This article focused on the effects that Hugo Ball on Dadaism and Dadaism had on Ball. Hugo Ball was a poet and an author and a key theorist of the Dada movement in Zurch, Switzerland and somewhat of a rebel. Some art historians didn’t take him seriously. They even went as far to refer to him as a brief episode in Dadaism history because they said he was never a Dadaist himself. Apparently, he flip-flopped from Dadaism to non-Dadaism and I think it was because of religion.
I would venture to believe that Ball was quite the character. He was interested in many aspects of life such as language, philosophy, theology, mysticism, history, religion, and politics, but he was confused. It seemed that he wanted to run with the Dada crowd, but Dadaism questioned his religious faith. So, he got on the Nietzsche bandwagon and welcomed the liberation of the death of God as he did not like the restraints of authority. With the Nietzsche crowd came iconoclasms who believed in destroying religious works of art because they thought images or idols corrupt the relationship with God. They didn’t believe that a piece of art could have a religious symbolic meaning so they destroyed everything they found.
Ball met a man named Richard Huelsenbeck and the two of them wrote a memorial for poets who died in the war and called it A Literary Manifesto. This manifesto was later identified as the only ‘proto-dadist’ manifesto and it basically said he wanted to ruin all things beautiful and wanted to deny and refuse to believe in anything.
After dressing up in a Cubist costume and calling himself a magic bishop to perform one of his sound poems at the Cabaret Voltaire, he ultimately became a devout Catholic.