Dada between Heaven and Hell: Abstraction and Universal Language in the Rhythm Films of Hans Richter Author(s):

Malcolm Turvey Source: October, Vol. 105, Dada (Summer, 2003), pp. 13-36 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397680 Accessed: 27/01/2010 11:37
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Dada Between Heaven and Hell: Abstraction and Universal Language in the Rhythm Films of Hans Richter*

MALCOLM TURVEY

Since its demise, Dada has functioned as an inspirational precursor to, and rich resource for, a variety of different critiques of modernity, as any regular reader of this publication will know. Does Dada have anything to say to those of us today who, while acknowledging modernity's problems, continue to believe in the basic ideals and aspirations of modernity, in part because modernity allows for self-critique; and who also believe that advanced art could continue to play a crucial role in that self-critique, as did Dada in the early twentieth century? For Dada is often identified with extreme, uncompromising condemnations of modernity, and with good reason. On the one hand, there is the strain of nihilism in Dada, the view-associated with figures such as Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia-that modernity has robbed human existence of any meaning, and that the correct (anti-)artistic strategy is to constantly reveal the meaninglessness beneath any pretensions (usually defined as bourgeois) to meaning. As John Erickson has put it, "Despite its varied origin, centers of artistic activity, and personalities, Dada has usually been classified bag and baggage under the rubric of artistic, or antiartistic, anarchy, which is generally taken to mean unswerving dedication to nihilism and disorder."l On the other, there is the strain of mysticism in Dada, the search through art-often associated with figures such as Hans Arp and Hugo Ball, who were influenced by WassilyKandinsky-for a spiritually satisfying alternative to the putative meaninglessness of modernity.2 Yet, as scholars have increasingly sought to show, there are more complex, nuanced positions within Dada, ones which do not condemn modernity wholesale, but which criticize one or more aspects of modernity, while embracing, even celebrating others. Here, I will attempt to contribute to this scholarship by exam* I thank Leah Dickerman, Lisa Pasquariello, andJudith Rodenbeck for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper; and, for her research, my assistant Diana A. Beechener. 1. John D. Erickson, Dada: Performance, Poetry,and Art (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), p. 117. See Richard Sheppard, Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism 2. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000), chap. 10. On Ball and mysticism, see Erdmute Wenzel White, The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1998); on Arp and mysticism, see the essays by Harriett Watts, such as "Periods and Commas: Hans Arp's Seminal Punctuation," in Dada/Dimensions, ed. Stephen C. Foster (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985). OCTOBER Instituteof Technology. 105, Summer 2003, pp. 13-36. ? 2003 October Magazine,Ltd. and Massachusetts

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ining why Hans Richter believed the films he made in the early 1920s, Rhythm21 (1921), Rhythm23 (1923), and Rhythm 25 (1924), to be Dadaist.3 The status of these films as Dadaist has always been somewhat uncertain, because they are very different from the canonical Dadaist film, Ren6 Clair and Picabia's Entr'acte (1923). Entr'acte is considered by most commentators to be the quintessential Dadaist film due to its parodic subversion of narrative structure, its mocking of high art forms such as ballet and other "bourgeois" phenomena (funerals), and its mimicking of irrational mental processes.4 Certainly, it is the film most often privileged in commentaries on Dadaist film. By contrast, the Rhythmfilms are purely abstract-indeed, they are often credited as being the first abstract films in the history of cinema-and they employ elementary geometrical figures in motion organized into patterns. Furthermore, Richter conceived of his abstract work as a search for a "universal language." Yet, Richter insisted that "The nucleus of the artistic endeavor of Dada as it appeared in Zurich 1916-19 was abstract art," and that his abstract films, in their patterned use of elementary forms to search for a universal language, were Dadaist.5 Hence, while commentators have acknowledged that these films might be Dadaist-due to the fact that Richter himself was a member of Zurich Dada, that he saw his films as Dadaist, and that versions of the films were shown at the infamous Dada "Soiree du Coeur a Barbe" in July 1923-there has been little attempt to demonstrate, at least in Anglo-American scholarship of recent years, why they might count as Dadaist. Nor has there been much of an attempt to understand them in terms of Richter's search for a universal language. Standish Lawder,in his chapter on Richter and Viking Eggeling's abstract films in his seminal The CubistCinema(1975), remarks in passing that it is a "paradox"that Richter turned to abstraction during his Dadaist period, without attempting to resolve this apparent paradox. And while his formal analysis of the films is very valuable, he has little to say about why Richter conceived of his abstract work in terms of a search for a universal language. Meanwhile, there is almost no mention of the films in Steven Kovacs's From Enchantment Rage:TheStoryof Surrealist to Cinema(1980), which includes a chapter on Dadaist film, and Inez Hedges's Languagesof Revolt: and Dada and Surrealist Literature Film (1983). At the beginning of his influential anthology on Dada and Surrealistfilm (1987), Rudolf Kuenzli asks:"Butin what ways are [Richter's abstract] films related to Dada?"without offering an answer.Nor do any of the essays in his anthology attempt one. Thomas Elsaesser,for example, in proposing his performance-based definition of Dadaist film, also asks: "Should Hans Richter's Rhythm 21 and Rhythm 23 be discussed as Dada films because Richter makes a case for Dada as abstract art?"
3. Rhythm25, which Richter reportedly hand-colored frame by frame is, sadly, lost. Richter's next film, Filmstudie(1926), initiates his departure from pure abstraction. 4. See Noel Carroll, "Entr'acte, the Paris and Dada" (1977), reprinted in Carroll, Interpreting Moving Image(Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 26-33. 5. ed. Richter, "Dada and the Film," in Dada: Monograph a Movement, Willy Verkauf (New York:St. of Martin's Press, 1975), p. 39.

