Ball and Hammer: Hugo Ball's Tenderenda the Fantast

Ball and Hammer: Hugo Ball's Tenderenda the Fantast by Ball, Hugo. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780300083736.

In this unconventional book, Jonathan Hammer offers a new translation of Hugo Balls visionary novella Tenderenda the Fantast, along with his own unique Tenderenda-inspired images. The resulting "dialogue" between Ball, the founder of Zurich Dada, and Hammer, a contemporary artist, casts new light on Dadaism and its postmodern legacies. In Tenderenda, composed between 1914 and 1920, Ball recounts a hallucinatory tale of his own Dada enchantment and disenchantments. Jeffrey T. Schnapp introduces the book, elaborating the cultural and historical context of Balls work and situating Hammers work in relation to Dada. In a concluding essay, Hammer probes various aspects of Balls asceticism, spirituality, and sexuality to arrive at a revisionist interpretation of Zurich Dada and the origins of modernism as well as postmodern art-making.