Rah! Rah! Dada!
BAYLES, MARTHA
The subversive moment in modern art by MARTHA BAYLES Greetings, this is your Dadioguide, speaking to you through the spongy thingamajigs on your headset. My job is to blow kudos and raspberries in...
...According to the catalogue, Ernst's work "requires the viewer to create an ambiguous narrative around interconnected pictorial and linguistic signs, couching social critique in metaphorical terms...
...And in Rome, the futurists were happily running their Experimental Theater in a ruin beneath Mussolini's mansion...
...and the serate, or "performance evenings," created by the Italian futurist Filippo Marinetti in 1909...
...colorful wooden reliefs, and whimsical marionettes...
...Actually, the prime mover of Zürich Dada, the German writer Hugo Ball, tried to enlist but was rejected on medical grounds...
...The short film shows even more terrible images...
...It is not known what the first replica fetched, but the Scottish art critic Julian Spalding reports that, in 1999, one of the later batch sold at auction for £993,789, and a couple of years later another was sold to the Tate Gallery for about £1 million...
...Ideals are only labels that have been stuck on...
...Now you are probably wondering: If Dada was a reaction to the horror of war, then why are these Zürich rooms filled with delicate cubist collages, goofy masks, abstract needlepoints (great upholstery concepts...
...But Dada's ambition went beyond opposing the war, just as Futurism's went beyond supporting it...
...Look at all those amputees...
...One of the few sensible critics out there, Spalding adds, "None of those who collected Manzoni's tins has, as far as I know, tested the veracity of their contents, but then, who would want to...
...Pinoncelli also hit that Fountain with a hammer, un acte gratuit that he . . . er, replicated this past January when Dada was on display at the Pompidou Center in Paris...
...The National Gallery makes no attempt to recreate these legendary evenings, which is probably just as well, because if it did, the result would bear a discomfiting resemblance to a U Street poetry slam...
...Could it be the ghost of Marinetti, deriding the smelly gangrene of a 100-year-old PR stunt...
...Another way of putting it would be to say that old Kurt would have been one hell of a scat singer...
...And while still in Zürich, Huelsenbeck, Tzara, and Janco composed a "simultaneous poem" mixing German, English, and French in a babel Ball credited with expressing "the conflict of the vox humana with a world that threatens, ensnares, and destroys...
...The noisier birds flocked to Cabaret Voltaire, a hole-in-the-wall venue that today would go by the dreary name, "alternative performance space...
...That "perhaps even" is priceless, don't you think...
...They'd be doing for the art world what your Dadioguide is now doing for you: Pointing to the exit...
...Photo montage was the perfect medium to express revulsion at the mechanization not just of war but also of life in general...
...You will note that the meaning of "realize" changes slightly over the course of this paragraph...
...We would begin again . . . by shocking the bourgeois, demolishing his idea of art, attacking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order...
...To be sure, Duchamp never urinated on da Vinci's painting, while Pinoncel-li did urinate on another replica of Fountain in 1993...
...Both traits are on display here, as Duchamp's "irreverence" is presented to the great unwashed with the utmost reverence...
...In 1951 he realized his mistake and "commissioned" a replica, which now hangs (stands...
...It's hard, in our gadget-worshiping culture, to understand this revulsion...
...Everything has been shaken to its very foundations...
...The Cologne section is also dominated by a single artist, the deeply peculiar Max Ernst...
...Americans tend to forget this, because our favorite Dadaist is Marcel Duchamp, the long-nosed, seriocomic Frenchman who placed a urinal in a New York art exhibition in 1917, and two years later drew a moustache and goatee on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa...
...For Grosz, this meant affixing illustrations of machinery to drawn and painted human figures, usually with malicious intent—as in the R-rated Daum marries her pedantic automaton "George" in May 1920, John Heartfield is very glad of it...
...But because he was also a fascist who helped to jump-start Mussolini (until Il Duce rolled over him), he gets short shrift from art historians...
...Although several Dadaists fought in the war, Berlin Dada was the first art movement in Europe to defy the jingoism of a host country...
...in the Philadelphia Museum of Art...
...Spectators at a serate could expect what one art historian calls "a systematic, thorough, and direct attack on their bourgeois mediocrity, passéist ideas and stupidity...
...But that is the point: Picabia, not Duchamp, is typical of Dada...
...But you are spared the most terrible: machineMartha Bayles, who teaches in the honors program at Boston College, posts a blog called Serious Popcorn at www.artsjournal.com...