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again without suggesting an answer. More recently, there is the analysis of the films byJustin Hoffmann in Stephen Foster's important anthology on Richter (1998). But Hoffmann ignores Richter's own claims about the centrality of abstraction to Dada, arguing that "Richter's... efforts to develop an abstract language of forms cannot be explained by Dada,"and locating these efforts instead within the context of De Stijl and international Constructivism. And he fails to show why Richter conceived of his abstractwork in terms of a search for a universal language.6 By clarifying Richter's definition of Dada, we can, I think, see why he believed his search for a universal language through his abstract films and other work to be Dadaist. More than this though, Richter's films, I want to suggest, speak to us today as a model for a sophisticated artistic critique of modernity. They demonstrate that there were different types of critiques of modernity within Dada, not just the nihilistic revelation of the meaninglessness of modernity associated, whether rightly or wrongly, with Tzara and Picabia; or the search for a mystical, meaningful alternative to modernity associated, again whether rightly or wrongly, with Arp and Ball. They show that a nuanced, complex position in relation to modernity is possible even in the direct aftermath of a catastrophic world war; that one can reject some aspects of modernity while accepting, even celebrating others; that one does not have to criticize modernity in extreme, uncompromising terms by damning it as a "hell,"or by searching for an alternative "heaven," to use words Richter borrowed from Arp. I According to his retrospective accounts of Dada and his personal involvement in the movement, written for the most part in the 1950s and '60s, Richter, who in his first years as a modernist painter (1912-17) had oscillated between Cubism and Expressionism, was during 1917 painting what he called "visionary portraits," after moving to Zurich in late August/early September 1916, and falling under the influence of the burgeoning Dada movement there. These explosive, colorful, semiabstract and abstract paintings were executed using a relatively spontaneous, free-associative method designed to incorporate a degree of chance into the painting process. For my own part, I remember that I developed a preference for painting my ["visionary portraits"] in the twilight, when the colors on my palette were almost indistinguishable. However, as every color had its own position on the palette my hand could find the color it wanted
6. Standish Lawder, The CubistCinema(New York: New York University Press, 1975), p. 37; Rudolf Kuenzli, Introduction to Dada and SurrealistFilm, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 1; Thomas Elsaesser, "Dada/Cinema?," in Dada and SurrealistFilm, p. 14; Justin Hoffmann, ed. "Hans Richter: Constructivist Filmmaker,"in Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism,and the Avant-Garde, Stephen C. Foster (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), p. 74.

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even in the dark. And it got darker and darker ... until the spots of color were going on to the canvas in a sort of auto-hypnotic trance, just as they presented themselves to my groping hand. Thus the picture took shape before the inner rather than the outer eye.7 At this point in his involvement with Dada, this method of painting seemed to Richter to be quintessentially Dadaist because it allowed for the "absolute freedom from preconceptions . . . [from] aesthetic or social constraints . . .from preconceived ideas about processes and techniques" that he identified, at this moment, as the essence of Dada (Dada Art, pp. 34; 57). Dada promised total liberty. The law of chance as the last consequence of spontaneous expression led us and became a remedy against war, obedience, banality and art: anti-Art as a new art. In 1917 I could produce nearly a hundred of my so-called "visionary portraits,"three to four a day, provoking the disgust of the critics visiting Galerie Wolfsberg in Zurich in 1918.8
7. Hans Richter, Dada Art and Anti-Art (1964), trans. David Britt (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), p. 49. All references to Dada Art and Anti-Artare hereafter cited in the text as Dada Art. 8. Hans Richter, Hans Richter(Neuchatel, Switzerland: Editions du Griffon, 1965), p. 18.

Hans Richter. Macabre portrait. 191 7.

One of Richter's"visionary portraits." ? 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst,Bonn.

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However, sometime around late 1917, Richter became dissatisfied with this method of painting and its results. He began to search for a more structured form of abstraction through which a rhythmical effect could be produced across his picture surfaces: "The completely spontaneous, almost automatic process by which I painted my 'visionary portraits' no longer satisfied me. I turned my attention to the structural problems of my earlier Cubist period, in order to articulate the surface of my canvases" (Dada Art, p. 61). The more freedom I allowed myself, the more I allowed the unconscious to be governed by chance, the more my reaction grew. What I tried to find was not the chaos but its opposite, an order in which the human mind had its place and in which it could flow freely. I had for some time madly run away from order, now I was just as passionately attracted to it.9 Thus began his period of more structured abstraction that resulted in a series of "Dada heads," the search for a universal language through scrolls and the Rhythm films conceived in collaboration with the Swedish abstract painter Viking
9. Ibid.,p. 20.

Dada Head I. 1918. Richter. ? 2003 ArtistsRightsSociety (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst,Bonn.

? Iw

Richter Preludium. 1919. One of Richter's scrolls. ? 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VGBild-Kunst, Bonn.

