January 20, 2009Almost 100 years after Dada, we visited the cafe in Zurich where Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara started doing crazy things in protest to established art and the society that approved it and the First World War that was going on all around neutral Switzerland.
The Cabaret Voltaire has been restored in a very funky way. Upstairs is a nice expansive coffee shop with a back room set up for conversations on a same-level stage. Posters and Dada memorability are all over the walls.
Downstairs is the series display of contemporary art -- a series of Fluxus films at this time -- and little projects in a front room that has the distinct look of a museum gift shop cross with trendy new-age shops that surround this historic space in the old town, the pedestrian shopping area -- of Left Bank Zurich.
It's eerily hard to get. Just like Dada. Just like much of contemporary art.
