'Dada': Ready-Made Disobedience
Friday, March 3, 2006; Page WE47
What is, perhaps, most surprising about the National Gallery of Art's weighty "Dada," a roughly 450-object survey of the early 20th century's most seismic art movement -- one whose lingering aftershocks can still be felt today in the contemporary art world -- is how visually slight much of the work in the show actually is.
The exhibition, which gathers work from dada's six international centers -- Zurich, New York, Paris, Berlin, Cologne and Hannover, Germany -- consists of nothing one might reasonably describe as a must-see. Modest photomontages abound, as do yellowing posters and other nonarchival printed matter, puppets, so-called "readymades" like Marcel Duchamp's famous porcelain urinal (here represented by a 1964 edition of the now-lost 1917 original, dubbed "Fountain" and nailed to a door jamb, just as the original once was in the artist's apartment), bits of jigsawed wood screwed together and heavy-handed political commentary along the lines of a pig in a German army uniform suspended from the ceiling.
  Max Ernst's "C'est le Chapeau Qui Fait L'Homme (The Hat Makes the Man)," part of "Dada." (Museum Of Modern Art, New York) |
That's because dada wasn't so much about a way of looking as it was about a way of thinking -- that and ticking off the bourgeoisie. That people actually could muster up enough anger to chase dadaist cabaret performers offstage or to shoot at a Man Ray assemblage (1917's "Boardwalk," whose three bullet holes were a badge of honor at the time) seems hard to believe.
The exhibition traces dada's roots to World War I, an event whose horrific toll in human lives was sufficient to shatter, if the show's wall text is to believed, every last bit of faith in traditional art, language, reason, philosophy, authority, class, taste and value. Suddenly, it was as if the world, or at least our way of making sense of it -- in pictures, poetry, theater and music -- had fallen apart, like Humpty Dumpty, into a million tiny bits. What's clear, though, from looking at "Dada," is just how much of a debt the dadaists owed, not to World War I, but to the earlier movement of cubism. Art, you see, had already been cracked to smithereens; all it needed was the rumble of tanks to bring it toppling to the floor in a heap.
"Everything had broken down in any case," wrote Kurt Schwitters, who pretty much single-handedly carried the movement's banner in Hannover, where he called his brand of dada Merz, a nonsense word suggesting not only the German words for "commerce," "pain" and "to reject," but the French vulgarism for "excrement." "New things," Schwitters continued, "had to be made out of fragments."
Although "Dada" doesn't address that theme specifically, this creation of "new things" out of old can be viewed as a form of peevish reparation, if you will -- a putting back together of a broken, senseless world, only not with the glue of logic, and not in any sense back to the way things were.
Random chance, absurdity and the workings of the newly fashionable unconscious mind were the order of the day. Art -- that is, things whose value lay in their craftsmanship -- gave way to objects meant to tickle the brain (and perhaps the funny bone) but not the eye.
As suddenly as it began, dada died in the mid-1920s, as its bickering adherents gave way to surrealism and other movements. Or did it?
Almost 100 years after its christening-- reportedly when Zurich artists Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck plucked the nonsense word from a French-German dictionary -- the National Gallery's lavish treatment goes a long way toward embalming a movement known for blowing raspberries in the direction of the status quo. As for Duchamp's urinal, reportedly valued at $3.6 million, it was only a couple of months ago that a French performance artist took a hammer to it, chipping it slightly, while one of its eight versions was on display in Paris.
Somewhere, I can't help thinking, Duchamp is smiling.
DADA Through May 14 at the National Gallery of Art, East Building, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW (Metro: Archives/Navy Memorial). 202-737-4215 (TDD: 202-842-6176).http:/
Public programs associated with the exhibition include:
Sunday at 2 Lecture: "The Return to Unreason: The Meaningful Nonsense of Dada Film and Music."
Sunday at 6:30 Screenings of dada and avant-garde films, with original scores performed live by Jazztet Ensemble Dada.
Tuesday and Thursday, and March 11, 16 and 23 at 1 Tour: "Dada in Berlin."
March 11 at 4:30; March 12 at 6:30 Screening of dada and avant-garde films, with original scores performed live by the Alloy Orchestra.
March 12 at 2 Lecture: "Dada: Man Ray in Paris."
March 12-29 (Weekdays at 1 and 4; weekends at 1.) An orchestra of automated musical instruments (including 16 baby grand player pianos) installed on the mezzanine will be programmed to play a portion of George Antheil's score for the Fernand Leger film "Le Ballet mecanique."
March 19 at 2 Lecture: "Marcel Duchamp and the Great American Thing."
March 28 and April 22 at noon; March 30 and 31, and April 1, 5 and 12 at 1 Tour: "Dada: An Overview."
April 4 at 2; April 26 at noon Tour: "Dada in New York."
April 12, 18, 20, 23 and 24 at noon Tour: "Dada in Cologne."
April 29 at 4:30 Concert by vocalist Ute Lemper.
May 14 at 2 Lecture: "Baroness Elsa and Dada."