Eggeling, and, following the dissolution of Zurich Dada in 1919, Richter's involvement with international Constructivism, De Stijl, and editing the journal G.10Yet, rather than seeing this period as a break with Dada, Richter saw it as fundamentally continuous. For him, his more structured abstract work was just as much Dadaist as the nonabstract work of other Dadaists and his own, later, nonabstract, more prototypically Dadaist film GhostsBefore (1927). Breakfast It is ... no accident that the first abstract films were made by two members of the original Dada group, Eggeling and myself. And they certainly did not demonstrate the officially acknowledged spirit of Dada: the Mona Lisa with a moustache, the toilet seat or the nail flatiron.... But they grew nevertheless from the art, and nothing-but-art problems which had drawn us into them.... After I have stated this fact: Dada = abstract art, I happily wish to insist on the other point: Dada = non-abstract art.11 And, as he makes clear in a number of his writings, around 1920, he and Eggeling began to conceive of their abstract work as a search for a universal language: In 1920, we published a small pamphlet called Universelle Sprache (Universal language). This pamphlet elaborated our thesis that the abstract form offers the possibility of a language above and beyond all
10. Richter's Rhythmfilms are usually considered together with Viking Eggeling's Diagonal Symphony (1924). However, while there are similarities between the films, there are also profound differences, as Richter himself noted. See also Louise O'Konor, VikingEggeling 1880-1925, Artist and Filmmaker, Life and Work,trans. Catherine G. Sundstrom and Anne Bibby (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1971). For this reason, I will not consider Eggeling's work here. 11. Richter, "Dada and the Film," pp. 40-41.

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national language frontiers.... To contribute to such a [language] seemed to us worth all the efforts and sacrifices we could think of.12 Why, therefore, did Richter believe his search for a universal language through his abstract films to be Dadaist? II In order to answer this question, it is obviously crucial, first, to clarify Richter's definition of Dada. Richter, as the above quotation about the equal place of abstraction and nonabstraction in Dada suggests, rejected any essentialist or family resemblance definition of Dada. Dada, he argued, could not be defined by intrinsic properties common to all Dada (anti-)art works, or overlapping properties common to some. Hence his formal inclusiveness; he allows both abstraction and nonabstraction to be Dadaist.13 Instead, Richter's definition, as we shall see, is a functionalist one. Dada (anti-)art is defined by the function it performs, not by intrinsic properties that perform this function. As with other Dadaists, Richter's definition of the movement is a corollary of his critique of modernity. In this critique, Richter tends to identify "rationality"as being primarily responsible for the ills of modernity, ills such as World War I. Pandemonium, destruction, anarchy, anti-everything-why should we hold it in check? What of the pandemonium, destruction, anarchy, anti-everything, of World War? How could Dada have been anything but destructive, aggressive, insolent, on principle and with gusto? In return for freely exposing ourselves to ridicule every day, we surely had a right to call the bourgeois a bulging haybag and the public a stall of oxen? We no longer contented ourselves with reforming pictorial art or versification. We would have nothing more to do with the sort of human or inhuman being who used reason as a juggernaut, crushing acres of corpses-as well as ourselves-beneath its wheels. We wanted to bring forward a new kind of human being, one whose contemporaries we could wish to be, free from the tyranny of rationality, of banality, of generals, fatherlands, nations, art dealers, microbes, residence permits and the past. (Dada Art, p. 65) Or as he puts it elsewhere: "The official belief in the infallibility of reason, logic and causality seemed to us senseless-as senseless as the destruction of the world and the systematic elimination of every particle of human feeling" (Dada Art,p. 58).
12. Richter, "My Experience with Movement in Painting and in Film," in The Nature and Art of Motion,ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York:George Braziller, 1965), p. 144. 13. It is commonly thought that Dadaists in general rejected essentialist or family resemblance definitions of the movement. However, Tzara's reported attempts to exclude Eggeling's work from his magazine Dada on the grounds of its visual similarity to classical art forms suggests otherwise (see Richter, "Dada and the Film," p. 40).

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Yet, when he elaborates on what, precisely, he thinks is wrong with rationality, it is not rationality per se that he criticizes. Rather, it is the putative dominance of rationality in modernity to the exclusion of what lies outside of rationality, which he refers to by different names such as "unreason," "the unconscious," "chance," "spontaneity,"and "contingence." Our scientific and technological age had forgotten that this contingence constituted an essential principle of life and of experience, and that reason with all its consequences was inseparable from unreason with all its consequences. The myth that everything in the world can be rationally explained had been gaining ground since the time of Descartes. An inversion was necessary to restore the balance. (Dada Art,p. 65) Again like other Dadaists, Richter defines Dada as a response to, and even a cure for, the ills of modernity. However, because he identifies the fundamental problem of modernity as being an imbalance between reason and unreason, he does not conceive of Dada as a critique of rationality, or as an attempt to find an alternative to rationality, as do, arguably, other Dadaists such as Tzara and Ball. Rather, he conceives of it as a critique of the dominanceof rationality, through an attempt to restore the putatively lost balance between reason and unreason: "The realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole-this was the central message of Dada" (Dada Art, p. 64). Behind this argument is a metaphysical conception of both reality and human nature. Human beings, Richter suggests, are a mixture of opposing characteristics: reason and unreason, conscious and unconscious, civilized and primitive, thought and feeling. Being authentically human, he argues, consists of achieving not a synthesis, but a "balance"between these "opposites": We [Dadaists] were forced to look for something which would re-establish our humanity. What we needed to find was a "balance between heaven and hell," a new unity combining chance and design. We had adopted chance, the voice of the unconscious-the soul, if you like-as a protest against the rigidity of straight-line thinking. We were ready to embrace, or be embraced by, the unconscious. All this ... developed as a necessary complement to the apparent and familiar side of our natures and of our conscious actions, and paved the way for a new unity which sprang from the tension between opposites.... Proclaim as we might our liberation from causality and our dedication to anti-art, we could not help involving our wholeselves, including our conscious sense of order, in the creative process, so that, in spite of all our anti-art polemics, we produced works of art. Chance could never be liberated from the presence of the conscious artist. This was the
reality in which we worked ... a situation of conflict.

