FAIRE DE SON HISTOIRE UNE BOUCLE (NOIRE): WAYS OF LOOKING AT TRISTAN TZARA

A close examination of pictorial and verbal portraits of Tzara, by both himself and others (Breton, Louis Aragon, Picabia, Germaine Everling, Man Ray, Hans Arp) - as filtered in the art and texts of the dadas and their critics through adaptations of cabbalism, Tao-inflected Africanism, spirit photography and Maurice Barres's ponderously mystical nationalism - yields a peculiar portrait of Paris dada, and of Tristan Tzara's ethical role within it. Anti-Semitic slurs against Tzara, used as weapons in dada power politics, while construable as a knowingly disingenuous use of clichE and caricature, raise questions of idiom. Raoul Hausmann's Mechanical Head: the Spirit of Our Time (1919) is analysed as an exemplary approach to dada portraiture, in which constellations of contradictory readymade attributes and associations, including anti-Semitic stereotypes, configure a tragicomic array of received social constructions, revolutionary aspirations, prejudices and ambivalences that constitute individuals as social actors within and outside dada.