著者

Lopez Lupianez Nuria

出版者

天理大学地域文化研究センター

雑誌

アゴラ (ISSN:13489631)

巻号頁・発行日

no.3, pp.1-16, 2005

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Handbooks of art history usually consider Dada — the avant-garde art movement born in 1916 and finished in 1923 — as an essentially nihilistic movement. In other words, Dada is supposed to be a kind of destructive movement, which would be surpassed by Surrealism later on. Nevertheless, clearly this widespread historical judgment conceals from us the very force with which Dada movement was experienced at the time as well as the actuality of its main ideas that have been repeatedly embraced by artists of later generations. This article studies the notion of "spirit" and the concomitant idea of "dictatorship of the spirit" in Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) — author of the main Dada manifestos and doubtlessly the key theoretical figure of the movement — in confrontation with the philosophy of Henri Bergson whose books we know Tzara read with his fellow Dadaists. And through this study we will show that Dada's creative force indeed go beyond any historical judgment, or beyond history tout court. Tzara says in one of his manifestos: "Dada is a spirit". In fact, the "spirit" for Tzara is something vital, creative, essentially irreconcilable with any external limitation, just as Tzara conceives Dada. This conception of "spirit", on the other hand, is very close to Bergsonian notion of spirit: "a reality which... is being created or recreated incessantly, and is essentially refractory to the measurement" because it is always active. And it is precisely from this point of view that we can understand the singular characteristic of Dada movement (as a movement of spirit) that is at once destructive and affirmative; it is destructive, on the one hand, because the great vivacity of spirit cannot help breaking the social and cultural order of the modern capitalist world which is essentially bourgeois and utilitarian; it is affirmative, on the other hand, because that vivacity of spirit has nothing nihilistic, it simply expresses an affirmation of life itself. This is exactly the idea Tzara defended by the name of "dictatorship of the spirit". And we can affirm that in this aspect Dada has totally maintained its actuality not only for later artists that have explicitly taken Dada as their reference but also for those other people —artists or not— that have practised their "dictatorship of the spirit" without knowing it.