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This conflict is in itself an important characteristic of Dada. It did not take the form of a contradiction. One aspect did not cancel out the other; they were complementary. It was in the interplay of opposites, whether ideas or people, that the essence of Dada consisted. (Dada Art,pp. 58-59) The nature of reality is such that, while the "causal" and "logical"explanations offered science and other rational forms of explication are valid, they do not exhaust by reality.Other phenomena exist that are not amenable to rational interpretation: A picture of the world takes shape in which, besides "causal" experiences, others that were previously unknown and unmentioned find a place. Laws appear which include within themselves the negation of Law. Absolute acceptance of chance brought us into the realm of magic, conjuration, oracles, and divination "from the entrails of lambs and birds." (Dada Art, p. 60) Thus, although Dadaist (anti-)art created through relatively spontaneous methods, such as the "visionary portraits" of 1917, might have sufficed for a time, ultimately it proved unsatisfactory for Richter. For if the goal of Dada was to restore the balance between reason and unreason lost in modernity due to the dominance of rationality, then (anti-)art that simply replaced reason with unreason, the conscious mind with the unconscious, order with disorder, intentionality with spontaneity, was insufficient. Rather, what was needed was a type of (anti-)art that could effect a balance between reason and unreason. And it was precisely this lack of balance that was, for Richter, the problem with the work of putative nihilists such as Tzara and Picabia, and that ultimately led to the disintegration of Zurich Dada. Such nihilists make the same mistake as their antagonists, according to Richter, simply replacing one type of dogmatic disequilibrium, the dominance of reason, with another, the dominance of unreason, instead of attempting to bring about a balance between the two. Tzara exploited the same chance factors as did Arp, but while Arp made conscious use of his eye and brain to determine the final shape, and thus made it possible to call the work his, Tzara left the task of selection to Nature. He refused the conscious self any part in the process. Here the two paths Dada was to follow are already apparent. Arp adhered to (and never abandoned) the idea of "balance" between conscious and unconscious. This was fundamental to me as well; but Tzara attributed importance exclusively to the Unknown. This was the real dividing line. Dada throve on the resulting tension between premeditation and spontaneity, or, as we preferred to put it, between art and anti-art, volition and nonvolition, and so on. This found expression in many ways and was apparent in all our discussions. Whatever may have been going on at the same time in New York (and later in Berlin and Paris), in the euphoria induced by the discovery

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of the spontaneous, we in Zurich saw Dada as a means of attaining what Arp called "a balance between heaven and hell." We wanted to stay human! As this tension between mutually necessary opposites vanishedand it ended by vanishing completely in the Paris movement-Dada disintegrated. (Dada Art, pp. 60-61) In advancing this definition of Dada as a response to, and perhaps cure for, the ills of modernity, Richter is rejecting one type of modernity critique available in the German tradition in favor of another. Instead of the nihilistic critique of rationality often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, in which reason is rejected tout courtas an illusion employed in the service of primitive drives such as the will to power, Richter is allying himself with a different critique of rationality that probably receives its most famous expression in the German tradition in Friedrich Schiller's
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795).

Schiller, writing at the beginning of the period of Romantic counterreaction to the Enlightenment, felt that art was increasingly at risk of becoming irrelevant in the modern age. This was because, according to him: "At the present time, material needs reign supreme and bend a degraded humanity beneath their tyrannical yoke. Utility is the great idol of our age, to which all powers are in thrall and to which all talent must pay homage."'4 Thus: "Weighed in this crude balance, the insubstantial merits of Art scarce tip the scale, and, bereft of all encouragement, she shuns the noisy marketplace of our century" (Aesthetic Education, p. 7). Nevertheless, for Schiller, art and aesthetic education still had a crucial role to play in the modern era, and it was his purpose in his letters "on the aesthetic education of man" to elucidate this role. According to Schiller, while modernity was making considerable progress in the realm of science, and had in many ways attained a higher state of civilization than previous civilizations, such as the Greeks, it nevertheless had done so at great cost, namely, "the fragmentary specialization of human powers" from which
humans "suffer" terribly (Aesthetic Education, p. 43).

Once the increase of empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of thought, made sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once the increasingly complex machinery of State necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance. The intuitive and the speculative understanding now withdrew in hostility to take up positions in their respective fields, whose frontiers they now began to guard with jealous mistrust; and with this confining of our activity to a particular sphere
14. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed., trans., and intro. by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 7. Hereafter cited in the text as
Aesthetic Education.

