Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzarawas a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vineaand painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth16 April 1896
CountryFrance
Dada covers things with an artificial tenderness. It is snowing butterflies that have escaped from a prophet's head.
The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.
Is it a spiral of water in the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of algebraic formulas? (On Man Ray's first photograms, 1921.)
Not the old, not the new, but the necessary.
We have always made mistakes, but the greatest mistakes are the poems we have written.
When everything that is called art was well and truly riddled with rheumatism, the photographer lit the thousands of candles whose power is contained in his flame, and the sensitive paper absorbed by degrees the blackness cut out of some ordinary object. He had invented a fresh and tender flash of lightning.
I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles.
Art needs an operation
Always destroy what is in you.
Thought is made in the mouth.
Let us try for once not to be right.
I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way." - Tristan Tzara "Dada Manifesto 1918
But let's speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera.
Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting.