Dada Redux

AFEW YEARS ago, when The Sex Pistols first toured America, this country began to be conscious of a strange movement, an unprecedented mix of nihilistic attitudes, bizarre fashion and screeching volume--punk, What is called "new wave," though, is hardly new at all. The punk movement was simply a case of fashion catching up to where the fringe movements of art had been for years. If we look back as far as the 1910s, we can see a distinct and sometimes exact precursor of the punks' nihilism in a group called the Dada. What is new about the punks is that they're not artists or intellectuals. Instead, they're ordinary, often suburban kids, who have no real idea what they're unhappy about--they know only that they're unhappy. What was once an attitude exclusive to a well-educated fringe has become a movement of a pseudo-radicalized middle, accessible to all.

Punk is concerned essentially with the negation of traditional forms of society: good taste, politeness, moderation in dress and volume, and the family. Painters, writers and musicians had accomplished a similar negation before any of today's punks were born. The fractured images of any of Picasso's Guernica period paintings are as visually disturbing as a youth with a safety pin through his cheek. Atonal symphonies, far more dissonant and demanding than anything a punk can create with simple feedback techniques, have existed since the days when people still listened to Glen Miller. The best indicator of the punk ethic's staleness, though, is the Dadas.

Dadaism was originally a movement formed in Europe to protest the horrors of World War I, but it spread to America during the teens and the twenties where it outraged its contemporaries, much as The Sex Pistols did. A sculpture entitled "fountain," no more than a toilet seat hung by a nail, drew special condemnation for its vulgarity. Another work--a print of the "Mona Lisa" with a moustache drawn over the famous smile and the phrase "L. H. O. O. Q." under it--was roundly criticized for its irreverence. The phrase, roughly translated, means "she has a hot ass." The Dadas also sponsored "readings" which consisted of random gunshots or the din of a sledgehammer pounding on sheetmetal. The aim of this group, beyond sheer insanity, was to destroy the foundations of what makes art, and thereby to undermine one aspect of a society they saw as inherently evil. Their irreverence and vulgarity sprang from the same ethos that the punks' did--a conviction that anything at all is better than what we have now.

WHERE THE PUNK movement differs from that of the Dadas is in the backgrounds of their members. The Dadas were artists dissatisfied with the art form over which they had achieved a reasonable degree of mastery. They were, in a sense, trying to unravel the fabric of society from the inside. The most famous Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp, said "Dada was the extreme protest against the physical side of painting, a metaphysical attitude, a blank force." In the late teens, Duchamp became an accomplished chess player and decided to give up painting because it "bored" him. Thus, the Dadas were not street corner vandals: intellectually, they were seeking to turn art on itself and drag all of society down with it, so that mankind could start a new.

Most punks, however, have not developed talent, as the Dadaists did, that they could then negate. They are the guys who could never get the best-looking girls, learn enough chords to play jazz, or escape being just average in a society of what he was doing to separate his work from his own life. Consequently, Sid ended up as sick as the society the band tried to protest in songs like "Bodies" and "Anarchy in the U.K." The punk movement is simply one of fashion--McNihilism compared to the serious, intellectual efforts of the Dadas. Ironically, it is this unintentional chic that may help the punk movement survive longer than its predecessors did.

The Dadas died a quick death because the intellectual content of their works was far above that of the man in the street: it often required knowledge of two languages to understand their puns. The punks require no such education. Anyone who is willing to endure the disgusted stares of his parents can be a punk. Through punk, one can experience Duchamp's "blank force" of protest at its basest level. Because punk is a fashion, it will surely fade away eventually. But because almost everyone in the country has at least a vague idea of what punk looks like--if not what it is--punk will not fade as completely as Dada has. Even many years from now someone will say: "Remember when all those kids played that loud, grating music and mutilated themselves? They were angry about something, weren't they? What was it?"

The Dada/punk ethic will not be remembered for the hyperin tellectualism of the Dadas. The feelings of alienation and hopelessness and the desire to start over and build something better, however, will endure in the memory of a bizarre fashion, of The Sex Pistols leering, slashing and urinating all across America.