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we have given ourselves a master within, who not infrequently ends up by suppressing the rest of our potentialities. While in the one a riotous imagination ravages the hard-won fruits of the intellect, in another the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart should have warmed itself and the imagination been kindled.... Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment... he never develops the harmony of his being. (AestheticEducation, 33-35) pp. Due to the specialization imposed on humans by the increasingly rationalized state, rather than there being a balance between different faculties in each individual human being, one faculty tends to dominate, with disastrous results for the individual and society. In its striving after inalienable possessions in the realm of ideas, the spirit of speculation could do no other than become a stranger to the world of sense, and lose sight of matter for the sake of form. The practical spirit, by contrast, enclosed within a monotonous sphere of material objects, and within this uniformity still further confined by formulas, was bound to find the idea of an unconditioned Whole receding from sight, and to become just as impoverished as its own poor sphere of activity.... We know that the sensibility of the psyche depends for its intensity upon the liveliness, for its scope upon the richness, of the imagination. The preponderance of the analytical faculty must, however, of necessity, deprive the imagination of its energy and warmth, while a more restricted sphere of objects must reduce its wealth. Hence the abstract thinker very often has a cold heart, since he dissects his impressions, and impressions can remove the soul only as long as they remain whole; while the man of practical affairs often has a narrow heart, since his imagination, imprisoned within the unvarying confines of his own calling, is incapable of extending itself to appreciate other ways of seeing and knowing. (AestheticEducation, pp. 37-39) What is needed in modernity, argues Schiller, is an "instrument" that can restore the balance or harmony between the different faculties or "drives" basic to humankind but lost in modernity. And that instrument, he declares, "is Fine Art" Education,p. 55). (Aesthetic Of course, Richter's critique of modernity does not correspond exactly to Schiller's critique. For example, Richter has much less confidence in the state than does Schiller. But he does employ the same basic concepts and arguments in relation to modernity as Schiller, thereby differentiating his critique from the nihilistic one associated with Nietzsche, and indeed others such as the dialectical critique associated with Hegel and Marx. Like Schiller, he equates authentic

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humanity with the "balance" of different human faculties and drives ("wholeness"), and he associates modernity with the loss of this balance due to rationalization. And this critique of modernity provides him with a functionalist definition of Dada identical to Schiller's argument about the role of art in modernity. For Richter, Dadaist (anti-)art is defined by its function, which is to counter the dominance of rationality in modernity and restore the resulting lost harmony between reason and unreason in both human beings and society, thereby creating "whole" human beings and societies again. In late 1917 Richter is searching for a type of (anti-)art that will fulfill his definition of Dada by effecting just such a balance between reason and unreason, conscious and unconscious, order and disorder. What he comes up with is the form of more structured abstraction that includes his Rhythmfilms in their quest for a universal language. III Before pointing to ways in which the Rhythm films conform to Richter's definition of Dada, I first want to speculate as to why Richter also considered his search for a universal language through these films to be Dadaist.15 I say speculate because, unfortunately, Richter's retrospective remarks on this subject are tantalizingly brief, and the Universelle Sprache pamphlet is, apparently, lost.16 As historians of the subject have shown, the search for a universal language has a long, venerable history in the Western tradition. According to Umberto Eco, it first emerges in the second century A.D. as part of a reaction against the "classical rationalism" of the Greeks: A diffused sort of religiosity began to grow in the souls of the most sensitive. It was manifest by a belief in a Universal Soul; a soul which subsisted in stars and in earthly objects alike. Our own, individual, souls were but small particles of the great World Soul. Since the reason of philosophers proved unable to supply truths about important matters such as these, men and women sought revelations beyond reason, through visions, and through communications with the godhead itself.... That such a wisdom could exist while still remaining unknown, however, could only be accounted for by the fact that the language in which this wisdom was expressed had remained unknown as well....
15. Of course, the ideal of a universal language is in circulation widely among modernists and avant-gardists of various, antithetical stripes during this period. Furthermore, as others have pointed out, this ideal dovetails with the internationalist ambitions of Dada in its opposition to World War I and the nationalist aspirations that started the war. What I am trying to answer here is the question of why Richter would have believed that the particular form of abstraction he used in his Rhythmfilms, in its search for a universal language, would have effected the balance between reason and unreason that he began searching for in late 1917 and that, for him, constituted the mission of Dadaist (anti-)art. 16. What appears to be a version of this pamphlet, titled "Demonstration of the 'Universal ed. Language,"' has recently been translated into English in Hans Richter, Foster, pp. 185-239.

