Here it is mid-August, and I am only just now telling you about the summer's most exciting show. I mean "Dada," and if I have taken far too long to break the news, you can easily understand why.
For once a blockbuster does what the word suggests. Instead of attracting long, orderly lines, the explosion leaves shrapnel everywhere. For a movement dedicated to destroying fine art, Dada sure made a lot of it. At least they left a great deal of its wreckage behind. At the Museum of Modern Art through September 11, Dada spans two entrances, six cities, and four hundred fifty objects. It may never look this deft, messy, and just plain artful again.
Often one recalls Dada as a brief, witty refusal. One thinks of the first readymade, In Advance of a Broken Arm. Marcel Duchamp bought a snow shovel, well before anyone could have called it art, and it still looks perfectly ordinary. He contributed a fancy title but not a noticeably fancy display or, heaven forbid, "installation." One thinks of a small circle and their provocations, before they turned from denial to assertion—the dream world of Surrealism. Clearly the Modern knows a thing or two that this story leaves out.
Alternatively, one may think of Dada as the source of art today. One may hear that the first half of the twentieth century belongs to Cubism, the second to Dada. That has one struggling to make sense of Abstract Expressionism. It reduces Minimalism to an industrial-strength form of Pop Art. It elides the conceptual puzzle of appropriations of past appropriations—from Dada to Pop Art to the irony of the 1990s to the repetitions in galleries everywhere now. Besides, Dada began barely two years after Cubism at its most abstract and the same year as a collage guitar by Pablo Picasso, and it ended two years before his Three Musicians.
Still, something in those narratives holds, between doubts about art itself to implications for art far in the future. Can art rebel against the very idea of art, and can that rebellion then engender art to come? The Modern plays up the future, but it takes that future to begin without delay. It sees Dada as not an idea, an accident, a flurry of manifestos, or a handful of eccentrics, but a work in progress. One may as well call it modern art.
The survey has six rooms—for New York, Paris, Zurich, Cologne, Hanover, and Berlin. It describes each of these incarnations of Dada, from about 1913 to 1919, as an expanding circle. Start in New York with a snow shovel and a urinal, and one may find the dirt, grime, and glamour of American realism. Start with the scraps of art history turned into sculpture, and one may find decorative painting by names that barely make the history books. For once a blockbuster does what the word suggests. Instead of attracting long, orderly lines, the explosion leaves shrapnel everywhere.
If such a capacious definition comes close to chaos, that, too, has advantages. For Dada, after all, chaos comes with the territory. Moreover, a touch of chaos avoids a serious problem: once an alternative art enters the museum, it can stop offering alternatives. This show wants the alternatives to stretch in every direction but backward. Its version of Dada sets the tone for all of modern art to come.
If you want to know whether I believe it, there's a fuller version of this review on my own ever-growing Web site, where I do my best to take the alternatives apart. However, let me offer you, if I may, some hints.
The show's six rooms nonetheless leave space for invention to flow. The artists themselves did. Francis Picabia first found his merry way to New York City, where his free spirit and admiration for this side of the Atlantic led Duchamp and, in turn, the Armory Show to join him. Man Ray headed for Europe, too, ready to start over. The American artist's early work with Duchamp brings out Dada's collaborative side. One can share the excitement of a few like-minded rebels, determined to put art's future to the test. Once in Europe, however, he turns to his rayograms, the direct impression of objects on sensitive paper. They strip photography of artifice even before it had gained wide recognition as art.
Still, chance alone has its limits, or it would not permit skepticism and discovery. When May Ray let those ghostly rayograms shape themselves, he cast doubt on representation and on the uniqueness of a creative gesture. Yet when he allowed them so much beauty and named them after himself, he cast doubt on collaboration and self-denial, too. As this survey toured Paris and Washington, it took different forms each time. Even chaos, it appears, amounts to an interpretation imposed on the past.
The show's optimism in the face of Europe's despair has one last consequence: it rescues Dada not just for its century, but also for art. Did Picabia wish to destroy the future only to build it anew? When Duchamp exhibited a urinal, did he show that anything can be art, that nothing can be art, or that only an eye as perceptive as his and a context as capacious and specific as his can describe art? The Modern may think it knows, but you may leave as unclear as ever, and that alone offers insight into Dada and art today.
John is a writer and editor based in New York, where his publications include the largest source of art reviews online.
John,
I'm so glad you wrote this piece. Our fellow shark John Kruth and I saw this show just before it opened (big thanks to Bob O'Connell for that), and we were both blown away.
Looking through the catalogue I'm reminded of the things that impressed me about this show - the quality of Duchamp's work, even when compared to so many other greats, the range of form that Dada presented itself in, and most of all the fact that these guys seemed to really be enjoying themselves. The films especially demonstrate a wonderful playfullness - what a treat to get to see them!
There's a palpable sense of entertainment in the absurdity of so much of this work, and I can't help wondering if Duchamp wouldn't smirk in amusement at the way his work has been perverted today.
When I look at those Readymades I see a very clear distinction being drawn between form and content - the first such case to my knowledge - and the Rayograms seem to address the relationship between intentionality and illustration.
But in all this work I see a biting, humorous parody of institutional norms and manners. It's ironic that so much of this work has inspired pseudo-intellectual mannerism, but ain't that just the way?
To steal and paraphrase an idea and societal critique from Jesus, in the artworld we need more of Dada's "spirit" and far far less of it's "letter." (That beats the hell out of quoting Derrida, don't you think.)
You know, New York desparately needed more of the "letter" of the urinal. So I'm thrilled at the facilities in the chain bookstores.
Actually, the problem of the letter and spirit is obviously a bit parallel to the one about whether it's freeing up art or destroying it, and the Derrida allusion is really helpful in suggesting how hard it is to untangle the choices. The one that keeps getting me thrown, though, is the repetition of appropriation, the quotation of quotation and the rebellion against rebellion. So we had Picasso, then Dada, then de Kooning women, then Pop Art, later Koons, then Hirst and the Young British redoing Koons, etc., etc. I got so puzzled at "Neo-" this and "Neo-" that movement, I once called an article "Neoneo."
From Derridean reasoning, the repetition should defer meaning and enrich it. So why does it often feel instead so annoying? (Well, never de Kooning.) Gosh, almost makes you want to become a Marxist.