...Take a deep breath...
...Climbing the stairs to the Berlin section, you will leave the birdcage for the lions' den...
...Never mind the hat rack...
...You are ready to appreciate the legacy of Duchamp as embodied in a certain performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli, who has been stalking Fountain rather the way the master stalked the Mona Lisa...
...That our own "notions about art" are "preconceived...
...According to the New York Times, "the porcelain urinal was slightly chipped in the attack and was withdrawn to be restored...
...Friends of the artist who visited the studio were treated to a discombobulating installation, where the boundaries between the ready-made and the surrounding furniture and studio detritus were nonexistent, thus simultaneously challenging their physical surroundings as well as their preconceived notions about art...
...He also (here's the rub) wanted to "glorify war—the world's only hygiene...
...If this information makes you feel less reverent, then good...
...If this is the type of thing you enjoy in an art museum, then perhaps you would like to rent an additional CD in which I describe some of my weirder dreams...
...It's been 90 years since Duchamp pulled off his cute little prank of pointing to a rusty comb and saying, "This is art because I say so...
...But ponder Raoul Hausman's A Bourgeois Precision Brain Incites a World Movement, or Hannah Höch's Bourgeois Bridal Couple, and you'll get the point: Cyborgs were not invented in 1960 (when the word was coined...
...But others pack an emotional wallop...
...To their credit, the hard-core Dadaists did not swap irony for ideology...
...Dada Triumphs...
...The first of these immortal works can be found in the New York section, the second in the (final) Paris section...
...What is that cackling sound...
...Here is how the catalogue describes his most creative period: The ready-made—and the intellectual ideas behind them—seem to have been too advanced, too cerebral, and perhaps even too shocking for American modernists to respond to...
...It is dominated by a single figure, the remarkable Kurt Schwitters...
...In Cologne, the slogan "Dada Siegt...
...In 1916, when Germany was gripped by anti-British hatred, Helmut Herzfeld deliberately anglicized his name to "John Heartfield...
...In Western Europe, though, many cutting-edge artists still believed that the Communists were their friends...
...If they were alive today, they would not be endlessly recycling the same old Dada doodoo...
...Your Dadio-guide's own view (not that you asked) is that a little Ernst goes a long way...
...Dada is organized by city, not chronology...
...Tocqueville pointed out many years ago that Americans dislike high-toned aristocratic culture but also have an affinity for bombast...
...Some works, such as Heartfield's and Rudolf Schlichter's Prussian Archangel (basically a stuffed infantry uniform with a pig's head) are jokes...
...The core sensibility of Berlin Dada was rage and ridicule toward the war...
...The Porte-chapeaux (Hat Rack) and a snow shovel (In Advance of the Broken Arm) were hung from the ceiling...
...My job is to blow kudos and raspberries in the right amounts as you walk from room to room, mouth slightly agape, pressing Play, Pause, Stop, Fast Forward, and Rewind...
...Ball summed up this side of Zürich Dada when he described the city as "a birdcage surrounded by roaring lions...
...For example, the paintings by Otto Dix, a combat veteran who won the Iron Cross, show the misery of Kriegskrüppel (war cripples) burdened by grotesque pros-theses and the indifference of civilians...
...The next section, Hannover, is kinder to the way we live now...
...By now you have noticed that Dada was predominantly German...
...His intricate forays into mechanical drawing and parodies of commercial illustration are practically the only things worth looking at in these rooms...
...Of course, there's a big difference between Futurism and Dada...
...was meant ironically...
...The lesson is subtle but unmistakable: The majority of Dadaists were engaged in the old-fashioned business of creating objects, and most of the objects they created can, with some stretching, be called beautiful...
...Yes, I know, it was a urinal to begin with...
...Trébuchet (Trap)—a coat rack—was nailed to the floor . . . while the porcelain urinal, christened Fountain by Duchamp, was suspended from the lintel of an interior doorway...
...But in 1922, when Ernst abandoned his wife and child to join the surrealists in Paris, the idea of radical artists winning political power did not seem outlandish...
...Similarly, "George Grosz" was an anglicized, and slavi-cized, version of Georg Gross...
...Like Dada in general, the show at Cabaret Voltaire was cobbled together from older avant-garde sources, such as Ubu Roi, the in-your-face play written by Alfred Jarry in 1896...