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The classical Greeks had identified the barbariansas those who could not even articulate their speech. It now seemed that these very mumblings were of a sacred language, filled with the promise of tacit revelations.17 Since this moment, the concept of a universal language has been associated in the Western tradition with the original, perfect language of the godhead. Knowledge of this language is mystical and sacred, allowing those who possess it to decipher the imprint of the divine on nature, to "read" the "Book of Nature," which is "written" in the original, perfect, universal language of the godhead. And this knowledge can be attained through occultism, alchemy, numerology, and a wide variety of other "hermetic sciences." The last great flowering of this search for the universal language of god occurs in the Renaissance: The term clavis universalis[universal language] was used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to designate a method or general science which would enable man to see beyond the veil of phenomenal appearances, or the "shadow of ideas," and grasp the ideal or essential structure of reality [by] deciphering the alphabet of the world; reading the signs imprinted by the divine mind in the book of nature; discovering the correspondence between the original forms of the universe and the structures of human thought; constructing a perfect language capable of eliminating all equivocations and putting us in direct contact with things and essences rather than signs; the construction of total encyclopaedias and ordered classifications which would be the true "mirrors"of cosmic harmony....18 With the rationalism of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the concept of a universal language is discredited, becoming "associatedwith the foolish, superstitious and impious pursuits of astrology, magic and alchemy-relics of mediaeval darkness, feebly persisting in the age of the new science."19 This is because, following new, rationalist ontologies, nature is no longer conceived of as a language expressing a divine plan, as being written in the language of the godhead. It is no longer believed to have a teleology, purpose, or meaning that can be deciphered through knowledge of the universal language of god. Schiller famously called this "the disgodding of nature": Where now, as our wise men say, only a soulless ball of fire rotates, Helios in quiet majesty once guided his golden chariot. Oreads filled these heights. A Dryad lived in every tree. From the urns of lovely Najads sprang the silver foam of streams. Alas! From that living, warm
17. Umberto Eco, The Search thePerfect for Language,trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 13-14. 18. Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory:The Questfor a Universal Language, trans. and intro. Stephan Clucas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 15. 19. Ibid., p. 16.

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picture only the shadow remains.... Like the dead stroke of the penduof gods-slavishly serves the law of gravity.20 lum, Nature-bereft The association between universal language and non-rational, mystical, even sacred knowledge is clearly evident in Richter's writings when he discusses Arp and Ball, whom, as I have already noted, are the Zurich Dadaists most often linked with the search for a mystical, meaningful alternative to modernity. In a section of Dada Art and Anti-Art entitled "The Language of Paradise," Richter remarks: By casting doubt on the claims of the spoken, unspoken or written word to priority, Ball the poet revealed the deeper causes which made the Dada writers, despite all their anti-art declarations, finally unable to arrest their pro-art tendencies within the movement. Our search, as visual artists, for the "true language of paradise" went much deeper than the wild anti-art propaganda of the movement's published statements, which was based on social, moral, and psychological arguments. If Ball, whose chosen medium was words, could feel this to be true, we as painters, whose medium was the "paradisal" language of signs itself, were necessarily even more conscious of it. (Dada Art, p. 49) In a later section entitled "Chance and Anti-Chance," Richter, following a discussion of Arp, has this to say: The adoption of chance had yet another purpose, a primitive one. This was to restore to the work of art its primeval magic power, and to find the way back to the immediacy it had lost through contact with the classicism of people like Lessing, Winckelmann, and Goethe. By which is part and parcel of appealing directly to the unconscious, of the we sought to restore to the work of art something chance, of which art has been the vehicle since time numinous quality immemorial, the incantatory power that we seek, in this age of general unbelief, now more than ever. (Dada Art, p. 59) Yet, when one examines the few comments Richter actually makes about his and Eggeling's search for a universal language in their scrolls and abstract films, what is interesting is that, to a large extent, he employs secular, materialist, even scientific language, and avoids talk of a "language of paradise," "magic," and "incantatory" powers. Instead of a mystical, sacred alphabet, we find brief "hardreferences to uncovering the species-wide laws of human perception wired" in the brain: [ Universelle Sprache] elaborated our thesis that the abstract form offers the possibility of a language above and beyond all national language
20. II Quoted in Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in GermanCulture from Wilhelm to Hitler (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 4.

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frontiers. The basis for such a language would lie in the identical form perception in all human beings and would offer the promise of a universal art as it had never existed before.21 When, for example, Richter discusses how he and Eggeling employed "Chinese writing" as a point of departure for their abstract work, it is not on the potentially mystical connotations of such writing that he focuses, but rather the fact that "old Chinese characters" seemed to them "to use the archetypal patterns of form which are inherent in the human brain," and that such patterns, according to Richter in
1965, had been "recently verified by the experiments of Prof. Max Knoll."22

Such language points to Richter's awareness of the other position the concept of a universal language occupies in the Western tradition. For, again, according to historians, despite the association between universal language and anti-rationalist mysticism, the search for a universal language is also found in rationalist traditions such as formal logic (mathesis universalis), which thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz attempt to develop in the seventeenth century, and which is taken up again at the end of the nineteenth century by Bertrand Russell and others.23
21. Richter, "MyExperience with Movement in Painting and in Film,"p. 144. Ibid. 22. See Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, 23. chaps. 5-8. Eco gives examples in addition to formal logic of rationalist searches for a universal language in the last two chapters of his Searchfor a Perfect Language.

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Richter. scrolls.? 2003 Artists Fugue. 1920. One of Richter's

Rights Society (ARS), New York/VGBild-Kunst, Bonn.

