June 20, 2006
"Dada": two critics, one conclusion
Jed Perl, writing in the New Repbulic:
Like so many atheists, the Dadaists were true believers of a sort. Late in life, when Arp was carving blocks of marble into classical forms that somehow still embodied a Dadaist's doubts, he reminisced about the Dada years. "The important thing about Dada, it seems to me, is that the Dadaists despised what is commonly regarded as art, but put the whole universe on the lofty throne of art," he wrote, "we declared that everything that comes into being or is made by man is art. Art can be evil, boring, wild, sweet, dangerous, euphonious, ugly, or a feast to the eyes. The whole earth is art. To draw well is art . . . . The nightingale is a great artist. Michelangelo's Moses: Bravo! But at the sight of an inspired snow man, the Dadaist also cried bravo." Put this way, the Dadaist creed is quite simply a celebration of the open-mindedness of the avant-garde, and most of the artists I know would agree with a good deal of what Arp has to say. Not the least of the strengths of Dickerman's exhibition is that one may leave it believing that Arp, not Duchamp, is the essential Dadaist hero. Arp's youthful Dadaist optimism puts Duchamp's withering skepticism in its rightful place—not an entirely dishonorable place in twentieth-century art, but a very small place. Dada deserves better than Duchamp.
Peter Schjehldal, writing in the New Yorker:
[Dada] revelled in novel styles and in popular media—Cubist and Futurist pastiche, collage, assemblage, film, theatre, photography, noise music, sound poetry, puppetry, wild typography, magazines—basically for the hell of it, despite the odd skew, mostly in seething postwar Germany, toward political agitation. Some forms, such as abstraction and machine aesthetics, informed later art; but, as a phenomenon, Dada foretold nothing so much as the marketing of youth fashions. Though hardly commercial, it anticipated a byword of modern advertising: forget the steak, sell the sizzle. The first artist who springs to mind when Dada is mentioned, Marcel Duchamp, would constitute an exception, but he really wasn’t a Dadaist. He had already conceived many of his signature “readymades”—common objects, such as a bottle rack and a snow shovel, presented as art—and his magnum opus, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,” was under way before he had heard of the movement. Apart from accessory japes, like the mustachioed “Mona Lisa” (1919), his relations with Dada were more diplomatic than creative. A vital order of business, in clarifying Dada, is to pry Duchamp from its clutch.
This is as good a time as any to mention that the two books accompanying this show—its catalogue, edited by exhibition curator Leah Dickerman, and The Dada Seminars, both published by DAP and the National Gallery of Art—are a fantastic resource and are beautifully designed.
Elsewhere, Tyler Green posted a two-part interview with Dickerman (part one here; part two here).