Ultraist Aggregation and Dada Agitation: Avant-Garde Attitudes in the Wake of War

This essay will insist on certain similarities between ultraist aggregation and dadaist agitation, but it will also work to understand how the distinction between the two could be meaningful to avant-garde tastes in 1921. Ludington analysis will meditate especially on the fact that Dada and Ultra are the most important avant-garde movements arising in neutral Switzerland and neutral Spain, respectively, during and immediately following the pan-European disaster of the First World War. To perform his comparative analysis, he will look to Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes's poem, "Trombone a coulisse" ("Slide Trombone"), and its translation by the Spanish ultraist Rafael Lasso de la Vega, a "polyhedric and extravagant figure."