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The search for a universal language is therefore common to both rationalist and anti-rationalist traditions in the West. Indeed, these two traditions often overlap. For example, although the return to formal logic in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is born of a need for a deductive theoretical technique of mathematics, and is therefore typically shorn of mystical associations, this is not always the case. Take, for instance, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, which Wittgenstein wrote in the 1910s. On the one hand, the Tractatus constitutes an enormous step forward in the development of formal logic by proposing the so-called "picture theory" of meaning. The philosopher John Hyman has provided an elegant summary of this theory: Wittgenstein argues in the Tractatus that a language is a system of representation. Words are combined in sentences to form pictures or models of possible states of affairs in the world. Every meaningful sentence can be dissolved by analysis, until its only constituents are logical expressions (such as 'not' and 'and') and simple, unanalysable names. Each of these names corresponds to an object [in reality], whose name it is. The syntax of a name, i.e., the ways in which it can and cannot be combined with other names to form a sentence, reflects the essential nature of the object which it names, i.e., the ways in which it can and cannot be combined with other objects to form a state of affairs. Hence, a meaningful combination of words corresponds to a possible combination of objects. If the arrangement of the simple names concealed in a sentence corresponds to the actual arrangement of the objects which they name, then the sentence is true. If not, it is false.24 the only meaningful use of language is to "picture"or According to the Tractatus, describe reality, and language is essentially a system for doing this. The task of philosophy is to lay bare this system: the principles of logical syntax that govern the combination of unanalyzable names into "pictures"of possible states of affairs. On the other, as many commentators have been keen to point out, the Tractatusis full of mysterious passages invoking the spiritual significance of the philosophical task of uncovering the logically perfect, universal language that exists beneath the confusing surface of all languages, and the way this perfect language mirrors the metaphysical structure of reality. Uncovering this language gives rise, in the philosopher, to the feeling of wholeness and insight into the very essence of reality usually associated with mystical, visionary experience: "To view the world sub specia aeterniis to view it as a whole-a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole-it is this that is mystical."25
24. John Hyman, "The Urn and the Chamber Pot," in Wittgenstein, Theoryand the Arts, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 146-47. 25. trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (London: Routledge; Kegan Paul, 1961), ? 6.45. For sober analysis, see P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion: Themes thePhilosophy Wittgenstein in (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), chap. 4. of

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The fact that the search for a universal language is common to both rationalist and antirationalist traditions in the West, and that these traditions can easily overlap, as in the case of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, suggests, I think, why Richter would have believed his own artistic quest for a universal language to be Dadaist. For if Dada is defined as an attempt to restore the lost balance between reason and unreason in modernity, then the concept of a universal language provides Richter with a perfect vehicle for trying to effect this balance. Rather than constituting a mystical, meaningful alternative to rationality and modernity, as, arguably,it does in the work of Arp and Ball, the search for a universal language can be seen as appealing simultaneously to both the rational and irrational sides of what Richter defines as authentic human nature, in as much as it is associated with both rationalist and mystical forms of knowledge at the same time. Hence, it provides Richter with a way to criticize and attempt to correct the dominance of rationality in modernity without criticizing reason itself. IV Now that we have a grasp of Richter's functionalist definition of Dada, the critique of modernity and metaphysical vision of reality and human beings informing this definition, and why, given this definition, the concept of a universal language might have appealed to Richter as a way of conceiving of his abstract work, we can finally examine whether the Rhythmfilms themselves conform to this definition of Dada. These films are formally complex, and much more space than I can devote to them here is required to do this complexity justice. Therefore, I will only be able to hint at the ways in which they indeed can be seen as conforming to Richter's definition of the movement. Richter, as I have already noted, abandoned his "visionary paintings" in late 1917 in favor of a more structured form of abstraction conceived of in collaboration with Eggeling. However, this did not mean that he turned his back on the principles of spontaneity and chance that had motivated his "visionary paintings." Instead, as he put it, his new form of more structured abstraction was an attempt at balancing these principles with what were, for him, the opposite ones of intentionality and order, in line with his definition of Dada as effecting a balance between unreason and reason: "Organization submitted to chance. Chance gave variety to organization. A balance was achieved" (Dada Art, pp. 61-62). And, due to his contact with the musician Ferruccio Busoni, he began to employ contrapuntal rhythm as a musical analogy for the type of abstract form, a balance of chance and organization, that he was developing. Others, such as Standish Lawder andJustin Hoffmann, have traced the history of Richter's development of this form of abstraction from his initial experiments with black and white planes in his "Dadaheads" to his scrolls and films, as well as the technical and aesthetic difficulties he encountered moving into the medium of film.26
26. See Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, pp. 35-38; 42-57; and Hoffmann, "Hans Richter:

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What has not been pointed to, however, is the degree to which the abstract form of his films can be seen as balancing with disorder with order, spontaneity chance with pattern. For while on a macro-level they create a intentionality, strong impression of order, on a micro-, moment-by-moment level, they are surprising and unpredictable. Typically, just as Richter has established a pattern, he breaks with it in unexpected ways. suddenly In Rhythm 21, for example, the first section introduces the film's basic elements: white figures (squares and rectangles) on a black background always to the frame. These move in two directions at the positioned perpendicular same speed: either across the screen from side to side or top to bottom, or into and out of the screen. However, just as the viewer becomes accustomed to these elements and the pattern of their movements, Richter varies them unpredictably. As Lawder has noted, the most obvious and "surprising" variation concerns foreground and background: One of the surprising elements in the opening exercises in Rhythm 21 ... is the complex spatial illusionism that derives from the dynamic interplay of contrasting areas of black and white. Which forms are elements? At any foreground figures, and which are background given moment, these spatial relationships are purposefully ambiguous and constantly changing.27 White figures on a black background become black figures on a white background, creating a highly unstable sense of depth; the color gray is introduced on some of the figures, further rendering unstable the sense of depth (are the white squares and rectangles behind the grey ones, or vice-versa?), as does the negative footage that replaces, for a few seconds, the positive, creating black figures on a white background, which themselves then become ambiguous. But there are plenty of other unpredictable variations: movement suddenly speeds up and just as suddenly slows down; stop motion replaces the smooth movement of the early part of the film, creating erratic "jump cuts" between large and small figures; diagonals suddenly appear for a moment, and just as suddenly disappear; recessional movements become lateral ones, and vice-versa; multiple figures appear at the same time, some receding, some advancing, some moving laterally, and some remaining still. Yet, in spite of all these surprising changes or "variations," a basic pattern or "theme" remains throughout: white squares and rectangles on a black background moving laterally or into and out of the screen. In other words, an impression of order is maintained in spite of the moment-by-moment disorder. Of course, a more sustained and systematic analysis of these films than is possible here is needed to demonstrate this convincingly, but my hunch is that such an analysis would show that the films conform to Richter's
Constructivist Filmmaker." 27. Lawder, The CubistCinema,p. 51.

