As an attempt to consume the whole of dada, CannibaleËs title was appropriate, but the title invites other speculations about its meanings in the context of dada. The primitive connotations of "cannibal" were possibly an ironic reference to the claims put out by the futurists to be the "primitives of a new sensibility," as well as to the precubist Africanist paintings of Picasso. Dada of course to an extent participated in the primitivising strand of modernism, particularly when it could be turned to polemical use against its own bankrupt civilisation. But dada did not claim to be part of the modernist avant-garde; ("Dada is not modern," it insisted). Its sense of the inadequacy of the "schools of formal ideas" as such, for their purposes, reveals one of the underlying impulses behind dada: that of restoring to art an immediacy, a direct relationship with life. The dadaist as far as possible was to be the opposite of the "men of the spirit" who, as Richard Huelsenbeck said, "sat in the cities, painted their little pictures, ground out their verses, and in their whole human structure [. . .] were hopelessly deformed, with weak muscles, without interest in the things of the day, enemies of the advertisement, enemies of the street, of bluff, of the big transactions which everyday menaced the lives of thousands. Of life itself. But the dadaist loves life [. . .]."1 The extreme situation in war-devastated Berlin coloured the tone of HuelsenbeckËs text, its attack on the "art for artËs sake mood" that lay over Zurich dada, which "failed to advance along the abstract road, which ultimately leads from the painted surface to the reality of the post-office form,"² and finally his statement that in Germany, "dadaism became political, it drew the ultimate consequences of its position and renounced art completely."³ In Paris dada worked out its aggression and rudeness at a more individual rather than political level·under the sign of anarchy·but there too it was a question of life rather than art. So perhaps Picabia, whose little magazines were full of anecdotes, aphorisms and gossip, and whose visual productions incorporated words, photographs, ordinary objects and, in theory if not in practice, living animals, thought of the dadaist as a cannibal in the sense that his materials were life rather than art.

PicabiaËs response, like DuchampËs, to the "art and life" debates was not, however, without irony, as in his proposals to use real white mice, or a living monkey (for Tableau dada) in his "works of art;" in Tableau dada he hints darkly at the logical extension of "live materials" to the use of human beings, playing with the French term for a "still life," nature morte, literally "dead nature," and giving a new and comically sinister turn to the notion of the "portrait bust."

DadaËs ambivalence to the avant-garde of the time can be too easily subsumed under a general idea of "anti-art." One of its central modes of opposition was parody: cultural cannibalism par excellence. So the claims of the avant-garde to newness and originality were mercilessly mimicked: the "simultaneist" poem, for example, (whether of the futurists or the French proponent Henri Barzun) was performed in Zurich in the form of three anodyne popular songs in English, French and German spoken or sung simultaneously, interspersed with bells and meaningless exclamations, to create a jumbled confusion of sound rather than the dynamic multilayered modern poem. The idea of abstraction itself has an ambivalent position in dada. Sceptical of the claims to a "new language" put out by the proponents of abstraction Kandinsky and Mondrian, the dadaists nonetheless played with abstraction in a more radical way than Huelsenbeck recognised. Marcel Janco, for example, in a now lost "Composition" gathered a strange amalgamation of wires and objects which may have been intended as parodic; Arp too, together with his partner Sophie Taueber, produced the first "soft" abstract sculpture.

The practice of collage, various as it was in the hands of dada, cannibalising newspapers, photographs, prints, reproductions of all kinds, disassembling bodies and recombining their fragments in new forms, is also a kind of anthropophagy.

That dada felt itself profoundly alien to the society responsible for the carnage of the First World War is undoubted; "this world of systems has gone to pieces,"⁴ as Hugo Ball, founder of the Cabaret Voltaire, dadaËs birthplace in Zurich, put it. Rejection of the social and political, as well as cultural values of European civilisation presupposed a rejection too of its colonial expansion·certainly a factor in the War. Although not yet the outspoken criticism of colonialisation found in surrealism, which was to organise an Anti-Colonial exhibition in 1931 to oppose the huge Colonial exhibition in Paris of that year, itËs possible that Cannibale, for dada, had undertones of siding with the colonised "other." If so, it may have been in the spirit of one of dadaËs immediate predecessors, Alfred Jarry, whose black humour was a particular stimulus for Duchamp and for the surrealists. JarryËs short text of 1902, "Anthropophagy," is a sly critique of the intersection of anthropology and colonisation.