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tags: Surrealism Dada
The last time anyone saw Arthur Cravan alive, he was sailing off, alone, into the Pacific Ocean on a leaky boat. The nephew of Oscar Wilde, he was a poet, a boxer, a fraudster, a draft-dodger – and, according to some, the inventor of performance art.
André Breton, the ‘father’ of Surrealism, thought him inspired, while the situationist philosopher Guy Debord declared Cravan one of the people he esteemed most in the whole world.
To friends and neighbours, his family seemed respectably bourgeois. The reality was quite different, though. ‘Almost as soon as I could speak’, he later recalled, ‘I knew that everything people told me was a lie.’
He set out to become a critic. But not just any critic. There were already more than enough of those. Rather, he wanted to be the most hated critic in France – to hit hard, to knock the stuffing out of the self-satisfied bien pensants, to brawl in the galleries of the mind. Since no one with any sense would publish him – even among Paris’ avant-garde – he founded his own review: Maintenant (‘Now’). He wrote most of the articles himself, albeit under noms de plume.
Duchamp and Picabia invited him to give a lecture at the opening of their exhibition at the Grand Central Gallery. Cravan did not disappoint. He arrived drunk. On reaching the lectern, he gave it an incredible thump, then proceeded to strip naked. The guests, all rich collectors, were appalled. Cravan was promptly carted off by the police. But Duchamp was delighted. This was something new. It was performance as art. It was pure Dada.
Cravan met the British poet Mina Loy. The two fell in love. In Cravan, Loy saw a singular being, with no regard for material things. He found her bohemianism irresistible. They became inseparable.
While Loy boarded a Japanese hospital ship at Salina Cruz, Cravan went to buy a sailing boat in Puerto Angel, intending to meet in Buenos Aires. They never saw each other again.
Loy never discovered what happened to Cravan. Nor has anyone else since. In a sense, it hardly matters. By that point, Cravan’s life had become a work of art in itself. That his disappearance provoked such questions was a sign that he had, quite literally, become Dada. Alive or dead, his defiance of reason, of certainty – of everything – was what it was all about. But at the same time, his disappearance was also a parable. For Dada, with its self-regarding unreason and love of spectacle, was left, like Cravan, adrift, floating aimlessly on a sea of its own choosing – without harbour, without end.