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DADA PAINTING OR THE OIL-EYE
T HE bigwig, reality, is the straw man of tickertape-brains
which daily retails its gallons of philosophy, fire-works,
morals, science, politics and perfumes; he it is who for
the most part supports the vulgar idiots that painters
usually are. Sight is the suction pipe of his material.
Sight is the lowest sense, so low that it should simply be worn
under the sole of one’s boot. It is the enemy of poets. It is true
that poets .... but all the same, after the game of heads and
tails, they are the most suave consolation of our days. The eye
throws the dirt, which it has absorbed from outside, into the
wheels of fantastic imagination and prevents them from turning.
Scarcely has the brain begun to weave charming chains of illogi
cal and boneless flowers when the hydra springs into one’s eye to
recall one to virtue. It is impossible not to see, except at night or
in a cellar, but it is there that painters decay. Poets can be
blind. Painters can not and yet it is the only condition under
which they would be able to wave from the top of minarets their
peacock plumed hats that should tickle the heart and bowels of
the amateur of amateurs.
The cubists are pale succubae whom grabbing prostitution,
freshly painted with the old putrefaction of aesthetic morgues,
comes to visit. After a few slaps on the behind of the bourgeois
impressionist women, they send off into the sky pretty rockets
of mud and caramels. They are delicious and as prolific as flies,
mice and lice.
The dadaistes are not the sons of the cubists. Some among
them once dipped a finger into the bouillon cube and immedi
ately put it in their mouths to see what kind of a taste it had.
There is no one who has not sometime in his life taken an emetic.
They are neither sons nor fathers of anyone. No prophets an
nounced them.
The grumblings of the legal painter put them outside paint
ing entirely. It seems that only the gorillas and the monkeys
with their blue buttocks have the right to paint, this being the
art of obscene grimaces, palatable or tearful before the thighs,
the apples or the horizons. The dadapainters are outside the
plastic? They would be especially favored if they could escape