Chaos and irrationality inspired dadaist experiments with chance operations. Hans Richter explains that the Alsatian painter and dadaist Jean Arp once, when dissatisfied with one of his paintings tore it in pieces and threw it on the floor. To his amazement Arp noticed that the new configuration of scraps was more successful than the original. Chance had succeeded where the original artist's intent had not. Tristan Tzara also used chance methods in his poetry. He cut up newspapers into little pieces containing no more than a few words, then either selected them randomly from a hat or threw them onto a table. The new combination of words was then pasted together. Tzara described this process in the fifth of his Seven Dada Manifestoes (1916-20):

To make a dadaist poem

Take a newspaper.

Take a pair of scissors.

Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.

Cut out the article.

Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.

Shake it gently.

The take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.

Copy conscientiously.

The poem will be like you.

And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.[18]

These works anticipate John Cage's first compositions using chance methods by more than thirty years. Again, the motivation behind this sort of activity was to bring art closer to the randomness that characterized real life.

The rejection of tradition and institutionalized art, political and social activism, chaos, chance and irrationality, simultaneity, and the merging of art and life were the aesthetic principles endorsed by avant-garde movements in the early twentieth century. Dadaism, futurism, and the artistic movements which grew out of them--collectively known as the "historical avant-garde"--did not survive beyond the fourth decade of the twentieth century. The onslaught of World War I helped bring on the dissolution of futurism as an international movement, although aspects of its ideology took root in Russia.[19] The futurist's interest in the industrial world, for instance, was echoed by the Russian constructivists, who believed in a utilitarian art committed to the establishment of a classless society.[20] In general, avant-garde art flourished in post-revolutionary Russia, but the tolerant artistic climate which reached its apogee during the 1920s later declined under the increasingly totalitarian political regime.[21]

During the years after World War I, dadaism spread from Zürich to Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, and Paris. It was in Paris that the movement began to break apart as a result of internecine rivalries and, above all, the impossible task of unifying a movement that embraced chaos and disorder. Although many of the artists and writers who helped begin dada still remained productive, by 1924, after a series of confrontations, polemics, and public disputes, dadaism was finished.[22] Surrealism emerged out of the ashes of dada, but by the beginning of the Second World War this movement also ran out of steam due to its inability to align itself with the communist party and the fact that few people could concern themselves with "discussions of sex, character, and potential behavior of a scrap of velvet at a time when fascists were burning books and killing people."[23]

II

The collapse of the historical avant-garde did not prevent the dissemination of its aesthetic principles and artistic techniques. After World War II, there was a resurgence of avant-gardism. Many of the radical groups associated with the post-war revitalization of the avant-garde--such as the Nouveau realistes, the Cobra movement, the International Situationists, and Fluxus--had political and artistic agendas remarkably similar to those of the historical avant-garde and are thus often referred to as the "neo-avant-garde" or "neo-dada."

John Cage was perhaps the most crucial link with the historical avant-garde after the war. He enjoyed a long time personal association with Marcel Duchamp and it is not surprising that many of his ideas stem from dadaist aesthetic ideology. From the 1940s on he increasingly took on the role of an agent provocateur, much in the same spirit as Tristan Tzara and other radicals active in the early part of the century. In 1948 he caused quite a stir with his polemics against Beethoven at Black Mountain College. His "Lecture on Nothing," presented at the New York City Artist's Club sometime in 1949 or 1950,[24] was, in part, an inflammatory jab aimed at the aesthetics of abstract expressionism.[25] The uproar that resulted from these activities was surpassed by the first performance of 4'33", Cage's composition for piano without sound in Woodstock, New York on August 29, 1952. The audience, although well-prepared for an evening of contemporary music, was shocked by what Cage would later call his most important work.

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