Famous games of dice: a new history. Part 2 of 16 in a series.
The Dadaists saw, amidst the futility of the war machine and the hopelessness of human existence, a path to expressing their despair through absurdity, and this they did with a passion at the Cabaret Voltaire on Spiegelgasse 1, in Zurich of a Sunday afternoon. It is said that Marcel Janco liked to entertain his fellow artists with a Romany accordion and scatological singalongs, while Hugo Ball tried to impersonate the paints on a canvas. Undoubtedly one of their more conventional leisures was to play dice games, but being Dadaists they were inclined to interpret the rules in all manner of peculiar ways; to argue the results of the dice in plain contradiction of the evidence presented before them; and to attempt to play dice on non-euclidean surfaces. If you weren’t a Dadaist yourself this could be infuriating.
Between October 1916 and July 1922, committed absurdists Tristan Tzara and Jean Arp played a series of 483 games of Beetle using blank dice and drawing a Dadaist interpretation of a beetle for each game. But they could not agree on what a Dadaist beetle would look like, and almost never agreed on the outcome of the blank dice rolls, so the final result of this series remains a mystery. Both Tzara and Arp claim that the other won by a considerable margin, and that to say otherwise would be an act of patronising charity to the real loser.
