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, but an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in. The Dada movement, to him, was a direct revolt against the prevailing bourgeois aesthetic and social values of the West and against society's glorification of war and violence.

Belfast-based philosopher Keith McVeigh, who joins Nico Andreas Heller for this edition of Annotations, has developed his practice as a composer and pianist against the ba ...