Introduction — David Vichnar
Dragan Aleksić’s year in Prague (1920–21) is one of those compressed episodes in avantgarde history where several circuits suddenly touch & spark.† Arriving in October 1920 to study Slavic philology at Charles University, he stepped into a city already thick with postwar experimentation: the Devětsil circle was congealing around Teige, Čapek was translating French expressionism & futurism, & the local Dada scene was turning Prague into one of the key Dada hubs. It was in this charged environment that Aleksić formulated his notion of “organic art” (org-art), which he presented at his now- legendary “Orgart conference” in a rented room at Jiřího z Poděbrad Square in Vinohrady (within walking distance from his home on Italská Street), a lecture which he then sent to the main Dada centres in Zürich, Berlin & Hanover. The response obtained from Schwitters, Hausmann, Mehring, & others was encouraging enough that the Yugoslav student was swiftly recognised as a legitimate Dada ally. In effect, Prague became the hinge through which Yugo-Dada attached itself to the wider European network.
From Prague, Aleksić began working as a kind of foreign correspondent for Ljubomir Micić’s newly founded Zenit in Zagreb. The third issue of the journal (1 April 1921) carried his manifesto-essay “Dadaizam,” written from Prague & accompanied by several programmatic poems, staking out an aggressively anti-bourgeois, anti-“boredom” poetics, with the famous formula “truth is my concept (2×2=5).” In this text Aleksić absorbs the lessons of expressionism & futurism but pushes them further, emphasising pure nervous intensity, abstraction, & a radical “kakotedragość” (“as-you-likeness”) as the basis of creation. Prague, in his description, is no longer just a Central European capital but a testing ground for a new, pan-European avantgarde – a place where the “realism of truth” circulates as “symptoms” & “shocks” rather than as stable representations. At the same time, he is already in correspondence & personal contact with Schwitters, Hausmann, Tzara & the Hungarian Lajos Kassák; the Orgart lecture, translated & circulated among them, becomes a passport that lets a provincial student step directly onto the international Dada stage.
Aleksić’s Prague sojourn is also the prehistory of Yugoslav Dada’s institutional forms. It is from here that he helps to set up the short-lived “Umetnički klub Zenit u Pragu,” advertised in Zenit as a local nexus for the movement, & it is to Prague that Branko Ve Poljanski fl ies in spring 1921 “to make miracles,”* as Aleksić later recalls, so that the pair can launch joint performances & plan a south-Slavic Dada offensive. Kristina Pranjić has shown how precisely this Prague phase (1920–21) anchors what she calls “the emergence & establishment of Yugoslav Dada”: it is in Prague that the Yugoslav branch becomes fully transnational, entangled not only with Berlin & Hanover but also with Bohemian & Hungarian modernism, before shifting its centre of gravity to Zagreb in 1922. Aleksić thus appears not simply as “the Yugoslav dadaist” but as one of Prague Dada’s most mobile mediators – a fi gure who channels German & Swiss impulses into the Balkan context while simultaneously exporting Zenitist & Yugo-Dada energies back into the larger European field.
Aleksić’s “Orgart” attempts to transform the anarchic revolt of Dada into a constructive method grounded in the organisation of reality rather than its representation. Unlike Zürich Dada’s emphasis on destruction or Berlin Dada’s political satire, Org-Art proposes an art of arrangement, in which everyday materials – noise, gestures, objects, fragments of language – are assembled into new constellations that reveal the hidden forces structuring modern life. Drawing on his direct exposure to the Prague Dada soirées of 1920–21, Aleksić conceives Org-Art as both an extension & a correction of Dada: where Dada explodes meaning, Org-Art reconfigures the debris into events, momentary organisms that include the spectator as a participating element. In this sense, Org-Art anticipates later practices of performance art, happenings, & situationist détournement. Org-Art is Dada shifted from negation to vital organisation, a uniquely Balkan synthesis that preserves Dada’s energy while proposing an aesthetic suited to the technological & social rhythms of the postwar world.
† The present account is based on Kristina Pranjić’s excellent pioneering research published as “The Emergence & Establishment of Yugoslav Dada: From Prague to Zagreb (1920–1922),” Svět literatury 64.2 (2021): 89-103.
* For more information, cf. Predrag Todorović, Часопис „Зенит“ као платформа зенитодадаизма, Књижевна историја – часопис за науку о књижевности, 53.175 (2021). Online: https://knjizevnaistorija.rs/ index.php/home/article/view/202
ORG-ART (Organisation Art)
ORG-ART is the art of organisation, the art that arises when the artwork no longer imitates the world but organises it. ORG-ART takes the material of life – objects, movements, sounds, durations – & arranges them into new relations. The artwork is not a picture, not a poem, not a sculpture, but an organisation of forces.
The world is full of unorganised material. The streets, the factories, the advertisements, the gestures of people, the noises of machines – all this is raw material for ORG-ART. The ORG-artist does not create from imagination but from arrangement. He is a constructor, a technician of reality.
ORG-ART rejects illusion. There is no representation, for representation is deceit. There is only the bringing-together of elements. A poster, a shout, a tram-bell, a sudden turning of the head – this is the material of ORG-ART.
ORG-ART is close to DADA, but it is more systematic. DADA is revolt; ORG-ART is method. The Dadaist tears down; the ORG-artist organises the ruins. Dada destroys the sentence; ORG-ART arranges the fragments into a new syntax.
Every artwork of ORG-ART is an event. It happens in time, in space, among people. It is not an object to be admired but an organisation into which the spectator enters. The spectator becomes part of the arrangement, part of the organisation of the moment.
ORG-ART abolishes the separation between life & art. Life becomes material, & art becomes organisation. The highest form of ORG-ART is the organised life-moment: a second in which forces meet, collide, & form a unity. This is the new art.
ORG-ART is the art of the future. It belongs to the age of electricity, of motors, of wireless communication. It is the art of organisation in a world that is becoming organisation.
The artist of ORG-ART is the organiser of reality.
COOK YOUR GRAMPAS: PRAGUE DADA is available now from Litteraria Pragensia. You can order a copy here.
Dragan Aleksić [22 December 1901 – 22 July 1958] was a Serbian Dadaist poet, author, journalist and filmmaker. He was the founder of “Yugo-Dada,” the Yugoslavian branch of Dadaism.
David Vichnar teaches at Charles University Prague. He is also active as an editor, publisher and translator. Apart from numerous edited volumes, his publications include Joyce Against Theory (2010), Subtexts: Essays on Fiction (2015), and most recently, The Avant-Postman: Experiment in Anglophone and Francophone Fiction in the Wake of James Joyce (2023). He translates from/into English: his book-length translations include Philippe Sollers’ H (from French) and Melchior Vischer’s Second through Brain (from German), as well as Louis Armand’s Snídaně o půlnoci (English-Czech). He directs Prague Microfestival and manages Litteraria Pragensia Books and Equus Press. His articles on contemporary experimental writers as well as translations of contemporary poetry and fiction—Czech, German, French and Anglophone—have appeared in numerous journals and magazines.
