Coming Up: On Humiliation

Nico Andreas Heller in Conversation with Keith McVeigh

Hugo Ball, co-founder of the Dada movement, once remarked that “every word that was spoken and sung [at Cabaret Voltaire, their club in Zurich] represented at least this one thing: that this humiliating age had not succeeded in winning [their] respect”. That was back in 1916, at the height of the first world war.

For Ball art was not an end in itself, bu…