Merda d’artista : M. Duchamp, T. Tzara und die stanzen von E. Jandl

“Art is shit” becomes the motto of the Dada movement. At the end of the twentieth century, Ernst Jandl will also shift the lofty, sublime, and divine art of lyric articulation “into the depths of poetry” and compare the Orphic poetic myth to defecation. His stanzen irresistibly recall Duchamp’s inverted urinal Fountain and Tzara’s Seven Dada Manifestos. After the instrumentalization by National Socialism and in the face of a bourgeois humanism, which often serves only as a pretext of cultural reaction, the beauty of art is corrupted and discredited. If the poem as artefact tends to assume a monumental character, it is precisely this inclination that must be counteracted. Jandl trusts in its inherent power of authentic expression, and consequently redirects the focus of classical avant-garde themes and techniques to a literally embodied poetic language. While the meaning of any human manifestation was ultimately centered in a (semi-)divine, transcendental sense, the absence of this meaning can no longer be demonstrated more plausibly than by reducing a meaningful stanza to an undifferentiated disgusting mass: shit.