...Most of Grosz's Gott mit uns (God With Us) portfolio was confiscated and destroyed, but a number of prints survived, including one of an army doctor pronouncing a rotting corpse "Fit for Active Service" and another of plutocrats feasting while soldiers die: "Blood is the Best Sauce...
...More than any other artist, Marinetti jumpstarted the 20th century...
...68 of this canned edition, for the sum of £22,300...
...The official Audioguide doesn't want you to turn around and head for the Cézanne exhibition, and neither does your Dadioguide...
...what's astounding are the clichés...
...Everything had to be demolished...
...Not only that, but when they got up to mischief, they did so with panache...
...Yet his ghost hovers everywhere...
...When aimed at such targets, Dadaist rage and ridicule come off as heroic...
...Look at that looming tank, about to purée you into the mud of your trench...
...The catalogue helpfully explains that the Ursonate "opens a psychic space in which the Dionysian and Apollonian intertwine...
...It is the total mass of machinery and the devil himself that have broken loose now," he wrote...
...A master of agitprop, Marinetti wanted to "free this land [Italy] from the smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians," and to "destroy the museums, libraries, academies...
...To this end, Berlin Dada pioneered a new medium, photo montage—a fancy word for cutting and pasting...
...Schwitters also wrote nonsense poetry —that's him declaiming the Ursonate (Primal Sonata) in the passageway overbuilt at crazy angles to recall the Merzbauen he constructed in his various houses...
...In 1964, he realized the same mistake again, and "personally authenticated" (i.e., signed) another eight replicas...
...You are now in the presence of Fountain...
...Both movements wanted to create a cultural tabula rasa by breaking radically with the past...
...This exhibition is that rare phenomenon, a blockbuster that lays bare the intellectual and aesthetic bankruptcy of the contemporary art scene...
...But the touchstone is always World War I. In the first section, Zürich, you will learn that Dada was an international movement of poets, painters, performers, and provocateurs who, seeing no honor or purpose in the carnage, decided that honor and purpose were kaput...
...So eager was Ball to see action, he traveled to the Belgian front on his own, only to witness the harrowing effects of long-range artillery and poison gas...
...While contemplating this masterpiece, please be informed that it is an "authorized replica," since Duchamp did not think to hold onto the "original" back in 1917...
...According to Spaulding, "the Tate recently acquired no...
...The next time you clean the receipts, invoices, bus transfers, ticket stubs, take-out menus, and flyers out of your glove compartment, ponder Merz, derived from Kommerz (commerce) and used by Schwitters to characterize a rich array of works, none dull and many beautiful, that are closer to cubist collage and constructivism than to Dada...
...According to Janco, "We had lost confidence in our culture...
...Duchamp's anti-art tricks were already tired in the early 1960s, when one of Marinet-ti's countrymen, Piero Manzoni, filled 90 cans with his own feces and personally authenticated each can with a label saying Artist's S—t...
...Apart from a brief mention in the massive catalogue, Marinetti is absent from this exhibition...
...Neutral Switzerland was a refuge for deserters and draft evaders from all over Europe, these artists among them...
...Even the horses wore gas masks...
...The artists featured here— Sophie Taeuber, Hans Arp, Christian Schad—were quiet birds playing with media and with the boundary between fine and applied arts...
...If you like Surrealism, you'll love Ernst...
...You will note that Dada begins with text and photographs telling you that World War I was no fun...
...That the great Duchamp did not live in a third-floor walkup full of junk, but in an "atelier" graced by a "discombobulating installation" of "advanced," "cerebral," "perhaps even shocking" objets d'art...
...gunned cavalry, for instance, or soldiers with their faces blown off...
...Must we be lectured for the kerjillionth time that this was not an idea but an "intellectual idea...
...As the ready-made proliferated around 1916-17, their presence in Duchamp's atelier created a disorienting environment of their own...
...As you walk through these last two sections, keep an eye out for Francis Picabia, a true Dadaist but also a true artist...
...To be sure, the alliance between the Russian avantgarde and the Bolsheviks was not going well (the party was beginning to suspect that the proles did not dig Malevich's Black Square...
...Started by Ball and his lover Emmy Hennings, the cabaret soon attracted three bumptious newcomers: two Romanians known by the pseudonyms Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, and one German, Richard Huelsenbeck, whose poèmes nègres consisted of really bad drumming and really loud gibberish...
...But fear not, fellow mechanized borzois...
...Titles too clever by half are de rigueur in Dada...
Vol. 11 • May 2006 • No. 31