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definition of Dada on a formal level through their balancing of order and disorder equated, for Richter, with reason and unreason. Furthermore, if my hunch is correct about their form, Richter's films conform not only to his definition of Dada, but also to the metaphysical vision of reality and human beings as a balance of opposites informing this definition. Indeed, Richter himself made this argument about his abstract work: In musical counterpoint, [Eggeling and I] found a principle which fitted our every action philosophy: a corresponding produces reaction. Thus, in the contrapuntal fugue, we found the appropriate system, a dynamic and polar arrangement of opposing energies, and in this model we saw an image of life itself; one thing growing, another declining, in a creative marriage of contrast and analogy. Month after month, we studied and compared our analytical drawings made on hundreds of little sheets of paper, until eventually we came to look at them as living beings which grew, declined, changed, then were disappeared-and reborn. We finally could operate them like instruments (and that is exactly what we called them). A vertical line was made meaningful by the horizontal, a strong line grew stronger by a weak one, a single unit became important against
RichterFrames from thefirst sectionof Rhythm 21. 1921. ( 2003 ArtistsRightsSociety (ARS),New York/VG Bild-Kunst,Bonn.

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many, a defined one was clear against an undefined one, and so forth. All of these discoveries became meaningful in the light of our belief that a precise polar interrelationship of opposites was the key to an order, and once we understood this order we knew we could control this new freedom.28 In other words, arguably, Richter's abstract work, including the Rhythm films, constitutes a representation of his vision of "life," of the metaphysics informing his critique of modernity and his functionalist definition of Dada. In these films, all sorts of formal "oppositions" are balanced into a harmonious whole, just as, for Richter, being authentically human consists of achieving a balance between opposites: reason and unreason, conscious and unconscious, civilized and primitive, thought and feeling.
28. Richter, "MyExperience with Movement in Painting and in Film," p. 142.

ArtistsRightsSociety (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst,Bonn.

Rhythm 21. 1921. ? 2003

Right andfar right:Richter.

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Finally, as we have seen, when referring, albeit briefly, to his search for a universal language through his abstract work, Richter tends to talk about uncovering the species-wide laws of human perception "hardwired" in the brain: "[Eggeling and I] thought we had found the key to a 'universal language.' As this language was based upon the polar relationship of elementary forms and corresponded to the laws of perception it ought to be independent of nationality and race = universal."29 If, indeed, Richter's films do uncover a "law of perception," it is one that conforms to both his definition of Dada and his metaphysical vision of reality as a harmonious whole composed of different, potentially opposed forces. This "law"is that no form is perceived in isolation. The way any single form is perceived is dependent on its interrelation with other formal elements. Lawder paraphrases this "law"very nicely:
29. Richter, Hans Richter, 24. p.

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As one form swells to the foreground, another sinks into the distance, others merge, interpenetrate, or overlap. No single form seems to move in isolated activity, for the compositional interdependence of these formal elements is far greater than in static paintings of similar movements of each form seem inexorably linked to design-the movement elsewhere on the screen.30 films conform to Richter's definition Admittedly, the argument that the Rhythm of Dada and the metaphysics informing this definition is based on loose analogies to their form. But these analogies are ones that Richter himself makes, and they point to at least some of the reasons why Richter believed his films to be Dadaist.

In this paper, I have attempted to clarify why it was that Richter believed his search for a universal language through his abstract films to be Dadaist. One question for future research is whether Richter's definition of Dada was shared by other Dadaists, or whether it was a personal one that had little influence on the movement. In other words, should Richter's Rhythmfilms be viewed as Dadaist as Entr'actehas always been, or should they continue to have an uncertain status on the fringes of the movement? More than this, though, I hope to have shown, as other scholars are doing, that although Dada is often identified with extreme, uncompromising condemnations of modernity-the nihilistic revelation of the meaninglessness of modernity, can find the search for a mystical, meaningful alternative to modernity-one within it more nuanced, complex positions, such as Richter's, in which some aspects of modernity are criticized (the dominance of rationality) while others are embraced, even celebrated (reason as being as fundamental to authentic humanity as unreason). Such positions might speak particularly loudly to those of us who continue today to believe in the basic ideals and aspirations of modernity.

30.

Lawder, The CubistCinema,p. 52.