Who's Your Dada? Slash (the) Heteropatriarchy
In 1908, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)—the militant wing of the British suffragette movement—knew that the liberal path of reform had got them nowhere. They instigated a campaign of direct action to smash and slash the cultural and material infrastructure of (white) colonial heteropatriarchy. Among its other achievements, this campaign invented Dada, as a slash to the colonial-heteropatriarchal screen. Call it Slash Dada. It set the ground for the strike against white sight. And it still does.
Slashed Carlyle
In properly Dada fashion, let’s begin at the end. On July 17, 1914, Margaret Gibb, working under the alias Anne Hunt, slashed the portrait of Thomas Carlyle by Sir John Millais in London’s National Portrait Gallery. Her protest against the infrastructures of white colonial heteropatriarchy could scarcely have been better directed than at Carlyle, defender of slavery and inventor of the “great man” theory of history.
In a word, against visuality, a word coined by Carlyle in English. Note how Gibb had carefully, and with revolution aforethought, slashed Carlyle’s eyes as if to say: “not so much visuality now, Tom!”
Despite later historians’ assertions that paintings were attacked at random, the National Portrait Gallery Warden reported that when he “asked which the picture was…the woman answered ‘Oh, it’s the Millais Carlyle’.” She knew exactly what she was doing. It made perfect sense to cut into Carlyle’s patriarchal and racist world view.
At her trial, Gibb declared: “This picture will have an added value and be of great historical interest, because it has been honored by the attention of a militant.” For me at least that’s true: I’ve been to see the painting to look at the cut that Gibb made, not because I like Millais. What I call Gibb’s Slashed Carlyle undid heteropatriarchy by slashing it. It’s a monument to countervisuality.
Gibb and the other slashing W.S.P.U. militants made visible apertures in imperial white reality, gendered masculine. Perhaps the best known was Mary Richardson’s attack on Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus in London’s National Gallery. The militants used butcher’s cleavers to attack the art. It emphasized the violence of the imperial world view that the women were cutting.
The WSPU argued in relation to Richardson’s action: “the Rokeby Venus has, because of Miss Richardson’s act, acquired a new human and historic interest. For ever more, this picture will be a sign and a memorial of women’s determination to be free.” Over a hundred years before racist statues were placed in museums still bearing the marks of their toppling, the WSPU had anticipated the move. What these memorials ask to be remembered is anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal resistance.
Slashing the Imperial Screen
The slashing of paintings was an acceleration of the WSPU 1908 window breaking campaign. Militants broke the windows of shops, museums and other institutions as a visible sign of support for women’s suffrage. Emmeline Pankhurst declared “The argument of the broken windowpane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.” These were not simply windows but imperial screens.
In 1859, two years after the first Indian War of Independence (still known to some in the UK as the Indian Mutiny), conservative John Ruskin taught art students to reconfigure the Renaissance “window on the world” perspective into a screen. He imagined “an unbroken plate of crystal” a mile high and a mile wide but of no thickness, so as to be undistorted by refraction or reflection.
As a result, empire became an immense diorama, separating the imperial viewpoint from those people and places to be looked at. Those behind the glass were subject to observation and depiction but had no claim to representation. More than that, they became targets. It was from this all-seeing imperial perspective that Mr. Kurtz commands with his last words in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899): “Exterminate all the brutes.”
Ruskin was a supporter of the Confederacy and slavery. In 1865, he defended Governor Eyre of Jamaica when he repressed the Morant Bay uprising by killing over 400 people. Ruskin asserted it was clear “that white emancipation not only ought to precede, but must by the law of all fate, precede, black emancipation.” At the same time, Ruskin’s misogyny is so notorious, combined with a toxic fascination with young girls, that breaking his “screen” was a properly intersectional, anti-colonial, anti-racist and feminist action.
The WSPU sustained its cuts into white conceptual reality with attacks on the material infrastructure of imperial male whiteness. Women set post boxes on fire, bombed cricket pavilions and country houses. The houses of government ministers were particular targets, as befits an insurgency. In 1913, there were 213 such attacks and 1914 was on a pace to match that number before war broke out.
In 1913, police raided the studio of Suffragette artist Olive Hickin, who trained at the elite Slade art school and was number two on the government list of “known militant suffragettes,” after her attacks on the Roehampton Golf Club and a house belonging to prime minister Lloyd George. These items were found in her studio: wire cutters; fire-lighters; hammers; bottles of corrosive fluids; 5 false motorcar plates; strips of ribbon bearing the slogan: “No votes - No telegraph connections.” That’s quite a list. Where Ruskin had seen art as the means to expand empire, the suffragettes’ art strike targeted the imperial infrastructure of culture and communications to unbuild heteropatriarchy.
From Slash Dada to Schoolboy Dada
The First World War ended this insurgency. On July 30, 1914, the anti-war socialist Rosa Luxemburg, theorist of the general strike, sat on the platform of a rally organized by the Second International in Brussels. Her head in her hands, she was unable to speak, despite being repeatedly called on by French socialist Jean Jaurès. Luxemburg could already see how decades of planning to resist the call to war were about to be demolished by a wave of patriotic fervor. So too the suffragette movement, called to a halt by Emmeline Pankhurst in support of the war.
If women finally received the vote in 1918, it was not the patriarchy ending moment that had been hoped for because of the war. The resurgence of militarist masculinity overwhelmed socialism and feminism alike, albeit at appalling cost. Even the end of the war created a new wave of patriarchal monument building, rebuilding the shattered imperial world view with an infrastructure of statues. Breaking a window no longer resonated in quite the same way after millions of deaths.
Instead of Slash Dada, there was schoolboy Dada. In 1919, Marcel Duchamp put graffiti on the Mona Lisa, adding the letters L.H.H.O.Q , creating a “pun” when the letters are spoken out. Slash Dada cut into the patriarchy, Dada went along with it.
From Slash to Sousrealism
That’s not to say that the slash and smash tactic was wrong or should be forgotten. In 2012, Occupy activists broke a single Starbucks window and condemnation rained down on them—from the left. Following the WPSU would have meant breaking every Starbucks window—or at least saying you would—so as to highlight resistance to corporate capital.
Now that statue removal has slowed into a war of position, self-declared left critic Robert Bevan has come along with a lengthy account, claiming yet again that monuments must be kept because they represent the “truth about the past.” This week, a delighted Tristram Hunt, director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and a long-time opponent of restitution, gave the book a front-page review in Rupert Murdoch’s TLS.
For Hunt, Bevan is a useful straw leftist to advance his tired claim that “Colston and Rhodes should stay precisely because they serve as useful and instructive sites of shame.” But there was no such instruction in all the decades before activists removed them. Hunt could easily have organized it as director of the V&A. But he didn’t. The monuments are “historical records” only of whiteness’ ultimately failed cover-up of its own histories.
Slash Dada was intensely powerful in revealing the long historical obfuscation of monuments and memorials. For all its capacity to unleash power-as-potential (potencia) and overturn static power (poder)—to use the terms of the feminist strike in Argentina— its spontaneity now needs a framework. Just as mainstream Dada became Surrealism, so must slash Dada become sousrealism (see next week!).