movement, but as constitutive of its structure, this essay aims to fill a gap in Dada scholarship, which has expanded considerably in recent years but continues to overlook the defining and influential function of magazines in the movement.

The Dada Movement and The Importance of Dada Journals

Initiated by a small assembly of visual artists and writers who gathered during World War I in neutral Zurich, Dada was a highly influential international movement with advocates in at least ten cities, including Bucharest, Zagreb, Berlin, and New York, by the mid-1920s. Through their experiments with collage, montage, chance, the ready-made, and the journal medium, the Dadaists—Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, and Dragan Aleksić, among others—countered deep-seated convictions regarding originality, autonomy, and authenticity; and in defiance of the nationalism that they blamed for the war, they advocated multiplicity. Rather than espousing a single set of organizing, galvanizing tenets, these artists promoted distinct, even contradictory, interpretations of "Dada," often insisting that in fact it meant nothing at all, and thus repeatedly frustrated efforts to categorize it definitively. The Dadaists' emphasis on the journal was vital to their pluralistic and inclusive model of membership. By creating and exchanging magazines such as Dada, as well as Die Schammade, Dada Tank, Der Dada, and dozens more, they forged a sense of identity based on diversity and distance rather than on conformity and proximity. ² These individuals recognized that the magazine was uniquely suited to fostering connections at a time of censorship as well as restricted travel and exhibition opportunities. They depended upon their graphically stunning publications to learn about each others' artworks and writings and to forge ties with audiences in cities across the globe. The centrality of the journals was instrumental to their aesthetic practices. Finally, and most significantly for this article, the printed, multipage format of the magazine enabled Dada editors such as Tzara to combine disparate, incongruous materials under the "Dada" title, raising challenging questions regarding what defines an art movement. ³

Dada as Distinct from Other Movements: The Artist as Editor

Tzara promoted Dada as fundamentally distinct from other artistic groups—chiefly expressionism, cubism, and futurism—through his keen manipulation of...